14 DAY TRIAL // Kingdoms of Amalur was supposed to change the way the gaming world experienced action role-playing games, but the game failed to make the impression that developers at Big Huge Games and 38 Studios had hoped for.
Mike Fridley, who was the executive producer working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, stated in a postmortem in the April issue of Game Developer magazine:
“Shortly after we came out of preproduction, we took a long, hard look at the game we were making and tried to figure out where we were going to be better than the competition. We figured that open-world RPG designs are segmented into four basic quadrants: story, character progression, exploration, and combat.”
He added, “We discovered that it was easy to identify the games leading the industry in story, progression, and exploration, but there was no clear title that does combat well while still meeting the expectations of the player in the other three quadrants. So we decided to go all-in on combat and change our staffing plan to really commit to making combat fun in an open-world RPG.”
The article in Game Developers magazine covers more aspects of the development process for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, offering details on how the team presented their game to the public and what other problems they needed to overcome before launch date.
When Kingdoms of Amalur was initially announced, the developers described the experience as revolutionary, with a combat system that would keep gamers more engaged than those offered by Fallout or Skyrim.
The final result was enjoyable enough, but failed to produce a game with long-term appeal.
38 Studios has assembled a team of superstar developers in order to create Kingdoms of Amalur and they are currently also involved in the development of a MMO based on the same universe, called Copernicus.