The launch date for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the action and role-playing mix from Big Huge Games and 38 Studios, is fast approaching and the developers working on the game say that much of their performance depends on how hooked the fans are on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Ian Frazier, the lead designer working on
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, stated, “Frankly, Reckoning is either going to do well enough that we're going to be in a good place or people are going to go, nope, I'm still playing Skyrim, I'm not interested, in which case we're hosed.”
The developer believes that there’s no middle ground between the two possibilities. He says he is a fan of the experience that Bethesda has offered in Skyrim but that gamers should try and see what Reckoning does differently.
He says, “But a lot of folks are still playing it, and that's been one of my biggest concerns. It's the same thing as if we had released first. It's hundreds of hours of content and it's a high fantasy world. Are people just going to be bored? Are they just done with high fantasy for a while? I hope not. But that's the big concern at the studio.”
Frazier also thinks that the big success of
Skyrim, which has managed to move more than 10 million copies to gamers, proves that the role-playing genre can perform very well as long as the developers create an experience that is attractive and easy to understand.
The developers are not always happy with the fact that Kingdoms of Amalur and Skyrim are always compared, but the practice also allows the Reckoning team to point out key differences, like the more attractive art style or the focus on action when it comes to the combat system.
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