Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview

The folks at The Average Gamer had the chance to interview Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s system designer Will Miller on the title’s leveling mechanics, the jail system, whether.. ehrm the game reacts to the player character being naked, factions, persuasion mechanics and much more at a recent EA press event and came back with some rather interesting answers. Here’s a sampling:

When it comes to the destinies do you not worry that it would be very easy for a player to just break their build?

WM: Break the game?

Well, break themselves.

WM: So we let you pick whatever abilities you want. We encourage you to, if you see something that’s cool on that tree, take it. Regardless. If you’re a mage and you see a might ability that you want, just go for it coz it’s cool, it’s there. As you do that, the game looks at the combinations of things you’ve unlocked and rewards you destinies to fit those combinations; to fill in the gaps that you may create by multiclassing in a certain way.

For example, one of the biggest mistakes new RPG players make is they’ll evenly allocate all of their skill points, right? And that totally nerfs your character late in the game ’cause you don’t unlock any of the high-level ablities. It’s awful.

In our game, that’s totally fine. If you do that, you unlock the jack-of-all-trades destiny tree. you can apply that to your character. What’s cool about that specific one is that yes, there are a finite number of ability points so you’re not gonna be able to unlock the top tier abilities in all three trees but. we cut your equip requirements in half. So if you’re one of the players who likes to run way ahead in the game and get all this loot, if you didn’t have that destiny you couldn’t use the loot ’cause it’s way out of your level range. But if you have that destiny equipped, you can use pretty much whatever loot you find.

We also buff physical damage, magic damage, mana regen and all the stuff to make that build work. So we spent a lot of time playing with different combinations of abilities, figuring out what buffs to give you to make pretty much whatever decision that you make in the levelling system work for you.

We also let you swap those destinies out whenever you want to and if you really bork yourself and you find yourself playing a mage and saying (Well, I don’t really like the way the mage plays) or (I wanna try a fighter), you can go to a fate-weaver and totally re-spec your character. It costs some money, right? And it costs a bit more every time to to do it. Not a prohibitive amount, so you can totally wipe the slate clean in the game without starting over.