Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Preview and Interview

38 Studios’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has received some more attention by the press lately in the forms of a preview and interview, which should give a good overview of the title just before E3’s extensive coverage.

GameSpy has an “interrogation room” feature, where two of their editors discuss the game. Here’s a snippet:

Eric Neigher: Hmmm, I’ve often wondered about putting an honest-to-goodness fighting system in an RPG, or even an action-RPG, but it’s hard to duplicate that Bayonetta perfection without a lot of trial-and-error. Tekken seems like it might be kinda button-mashy for an RPG system, but hey, that’s better than The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s mouse-swing thing. So how about the storyline itself? R.A. Salvatore is a pretty well-known dude, and Todd McFarlane and all his Spawn stuff is involved. What’s the tone of the game?

Gus Mastrapa: Reckoning doesn’t look like Spawn at all, which is appropriate. You may remember that Todd McFarlane also did some art for the aborted Ultima Online 2 back in the day; the look of this game seems like a continuation of that train of thought. Though if you look closely, you can certainly see some of McFarlane’s style come through in the universe. During one dungeon crawl, I saw characters called Bolgans, which were pink, tubby brutes not too dissimilar to the grotesque Clown from Spawn. R.A. Salvatore’s contribution to the game feels even bigger: The author cooked up a 10,000-year history for the world of Amalur. 38 Studios’ long-gestating MMO project will take place in the same universe, albeit sometime in the future. Reckoning’s focus is on one hero’s contribution to the history of the realm. With an open world and 100 hours of gameplay, it feels like you get to write that history as you see fit.

While Wired has a short video interview in which Ken Rolston discusses how he ended up joining the team and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s combat.