Jennifer Elizabeth MacLean and Michael Dawe were married Friday at the Blithewold Mansion, Gardens and Arboretum in Bristol, R.I. Ken Rolston, a Universal Life minister, officiated.

The bride, 38, and bridegroom, 31, both work in the video game industry, in Providence, R.I. She is the chief executive of 38 Studios, and he is a senior programmer at Big Huge Games.

The bride graduated from Johns Hopkins and received an M.B.A. from Columbia. She is a daughter of Kenneth D. Nadolny of Millersville, Md., and the late Patricia Ann Nadolny.

The bridegroom graduated cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received a master’s degree in computer science from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash. He is the son of Kathleen T. Dawe and Stanley P. Dawe of Sunset Beach, N.C.

[ Source ]

Just when Ken Rolston thought he was out of the videogame biz, the creators of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning pulled him back in.

After serving as lead designer of the acclaimed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Rolston retired. But when his friends at Big Huge Games told him they wanted his input as a “lead creative visionary” for their new RPG, to be published by Electronic Arts, he couldn’t resist getting back into the game.

In this Wired.com video, Rolston recounts the story of how he became involved in creating Reckoning, to be released early next year for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, then tells us what differentiates it from other role-playing games.

In a word: combat. He’s not just whistling Dixie, either. Wired.com tried the game at a preview event and found that slashing orcs and setting people on fire felt really good — not quite as good as a straight-up action game, but not the sort of sluggish half-measures that you typically associate with RPGs.

[ Source ]

“Combat!” That’s the thing that differentiates 38 Studios and Big Huge Games’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning from your typical role-playing game fare, says the game’s lead designer. It’s the primal stuff extracted from games like God of War, Tekken and Call of Duty and injected into this high fantasy world.

“We’ve failed if we haven’t communicated that,” says Big Huge Games senior designer Ken Rolston, who is perhaps better known for his work on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion at Bethesda Softworks. Rolston’s got pen-and-paper RPG in his blood, having worked on Dungeons & Dragons, Paranoia and Warhammer games.

Rolston told Kotaku at a recent preview that, while he still has a fondness for the “lovable, old-fashionedness” of role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate, his company’s 2012 game has him just as excited for fighting game-like action, loot drops and the “candy” that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will hand out to players over dozens of hours.

[ Read More ]

Fantasy worlds in video games are getting pretty intricate. Consider the upcoming game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which is being developed by 38 Studios and will be sold by Electronic Arts. In this game, you can pick the pocket of a citizen in the world. Once you do that, you have to slink away because the character will start feeling his or her clothing for a wallet. When they don’t find it, they’ll whirl and look for a thief.

[ Read More ]

Ken Rolston has probably been making RPGs since before you were born, just not necessarily the ones with pixels in them. He cut his teeth building traditional, role-playing board games – the kind you play with pencil and paper – before moving into the games industry at Bethesda and working on the Elder Scrolls series for both its Morrowind and Oblivion instalments. As Lead Designer at Big Huge Games, Rolston now heads up development of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning under the 38 Studios label; a publisher that was built by classic American entrepreneur and sporting hero, Curt Schilling. Kingdoms of Amalur also has the esteemed fantasy novelist, R.A. Salvatore, and comic book/action figure luminary, Todd McFarlane amongst its creative team.

So, what’s it like working for 38 Studios and former Major League Baseball pitcher, Curt Schilling?

Giant, scary baseball player. Big and huge; really annoying because he’s so big.

Did he bring you on board personally?

Yeah. As a matter of fact, one of the great things in my life is that I’ve always worked for people I like. I know a lot of people have different experiences and so therefore I love it and, when he took me out to dinner the first time, one of the things that sold me was he said: ‘You know what I really want to do? I was talking with my wife and I’m finished with my baseball career – I want to do something different. Give me some money so I can go and start something!’ And I was imagining what his wife would say and he said, ‘Yeah, what I’d really like to do is have a game company.’

I thought, ‘what a bad idea – what a way to throw away money, you know?’

And he says, ‘Yeah, so I can make some money.’

So I say, ‘Okay, that makes more sense.’

And he replies, ‘Because I want to buy a hospital.’

‘Well that’s refreshing,’ I told him.

It’s because he [Curt], R.A. Salvatore [Creative Director], and Todd McFarlane [Art Director] met doing charities and they’re very different people, it was wonderful getting to know them, and Curt didn’t have to go too far to get me on-board because I wanted to make a good role-playing game. I wanted to work with those guys but the fact that he was charming and morally appealing helped a lot, so I love working with him.

[ Read More ]

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!”.

[ Read More ]