Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview
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GB: It was always an action-focused game, from the start?
CS: Ah.no. It looks that way. But no. Explaining that to people has been the challenge in leading up to the demo and all the marketing. Because it's hard not to just be visually stunned by the combat and the animation. But there's a deep, stat-driven, lore-driven, story-driven multi-hundred-hour Baldur's Gate RPG fantasy game behind this combat. That's very hard for people to grasp. But yes, the combat is the thing that jumps out at you as what is uniquely different. I think when you see it first, you think God of War or some other combat game. And then you quickly understand when you start playing, there's a massive, deep, and rich story behind this. It's hard to imagine that the combat is statistically driven as well, in addition to being a button-masher. That was the challenge, and I think it's still a challenge. I still think people are hesitant to believe that those two things can coexist, but they do.
GB: What was it like working with folks like Ken?
CS: Oh my gosh. [Apart from] having to introduce him as an internationally celebrated game designer every time I say his name, which is frustrating, it's been awesome. Ken is what my dad used to call (good people.) He's genuine, he's obviously amazingly talented, and he's got a couple screws loose. That makes it fun. He's also quietly, deeply involved, in all the good ways. I can think I have good ideas, Bob [Salvatore] can think he has good ideas, and Todd can think he has good ideas. Ken is that guy who can take bigger concepts and make them fun gameplay. I think that was his magic and his touch on all of this. About a month before we went gold, Ken went and played the game for two straight weeks and never accepted a quest. And he wrote up a report about it. When we asked him why, his response was, (Because I wanted to know you could do it in our world.) That's the depth of the world in this game, and this IP, and everything we do.
GB: You guys seem like you got it out on time. Did it pretty much come in on schedule?
CS: Yep. Well, our initial ship was late last year. We had a chance to look at the competitive window, and another smart decision by EA was to try to move away from that a little bit. I think we found a sweet spot. I think given where we are, given who and what we are, I think this is the best possible time we could have done this. I also think that there's somewhat of a fallacy around launch windows. I think a lot of people believe game windows to be far longer and bigger than they really are for us as gamers. Outside of an MMO I'm not sure of many games that I don't beat the crap out of in 30 days. I think it's a month to month thing. There's some other games, Plants Vs. Zombies, Railroad Tycoon, Company of Heroes, that I'll play for years, on and off. But my dedication and commitment to one title and one title only, it's not as big a window as we sometimes think. But at the end of the day, we finished on time, we finished on budget, and I think we over-delivered in every possible way that anybody outside of the company could have been expecting.
