Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview
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You've got such an all-star team: former athlete and 38 Studios owner Curt Schilling, veteran RPG designer Ken Rolston, author R.A. Salvatore, and artist Todd McFarlane. What have they brought to the project? Has it been easy to integrate their contributions?
Honestly, I came into the acquisition and thought, "Um, I dunno, that's a lot of big names. It sounds like this might be bad." But I've been pleasantly surprised.
R.A. Salvatore, his big thing is that he wrote a 10,000-year story bible. So, before we even started building into what Reckoning is, we had this massive framework of narrative over the course of a very large stretch of time. It's been incredibly valuable, because we're not pulling things out of our butts on a daily basis. It helps our concept artists, our environment teams, and our enemy designers to root things in a world that feels believable.
Todd's involvement has been all over the place, but his biggest focus has been animation. He's given a lot of advice to punch up a sense of drama. If you've seen our demos, there's a lot of pauses and slowdown moments extra little bits of flair. Those very small details come from Todd's feedback. A lot of Todd's thing is, "Make it more awesome!"
The one point where we do occasionally see a conflict between them is during the traditional artist-versus-designer debate, where the artist says, "Let's make this look awesome" and the designer says, "Let's make this make sense." We try to find compromises that do both.
Meanwhile, Ken Rolston's been doing RPGs for 26 years, from the tabletop era to today. His big thing is the "I don't give a crap about your design" player. As designers, we tend to focus on a cool story or quest or combo we want you to use. What Ken consistently reminds us is that a lot of players don't care. Even if you wrote the best story in the world, they may just not want to play that story; they may want to deliberately screw it up. Ken reminds us to do the little things to make that player happy.
