A World Without Reckoning

Eric has been spending the last several days with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in order to render a verdict here on GameBanshee, but in the meantime, he’s penned a new piece on Gamasutra that shares his thoughts on some of the game’s underlying systems, its approach to loot, and the sheer amount of content (for better or worse) that it offers to players. There are a few spoilers within, so be careful:

Most lacking from Reckoning, I think, is that sense of emotional attachment. At one point in the game, the player is given the option of destroying the town of Canneroc, a small silk-harvesting village in the middle of a spider-infested wood. In a more traditional RPG, the decision to destroy this town would not be something taken lightly: chances are the player would have spent some time there, got to know its residents, its place in the world, been given some sort of investment into its well-being, etc. However, in Reckoning, it’s just another quest hub to move on from, and whether it continues to exist or not has no impact on the game as a whole. What could have been an interesting moral decision is cheapened significantly by the lack of gameplay repercussions and the structure of the game itself.

I think it’s very strange that Reckoning subscribes to this MMO-style world design. As a single-player game driven largely by its quests, story and exploration factor, there’s very little reason for players not to want to complete every bit of content (at least in theory). Even if a zone’s enemies are cannon fodder, or the loot is no good, players want to be able to tick those quests off one by one. By segregating the game world in this manner, there’s a fundamental conflict of interest between the world design and the motivations of players in navigating it.

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Reckoning is more or less the prototype for an upcoming MMORPG, so it does make sense that the game follows at least some MMORPG-style design tenets. At the same time, it’s also very clear that what works for an MMO simply does not work well for a single-player game. A story-driven experience demands that players are emotionally engaged with the game, and in focusing everything about the game world on the player, from movement through it to the transitory nature of the quests and objectives, it’s harder to care about the larger picture.

Interestingly, I think one of the game’s biggest failings isn’t so much its size, but its portrayal of size. In trying to portray multiple nations and kingdoms, and even different continents, it inevitably falls victim to its own necessary abstraction. A game like Skyrim works because it is centered around a single province, and we are more ready to accept the compromises in scale needed to keep the game a reasonable size. Amalur tries to convince players that its cities of twenty are some of the most bustling, important places in the world, and under such strain, the illusion shatters.