Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Preview and Interview

We have a couple of new Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning articles to bring to your attention, including a hands-on preview of the game’s high level content over at Ten Ton Hammer:

The no spoilers take on the final encounter with Balor; it was a multi-stage encounter with interactive cutscene aspects i.e. press the key when prompted while the baddie is in a down state or the encounter will regress a stage. Other EA published titles could learn a thing or two from Reckoning’s treatment of the time-honored concept the amount of time to hit each key was urgent but not uncomfortable, and the penalty for missing a keypress isn’t overly punishing. For a little extra drama, I was down to my last potion in the final stage but prevailed, reveling in a finishing animation that surely must have made Todd McFarlane spawn a grin. Mel Senshir, and the outlying swamps of Klurikon, was now open to exploration.

At the very least, our final Reckoning preview event underscored the level of polish going into Big Huge Games’ big huge name-dropper of a title. With 2 months prior to launch, Reckoning is story-complete and feature-complete, (it’s just not a finished title,) explained Producer Andrew Frederiksen. They could have fooled us. In four hours of admittedly staged play, I didn’t experience a single bug, cosmetic or otherwise.

Then we jump to Gameplanet for an interview with lead designer Ian Frazier and producer Sean Bean:

Gameplanet: Ian, you worked on Titan Quest, which was a highly respected game. A lot of people were annoyed when Iron Lore got shut down…

Ian: We were also very annoyed!

Gameplanet: …Is there any influence from Titan Quest in Amalur?

Ian: There’s two that you’ll definitely pick up on. One is our Destiny system, it’s something I always wanted to do with Iron Lore, it was always “some day, we’ll get to do this!”, and some day we did, because we got to use it with Reckoning. The way that it works is that you start the game off, you’ve got these three different ability trees, and you’ll notice the structure is a lot like how they looked in Titan Quest. You can invest in the abilities either on a single tree, or across all three trees. You may remember in Titan Quest you could have two different masteries, and you could combine them to make hybrid characters. We always loved that, it was something that was received really well by the community with Titan Quest, so we wanted to keep that hybridisation in Reckoning. We not only let you hybridise like Titan Quest did, but you can do it with three trees at a time, and we reward you with these dynamic classes, what we call Destinies because of the decisions you’ve made, the way you’ve chosen to focus on a tree, or hybridise between two or three trees.

Another thing that is somewhat inspired by Titan Quest is the way we do loot. Normally hardcore open-world RPGs are all about exploration, they do tons of quests and all that’s great, but the loot tends to be a little bit lacking. I saw no good reason to not bring over all the good aspects of the loot system from Titan Quest and full-on jack them into Reckoning, and that’s what we did. We have a huge affix system that can generate countless items, so there’s not only your “flaming helm of resplendent glory”, but also hundreds and hundreds of hand-crafted unique items, much like Titan Quest. We also have custom art pieces that have their own history, names, facts and custom effects. So the loot experience is very much in the vein of Titan Quest.