Will there be a Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 2?
Big Huge Games would love to make it, but needs sales to convince EA.
Will there be a Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 2? Co-developer Big Huge Games would love to make it, but it needs enough sales of the first game to convince a publisher to fund it.
Reckoning finally launches in the UK tomorrow, Friday 10th February. It marks the end of a long journey for BHG, which has worked on the game in some shape or form for half a decade.
You'd think, then, that BHG would fancy creating something entirely different for its next big project. Not so, according to lead designer Ian Frazier. In fact, not only would the team be happy to work on a sequel to its open world fantasy RPG - it would love to.
"[A sequel] is certainly something we would love to do," he told Eurogamer. "Obviously it needs to succeed well enough to justify that. But we would love to do that.
"[The game universe] is really big. It's 10,000 years of history. We could be sick to death of the Age of Arcana, which is where Reckoning is set, and be like, okay, we'll just pick a different time period or pick a different geography in a different area of the world. It's pretty darn varied, so we have a lot of stuff to choose from to keep it fresh."
Of course, a Reckoning sequel is by no means guaranteed. Its existence, Frazier said, depends on how players react to the EA-published first game and, more importantly, how many copies it sells (a figure Frazier admits will be affected by Bethesda's open world fantasy RPG rival Skyrim).
But even if Reckoning fails to set tills alight, there may still be hope.
"It comes down to units sold at the end of the day, but it's complicated," he said. "If the game doesn't sell that many copies but the critical reception is really good, then our publisher might be like, well, it was the first in a new franchise, we're going to take a bet and sign you up for another one. If the sales are really good you're pretty much set no matter what. There's a pretty big sliding scale there.
"There's that invisible line where, you sold enough to justify getting a sequel or another project, but not quite enough to get a great budget for it. So it's like, oh now how are we going to pull it off? "That's the scary zone. That's what you don't want. It's almost better to flop and go out of business than to have to pull something out of your ass and make it happen.
"I've been there, man. At my last studio it was like, oh God, this is not possible. Not a place you want to be."