Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Community Q&A #6

We’re still a few months away from the release of 38 Studios’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning but, luckily for those who are looking forward to the open-world action-RPG release, we can spend this time reading its weekly community Q&As, that now have reached their sixth installment which deals with the setting’s timeline, difficulty levels, the title’s narrative, mod support and more. Here’s a sampling:

Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the story of Reckoning? We’d love to know more of what we are fighting towards. By MemoryKill

A: So from what we’ve put out on the internet so far, you can glean a good bit about our main story and what’s going in the world. There’s a war between mortals and Fae; you, the player, have been mysteriously resurrected, leaving you free from Fate.

What you might not know is how big and rich a world we’ve wrapped around those things. We have six factions. Each tells its own story, and at the same time, tells a story about some part of the world. The way that R.A. Salvatore designed Amalur, there are gears turning within gears. Some factions hint at what age our game takes place in, and at what ages might be to come. Other factions reflect back on the nature of a race in the game, the war, and the player’s identity.

There’s another story to Reckoning, and that’s what life is like in every area on the map. The way we designed our side quests, we custom tailored a story for every space. Again, every space tells its own story and fills in the world as a whole. Sometimes they involve war veteran and mortal-fae relations — and sometimes they simply explain the region of Amalur, because, remember, these lands stretch backward and forward in history. We are laying cobblestones on paths that will be dirt roads a thousand years ago, and gleaming thoroughfares a thousand years from now. By Ben “Tesseract” Schneider, Narrative Designer

Q: What is your opinion on community moding and will you be supporting it in any way? By Jmelon

A: Unfortunately, we will not be providing mod tools with Reckoning. With Reckoning being our first game in the Kingdoms of Amalur franchise, we’ve decided to focus 100% on making the game itself as good as it can possibly be rather than diverting resources toward the development of mod tools (which due to some technical aspects of how our tools pipeline works, would be a massive undertaking). I come from a mod background myself (got my start in the industry after working on a Dungeon Siege mod called “Lazarus”) and I absolutely love the mod community, so it pains me that we’re not officially supporting them, but in the end of the day, I think this was the right call for us on this game.

That said, please note that we’re not against mods. We’re just not providing official tools for them. Folks in the community generally find ways to mod a game even when there are no official tools, and if that happens with Reckoning, well, nothing would make us happier. By Ian “Tiberius” Frazier, Lead Designer