Interview: A Reckoning between fantasy RPG and action fighting

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 14 December 2011 10:43

Opinion and Analysis

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a new IP from 38 Studios boldly entering the market strewn with fantasy based RPG's.  But as Lead Designer Ian Frazier and Producer Sean Bean pointed out to RadioactiveIT, there is plenty to distinguish this game from rest, in particular the rich lore and the Tekken style combat.

With games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim dominating the single player RPG landscape, and not to mention the attraction of other similar AAA RPG titles both single player, multi and massively multiplayer also around, it is a bold path to tread to develop a new IP in this market

'We are pretty bold people,' says Ian Frazier, Lead designer at 38 Studios ' it's something we have wanted to do for a long time, Curt Schilling is the founder of the company [38 Studios] is a long time fantasy RPG fan, and so, from the very beginning, at the funding stage we knew this is what we want to do, no questions.  A huge proportion of the team are rabid fantasy RPG fans.  So it is something that is across the board, from the money level down to individual artists and designers, this absolutely something we wanted to do regardless of what anybody else was doing. '

'Then we are obviously trying many things to differentiate ourselves from all the other games that are in this space, and the big thing is our combat.  Obviously we are bias, but we believe we have not just the best combat in fantasy, but in the RPG genre as a whole.'

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning seems to be taking its cues from everything from Dungeon Siege to the more pure fighting style games such as Street Fighter

Frazier agrees: 'Yep, in terms of the combat experience it does pull a lot from the action game genre, you are right, our combat team lead is in fact a tournament level Tekken player, and a lot of that kinda shows up throughout the design of the combat.  We have juggling of enemies, the concept of framed advantages in there,  you can cancel out of a middle of an attack with a roll or a block, you can be in the middle of an attack and transition to another, you can combo together different weapons seamlessly .  It's all very smooth and very reactive and we spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on our animation, it gives us a sense of weight and heft and power to the moment-to-moment combat than what you would normally see in a RPG.'

'On the other hand you mentioned Dungeon Siege, it's the loot right?  You take these enemies down you want to get something awesome for it beyond just some XP.  Hardcore RPG's such as Bethesda [Skyrim, Fallout 3] and Bioware [Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect] games, they have a lot of strengths, but the things they don't tend to do as well is loot, and we wanted to take a hardcore RPG and inject into it, sort of, loot awesomeness that you get out of more hack-and-slash style of game, like Diablo or Dungeon Siege.'

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