THIS IS SO TRUE...

I enjoyed what I played from the 1st game, will start the second this week, and thought the 3rd was good, but none touched the gameplay of Kingdoms. 

It was just so much fun to play, it wasn't just a simple button press like Skyrim sometimes felt, but the whole system had nice depth to it. Makes me sad we will never see a sequel :(

I haven't started the DLC yet, been saving it.  Might knock one section of it off tonight.  I can see why some people in this thread view the combat as repetitive.  But I help myself out with it.  If I need to up the difficulty I do, and I tend to switch weapon loadouts fairly regularly to explore different play styles.

The first Fable is the best Fable.  2 is better than 3 was - but even I have to admit neither of them quite capture the magic of the first.

The game is nothing special. It gets very repetitive midway through the game. I would give it a 7/10.

It's a good game. It's very well constructed. The combat flows nicely and the world has a good amount of lore. Once you get your own house, things improve and you feel more like an adventurer.

The big problem with the game, however, is that it's simply too massive. There is too much content. I reached the end of the first continent, that big port city, then I went back to finish where the main quest branched off and I simply ran out of steam. By that point, I was slaying stuff left and right, a god among monsters, and I still had the entire Gnome city and all the quests in that area before me.

Related to that is also the fact that crafting makes you overpowered. I was disassembling everything I could get my hands on for Blacksmithing parts and my weapons and armor were light years beyond anything I could loot. My weapons, especially, were god-like. I wish I could use Chakrams like that in real life.

The game should have been smaller, which would have allowed them to tune it finer. It was a relatively interesting story--R.A. Salvatore has written some fantastic books (and some mediocre ones, as well)--and I wanted to see the end but it was bogged down with too much content.

Interesting...I have just entered the Gnome city.

I plan to finish it, I am still having a lot of fun.  I haven't done a lot of Smithing (but I have leveled up my smithing skill so maybe I should look into it). The little bit I have done hasn't created particularly powerful weapons though?

I actually really enjoyed the DLC! I think there was one that had like a Pirates theme to it? This was actually the last DLC I bought. Repetitive? Really, hmm. If Amalur is repetitive I'd hate to know what they thought of most other Western RPGs, like Fable and Skyrim. 

Sucks Lionhead and/or MS couldn't optimize Fable Anniversary on the 360... runs like garbage, technically speaking. But that's for another thread :)

I reached master level smithing as fast as I could and gemcrafting so I could add those to my weapons and armor.

You can only craft weapons with the stuff you salvage, so the better the weapons you take apart, the better the weapons you can make.  Also, what you get is random, so if I'm salvaging a weapon that has a really, really nice part, and that particular part doesn't come out of the salvage, then I'll restart the game without saving and try again.  

Also, some weapons types are more rare than others, so they're harder to create at a high level.  My chakrams were always much stronger than my faeblades, for example, because I always had more to take apart.

Relative to what I was saying earlier, I found an interesting interview of the writer of the lore:

"I hated the names.That was the biggest fight I had with people." Salvatore did say he created the names of the the different cultures and major characters, but the individual character names were all made up by Ken Rolston's team at Big Huge Games. Salvatore wrote the entire backstory of Amalur, however, he didn't have a hand in the writing of the script. Salvatore referenced the LOTR movies and how they introduced characters by cutting down the cast exponentially. Salvatore wondered if games should consider cutting down the amount of lore exposed to the player, which I have to say yes. The world we were introduced in the world was interesting but too much lore was thrown at us at once, and in the end I didn't really care as much as I should have.

"I loved the character of Alyn Shir," said Salvatore," and I wish she was in the game more." He also thought there might have been too many sidequests because, as a completionist, he felt too distracted by them to progress through the main story at the right pace.

All the quibbles aside, Salvatore absolutely adored the final product. "I wrote a long letter to Big Huge Games and I was almost crying as I wrote it," he told me. Salvatore is immensely proud of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, especially how fun the action combat ended up and is currently working on another 38 Studios game, an under-wraps MMO title set in Amalur.

http://www.qj.net/xbox-360/news/amalur-writer-hated-the-names.html

Shame they never got to finish.

That would explain it, I am going to have to rethink my blacksmithing - it is nearly mastered as is.

I can certainly identify with the side quests.  I mean there are literally hundreds right?  And I try to do them all!

Amazing the game is not buggy given its size and compelxity.

I have it and it's alright, I liked the combat system and the way you can change your fighting style. But beyond that the whole game feels like a meh mmo, which i don't even like mmos.

I have the Origin version. Maybe someday I'll put more time in it. Sadly, the game has been overshadowed by the bizarre plight of 38 Studios and Curt Schilling.