INSIDE BASEBALL
How 38 STUDIOS’ failed MM O gave us Kingdoms of Am al ur: Reckoning
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.
Fittingly, given all this talk of constellations, 38 Studios was fuelled by star power. It was founded by baseball legend Curt Schilling, a rare MMO nerd with the means to get his dream project up and running—having earned more than $114 million over his two decades in the sport.
It was Schilling who recruited Todd McFarlane, a friend and comic book artist known for Spider-Man and Spawn, as art director, and who called Salvatore out of the blue.
“The way he presented it to me was that he was putting together the 1927 Yankees, and he wanted me in his batting order,” Salvatore told Gamasutra in 2007. “When our names came on board, then the real talent came in. He’s a pretty persuasive guy, and his batting average is pretty good on the people he pulled in. He got most of the people he wanted.”
EverQuest II lead designer Travis McGeathy joined up, and with the acquisition of Big Huge Games, so did Rolston. The intention was to use Big Huge Games’ engine to power 38 Studios’ MMO—and in the meantime, put out a single-player RPG set in the same world.
The latter became Reckoning, which launched with EA’s backing in 2012. There was plenty there for Elder Scrolls fans to latch onto—from the tumbler-twisting lockpick minigame, to the NPCs who could be tapped for training in specific skills, to the guards who gave you the choice between prison, fine, and resisting arrest when they caught you stealing.
Dialogue harked back to Rolston’s work on Oblivion, driven by keywords that allowed you to ask a village drunk’s opinion on a distant war if you so desired. And cave networks tended to end with a cliff, meaning they could only be explored in one direction—an old Elder
Scrolls trick, used to ensure that a dungeon had a clear narrative shape, a beginning and an end.
FINAL FANTASY
Between Rolston and Salvatore, it’s perhaps no surprise that Reckoning struck a very earnest, Tolkienesque tone. As much as its campaign challenged social division and encouraged you to speak out against it—another Salvatore staple—its fiction was also comfortingly old-fashioned. Found books bore titles like The Words of Solen Reimgar as Chronicled by Parthalan, while standing stones in the wild delivered lore poems over strummed lyre—a slightly corny fantasy backdrop to an unusual premise.
Yet the Reckoning team pulled no punches in its aim to punt the RPG genre even further into the mainstream. Its combat hinged on combo moves learned as you level up, and offered convincing heft. It’s hard not to like a game that asks you to collect gold by smashing vases with a hammer the size of a giant’s croquet mallet. That appealing immediacy extended to satisfying, cut-and-dry questing, too—with a mission’s end rarely far from where it began.
What’s strangest about Reckoning in retrospect are its MMO trappings— its chunky, brightly colored world and the question marks that hover above the heads of NPCs. They’re a reminder that this was to be the overture to Project Copernicus, the MMO that 38 Studios was making. But fate, or financial woe, intervened.
The US state of Rhode Island had offered the company a $75 million loan guarantee in exchange for 450 local jobs over three years. But in May 2012, governor Lincoln Chafee told reporters his goal was simply “keeping 38 Studios solvent”. That ominous public announcement killed any hope of outside investment in a game which had become wildly expensive. The following day employees discovered they hadn’t been paid for the month. A little over a week later, the studio was finished.
Just last year, former employees of 38 Studios were finally seeing some money in lieu of their final paycheques—the result of almost a decade of litigation, and a fraction of what they were owed. Schilling himself was “tapped out” after putting $50 million of his personal fortune into the company. In recent years he’s become a right-wing talking head, losing work over transphobic memes. He publicly supported the pro-Trump mob which attacked the United States Capitol. It’s difficult to imagine Schilling leading a revival of the studio named after his jersey number.
Reckoning, however, has enjoyed a second life—revived by THQ Nordic in 2020, and re-released with a brand new expansion. Must have been born under a lucky star. Jeremy Peel
WHAT’S STRANGEST ABOUT RECKONING IN RETROSPECT ARE ITS MMO TRAPPINGS