Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Postmortem Excerpt

The folks at Gamasutra have posted an excerpt of a longer postmortem published on the April issue of Game Developer and dedicated to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. While the positive point reiterates Big Huge Games’ mantra of fun combat, I found the challenge they faced with having to make promotional demos interesting:

Too many damn demos

…

Being a brand-new IP, we were aware we couldn’t get away with a single demo at E3 and a few dozen screenshots and videos. We knew we had to get our awareness up so people would start paying attention to our game. Marketing decided that the best way to do that was show the press as many different things about the game as possible over a very long period of time.

I’m trying to remember the number of demos we had to create over the development cycle of Reckoning, and I honestly end up losing count. Doing a demo for us was a pretty major undertaking, like it is for almost everyone in the business. You’re basically taking content and systems that were meant to be first or second pass at a certain point in the schedule and bump it all up to shippable quality long before it’s supposed to be shippable quality. This results in a lot of work that is just thrown out because the real content and the real systems end up changing a few weeks or months later. And there is nothing quite as frustrating as working overtime on something that you know is just going to be seen once and then thrown away.

The consumer demo was another hurdle to overcome. There was no way we were going to be able to complete work on the game and create a downloadable demo in parallel. We just didn’t have the time. In the end, we had to outsource the demo, and they had to build something with old code and not a lot of time. The result was a buggy experience, but still an experience that a lot of fans enjoyed.

In the future, we’ll be sure to plan plenty of time and budget for multiple press demos and work on a better plan to either build the downloadable demo ourselves or better support outsourcers.