Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Video Interview

AusGamers has a video interview with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning lead designer Ian Frazier, on subjects such as the absence of jumping in the game and the influence it had on level design, the open-world design, backtracking and more. For anyone who doesn’t want to watch the video, they also offer a transcript from which I’m going to quote a snippet:

AusGamers: Now another big staple in this type of RPG is — especially with the concept of open-world, even if it’s not an RPG — is emergent gameplay. And I think games like Red Dead Redemption did it really well; Skyrim does it really well.

What have you guys done to approach that? Because at the moment, the stuff that I’ve played, I do come across people… but I obviously haven’t spent enough time with the game. And we were talking about this before, but can you just run us through any of those kind of systems that you have?

Ian: Well NPC scheduling is one thing. So NPCs — not all of them, but a lot of NPCs — have their daily rounds, where they go around and do things. So because of that, as you’re doing a quest, or just going through a city, you’re meeting people in different kinds of scenarios than… you may encounter a different thing that I did because of the timing.

The next thing is we do have a full day/night cycle which plays into that. So you’re going to have creatures that show up in certain areas that would otherwise not be there, based on time. Reagents that you can only harvest because you happened to go to the scene at night or what have you; so there’s some of that.

You also have the crime system. So if you are in the middle of town and you start pickpocketing or trespassing or what have you and you get seen, then you’re going to get people freaked out; you’re going to have people try to kill you or call the guards or whatever depending on where you are. And that’s going to create a different situation depending on who’s there and if you’re powerful enough to deal with them and if you flee or pay up your fine; how you choose to respond to it.

In fact, if you say (hey, ok, you can take me in coppers), they’ll bring you to jail, and the jails are totally different depending on where you’re at. So if you’re at a mortal area, it’s more of a traditional dungeon. If you’re in the Fae city of Isa, they throw you in a magical labyrinth, because that’s what Fae do — so that’ll be kind of different.

As far as wandering in the wilderness, we have a faction system — some creatures hate other creatures. So you may be wandering in the woods and see a giant spider chasing down a deer to eat. And you won’t necessarily see the same thing that I saw — there’s a chance that it won’t happen — but the combination of wandering things, scheduled things and the faction system that makes them like or hate each other, gives you those sort of emergent moments that will vary between players.

AusGamers: So there’s a full functioning ecology that’s built around hierarchy and a food chain and stuff like that?

Ian: We don’t simulate like (they eat the meat, therefore they live…); we don’t do it to that level. But we do try to simulate who would and would not like each other and who would try to eat what else, in order to give you that kind of feel as you explore the world.