Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview

With the game hitting store shelves tomorrow, Gamasutra brings us a last-minute interview with Reckoning’s lead world designer Colin Campbell about a variety of topics including quest design, the challenges of building a fantasy world worth exploring, the importance of building a game that caters to both genders, and more. A couple of questions and their answers:

With open world games, I don’t know if it’s a weakness, but a challenge is environmental storytelling. Have you given any thought to environmental storytelling? Because I know R.A. Salvatore, in particular, is big on world building and society building.

CC: Yeah. It’s one of the things we really strive for. We built a game where you can run along the path and veer off… The main quest is telling you to go in one direction, and you can veer left and explore the tiny shack that’s been destroyed, finding quests that lead you down to the dark, spider-infested forest.

So, we try to build a world that ebbs and flows, and has moments of large visual storytelling — like I said, a whole forest that’s spider-infested, and then, like, a tiny overturned cart you find.

And, you know, 50 feet down the road, you find the bandits that are getting away with the loot. You kill them, and maybe that’s not a quest, but it’s a little moment in the world that makes it come alive. We try to do all types of scale in that way.

…

Given the high investments that have been made in games this generation, the number of people who have to buy a game to make it successful is very high, and there’s a certain belief that we have to make them work for a lot of people.

But RPGs are pretty serious investments for players. Do you have a sense of where, philosophically, you lie in terms of saying, “How understandable does this game have to be?” or “How readable does it have to be?” Who are you targeting?

CC: One of my favorite things about our game… The combat, for example, anybody can pick up the combat, press the buttons, and get through the game. it’s very approachable. It’s very organic. It feels the way that combat should feel, I think in a lot of ways. You press the button, and something happens the way you expect it to happen.

That said, the player that wants to can learn about the different talents, learn about the ways… Like this attack does this, and you can chain this attack into this attack, and use a spell with these attacks or with these weapons, and you can apply this buff to this weapon.

There are a lot of opportunities to customize yourself and add a lot of depth to it. That’s where all the RPG depth comes in. So, I think… You’re never going to please everybody, but I think we’ve done a good job of creating a spectrum that can appeal to a lot of folks.