It's no secret that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a massive game. Game designer Ken Rolston has already said that the game has a "way-too-big" approach. But how does that translate into gameplay hours?
According to lead designer Ian Frazier, the Kingdoms of Amalur speed run "took around 200 hours."
Speaking to Strategy Informer, Ian Frazier said:
We recently had a content completion play through about two months ago… so, QA guys, they’ve been playing the game for years, they know all there is to know about it, it’s ins and outs, etc… their goal is to play everything. Do every quest, every dungeon, everything possible, but as fast as possible.
That means easy difficulty, skip all cut scenes and dialogue, sprint everywhere that’s sprintable, fast travel everywhere you can, don’t do any combat you don’t need to do… that all took around 200 hours, and that was a speed run.
Given the fact that they play on easy and skip all dialogue and cut scenes, it's highly probable that the game will take the average gamer well over 200 hours to complete.
Of course, that estimated time includes all of the game's content. If you're only interested in the game's main campaign quests, it will last "around 30 to 40 hours". Still an impressive gameplay time.
Earlier, Frazier revealed Amalur has around 130 hand-crafted dungeons in the game.
"It's incredibly dense," said Ian Frazier describing the world. "There’s nowhere you can go in the Faelands where you won’t find a ton of different people to talk to, quests to do and things to discover."
One of the developer's biggest worries is that they might have overdone it with the game's "way-too-much" approach. In fact, the game is so large that Frazier strongly urged Xbox 360 users to install the game on the Xbox hard drive.
"I think in terms of a selling point – bang for your buck – I think it’s great. It should be on the back of the box," Frazier explained. "But as a developer I have to look at it and think “did we overdo this?” I really don’t know."
You'll soon be able to decide for yourself if they overdid it with the content. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is due out on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on February 7th. In the meantime, check out our impressions of the demo if you haven't yet tried it.
