6 Reasons Why Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Looks Better Than Skyrim

Big Huge Games’ mega RPG is almost here. It’s due for release on February 7 for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, and the hype is at an all time high. Amalur has been compared to many games already- Dark Souls, Dragon Age, Fable and even God of War. But the game it is being compared the most to is Skyrim. It’s almost as if it’s going directly up against Bethesda’s recent masterpiece. What’s more, Ken Rolston, lead designer of Elder Scrolls III and IV, is also the lead of Kingdoms of Amalur, making the comparisons even more heated. Both are similar games, set in a high fantasy world with rich background and mythologies, both offering hundreds of hours of gameplay. But the question is, which of the two looks better?

Now, don’t get us wrong when we say this, but it looks like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning might just dethrone Skyrim. We loved Skyrim- it won our Game of the Year award and we gave it a glowing review too, but Reckoning is looking so good, it’s hard not to tilt a little bit towards it.

Below, we have given six reasons why we think Amalur might just turn out to be better than Skyrim. As always, we’d appreciate any feedback, and we know tons of you will want to hate on this article furiously, so fire away with your thoughts in the comments section below!

Richer game world

Skyrim’s game world is huge- huge. And just about everything you see and everyone you meet and every place you go has a unique and interesting history behind it. That makes the game world of Skyrim richer than most we’ve ever seen in any game. But now it seems like Reckoning might be able to topple that. We all know the game’s world basically has a fully detailed, highly comprehensive history and mythology, stretching back as much as 10,000 years, giving the world of Amalur an even richer feeling than Skyrim (possibly). From the previews and impressions of the game so far, it’s clear that Amalur is a rich world that feels just as much of a living and breathing entity as Skyrin does- maybe even more.

Awesome combat

Anyone who’s been following Reckoning even a bit would know that its USP is the combat. Sure, the art style is beautiful, the game world is insanely rich and there’s a ridiculous amount of things to do in the game, but we all knon- the developers themselves included- that it’s Reckoning’s combat that makes it so special, it’s combat that makes it stand apart from the rest of the “deep, rich” RPGs these days. Kingdoms of Amalur’s combat is downright awesome. It’s flashy, it’s responsive, it’s extremely accessible and a whole lot of fun to play. But it isn’t shallow, like so many other RPGs we’ve seen with good combat. No, Amalur is a a deep, complex RPG- as deep as Skyrim or Dragon Age or Dark Souls- and it has excellent combat. I know it’s hard to digest, we’ve never really had a similar combination before, but that’s just what Amalur is. And that’s what makes it so awesome.

Less glitches

The Elder Scrolls games are notorious for their glitches, and it isn’t really Bethesda’s fault that they are. Because all Elder Scrolls games are so damn huge in terms of size and scale, it’d be impossible not to have any glitches in them. Skyrim, too, has tons of glitches, some of which are downright game-breaking. And while the demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning had tons of glitches, we all know now that it was outsourced to a third party developer, that it was not made by Big Huge Games, and that it was built on a 3 months old code of the game, so it was bound to have glitches. Big Huge Games has said that the bugs won’t be present in the final game, and critics who’ve been playing the game have said that the most extreme bugs they’ve encountered are frame rate drops. Obviously, Amalur will have bugs, it’ll be impossible for it not to have them, considering it’s such a large game. But they’ll be far less in number and far less game breaking than the ones we’ve encountered in Skyrim.