INTERVIEW: Sean Bean on building a new IP from scratch

MCV recently went hands-on with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and got a chance to speak with lead designer Sean Bean about creating the new IP.

The quirky and colourful game is a broad and varied single-player RPG experience, but after such a quiet period, we asked Sean about what went into the long buildup to such a huge and bold new IP coming to market.

Big Huge Games' last release was Asian Dynasties (expansion pack for Age of Empires III). Have you been purely working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning since then?

We've been working on a 'form' of it. When we were finishing up Asian Dynasties, we made Settlers of Catan as a self-funded XBLA game because we knew we wanted to get into console development, which wasn't something that we, as a studio, knew how to do. Our experience was in RTS games for PC.

So we said 'Well, let's do this and make it through the certification process and figure out the hardware', but in our hearts what we wanted to do was a game very much like Reckoning. It would be an RPG, it'd have this amazing combat that no one had ever seen before, so we (from scratch) started building an engine that would support all of that.

So we'd been working on that since 2007 with THQ, but then THQ ran into some hard financial times and they had to let us go. This was in 2009.

THQ had actually bought us, so we were a part of THQ and they were going to lay off the studio, and right before they were going to come in and shutter the studio, Curt Schilling from 38 Studios came in. He played for the Red Sox, but in his off-time, when everyone else would run out and carouse, he would play online games as a way to keep in touch with his family (and keep himself out of trouble).

Videogames save the day yet again!

It's true! And he fell in love with Everquest. And when he retired, he started 38 Studios with the idea that he wanted to make an MMO. So, their game was an MMO. And Curt came to us and said:

We've got this world with 10'000 years of history, with all this lore coming out of your ears and we're going to have an MMO, but we don't want to hit people cold with an MMO straight away. We'd like to be able to present the lore. You guys are making this really great-looking RPG: can you keep all these elements in place that you've got and all these systems, go over our IP and find a really great place to make an RPG.

So the game mecahnics and game world were completely disparate?

Yeah, we'd been working with these systems that we knew that we wanted, and when 38 bought us, we shifted into the world of Amalur. We took our animations, our art, our sounds and scrapped it all. We went through all of their lore and looked at all the parts of Amalur, and since their game is going to happen chronologically after our game, we thought 'What would your part of Amalur look like a couple of thousand years ago?'

So we've been working on THIS game under the Amalur IP since May of 2009.

I'd be willing to bet that a new RPG IP with a subtitle isn't expected to be standalone. What kinds of corrollaries to Reckoning have you looked at? Not sequels per se, but what else can be done at this early stage with a brand?

So, one of the things that Kurt did when he started the company was got a hold of Todd McFarlane, who has enjoyed some measure of success with toys, comics and graphic novels. He also partenered with R A Salvatore who has enjoyed some success with his writing.

The idea was to create an intellectual property that was so extensible that it could be expressed via multiple venues.

It could be the MMO, the console product that we're seeing today, with our in-house expertise it could be books, could be comics, could be graphic novels, could be toys.

And if you create a world which is interesting enough (which we think we have with Kingdoms of Amalur), then with all the know-how and all these proven pipelines, we can produce a console game for people who have consoles. But those who might be really into the world but don't play games or don't own a console could still participate conceivably through books, toys or figures. There have been no announcements or release dates for any of this stuff obviously, but the ability to produce those kinds of things is there.

Was that part of the appeal with getting into the Amalur world in particular?

Oh, yeah! I mean, we're all just geeks. We make games, but boy we just love the content that we're in. We love Todd and the things that he has done, and the stuff R A has come out with.

For us, it's just being able to work with that group of people and be creating what we think is this new world which is pretty exciting. So we're in geek heaven. We're pretty happy.

It's also quite bold to be launching a new brand this late in the console generation.

Yeah, I can see that. But I think that one of the strengths of launching at this stage of the console life cycle is the install base. So, even if only a certain percentage of people are interested in our game that percentage will be a bigger number.

Also, it helps because the hardware at this point is known. A lot of the tips and tricks that our engineers are able to take advantage of, they know because they've worked on other projects in other studios. We have friends in other studios that are working with completely different publishers, but we're friends.

Ostensibly, at the end of a console generation, there could be waning interest. But there are definitely opportunities to be taking advantage of and we have exploited those to the maximum.

Well, with a world as rich in character as Amalur, there's certainly a lot of potential for future growth.

Oh, we're really excited by it, and we'd be thrilled if the game made enough money that we could go out and get burgers, but what we really want is to be able to keep making stuff. We kind of thought that if we were going to ship this game in February then we'd really have to stop 'making' it in July and just fix it and fix it and fix it, which means that we have this laundry list of things that we know will be great.

So if the game does well and somebody says 'You know, we'd really like you to make a sequel', we as a group are all over that. 

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