KoA:R - Interview @ USA Today

USA Today has a roundtable conversation with Curt Schilling, Ken Rolstan, Todd McFarlane and R.A. Salvatore about Kingdoms of Amalur.  Nothing is really revealed yet but they talk about the style and direction.  Here's a bit from Ken Rolstan:

Ken, what can you say about the action aspect of this game?

I am celebrated justly for being an advocate of free-form, open-world gaming because it is a lot of fun. As well as being a warrior, a mage and a thief, I'm really a pilgrim in the games that I go through. It's that pilgrim's interest or tourist's interest, in just wandering around and seeing everything and playing around with things, that was the thing that brought me the excitement of working on The Elder Scrolls projects. And in many ways they probably have defined the standard for any large, vast, narrative single-player role-playing game that will be an award-winner or best-seller. But we have already done that and I wanted to find some other place where we could be distinct and special and I have always had a lingering sense that RPGs are in some way hampered by their tabletop and PC-based, turn-based past. They are comfortable with being slow-paced and being comfortable with requiring you to go look at your character page or look at your character interface in a PC game or to have to fuss with all those things.

What I really wanted was the same kind of action immersion that you get in other games where if you are skateboarding, you are skateboarding. You're not checking your interface to see if you have the right gear on to be skateborading. You are in that moment. ... You'd think it wouldn't be so hard. You just take an action game and then adapt it to an RPG. But if you look at an action game, they almost always have very simple worlds that you are moving through, levels and levels specifically designed to certain aspects of the character. So the player doesn't really have that much choice. He is going through a maze and he is not improvising. Whereas the soul of role-playing games is defining your own character and being whoever you want to be and customizing yourself. So the challenge was finding something that would allow us to have the experience of an action-adventure game but sill have the complexity, richness and customization of a RPG.