KoA: Reckoning - R.A. Salvatore Interview @ GameSpot

GameSpot caught up with R.A. Salvatore in an article format interview about creating the world of Amalur:

Though his skill brought imagined worlds to life on the page, Salvatore found crafting an interactive story hard to do. In print, the author is the one charged with supplying the heroes; in games, the hero is the player, meaning a game's story has to be flexible enough to let players project themselves into the story while maintaining enough richness and complexity to stand on its own.

In creating the world of Amalur, Salvatore looked toward existing human mythology and folklore in search of patterns of cultural behaviour. By studying the evolution of creation and destruction myths found in different cultures at different times, Salvatore was able to handpick different world views and customs and place them side by side, rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle.

"Why did some cultures succeed and others fail? Why did one thing work in one part of society but fail in another? I tasked my team of writers on Amalur to ask these questions and to research different mythologies from around the world and imagine what the world would be like if some of these stories were actually true. What would a real race of elves or dwarves behave like? We worked backwards, unraveling the stories we found and putting them together again."