I am looking forward to this game — which, I can’t point out enough, has as its lead designer Ian “Tiberius Moongazer” Fraizer, who lead the Lazarus project team — more than ever after reading a couple of different articles over the weekend.

The first is a Gamasutra feature, The ‘Long And Crazy Tale’ Of Kingdoms Of Amalur’s Creation. It’s an interview with Tibby, actually, and it covers the history of the game from its inception at Big Huge Games (under the working title Crucible), through the days when THQ owned Big Huge Games, and up to today, where the game is being produced by 38 Studios (an independent company founded by former baseball star Curt Schilling).

This part of the article may appeal to Ultima fans:

Playing a key role in guiding the team through its challenges is RPG veteran Ken Rolston, lead designer on Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He has an office at Big Huge and plays Reckoning regularly, giving feedback to the team.

“He’s not like writing dialogue as a general rule, he’s more playing quests and looking for what doesn’t work, seeing how we can we make this more ‘open,’ what we can do to support the freeform play style,” Frazier explained. “As an example, recently we have a lot of quests in the game — we had over a hundred side quests between faction lines and stuff, and generally we expect that’s what people are going to do. But Ken played the game for, I think it was three or four days straight without a single save, and didn’t do any quests. He was deliberately avoiding quests.”

“He was just wandering around, killing things and crafting stuff, and that’s it,” said Frazier. “He was going out of his way to not do any quest content, just to see what that would feel like, and how quickly he would advance, and what the XP looked like for a character that doesn’t do quests and so on. Then he just gives me a dump truck of feedback on that experience and then we can tune things to make that a good experience.”

“Ken’s office is actually across the hall from mine, which is good because we have squirt guns that we’ll attack each other with from time to time.”

Open world? Freeform play style? You read that right, and Tibby confirms those details in this Q&A session at the Reckoning forums:

Reckoning’s structure is extremely open. The main quest and each of the six factions contains a mostly-linear narrative you can follow, but you can veer off and pursue hundreds of different sidequests at any time. Even if you choose to ignore all the quests completely, the world is ripe for exploration, with all manner of rewards to find (both hand crafted and systemic) for the explorer.

The game is being marketed almost like a God of War clone, which is kind of unfortunate; it may well incorporate lots of action elements and combat, but it obviously also goes a lot deeper than that, into the territory that we have come to expect from an RPG. But then, with Tibby leading the design of the project…is that really a surprise?