Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview
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GZ: Many RPG players prefer to explore and tackle side activities before attempting main quests. How does Reckoning accommodate that sort of player?I really like what I'm hearing from these guys.
WM: The first hour to two hours is pretty directed and scripted, especially in the tutorial cave. It's a microcosm of what the game as a whole will be like for you to give you an opportunity to experiment with all the crafting systems, learn how the combat works and be introduced to the lore. After that it goes very wide, so once you get out of that area you can do whatever it is you want to do. You could follow the main quest and there's a lot of content down that road, there's faction quests you can do and freeform kinds of stuff, but we don't prevent you geographically - there's nothing blocking you from running one end of the world to the other. You could totally do that, but you'd get pretty owned!
GZ: The other thing we really liked was the quick time event Fate Shift attacks, mainly because the button prompts change periodically so you don't become numb to the actions that you're doing. How many different finishers are there in the game, does it change itself in accordance to class and skill setup?
WM: It doesn't change when it comes to class and most enemies have their own hand-animated Fate Shift kill. Some of them have more than one - obviously we'd love to put more in there but there's enough to have variety and be satisfying. We're very judicious when it comes to the use of QTEs. Saying we're going to make God of War, but in an open-world RPG - the temptation is there to base a lot of combat around QTE. We felt that the judicious application of QTE in Reckoning mode and a couple of other places lends itself to the visceral nature of what you see on screen. It's a button mash, I liken it to Crash mode in Burnout, you press the B button to get a bigger explosion; it's all just icing. You can't fail by failing the QTE ever in our game. So that's the philosophy behind that.
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GamerZines: Unlike other RPGs, Reckoning features a silent protagonist, why did you guys go for that?
Will Miller (Systems Designer for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning): There were a couple of considerations with that and one was localisation. We wanted to localise all of the voices in the game, we didn't want any speech that wasn't localised and having the player character talk ballooned that very quickly. However that was a very minor component to this decision, the big reason why we did this was because the less that's explicit about your character the more, the player gets to infer their own personality. Some of the best games have silent protagonists, Zelda for example, and if he ever speaks I swear - I'll march to Tokyo myself. That was a conscious choice and we think it was the right one.
GZ: That's really interesting, because games as a medium seem to be moving away from that idea. Take the success of BioWare's approach for instance...
WM: I love BioWare RPGs I really do, but I think there are better things that games do than tell a cinematic narrative. We want you to walk away from Reckoning with the story that we've chosen to tell you, but also the story that you've told yourself with our game. I feel like when you walk away from a game where your character talks, you've lived more of the designer's story than your own, but with Reckoning we give you a great set of building blocks to tell your own tale. The anecdotes that your friends always tell you about these games aren't about great scripted sequences, instead it's along the lines of; "I invested in this crazy combination of skills which made me totally invincible and that was awesome because it broke the game!"
Hopefully we won't ship with anything like that, but it's all about that kind of stuff. These great little experiences that the players had, that they did, not what the game did for them is what is super important. I worked for Firaxis for two and a half years and one of Sid Meier's big things is that the game should never have more fun than the player and that the systems always serve the game. My own personal design philosophy, as well as Big Huge Games', aligns very closely with that and that was the motivation behind that decision and many more.
