Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Community Q&A #17

In this week’s set of answers to community-submitted questions, the Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning team tackles the pros and cons of going up against existing franchises with new IP, how much music they’re incorporating into the game, how large the game world is, and more.

Just how many different “types” and “tiers” of armor and weapons are there? For example does it range from cloth to plate and rusty iron to, magically infused titanium or is it mainly mythical and “stat” based? By MemoryKill

A: Our basic armor loot pool consists of six tiers of Warrior themed armor which are built of metal materials, and five tiers each of Rogue and Mage sets which are more in the line of leather armor and cloth clothing, respectively. Our weapon classes all have five tiers as well, which vary by weapon type. Swords use five different metals, staves use wood, etc. Additional to that, within each material tier there are three levels of quality that an item can come in. Your baseline item will have no modifying word tacked on (“Iron Gauntlets”), but you’ll also see loot with modifiers, “Crude Iron Gauntlets” or “Fine Iron Gauntlets,” that include slight stat decreases and increases respectively from the baseline version. And there are versions of each armor type that have sockets in them for use in the Sagecraft system. I’ve listed below all the tiers of armor so you can see it’s a mix of real world materials like iron and cotton, and some Amalur-specific fictional materials.

These material tiers are the base of our loot system, but something like, “Iron Gauntlets” is the absolute simplest piece of loot you can find. Those material tiers also go through our affix system for an even further level of variety, which Will Miller described in more detail in a previous Q&A.

And on top of all of that, there are hundreds of unique weapons and armor that are outside of the basic materiel tier hierarchy. Short summary: It’s a lot of stuff.

Warrior:
1. Iron
2. Chainmail
3. Steel
4. Azurite
5. Sylvanite
6. Prismere

Rogue:
1. Leather
2. Boiled Leather
3. Studded Leather
4. Trollhide
5. Dreadscale

Mage:
1. Cotton
2. Linen
3. Silk
4. Hexweave
5. Spiritweave

By Justin “perezidente” Perez, Systems Designer