Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview
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With the studio sale well in the rearview, the Reckoning team is now around 120 people, including QA. Building that team, as well as switching from a strategy game studio to an RPG studio, was a daunting challenge, Frazier said.
"I would say [the transition was] pretty hard, honestly," he admitted. "We finally fully made that transition, but the two biggest challenges were hiring experienced RPG designers, and just RPG developers in general, because there aren't that many."
He added, "The industry, the RPG side of the industry, is really small, so it was hard for a long time to get people who knew how to make quests, to get people that knew how to build advancement systems and all that good stuff. We did it, but it was hard and it took a while."
"The other big challenge was just technical, just the engine. We built the Rise of Legends engine back in the day, and that was proprietary. Rise of Nations -- I'm not saying that was easy [to develop], but in comparison to this game it sure was. To have a multiplatform engine that's covering the action combat the way that we're doing it in Reckoning, which also has this massive streaming world -- for our tech team it's definitely been a very large challenge."
