Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Meet the Team Q&A: Tom Murphy

Big Huge Games narrative designer Tom Murphy is the latest Reckoning team member to be profiled in a Q&A over at the official website. The same round of questions that we’ve seen in the previous installments are posed to him, but obviously his area of expertise shifts the dynamic quite a bit.  A sampling:

What’s something fun or unique you can tell us about the Big Huge Games and 38 Studios culture?

It’s weird, but everything is so cyclical here. Much like the Fateless One, Reckoning started on a pile of corpses other projects that had their own worlds, their own characters and cosmologies. And when R.A. Salvatore hands us this big collection of lore and stories, our first thoughts in the narrative department were that it made our old stuff look like dirty socks. And though we were able to carry on a lot of systems, combat and tech from our older projects onto Reckoning, our old narrative ideas were put into the deep freeze.

But we never really forgot them. From time to time, one or several of these ideas would bubble to the surface a character, a region name and it was like finding your old toys from when you were a kid. Even though these ideas seemed incomplete or stupid in retrospect, we still put a lot of ourselves into making them, and still had a lot of fun ideas on where they could go. And I think that some of the best content we ended up putting into Reckoning was the content that was based in R.A.’s lore, but salted and seasoned with these older ideas that we loved so much.

That’s what’s special about Big Huge Games. Even when we move forward, we never really forget where we’ve come from.

Is there anyone in the video games industry you really admire and would love to meet?

If I ever got around to getting a degree from Butler Academy, I’d love to spend a week as a manservant to Chris Avellone and J.E. Sawyer of Obsidian Entertainment. I love their games to death.