Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview

The folks at 360 Magazine have a brief interview with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s lead designer Ian Frazier, which touches upon subjects such as what makes Reckoning stand up when compared to its peers and how big the game world is. Here’s a snip:

360: We’ve been spoiled a bit by The Elder Scrolls’ generous open worlds; what can we expect from Amalur’s?

IF: It’s big. Really, really big. And perhaps more importantly, it’s incredibly dense there’s nowhere you can go in the Faelands (the part of Amalur focused on in Reckoning) where you won’t find a ton of different peopleto talk to, quests to do and things to discover.

Beyond that, something we’re really proud of is the sheer amount of visual variety in the world we’ve got five exterior regions that each have their own very different biome and mood, from dank swamps to arid deserts to the strange crystalline landscape of Alabastra, so you get a lot more variety than is the norm for open-world games.

360: How big is the open world, both in terms of mileage and number of dungeons?

IF: I couldn’t tell you the exact square footage of the overworld map (that’s a hard number to nail down due to how our playable space is technically constructed), but I can tell you that it takes over half an hour to sprint at full [speed] across the map, even if you somehow avoid all combat.

As for dungeons, there are around 130 of them in the game, and each one is hand-crafted (we never reuse dungeon layouts).

Plus they come in several different art styles, from crystal caverns to the organic innards of an ancient tree, so there’s an awful lot of variety to experience there.

There are also a ton of buildings in the game, from shops to taverns to guild halls, so you’ve got all those to explore as well.