KoA: Reckoning - Interview @ Gamasutra

Gamasutra talked to Colin Campbell, the game's lead world designer which resulted in a
4 page interview.  They discussed the importance of building a game that caters to both genders, the challenges of building a fantasy world worth exploring, quest design and much much more.  Here's a sample about quest design:

You were talking about quest design and stuff. How hands-on is the design team in terms of getting in there, touching the metal, like scripting, that kind of stuff? And how much of the design team is more writerly, more big picture?

CC: I think that's a nice thing that we have right now. Everyone on our design team, almost, has a nice mix of creative and technical experience. There are obviously people who have been one way or the other a little more, but everybody can get in there and make their quest, or make their landscape they're going to make. We ask people to come in, give us some support to make it a little more artistic, or a little more technically sound, but everybody can play in both worlds.

And here's a sample about women in the game industry:

I think of women being an integral part of fantasy, but I don't as clearly think of women being as integral part of game development -- not because they're women, but just because that's how things have been.

CC: I think for a long time it's been a male-heavy industry. I actually taught night classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art for the last couple semesters, and a few of the Big Huge Games artists do. And that's really interesting because those classes that are very video game-centric have become more and more female, to the point where my last class I taught had 16 women and two men in it. The females in the class were just incredible. That's really going to have a significant impact in the industry. These women are going to do incredible things.

In other KO:A news Venture Beat has an two page interview with Curt Schilling, the founder of 38  Studios. Topics include the game's length, what was it like to work with "visionaries" such as Ken Rolston, the upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning's launch,  and much more.
A sample about how it all began:

GB: Tell me about the genesis and how long you guys have worked on it now.

CS: The Reckoning project was started as another project at the Baltimore studio, six or seven years ago. The actual beginning of Reckoning was about two and a half years ago when we acquired the studio from THQ. There have been some people on this game for six, seven years now, which is staggering I think. We launched this company with the MMO as the driver behind what we were doing, we always had this … “product ecosystem” is what we called it. We always had that vision from day one of growing a new intellectual property around an MMO as kind of the sun in the solar system. This opportunity presented itself, and once we felt that ethically, from a philosophical perspective, the two studios were aligned, bringing them onto the team so to speak was a no-brainer. They’d been shopping an RPG around and could not get anybody to bite on the IP, this story that they were selling. It was just a match made in heaven, out of a very fortunate circumstance.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning comes out tomorrow, February 7th 2012.