Kingdoms of Amalur Reflects RPG Genre Need for More Action and Drama

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the action and role playing game from Big Huge Games and 38 Studios, is one of the first big releases of the year and one designer working on the game says that it will satisfy a number of urges that fans of the genre have had for some time.

Ken Rolston, who is one of the leading developer on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, told GameFront that, “Despite the fact that RPGs have made such deep and passionate inroads into the mainstream market, I still feel they are slow-paced, abstract, and awkward.”

He added, “Reckoning reflects my hunger for a faster pace of action and combat drama, and a desire for simpler, easier-to-use interfaces. RPGs are naturally the deepest, longest, and most complicated kinds of videogame entertainment… that’s what makes them great. But making them just a tiny bit less clumsy in the interface, and just a big, fat, huge amount more physical and exciting in combat, gives them more fun-per-unit-time. Me? I want All-Fun, All-the-Time, Right-Now, thank-you-very-much.”

Rolston is best known to role playing gamers because he was the leading designer working at Bethesda when both The Elder Scrolls III and its follow-up, Oblivion, were developed, and he is credited with many of the innovations that the games introduced.

Kingdoms of Amalur is designed to mix quick and visceral action with a very big open world environment that gamers will be free to explore at their own pace.

The story of the game is penned by R.A. Salvatore, who is well known for his fantasy world creation skills, and the entire game will serve as the prequel for an ambitious MMO project that 38 Studios is also developing.

Recknoning will be playable on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 and is set to arrive on February 7 in North America and the customary three days later in Europe.