PART ONE I TWO

Despite the focus on free-flowing battles, players will also expect Kingdoms of Amalur to provide a robust role playing experience. Noting that the game boasts a full dialogue system, we ask Fridley just how important conversation and player choice is to the overall plot. He is unequivocal in his response. “Player choice in the narrative is the cornerstone of any good open world fantasy RPG and we went to great lengths in our quest and conversation systems to make sure the player has plenty of options.”

While many players will doubtlessly be more than happy to let their swords do the talking, those willing to invest time in the gentle art of persuasion will be rewarded with additional dialogue options. Fridley offers an example, noting that “if your persuasion skill is high enough, you may be able to convince a citizen that you deserve a better reward for your troubles or to pay you upfront for a quest you are going to perform for them.”

It remains unclear just how much players are able to influence the outcome of the main story arc. However, Fridley is adamant that players’ conversation selections and reactions to quest outcomes constitute the “meat of the game experience”. “For a lot of the content in the game”, he says, “there is no right or wrong answer” and the “choice the player makes shapes the outcome of that particular encounter.”

Since it was announced as Project Mercury in July 2010, promotions for the game have focussed heavily on the high profile contributions of Salvatore, McFarlane and Rolston. We ask Fridley to tell us a little about the work being produced by a creator on the project who is perhaps not quite as well known. “Wow, that’s a tough question to answer,” he says. “Not because I can’t think of one person to talk about, but because I can’t think of only one person to talk about.” After some consideration, he singles out lead programmer Phil Teschner.

During his time with publisher Microsoft Games Studios, Teschner not only contributed to the likes of Fable and Mass Effect, but also to the Rise of Nations sequel from Big Huge Games. Fridley couldn’t be more pleased to have him on board. “Phil is pretty well known in the industry as a problem solver, and we were lucky enough to get him settle in at BHG,” Fridley says. As the team’s senior architect, Teschner has been a “driving force” behind the creation of the proprietary RPG engine that underpins everything the player experiences in Kingdoms of Amalur.

He identifies the implementation of a multi-threaded renderer as among Teschner’s most important contributions to the project. “While it may not sound as sexy as fate shifts or stealth kills, it is a big reason that those flashy moments can exist in our engine.” While we’re more than prepared to pretend to know what he’s talking about, Fridley launches into a (very welcome) explanation of multi-threaded rendering. “Without getting too technical,” he says, “in a single thread engine, the game simulation and game rendering both take place on the same thread and happen one after the other.”  Simulation and rendering in Kingdoms of Amalur can be accessed from two threads running in parallel. The result? An improved frame rate. Fridley describes Teschner’s multi-threading solution as “a pretty major performance increaser.”

Big Huge Games isn’t alone in the Amalur sandbox. The developer’s parent company 38 Studios is currently hard at work on Codename Copernicus, a massively multiplayer title set in the same world. We ask Fridley to tell us a little about the relationship between the two teams. “Most of the collaboration between the teams is in regards to the story of our world and its people,” he says. While stressing that the MMO takes “place thousands of years” after the Kingdoms of Amalur, Fridley notes that certain “elements like racial architecture and clothing have roots in Reckoning’s timeline, so it is important that both teams work together to provide consistency across the Amalur universe.”

“Sharing this massive universe also allows us to set up what we call franchise mysteries that are explored across the entire Amalur product universe.” Will this mean that additional quest opportunities will be available to players of both games? Does the reference to ‘products’ as opposed to ‘games’ indicate that we’ll be shelling out for novels, comics or other spinoffs in order perceive the complete picture? Perhaps franchise mysteries will prove to be something else entirely, something far more ambitious? Before we can ask, Fridley notes that Big Huge Games intends to keep this promising concept under wraps, at least for the time being.

We conclude the interview by asking Fridley where he sees the RPG genre heading over the next decade. “Another tough question,” he says, noting that not all developers see eye to eye on “what actually defines an RPG”. For its part, Big Huge Games will “continue to push on the combat angle in future games. We truly believe that you can have fun questing in an RPG and fighting in an RPG.  You don’t’ have to trade one for the other.” He also identifies Kingdoms of Amalur’s unorthodox class system as a “big win” that the studio will “continue to improve” in its future releases.

“But most of all,” he says “we’ll be adapting to player feedback. I don’t think many things are really set in stone for us in the future of Amalur.  We really will be interested in seeing how the game is received by the public and how the audience reacts to what we have done.  BHG has always believed in listening to the gamer. You guys tell us what you like and don’t like and we listen.”

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is scheduled for release on 360, PS3 and PC on Thursday 9 February 2012.

PART ONE I TWO