If you haven’t yet taken the opportunity to try out Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning — the 2012 RPG released by Big Huge Games, for which Ultima V: Lazarus’ own Ian “Tiberius” Frazier served as the lead designer — then this is a great weekend to remedy that oversight. The game is on sale on Steam for a whopping 75% off; the base game will cost you just $4.99, and $9.99 will get you that plus the two (quite excellent) DLC expansions (and some other stuff).

Released in February of 2012, Reckoning enjoyed decent sales; its publisher, EA, expressed satisfaction at how well it sold, and if memory serves roughly 4 million copies — digital and physical — have been purchased. That’s not a Skyrim-level success, granted, but it is certainly quite decent as sales figures go. I don’t think the critically acclaimed Dark Souls sold that many copies, at least not as of the last time I bothered to look into such figures. Indeed, for a new fantasy RPG IP, four million copies sold is — or should have been seen as — a success by virtually any measure.

Reckoning was not quite a true open-world RPG, although it obviously borrowed quite liberally from the Bethesda Game Studios playbook in its design. Which really shouldn’t surprise, since its design team was headed up by Ken Rolston, of Morrowind and Oblivion fame. But even though it did share a lot of similarities with The Elder Scrolls in terms of design, it also featured several design choices that were refreshing to encounter, and even innovative at times.

I’ve talked about the game’s combat system before, and it’s worth mentioning again: this is the best combat system I’ve ever encountered in an RPG. It’s just so kinetic, and gets everything right that games from The Elder Scrolls and the Dragon Age series just don’t. Combat in Reckoning is fast-paced, tactical, brutal, and fun, and that’s before you consider how it gets capped off with the force-equalizing “reckoning mode” that you can pull off once your character has altered the fates of a sufficient number of foes.

Moving beyond the combat, the game is also passionately colourful; even the desert regions of its world burst with hues and shades that one just doesn’t see all that often in modern games any more. Skyrim looks drab and almost monochromatic compared to Reckoning’s vibrant colour, and nearly three years later I still find that I can just lose myself exploring its world and drinking in one brilliantly colourful vista after another in its lovingly-designed world.

The world in which the game is set is huge, as well, and features lots of variety in terms of settings, climates…and even characters. Oh, you won’t find rich, BioWare-designed NPCs populating every village, but if you keep at it, you’ll find you can tease out little bits of backstory from even the otherwise plain-seeming shopkeeper. And in some respects, this is a point in the game’s favour, because in a certain respect it feels real. Let’s face it: the average shopkeeper isn’t likely going to spill his life’s story to you after only having just met you, especially not if you traipse into his shop fully armed and armoured for war. A few personal details will come out in light banter, but it’s not like he’ll tell you his most intimate secrets and then send you on a world-spanning quest to solve them for him. And that doesn’t typically happen in Reckoning either.

Which is not to say that the game lacks for side quests; quite the opposite. There are people who will ask for help in the game, and job boards besides. Most of these are fairly basic quests: find someone, fetch something, etc. And then there are the House Quests.

The House Quests are one of the most surprisingly rich aspects of the game, because these side quests are full storylines in and of themselves. Some of them even reveal pieces of lore that date back centuries…if not even deeper into the canon of Amalur. (That 10,000-year backstory treatment that R.A. Salvatore prepared got put to quite good use in the House Quest storylines.) You’ll stumble over most of the House Quests quite by accident, but once you’ve been sucked in to one, you’ll likely want to finish it entirely, without letting yourself get too distracted by the smaller side quests…or the main story of the game.

Of course, it’s a bit easy to lose the main plot of the game in all of these side missions. And the main plot is actually quite good, although I think it suffers from some of its premises not being explored nearly enough. I mean, consider the central concept at the core of Reckoning’s plot: resurrected by a Gnomish invention, you — and you alone — are the only fateless person in an otherwise fated and wholly deterministic world. Everybody else in the world has an inexorable fate, a destiny set in stone from birth that defines explicitly who that person will be, how he or she will live, what he or she will do, and when and how he or she will die. And this fate can be known…but never altered.

But your character doesn’t have that. Your character is fateless, the sole free-acting person in this fated world. The opportunity is there, in that concept, for some intense philosophical examination. And sadly, Reckoning doesn’t fully explore this idea. What it does do, however, is sort of…dance around the edge of it, giving you just enough to tease your brain into mulling over the implications. There’s a scene fairly early on in the game’s overall plot (although you might find you’ve played for over twenty hours by the time you reach it) in which an elderly warrior you’re following recoils in horror from an approaching troll; this is the death he had seen himself to be fated to suffer. And when you dispatch the troll, he is flabbergasted…and more than a little confused as to what to do with his suddenly much lengthier life span.

That’s the other side of the concept that the game’s plot doesn’t fully explore: the fact that in addition to just being fateless, your character in wandering the world changes the fates of pretty much everyone he or she crosses paths with. It comes out in snippets in the dialogue, at times, but there could be more to its presentation and explanation. Still, the game invites the mind to wander.

Big Huge Games, the now-defunct Baltimore-based studio that developed Reckoning, was not a new developer, nor was this their first game. They produced a string of solid titles prior to being acquired by 38 Studios, and were able to fit the RPG they had been working on at the time into the storyline that Salvatore had developed for 38 Studios’ still-in-development Project Copernicus. In addition to Ken Rolston, Big Huge Games was home to industry veteran Grant Kirkhope, who produced an excellent soundtrack for Reckoning. It was also Ian Frazier’s development studio, the man that Ultima fans know as “Tiberius” (or just “Tibby”); he oversaw the development of Ultima V: Lazarus, a remake of Ultima 5 using the Dungeon Siege engine that is arguably one of the best uses of the Dungeon Siegeengine, better than even Dungeon Siege itself.

Big Huge Games was an unfortunate casualty of the financial implosion of 38 Studios, a sad fate for a studio that had survived potential closure at least once before. And with its closure and the seizure of all of 38 Studios assets, the Amalur IP passed into the hands of the state of Rhode Island, who never were able to auction it off. The prospect of any new Kingdoms of Amalur titles seems dim, at best, and this is a tragedy.

All of which is to say: if you haven’t yet played it, you really should. So go…buy…play.