Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Community Q&A #22

In today’s Q&A on the official Reckoning forums, lead world designer Colin Campbell, principal world designer Jess Hara Campbell, producer Sean Bean, and senior environment artist Shaun Martin tackle questions about the game’s explorable regions, the acquisition of shards and crystals for Sagecrafting, how to break into the industry, and more.

Q: I’m familiar with the “free your mind day” or something to that effect that you guys do, can you give us a couple examples of some of the ideas or mechanics that came out of that and ended up in the game? I read about the floating rocks that seem to be part of Alabastra, anything else you can share? By Falkon

A: As an environment artist here at Big Huge, a lot of my favorite ideas come from a combination of taking the time to just sketch out my thoughts on a “free your mind day” and group brainstorming sessions. When we have an important area or type of zone to create, we’ll often have large brainstorming sessions where anyone at the company in any department is invited to come. The only rule is that anything goes, no one in the brainstorm is able to say “No, we can’t do that for technical reason” or “That doesn’t fit with what we had in mind.”

The brainstorming session for the Erathi Ruin dungeons was one of my favorite. The basic idea behind them was that an ancient and highly magical civilization built them underground long ago (don’t want to spoil anything more). We had tons of random ideas, but one of my favorite was that even though these places are in ruin and crumbling, there would be protective magic still holding back the forces of nature and erosion. With certain Erathi Ruins located underwater, this would mean the water from those sources would be held back as well.

So if you keep an eye out in certain Erathi Ruins, you will see areas where water is held in place unnaturally by the magic still active in the ruins themselves. Keep your eye out throughout the game and you will see many different phenomenon caused by the conflict between nature and the magic within these ruins. By Shaun “Bearcop” Martin, Senior Environment Artist