Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Podcast Interviews and Q&A

Given how close we are to its release, the amount of coverage Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is getting, including a fair share of interviews given by the team, is not really surprising at all. The latest we have rounded up are a podcast interview with Curt Schilling (you can find the direct download of the MP3 here, should you so prefer), another interview with Mr. Schilling within the second episode of TWiT’s Game On! podcast (at the 21:15 mark), and a Q&A with the folks of Lazygamer.

In the first, the 38 Studio’s founder tackles a variety of subjects, like the first planned DLC for the game, slated for March and considered “too big” by EA, the way the characters are meant to be memorable and appear again, and how heavily they’re going to market the title. In the second, Curt talks about his long history of playing CRPGs, how Reckoning is essentially a single player role-playing introduction to Project Copernicus, the amount of time the team has spent on the game’s non-combat elements, how his role at the company has changed over the past five years, and more. And here’s a direct quote from the Q&A:

· The game itself is an open world adventure, but how open-ended are the quests? Are there multiple ways of exacting outcomes?

This was a perfect question for lead narrative designer, Andy Auseon, so he responded with this:

(While the open-endedness of our quests varies, we do provide many opportunities for Players to affect change, to alter the outcome of a quest’s specific storyline. Many quests have one or more pivotal points where players are offered a choice. They might push a group to do what’s best for them, lie to a character to spare her feelings, or allow a scoundrel to go free and escape punishment. Not every quest offers these kinds of decisions, but a large number of them do allow Player to express themselves in meaningful ways.)

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Naturally, our character is going to grow during the course of the game. But how about the game-world itself, does it also evolve and change based on the decisions we make, leading to positive or negative situations?

While player choice is a driving force of the design of Reckoning, literally changing the world visually wasn’t something we decided to dedicate a lot of resources to. For this title, at least, we focused more on supporting choice in other ways. Besides the visceral, moment to moment choices of how to approach a combat experience in Reckoning, throughout the many quests of the world the player can decide the fates of the inhabitants of Amalur, altering the future of towns and factions.