Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Video Interview

Big Huge Games' Joe Quadara and Ken Rolston recently sat down in the GameSpot recording studio for a ten-minute video interview about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Topics include why the game has "the best combat that you've ever seen in an RPG", how the vision of the game has changed since 38 Studios' acquisition, how the gaming landscape has changed since Oblivion shipped (Rolston's last game), and much more. A small portion of it has been transcribed here, so I'll quote from that:
"[That's always] a difficult problem for our messaging," Rolston said. "This is a role-playing game because I would be killed if it weren't. I make role-playing games."

Having created open-world and narrative-driven RPGs in the past, Rolston said his goal with Amalur was to make an RPG with top-notch combat, because he hadn't seen that yet. He admitted that he didn't know exactly how to pull that off when he started, noting it was made possible by the rest of the development team, including Quadara.

"I've never experienced a game like it before, and that's been the difficulty of talking about this game," Quadara said. "It's an RPG with good combat, and people have a hard time figuring out what that means in their own heads, because there's no example of it, really."

That problem might be compounded because even the terms used to describe the sorts of games that already exist are rapidly changing in meaning.

"Now we're in this age where we have all these action games that have RPG elements, that right there has just destroyed to me what an RPG means because we're talking about RPG elements," Quadara said, adding, "There are all these different ways we can spread out, and these are all valid representations of RPGs. But you ask any different person what an RPG is and they'll give you a different answer."