Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - Fighting Fate
Big Huge Games on combat, dungeon design and diversity.
December 12, 2011
by Cam Shea
Last week, Anthony Gallegos wrote an impassioned feature about why gamers should give Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning a chance. I couldn't agree more. Having spent a couple of hours with the game recently, there's plenty that stands out – the fluid, versatile combat, the bold, colourful art direction, the customisation choices available to the player, and last but not least, the great story set-up. Who wouldn't want to play as the first person to be resurrected from the dead; the person that is no longer tied to his or her fate like all other mortals, but free to determine it, and change the course of the world at the same time.
To find out some more details after the play session, we sat down with producer Sean Bean to talk combat, fate and game design.
How Combat is Different
Sean Bean: You play some RPGs and you're very into the world, you're very into the mythos, you're very into some of the systemic stuff, and then you get into a fight. And it feels like – in that moment – you stop being in it. So you get through the fight or you try to figure out a way to get through it, just so you can get back into [the stuff you're interested in]… We set out, with no proof that we could do it, to do that, and to also have really awesome combat. It was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of labour of love weekends, but we got to the point where… we were like 'my gosh, I think we've done it.' And we've had a very good response.
We have an AI system – we call it the Belgian Waffle AI – where enemies will surround you, and the amount of damage per second that they're capable of doing dictates who will attack and how many can attack at once. So you'll notice sometimes with the bigger, stronger monsters that they'll have the ninja code, where they're around you, but only one of them attacks at a time, but if you get some of the smaller faster guys, they'll just gank you.
When we place the bad guys in the world, there are points at which something will spawn, but then we create kind of a backlog of 'these are all the kinds of encounters that could spawn there.' Sometimes it's three Boggarts, but maybe also in that array, there's two wolves and another guy. So that's the constant iteration we're going through – this is the fight that you'd be in, what are all the different ways you might want to tackle it?
Those whack-a-mole arcade games have come a looong way.
Random Elements To Keep Things Interesting
Sean Bean: There's a lot of randomisation to it. I mean obviously we can choose specifically that when you're leaving Allestar Glade [at the start of the game], we want you to fight the troll, or if you swim out to the end of this creek and there's a dive point, you're going to find the unique helmet of whatever. But yes, the loot tables are randomised, it can even look at the loot that you've gotten and more heavily lean toward [what you need]. If you don't have a lot of potions you'll be finding more potions, if you need lockpicks you'll find more lockpicks, if you have part of a set, it's going to lean a bit more toward getting you another unique from that set. There are so many systems behind the scenes trying to make the loot system great for you.
How the Enemies Level
Sean Bean: If you look at the overworld map, you can see domes or regions and they're connected by transition spaces. Dalentarth, for instance, is made up of, like, seven. For each of those we have a level we expect the player to be at. We do have a gradation of difficulty, but it will never go below where it's set or above where it's set. So in a level zero to level five area, if the first time you enter that area you are level two, then the monsters there are going to be level two or three, y'know, to give you a little bit of a challenge. If you enter that same zero to five level area at level ten, they can only be level five. Conversely, if you were level five and you went into a level 20 – 25 area, the lowest the monsters could be in there would be 20. So people will probably keep themselves out of that area until they're strong enough.
Changing The Wider Fate of the World
Sean Bean: We've got six different factions in the world, and as you… play through the factions, and they recognise the ability that you have to change what was once their fate, then you can by the choices that you make, steer an entire group of people and a portion of the world that they belong in, one way or the other, based on how you decide to make those choices. On a smaller scale, at the very beginning, you'll find an injured girl on the ground and you have the different ways to solve that quest – you can go and buy her the medicine that she needs, create the medicine that she needs through alchemy, or steal the medicine. So, the different ways that you solve those kinds of problems will elicit different reactions from NPCs in that part of the world.
The Destiny & Fate systems in the game.
Dungeon Design
Sean Bean: As we broke the world up into the different regions, we've given those to what we call narrative designers. A narrative designer will sit down and think – what is the story of this area? Who are all of the NPCs? What are all of the things they could say at different stages of different quests? How do the quests inter-relate? And that goes as far as dungeons as well, so when they're thinking 'I've got this special item that I want to give away' or 'this group of people are going to be in some sort of underground den' they'll come up with a story for it, then work with our dungeon designers, and they'll map it out on graph paper or in drawing form and then they'll actually start constructing the dungeon.
They think about – what would be really good at this point? This would be a good place for a fight. This would be a good place for a jump. Once they've passed this point, I want it so they're not able to come back. What's some of the set dressing that we can put here that would make this fit in with the story? This is compared to – here are a bunch of dungeon parts, this feels like it would be a good track for a dungeon to follow, and then filling it with content. We go the other way around.
Keeping Quests Diverse
Sean Bean: Because you have one person over a region, and not multiple people, it is easier to avoid the situation where, if you had eight narrative designers, and they were all doing quests for a particular area, they could just do all fetch quests in that area, if there was a lack of communication, which, frankly, sometimes happens. We [changed to one person looking after a region] about halfway through [development] because we were running into stuff like that. Some parts of the overworld map would never be gone to because no quest ever took you there...
And so we put individuals in charge of narrative zones or narrative regions, and then they were able to say 'okay, I want a kill quest, I want a fetch quest' and they were able to make that little zone have the variety of quests, so that you don't run into this glut of one kind or another. Not only that, but we had played other games where it looked like things of real import were happening to one guy, and his neighbour knew nothing about it and vice versa, and so by having a single designer in charge of that whole area, and breaking up the world that way, then yeah, everybody's quests kind of stepped on each other's feet, in a good way, meaning that there was this situational awareness of the real meaty things happening in the world.
Not a gritty medieval city in sight.
Competing in a Crowded Market
Sean Bean: We're surrounded by all of these RPGs, which is wonderful for us because we play them all. We love RPGs – Big Huge Games as a group of people, we love games in general, we love RPGs, we love Western, we love Eastern. Think of it in terms of science fiction. Star Wars or Star Trek? Or Firefly? Or BSG? Or Farscape. I don't like to think of a world where I would suddenly have to take one of those sandboxes out of my repertoire when I like to just imagine… so here we are in this RPG genre and a lot of people are making really great contributions to our imagination. We've made a game that I think really strongly contributes as well. What I'm hoping comes of this is not only that people like it and love it obviously, and let my team keep making fun games, but a lot of the stuff that we think should be in RPGs that we've put in ours, I want to see more of that! We are incapable of making all the games that we want to play. We would love to see the things that we think make RPGs even better show up in other places, because then we'll have more fun things to play.
I'm really looking forward to this game.
