KoA: Reckoning - Interview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer talked to Ian Frazier, the lead designer for the game. Ian Frazier maintains that the bugs in the demo won't be in the final game. The demo seems to be based on a three-months old build and was made by another company. A quote from Ian Frazier:

There's a lot of tension about the demo, which we didn't build in-house," Frazier told Eurogamer. "It was branched off our code about three months ago. It got a lot of bug fixing. We sent them what we had, but there are a lot of bug fixes they didn't get. So we're all nervous, like, the demo's really buggy.
"But all the time the demo was worked on is time we spent de-bugging the main game. It should be clear from the reviews the main game is in way better shape. That's been a source of nervousness."

In other KO:A news R.A. Salvatore has been interviewed by Amazon.com
It mainly centers around the setting in this game, where Salvatore explains that he has been trying to create a world e.g cultures that the gamers can relate to.
Ken Rolston has made a newsletter. Here's an excerpt:

The first time I could play Reckoning's combat, even in its early, limited form, I could tell how amazing it was … how much better than I could imagine. I could dodge and roll and dash for handy corners, keep my enemy off-balance and moving to re-target me. And everything happened so fast. It took me a while to adjust. I've never enjoyed console action games, so it was a steep learning curve. That first experience with an early build was the answer to all my role-playing tactical movement dreams. But it didn't even begin to scratch the surface of the other RPG combat delights that Reckoning had in store for me.

More information.

They let a 3rd party make the demo?

They let potential customers make their spending decision based on an outsourced first impression?

Are they daft?

Originally Posted by Reyla
They let a 3rd party make the demo?

They let potential customers make their spending decision based on an outsourced first impression?

Are they daft?

Risk vs reward. This is a completely unknown IP, so the reward for getting people playing a demo is a lot higher. The risk is pretty high too, less if you can separate flaws in the demo from the actual product.. which you're reading so that's working.

And then there's the risk of putting resources on the demo rather than continuing to polish the game.

So overall, they probably managed it right.

Originally Posted by kalniel
So overall, they probably managed it right.

Not if the demo turned some potential customers away and/or caused some (like me) to cancel a pre-order. This was clearly a move made by the publisher to get some notoriety out ahead of launching a new IP. And "EA" dropped the ball IMO. I feel like BHG/38Studios were probably pushed into doing this, as you can tell from interviews they are as distressed by what happened as many fans are.

However, with all that said, I'm still interested, because: 1) the non-buggy parts of the demo were fun, 2) I like R.A. Salvatore (the Icewind Dale Ten Towns' setting is still an all-time fave of mine) and look forward to seeing what he's done with Amalur and 3) Ken Rolston knows how to design and deliver open-world RPGs. Also, I actually found the "hero who operates outside of the thread-lines of Fate" reminded me (in a positive way of the Wheel of Time books). Sure, it's been done before and sure the opening of the game was a bit TOO much like the opening of Planescape Torment, but everything in fantasy has been done before. Sometimes it's the combination of ingredients that makes the game.

So, if they deliver, I'm buying. But, based on forum posts I've read around the Interwebs, not everyone feels the same way after the demo

Originally Posted by Falchor
So, if they deliver, I'm buying. But, based on forum posts I've read around the Interwebs, not everyone feels the same way after the demo

I've seen a lot more people say they decided to pre-order the game despite having 0 interest before after playing the demo than people that claimed they cancelled their pre-orders because of the demo buginess. From those, a lot where people who 2 weeks ago had never heard of KoA:R.

I think a lots of people here have less tolerance to bugs than the average game player. Which I don't understand considering the quasi-worship Obsidian get…

Originally Posted by azarhal
I think a lots of people here have less tolerance to bugs than the average game player. Which I don't understand considering the quasi-worship Obsidian get…

Well, I'm no quasi-worshiper of Obsidian, that's for sure. I don't like buggy games… or buggy demos introducing a new game… a fault of mine I guess. I should ignore such things and be happy to reload after the second or third crash-to-desktop. However, I do find it strange that other companies can release demos (and games) that seem to work fine.. not perfect, mind you… but fine enough that any blemishes don't dampen my enthusiasm.

I don't think it was very buggy. I played the demo for 5 full play throughs. I had zero ctd's. I had some stretching textures and the autorun thing when I went in to dungeons. That was easily fixed by pressing w twice. Yet I had many ctd's after the first patch of skyrim.

Originally Posted by sakichop
I don't think it was very buggy. I played the demo for 5 full play throughs. I had zero ctd's. I had some stretching textures and the autorun thing when I went in to dungeons. That was easily fixed by pressing w twice. Yet I had many ctd's after the first patch of skyrim.

The most frustrating bugs seem to have been hardware-specific issues related to a subset of ATI/AMD graphics cards. Not sure what Skyrim has to do with this at all, but I suppose one could also point out the wide range of experiences players of that game reported as well; some encounter very few if any noticeable bugs compared to others who have frequent CTDs. So if you were mentioning it because the experiences with this demo were also mixed, I suppose it was a relevent reference. Otherwise it just reminds me of this

I used skyrim because it seemed like the most comparable game. If you want though you can replace it with any game you like. Point is you have one game that is release code with 1 patch and people still have issues. Yet we want to condemn a pre-release code demo because it has issues.

There are just to many different pc configurations to expect games to work perfectly on all pc's. That's why 1 guy says a game is a buggy piece of crap, yet someone else says it runs great. I can see being upset if your playing on console. All the hardware and software is the same and they've been around for years. There really shouldn't be any bugs on consoles.

There are no games that work on every pc. So why judge the game on a few bugs in the demo. Koa will release with bugs just like every game before it.

I didn't encounter a single bug in my playthrough of the pc demo. I have an Nvidia card though, and most of the bugs I've heard people complain about seem to be ATI related.

Polished or not however, I won't be purchasing KoA. Not because I think it's a bad game (I don't), but because it simply doesn't appeal to me at all, and I have better games in my backlog that I'd rather devote my attention to.