Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Preview and Interview

After serving us a similar piece for Risen 2: Dark Waters, the folks at GamingLives have published a preview and an interview for 38 Studios and Big Huge Games’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Here’s a sampling from the preview part of the piece:

A quick tour over the five distinct locales in the game and Ben throws up some quick stats to support the boasted size of Amalur; over a hundred and twenty unique dungeons, four large cities, and dozens of towns that function as both quest and narrative hubs. Switching from the macro to the micro, the presentation shifted down to street level and the inner workings of Amalur’s society is put on show, with NPCs that each have their own daily schedule bustling their way through the city and presenting the less honourable of players, such as myself, with the temptation to do a little pick-pocketing. For the more creative and resourceful of players, the demonstration shifted to showing off a little of the games three crafting systems: Blacksmithing, Sagecrafting and Alchemy.

For Blacksmithing, nothing the player discovers in the world need go to waste with any weapon that isn’t usable, or below the player’s expectations, able to be broken down into its component parts, which are then available to be re-forged into better, more tailored armour and weapons. Sagecrafting focuses on the ability to buff your equipment by taking shards found in the world and turning them into gems, ready to slot into whatever equipment will accept the modifications and giving your favourite sword those all important flames of awesome. The alchemy side of crafting will reward the explorer, promising that the player can take the ingredients that they find out in the world and combine them into potions, either by adhering to a strict recipe or purely by experimentation.

What most impressed me when reading about the game prior to the presentation was this classless approach to the RPG that Big Huge Games and 38 Studios were taking with Amalur however, Ben acknowledged that in saying that Reckoning doesn’t have a class system, it probably sounds like a class system itself. The Destiny system won’t force the player into making such a great commitment so early in the game, or indeed throughout the game, it will instead watch the player, track what skills and abilities the player is using and then issue them with a Destiny card, applicable at any stage in the game, that will help channel those predominant skills the player is shown to be relying on and buff them up so that the player can better define themselves and identify with the role that they want to play.

And here’s an excerpt from their interview with EA Partners’ producer Ben Smith:

Moving on to Kingdoms of Amalur, it seems to be that RPGs are the games these days that are taking all the headlines as far as the gaming press goes. What do you think it is that has allowed the RPG genre to move to that main stage?

My personal theory is that the great thing about an open world RPG, is that there’s something for everyone. No matter how you like playing an RPG, and even if you don’t necessarily like RPGs but you like a certain component of it, you can go into an open world RPG and probably satisfy that itch and just have fun. It’s not just one style of player that likes or wants to play the game, it’s about 14 different styles of player that would be perfectly happy to go in and fish (not in our RPG!) but just happy to craft, explore and kill things. I’m an OCD gamer, I go into a town and just take every quest and then I will do those and then I come back and then I move on to the next town. So I think the advantage we have in doing a game of this genre is that it appeals to a lot more people in different ways. With there being a lot more RPGs around these days, what is the absolute key, standout, shining trophy for Kingdoms of Amalur that’s going to be attracting people?

I think we hope that it’s a package deal but I think the combat is what stands out the most. With a really good RPG, the way something really stands out is if all the little things work together to be an awesome package. So we locate four things we see working together really well that can make a game like Kingdoms of Amalur special. The big open world and RPG systems being one layer, the combat on top of it that nobody else has done but is moment to moment fun and is informed by the RPG systems working underneath it, and then our unique Destiny systems, supporting you not having to make decisions before you understand what you’re doing and then feeding that back into the decisions you’ve already made to make you feel more powerful and then wrapping all of that into a kind of world lore player story thing that the main quest is -this big world at war, a player whose come back to life and doesn’t know [who he is]. It’s kind of a trope but, it’s a trope for a reason. It works. You don’t know who killed you, you want to go and find that out and hey, that happens to interweave with the world story and off you go.