I have to agree /w gilalizard. The combat was accessible & flashy, but he game world lacked the soul & lore needed to give it depth. The catoony art style, bright color palette, and "meh" character models seemed very generic to me as well. KoA did little to little to deviate from genre conventions, nor did it push the envelope in terms of action/rpg gameplay.
Selling 1.22m units in 90 days does not make a successful game. As Lincoln Chafee (Gov. of R.I.) stated, KoA needed to generate sales of more than 3 million units in order to cover the development costs. That is why I called it a "flop". This means that the game had little hope of ever recuperating the resources that were invested in its creation.
Agreed. I don't blame the R.I. Economic Dev. Co. for mitigating their loses. A good job is getting harder to find in the northeast these days. R.I. took a big gamble on 38 Studios, to in fact, bolster economic growth in the state by creating 100's of jobs. The IP flopped, so now it's time to cut their losses and move forward. Hopefully a new publisher will acquire the IP and make it profitable. Only time will tell.
It happened because somebody made the bad decision to spend $125 million on the development of this generic, opus on an action rpg. Most blockbuster movies don't even have a budget that big. If Kingdoms was an established series, with a huge fanbase (like Diablo III), it might of made sense to spend a 1/4 of that amount on development costs, but to gamble $75 million on a new IP was obviously a stupid move.
To all the people saying you need a high end gaming rig to run these games, I call bull$hit. I have a 3 year old pc (not even a core 2 duo) /w 4 gigs of cheap ram and a 512 mb graphics card, and I can still run Fallout 3 at a smooth clip (/w HDR and 4x AA/AF). The only games that run like crap on older PC's seem to be the sloppy console ports (i.e. GTA4, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect.) And as for Night Owl's comment, "Developers know exactly what each console is capable of and design the game to run optimally for you." Not entirely true. Bethesda outsourced Fallout 3 emulation to different software companies for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Don't you people realize that these games are designed, programmed, and compiled on PC's before they're ever emulated to consoles? Knock PC's all you want, but companies like Bethesda have been making tightly coded, smooth running games for PC before there was ever a PS1... oh yeah, and that level cap for consoles must really suck. (we just type "setgs imaxcharacterlevel 100" and we don't have that problem... do that /w you console)
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