Dhruin
SasqWatch
A new trailer has been released for Reckoning titled Power & Mastery showing some of the character combat approaches, divided into Might, Finesse, Sorcery and Hybrids.
More information.
More information.
The graphics style of this game really put me off. The trails behind the weapons, the way things light up like light bulbs when you hit them.
The scene when they shoot the guy with an arrow and he goes flying in the air and they shoot him 2 more times keeping him in the air. People flying 10 feet from being hit with a dagger. Too arcade for me.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this game.
Dear God! Too much camera shake and flashy special effects.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this game.
I agree with some of the comments about the art style; however, I'm willing to give it a shot based on the fact that it is an open world RPG with a rather large amount of content, several joinable factions, interesting lore, a detailed crafting system, etc.
The combat system looks a little bit street-fighterry, but it will probably be fun. The archery animations are way too fast, however. He's not even completely drawing the damn bowstring! (I wonder if Duke Patrick can make a mod for this game? )
Big Huge Games' last release was Asian Dynasties (expansion pack for Age of Empires III). Have you been purely working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning since then?
We've been working on a 'form' of it. When we were finishing up Asian Dynasties, we made Settlers of Catan as a self-funded XBLA game because we knew we wanted to get into console development, which wasn't something that we, as a studio, knew how to do. Our experience was in RTS games for PC.
So we said 'Well, let's do this and make it through the certification process and figure out the hardware', but in our hearts what we wanted to do was a game very much like Reckoning. It would be an RPG, it'd have this amazing combat that no one had ever seen before, so we (from scratch) started building an engine that would support all of that.
So we'd been working on that since 2007 with THQ, but then THQ ran into some hard financial times and they had to let us go. This was in 2009.
THQ had actually bought us, so we were a part of THQ and they were going to lay off the studio, and right before they were going to come in and shutter the studio, Curt Schilling from 38 Studios came in. He played for the Red Sox, but in his off-time, when everyone else would run out and carouse, he would play online games as a way to keep in touch with his family (and keep himself out of trouble).
Videogames save the day yet again!
It's true! And he fell in love with Everquest. And when he retired, he started 38 Studios with the idea that he wanted to make an MMO. So, their game was an MMO. And Curt came to us and said:
We've got this world with 10'000 years of history, with all this lore coming out of your ears and we're going to have an MMO, but we don't want to hit people cold with an MMO straight away. We'd like to be able to present the lore. You guys are making this really great-looking RPG: can you keep all these elements in place that you've got and all these systems, go over our IP and find a really great place to make an RPG.
So the game mecahnics and game world were completely disparate?
Yeah, we'd been working with these systems that we knew that we wanted, and when 38 bought us, we shifted into the world of Amalur. We took our animations, our art, our sounds and scrapped it all. We went through all of their lore and looked at all the parts of Amalur, and since their game is going to happen chronologically after our game, we thought 'What would your part of Amalur look like a couple of thousand years ago?'
So we've been working on THIS game under the Amalur IP since May of 2009.