Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview
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R.A., what can you tell us about the setting of the game?Thanks Blue's News.
Salvatore: I've been a gamer as well since 1980 and I started writing for a game company, half the novels I have written have been for TSR and what is now Wizards of the Coast -- the people that did the Dungeons & Dragons games. So I was always wondering 'What will the author's role be in a video game?'
It was hard for me to really know my role because I'm used to working in my own world or another world and finding my own corner of it and doing my own thing. I don't have to answer to people and don't have to worry about other people using what I'm doing. But this is an entirely different thing.
I don't want to give too much away about exactly what the world itself is going to look like. But what we did do to create this world was create a 10,000-year history of it so that everything made sense. We knew we were going to be bringing in from many different disciplines and we wanted them all painting on the same canvas and that canvas was created by this long history.
One big epiphany moment came for me in November of that first year. It was Curt's 40th birthday. What do you get Curt Schilling for his birthday? Curt had a favorite character and I took that character and wrote a short story set in Amalur. I took this short story and made this little leather-bound book and gave it to him as a birthday gift. Just a little short story. I didn't tell him not to share it with anyone or to share it with anyone. And about a week later, I went into the office and everyone in the office was talking about the short story because ... that little short story allowed them to get the smell of the world, the feel of the world. That is when you get those chills that we're doing something pretty cool maybe here because everybody is getting it.
To say I created this world and this story is really, you can't make that statement. Period. You can say that I gave a little guidance at the begining and started the ball rolling. And many, many poeple have jumped on that ball and just pushed it down the road. What I quickly came to surmise was that my job was to make sure everybody was pushing the ball the same way. That didn't take very long.
Rolston: The charm of what R.A. has done, I agree he hasn't created the stories, but he has created the structures and the themes and these mysteries and he's given enough detail to them and little connections so that whenever you write a story it touches on those franchise mysteries and that is one of the things that makes this a really remarkable setting. It has such a wonderful mysterious hidden heart to its narrative. He uses symbols and characters and things like that that cause these resonances. I think it's something that develops with poeple who develop Dungeons & Dragons games and certainly it would be a highly developed skill in anybody who writes novels. But it is absolutely essential in shared vast universes like RPGs. It's his ability to articulate a story at the structural level where the structure is so resonant that it makes everyone tune in almost instinctively to what he is doing. BTW that provides the suspense that will travel through our game and through any other game and any other material in the future.
Ken, what can you say about the action aspect of this game?
I am celebrated justly for being an advocate of free-form, open-world gaming because it is a lot of fun. As well as being a warrior, a mage and a thief, I'm really a pilgrim in the games that I go through. It's that pilgrim's interest or tourist's interest, in just wandering around and seeing everything and playing around with things, that was the thing that brought me the excitement of working on The Elder Scrolls projects. And in many ways they probably have defined the standard for any large, vast, narrative single-player role-playing game that will be an award-winner or best-seller. But we have already done that and I wanted to find some other place where we could be distinct and special and I have always had a lingering sense that RPGs are in some way hampered by their tabletop and PC-based, turn-based past. They are comfortable with being slow-paced and being comfortable with requiring you to go look at your character page or look at your character interface in a PC game or to have to fuss with all those things.
What I really wanted was the same kind of action immersion that you get in other games where if you are skateboarding, you are skateboarding. You're not checking your interface to see if you have the right gear on to be skateborading. You are in that moment. ... You'd think it wouldn't be so hard. You just take an action game and then adapt it to an RPG. But if you look at an action game, they almost always have very simple worlds that you are moving through, levels and levels specifically designed to certain aspects of the character. So the player doesn't really have that much choice. He is going through a maze and he is not improvising. Whereas the soul of role-playing games is defining your own character and being whoever you want to be and customizing yourself. So the challenge was finding something that would allow us to have the experience of an action-adventure game but sill have the complexity, richness and customization of a RPG.
