Ken Rolston of Elder Scrolls fame
What I Liked
The game has a visual pop that is rather impressive. The colors are vibrant, the architecture is impressive and the scale of everything is massive. It reminds me of World of Warcraft in that it is slightly stylized and things are exaggerated. The opening area is great because it isn't the dull browns of most games these days, but the lush greens of a forest. Really, the world itself is massive and well thought out. Even though I couldn't range too far from the opening town, there were plenty of places to explore and plenty of new things to see.
The game systems were well done, too. The combat (which I'll get to separately) functioned well and was brisk. Doing the usual sorts of RPG tasks all felt really solid. While searching for ingredients, the harvestable plants offered a telling glow. Picking locks is very similar to Fallout 3 and works very well. Disarming traps in dungeons was quick and easy. There is a satisfying ease to tasks in this game. Not that they are done for you, but that nothing I came across was obtuse or needlessly difficult to do.
I loved that classes were fluid, too. You put your points into archetypes that then open up specializations. But, these aren't set in stone. Using destiny cards, more options become available to you. I loved this aspect because it means that in the long run, your character will play how you like them to. It's always hard to pick a class at the beginning of a game and be locked into it. I mean, sure, I normally play rogues, but what if I really love wielding Great Swords? Kingdoms allows you to shift your class at will and lets you experience the game as you want.
Talking to folks brings up the great voice acting. Most characters I ran into were fully voiced and nearly all of them were well done. There were a couple of strange sounding accents, but that's to be expected. A vast majority of the speaking characters sounded good. Nearly everyone has a quest/job for you to do, too!
Combat skills are pretty useful
What I Was Mixed On
Picking up with my last point, though many folks had quests/jobs for me, they weren't very interesting. In my 45 minutes, I picked up 8 or so quests, and many of those had multiple quests branch off from them. An example: the head of the church sent me to find a wayward member of his order. Finding that lad then saw me tagging along with the boy as he sought out an item to share with his friends. That finally done, I could return to the order and report that I found the missing member. OK, so that's not so bad. But others saw me fetch flowers for a lady, who then gave me a dungeon to delve looking for other items, which saw me killing bandits to get what I needed. I returned to the dungeon lady and got an item to return to town. What got me was that every single quest was a fetch quest. It was early in the game, but when %90 of the quests I was given involved "run here, collect that, return" I wasn't really excited.
Back to combat. Now, I liked how snappy combat was. I enjoyed how most battles played out quickly and with a minimum of fuss. The different weapon types lead to different combat styles, too. The dual-wielded knives meant that I zipped around the battlefield nimbly dodging and striking. Magical staves saw me leaving powerful waves of destruction and shooting balls of fire into my charging foes. The sword and shield were dull, but easy to understand. Since you have a primary and secondary weapon, you can swap between the two mid-combo. This meant I could launch enemies skyward with my sword and turn them into pin-cushions with my bow. Or strike them with my knives before blowing them all backwards with a swing of a magical stave! It's a shame that the combat became repetitive so fast. It was a bit too button mashy for me after a while. And the auto-targeting, while welcome, never seemed to be on the same page as me. Yes, the big troll is the largest "threat," but the stupid archer right behind him interrupts my attacks, so let's get him first, shall we? No? Oh...
Oh, he looks friendly!
What I Didn't Like
The silent protagonist. I'm done with this. I know why companies chose to have your character silent. I know that on projects like this, where the character creation is so massive that it would take more resources than necessary to voice all the heroes. And I know it's stupid to be disappointed in this. But, I am. After Mass Effect, I really can't stand reading what I say and watching my stone-faced character just sit there. It's something that I've found kind of pulls me out of games and makes me less invested. It happened with Dragon Age: Origins and happened again with this demo.
Since this is a demo, I'll forgive a lot of glitches. But, I should point out that 9 times out of 10, the water didn't load properly. The meant large swaths of grey and screen tearing as I went by. I'm sure things like that will be ironed out by launch (or shortly after), but it still was a bit jarring. When the water did load, it was gorgeous!
To go with the water issue, I also had frame-rate issues. Nothing making the game unplayable, but at times my frame-rate would drop sharply. What was strange was that I could never pinpoint why. It wasn't when loading is normally hidden (opening doors, crossing certain plateaus in the land), but seemed to be at random. While not game-breaking, it certainly threw me off.
There is a lot of world to explore
To be completely honest, this game wasn't on my radar at all. I had seen demonstrations of it, I had read previews and saw adverts for it. But, nothing had grabbed me and shouted, "You want this game! Go pre-order this game now!" After playing the demo, that hasn't changed too much. I enjoyed my time with the demo. I'm pleased that it was such a wide experience instead of the usual short demo. I liked a lot of what I played. The game is on my radar now, but nothing I played screamed "Day One purchase!" That said, there is a lot to be excited about with this game. Try the demo yourself and you may find that Skyrim has a challenger for your open-world RPG affections.
