Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview, Part Two

A relatively short span of time after we posted about the first part, we can already report on the second part of Atomic’s chat with one of the “visionaries” behind Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Ken Rolston, which deals with the title’s soundtrack, how technology is holding back Rolston’s ideas, playtesting and feedback. Here’s a sampling:

Atomic: Last time we spoke, you talked about the idea of a development cycle with a lot of time built in around the idea of play testing. Have you been able to do that?

Ken: Well that’s why Big Huge is great in so many ways. Not only are they used to having builds early that you can play in testing, they’re also into user testing. So they crap detect the process of whether that game is fun or understandable. Oh, they’re great. And I keep wondering, why didn’t we do this everywhere else? And it may be that everyone else in the world does it and I just never saw it at Beth Soft because… and Beth Soft games are great, there are no ways to complain about it, but the process for us of iteration is very important for great game balance and all that other stuff that is obvious. But for me, most importantly, is it accessible? Anecdote time. Jake Gillen, he’s like a world builder, and he told me, this was early on, ‘˜Yeah, I couldn’t even get started in Oblivion because I played and I kept getting killed.’ And I said, ‘˜Well that’s impossible. That’s the easiest game on Earth.’ And he said, ‘˜Yeah, I played one of the standard classes that you’d given me.’ Oh no, you didn’t do that. You’re supposed to know that you make a custom character because none of those other things work! And it’s that idiocy on my part of thinking from the hardcore’s inside knowledge. And I betrayed him and millions of other people, I’m sure, by giving them things that looked like they were playable because they looked, in the interface, really cool, and they were actually shitty to play. You could easily get killed. So I learned from that. I need to have the best reminders that I’m an idiot and a hardcore guy and I need to be able to see it from the eyes of beginners.

Atomic: How do you do that? How do you step back?

Ken: Ian does it, really. Ian is in charge. He runs all of these tests and EA’s great about that, they have these labs, they do all the… okay, it’s engineering at that point, it’s human engineering, it’s beyond my understanding. Remember, I’m a visionary. But they do it and it’s just fucking amazing. Just a simple example, now when you pick up an item, you can see what that item is and you can instantly equip it. You don’t have to go to your inventory to equip it. Oh my God is that so freakin’ obvious. But it never occurred to me and never would have occurred to me without the testing.