Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning lead designer Ian Frazier has tackled another batch of questions about the game for Strategy Informer, during which he suggests that the game’s 200+ hours of content might have actually been a bit overdone. As long as it’s all quality content, I’d disagree:

Strategy Informer: Do you think there’s such a thing as ‘˜too much’ content?

Ian Frasier: That is a really good question. There are really two answers to that question too much content at a time? Absolutely there can be too much content. We’ve really tried with Reckoning, at the beginning specifically even though there’s a crap load of stuff in the game, to start with this small funnel of content and then gradually get bigger.

You’ll notice World of Warcraft does this really well, like it’s a ginormous game, but they start small and then grow till you have like a bazillion options, but by that point you understand what you want and can pick and choose what you want to do. It’s similar with us Chakrams for instance, Faeblades and Greatswords. they don’t actually drop until you’re level 3. So we do a lot of things like that under-the-hood, where we control when the player experiences what. Same with factions we don’t dump them all on the player at once.

It’s an open-world game not like Skyrim where it’s just a massive open square, but it’s a network of spaces you can journey through. It’s a bit like Fable but more like Skyrim in the freedom side of things.

The other side of that is (how much content in general is too much?) I don’t have an answer to that. It’s a question I ask myself regularly as we got to the end of this game and thought (my god, did we make it too big?)

Have I mentioned the content completion play through? We recently had a content completion play through about two months ago. so, QA guys, they’ve been playing the game for years, they know all there is to know about it, it’s ins and outs, etc. their goal is to play everything. Do every quest, every dungeon, everything possible, but as fast as possible. That means easy difficulty, skip all cut scenes and dialogue, sprint everywhere that’s sprintable, fast travel everywhere you can.don’t do any combat you don’t need to do. that all took around 200 hours, and that was a speed run. For a normal person, it’ll be way more than that.

I think in terms of a selling point bang for your buck I think it’s great. It should be on the back of the box. But as a developer I have to look at it and think (did we overdo this?) I really don’t know.