Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Meet the Team Q&A: Matt Berner

In case you’re curious to learn more about the 38 Studios and Big Huge Games teams that have made Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, community manager Muse has been interviewing them, the latest piece being with combat and system designer Matt Berner:

What part(s) of Reckoning are you most proud of?

Personally, I’m most proud of my work on Player Combat. There were two weapons in particular, the Faeblades and Chakram. These weapons are both highly imaginative and were tough to conceptualize. Their personality and attacks were iterated upon so many times that I lost count. Our goal was to (find the fun.) It’s an arbitrary statement, but it’s pretty obvious when you succeed – you can see it on the faces of the people playing.

In general, I’m most proud of the team. Big Huge Games is an amazing studio, filled with a lot of intelligent and diligent people. There have been a number of challenges, and it took everyone to make the game as great as it was. What I’m most excited about now however is what we’ll be doing next.

If you could be any character or creature in Reckoning, what would you be?

The Fateless One is pretty much a no-brainer, so I’ll step out on a limb and say one of the Fae. Although capable of death, they live a life of immortality. It would be fascinating to see the ages turn, to have endless time to learn and experience the world.

What is something you learned by creating Reckoning?

Reckoning was my first RPG, and it was a big one. The amount of content that goes into a game like this is almost unimaginable. There’s a saying: The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. I think game development is like that. The possibilities are endless, and content can go in near infinite directions.

As an RPG, my experience with Reckoning has taught me that there will never be a perfect game. Games do a few things great, some things well, other things poorly, and most not at all. Seeing and understanding why decisions were made has helped define and refine my take on project scope.

If this was to your liking, there are also other two developer interviews, with producer Sean Bean and content designer Kitty Hughes respectively.