INSIDE BASEBALL

How 38 STUDIOS’ failed MMO gave us Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

- Jeremy Peel

Must have been born under a lucky star, this one,” mutters the gnome pushing the cart that carries your dead body. His voice is leaden with irony. Your luck extends only to the fact that your corpse is in one piece. A fat lot of good that’ll do you on your way to the incinerator.

It’s an opening most reminiscent of Planescape: Torment, the classic RPG that begins in similarly macabre circumstances. But it also evokes The Elder Scrolls— namely the census taker who processes your entry to Morrowind, and mentions that you were born under a certain constellation. In that game, it’s a detail that contributes to a sense that you’re favored by the gods, and fated for great things. Here, in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, it’s a winking reference that acknowledges the Bethesda pedigree of lead designer Ken Rolston, as well as the fact that things will be different this time.

Rather than fated, you are fateless. Returned from the dead by gnomish experiments, you are the only living individual in Amalur whose story in the great tapestry of destiny has already concluded. That makes you both an exciting and dangerous figure: Able to lay down your own path, and knock the fates of others off course.

KINGDOM COME

Behind this premise, and the fiction of Amalur, was the American fantasy author RA Salvatore. The Drizzt creator directed his writers to research-creation and destruction myths, and to find patterns in folklore. He circulated short stories about key characters around the office at 38 Studios, where Amalur was first conceived as the backstory of an MMO. But that MMO would never come out, and Amalur wouldn’t live beyond its first reckoning.