AusGamers chats with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Lead Designer and veteren of the Elder Scrolls games, Ken Rolston. Ken gives us his thoughts on the game’s lore, working with Todd McFarlane and the absense of co-operative multiplayer.
AusGamers: I guess we’ll kick off with a question about the game’s storyline. Without spoilers, can you tell us a little bit about the lore of Amalur? Did the lore come first from R.A. Salvatore before the game was conceived or was it written with the game in mind?
Ken Rolston: Ok, I’m going to set things up a bit. I deliberately don’t want to talk about story, but you happened to mention something I can talk about, so I’ll mention the lore. But I’m also going to talk a little bit about the story — what we can tell you about the story of the game.
You’re talking not so much about the story of Reckoning, but the world of Amalur and we don’t want to tell too much about it. But it is kind of a useful anecdote, that when we got the ten thousand years of history from R.A. Salvatore, Mark Nelson and I — this is the early days of us saying “what can we do in this world?” — both Mark and I instinctively went immediately to this one place in the history that looked amazingly perfect. Because it was a thing where… the great time is when there’s a lot of conflict and a lot of change so that’s when this thing happened.
So that’s an important element in the bigger picture. But for us we said “wow, this is the fountain of premise”. I don’t care nearly so much — when I have a blank page — about having a great story, as having a great premise. Because in a role-playing game, the story should be about the player, and really — from my point of view — the great point of a story is its point of contact with the user the first time.
So what I want is a great premise and the thing that came out of that war, that was interesting to us, is that it’s when a very special thing happened. And this is what happens in Reckoning; your character is dead, and wakes up [laughs]. And that’s a great gag… it’s a great gag and all that. But it’s also the first time in history that anyone has ever been dead and woken up.
Now that makes it different; that works within the frame of the genre, which is familiar. But then it’s special in some way. And what’s delightful about it, is that the player and the character are both going to begin — when it starts with character creation — they both begin in ignorance, which is what we call [in a delighted voice, with air-quotes] “the seeds of suspense”.
So as a writer, as a narrative teller — oh my god — both the player and the character, share the same suspense: “What the hell happened? What does it mean and what am I going to do about it?”. And then as you move forward through the game — the character and the player simultaneously — you’re progressing through things that drive your character because you want to know what’s happened. And at the same time, you’re moving out into the world and you’re finding that those questions are part of the world’s questions too.
“For every life, there’s a reckoning”, that is the phrase that Mark Nelson came up with. And I don’t even know what it means really, it’s just so absolutely true. For every life there’s a reckoning — when you’re the first person in history that woke up after being dead, you get a second chance. Then that in an epic sense: does the world get a second chance?
That whole idea of how history could be different and it could all be on the basis of one person and the way their fate changes. You know, maybe that’s just mythological or thematically satisfying, but I like starting off as something that is enigmatic, epic and doesn’t suck. So I want the player to have those same feelings: “[in a funny voice] This is enigmatic, epic and doesn’t suck; so oh boy, I can’t wait to move through the world and find the answers and stuff!”.
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