Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Postmortem

Big Huge Games executive producer Mike Fridley took the time to pen a postmortem about what went right and wrong during Reckoning’s development for the April 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine, and lucky for us, Gamasutra has reprinted it to the web for our easy consumption. Those of us who have followed the game since it was called Ascendant will see a few well-known nuggets in here:

At first, our RPG project was named “Crucible” and was being published by THQ. We were making great progress on it, and THQ was happy enough with the progress that they purchased us outright; and we became an internal THQ studio. Around that time we switched some of the key features of the game and renamed the project “Ascendant.” We were part of the THQ network of studios for a short period of time right up to the point that THQ started running out of money. Our big, juicy, unproven-in-the-genre studio was a prime target for them to try to sell.

With literally days left on the “close the doors” timer at the studio, THQ sold us to Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, which has R.A. Salvatore as “creator of worlds.” It became clear pretty quickly that we would need to change the universe and some of the game features yet again to take advantage of Robert’s genius. We changed the project name to “Mercury,” which later was given the final shipping name of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

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Before preproduction started on Reckoning, Scrum was starting to gain a lot of momentum in the game development community. I don’t think that Scrum is the only way that people should be developing games these days, but after running pure Scrum for the entire development of Reckoning, I’m a firm believer in its methods.

I won’t go in to the details of Agile development here, but the basic element of Scrum that made it so successful at BHG is the ability for the individual developer to estimate his or her own work.

The old days are gone. You can’t expect producers or leads to come up with a huge waterfall of everything they thought would get done over the next three years. In the game development business, it’s insane to think you have any insight into what your team will be doing one year from now. You can set major milestones with hard dates, but filling in all the details between those points is an exercise in futility.

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In Reckoning, a lot of the custom content work we did focused on the main quest. There is a lot of custom content throughout the entire game, but we knew we really wanted to spend more of our time on the main quest, as most players would see the majority of that line. A big chunk of that custom work was cinematics.

Our cinematic team is awesome but very small. Much like most of our teams on the project, they have to produce more content than would normally be expected for a team that size. Not locking down the major beats of the main quest early really hurt the cinematics team.

Going from a storyboard to a finished cinematic takes a long time. Once a cinematic is finished, it is very costly to change. Because we weren’t locked down on the major cinematic moments in the game for so long, we ended up having to cut several cinematics that we really wanted to include. The cinematics we have in the game are awesome, and we got all the major beats that we wanted, but we definitely wanted more.