Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview

Computer and Videogames is hosting a new interview with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’s lead designer Ian Frazier, which touches upon subjects such as the “three visionaries” behind the game, the difficulty of pushing a new IP in the market, the game’s combat and more. Here’s a snip on Ken Rolston’s contributions to the title and what the game has in common with Titan Quest:

You said Ken is a madman?

His office is right across the hall from mine. I have to keep a squirt gun in my office just to pacify him. He opened his keynote at Gamescon with the words, “Citizens of Earth!” I think a lot of the time people see interviews of him being crazy and they assume he’s putting on a show? No, that’s pretty much him.

How do you make sure that ends up in the game rather than just driving you all insane?

Well, he has driven us all insane, but his big thing is he just plays the game for really long stretches of time and gives us feedback on it. Ken’s approach is not the way that I work at all, and that’s awesome as it gives you a very different angle. It’s not about breaking the game, it’s more about avoiding all the custom-crafting stuff. He’ll play through the game trying to talk to nobody, avoid all quests, wander into the dungeon you’re not supposed to get to yet, and deliberately do the opposite.

He’ll play that way for 50 hours, and just hand me a load of feedback, and then we’ll be able to look at it and say, ‘okay, how do we make the game fun for this kind of player?’ Because there’s a lot of people out there who play that way. That’s a big part of his contribution.

You worked on Titan Quest – with Torchlight and Diablo, seems like a genre that’s having a resurgence. A) why do you think that is? Are RPG tastes cyclical in some ways, and B) have you taken much from it for Kingdoms?

It’s hard to say if it’s cyclical. It’s impossible to say. What it feels like from a business standpoint is if Diablo’s successful, a lot of people say, ‘hey, can we get some of that money too?’ That would be great to have.

Titan Quest didn’t do that well. If it had, you’d probably see a lot of games in that style, but when Diablo comes out, you’ll probably see another surge. For Titan Quest in particular what hurt us was piracy, and the system requirements which were quite high. That can just kill you.

Something else we wanted to do but were unable to pry from THQ were persistent servers. Not a problem Diablo’s going to have, but with Titan Quest, if people wanted to cheat, there was nothing we could do to stop them.

And there are so many elements of Titan Quest I’ve very deliberately poached and inserted into Reckoning. Firstly, there’s hybrid classes. We actually go beyond that, but that idea of being able to mix and match different builds, we totally have that in Reckoning. The other thing is the loot system: the underlying system is straight-up: I made this in Titan Quest, let me see if I can do it again and do it better!