14 DAY TRIAL // A source has told Joystiq that a development team at Big Huge Games was already working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 2 when financial trouble hit both the company and its parent, 38 Studios, and forced them to lay off all their staff.
The developer is said to have been in the pre-production stage for Reckoning 2 and was planning to include higher quality graphics, more combat animations and more detail for the game world while completely eliminating all inter area loading screens.
The pre-production effort was apparently funded directly by Electronic Arts, the publisher who worked with Big Huge Games and 38 Studios on the first game.
Despite the financing, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 2 did not yet have an official publishing partner and it was making pitches to several companies after EA declined to fully fund it citing executive decisions.
A source inside 38 Studios has told Joystiq that, “Reckoning was developed with EA publishing money, not Rhode Island tax dollars.”
It went to add, “It had nothing to do with the 50 million dollars from RI. That money went directly to the MMO project.”
It’s highly unlikely that Reckoning 2 will ever be fully developed and released, although some analysts have suggested that a publisher might be able to pick up the right to the game world for 20 million dollars (15.9 million Euro).
It’s not clear whether the Reckoning 2 project was set to be launched before the Copernicus MMO or alongside it.
38 Studios was unable to pay the state of Rhode Island and its own employees and then fired all its employees and has ceased all development work.
A number of the developers working on Kingdoms of Amalur have already been offered jobs at other studios and work on a patch that was planned for the PC version of the game was also suspended.