Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Community Q&A #24

In the twenty-fourth community Q&A to hit the official Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning forums, we learn about the importance of Lorestones, how they arrived at the game's system requirements, what the Mastery of Arms bonus actually affects, and more. A snippet:
Q: Will there be alternate dimensions or worlds that can be visited by doing certain things or being on certain quests? By Kaloris

A: While the world of Amalur is vast, it is only a part of a larger fictional cosmos. Like any good fantasy setting, there are different planes of reality home to both wonders and horrors. While the intersections between the ethereal and corporeal realms of Amalur wax and wane, the rise of magic in the Age of Arcana has weakened the barrier between these planes.

It takes a powerful form of magic to puncture the barrier between the magical realms and the physical ones. but the intrepid player is sure to come across a few in the course of his travels. No spoilers :P. By Thomas "Bentaporst" Murphy, Narrative Designer

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Q: I'm curious what types of things contributed to the total size of the data in Reckoning that took up so much disk space? In contrast Skyrim had 4.5 hours of music, plus about 10-12k more lines of dialog, and the world is potentially larger than Reckoning, yet it's resources were about 4.5 gigs of data smaller. This isn't a complaint, I'm just curious as a cat. By Falkon

A: Hi Falkon! I assume you are basing this off the PC system requirements for hard drive space. I can't really speak to other products, but I suspect in general our overall size is similar to other titles within this genre. The bulk of our data is in fact audio, with over 560,000 words of spoken text a single language worth of audio takes up roughly 40% of our DVD footprint on consoles.

The install size discrepancy on PC is likely due to the fact that we can take advantage of the PC medium to install multiple languages simultaneously in some cases, which can quickly grow the install size into the 10GB range listed in our requirements (some single language PC installs will clock in far lower). To answer your general question of where our total size goes, we are fairly evenly divided (apart from audio) into region sets, terrain data, collision data, equipment art, UI, cinematics, dungeon/exterior sets, and texture data, with many slivers of other smaller data throughout. By Bryant "Tag" Freitag, Lead Programmer