The playable demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (our fun and gorgeous single-player RPG) drops on January 17 for PC, 360, and PS3. If you play the demo as well as the demo for Mass Effect 3 (another fantastic RPG you may have heard something about), you unlock awesome items for your characters.

Why is this cool? Well, it’s like being paid to play demos for two of the best games of 2012. It’s also cool because of the thought and attention put into this idea. The details were lovingly nurtured, down to the symbols that appear on the armor. There’s a story in everything.

Reckoning is the gateway to Amalur, the setting for our upcoming MMO as well. I’m proud to have worked on these games, and can’t wait until they’re in players hands!

The time draws near…

This is a big freaking list. Either I’m getting worse at narrowing down my choices for favorite albums, or maybe it really was just that good a year. There were a ton of releases I really liked, with an exciting blend of new talent along with reliable veterans making some of their best records in ages.

The downside of this phenomenon is that it takes me a hell of a long time to write this annual music post, and I’m inherently lazy. But man, there’s some music here I just really have to talk about. So here we go.

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I’d imagine most people still aware that this blog exists realize that I have been working for 38 Studios for the last five years (yeah, it’s been that long!). We’ve been very quiet about the specifics of what we’re doing, other than that we set out to make an MMO, acquired an excellent RPG team, relocated to Providence, and are set to release Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in February. So all in all, an eventful half-decade.

All the while we’ve continued the labor of love that is our MMO, though we remain quiet about it. We’re going to remain so for a bit longer, but we’ve started to take the wrapper off more and more of the world behind the games. The deepest dive into the lore of the world comes in the form of our new Amalur.com website.

This is a big deal to me, as I’m personally curating the writing as we take the mounds of internal documentation and fashion it for an outside audience. Our artists and web designers are doing some beautiful work, and the site will be evolving and expanding *a lot* over time. The first content drop is over 16,000 words, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of the material we’ve got to share.

What’s interesting about the Amalur.com project is that the site isn’t made to promote a specific product. Rather, it’s a gateway to exploring a deeper history than any single title could portray. If we do our jobs right, Amalur.com will help reinforce the connections between products within a single consistent universe.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Don’t get around much anymore–in blog posts, I mean. But hey, as long as I can stay ahead of Hartsman (who, as a big-money executive, does no actual work and thus lacks any excuse for not blogging), I figure I’m doing okay.

Anyway, I’m headed down to New York Comic Con this week for a panel scheduled on Friday at 1:30 pm called Creating a World Worth Saving. I’ll be joining our own Creator of Worlds, R.A. Salvatore, plus Andrew Auseon and Ian Frazier from the Reckoning team. We’ll talk both theory and practice of how you develop a world meant to span a whole ecosystem of products, and in specific about how we used those principles to craft the narrative of the RPG.

It’s still slightly too early to reveal hard facts about our MMO, but I’ll sneak some storyline tidbits in there. Until our PR guy tackles me and drags me from the stage, that is.

I’m in California for the first time in years to attend E3. I haven’t been to the show since the height of its excess, before it was neutered. Though still manic and bombastic, it feels noticeably less chaotic to me. I have memories (now fond, at the time not so much) of being hoarse each night after trying to shout my demo script for visitors at the SOE booth because I was competing with blaring sound systems from other booths. While communication still requires some effort on the show floor, it seems considerably easier than I remember it.

The show will never again inspire the awe and wonder I experienced the first time I attended, but it’s cool nonetheless. Activision’s reveal of the MW3 trailer was a dramatic event that had the crowd breathless in anticipation. Sony and Nintendo hardware had a ton of folks checking it out. Smaller projects drew attention as well–World of Tanks had an actual tank on display.

The show had its share of underwhelming displays as well, but that’s to be expected. Overall E3 remains a genuine event, a chance for the games industry to show off a bit in the shadow of Hollywood.

The coolest bit for me was checking out the Reckoning booth and seeing our team demo the RPG. I’m really excited about players getting to learn more about our world. And seeing the latest trailer playing on EA’s gigantic booth screen gave me chills.

Guess I’m just a sucker for the pageantry of it all.

It’s very easy for game designers to come up with lofty, complex ideas. This is especially true for people who take a support role on one project and suddenly find themselves in charge of something on another title; they get the impulse to put their stamp on everything, to show the world how clever they are by embroiling players in complex plots and multi-layered gameplay.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is take a step back and simplify things.

Every night at dinner, I get asked by my toddler, “Daddy, what did you do at work today?” My answers vary, but often I mention how I looked at pictures of monsters (character art review), saw some fantastic place (environment art review), read a story about some great battle (narrative review), and so forth. Occasionally I even get to talk about something I wrote myself! If I say I looked at a monster, I’m asked “Was he good or bad?” If I say bad, I’m asked “What does he want to get?” And I usually give a little story about that creature’s motivations.

After this ritual had been going on a while, it suddenly struck me how incredibly useful this was to me as a storyteller and designer. If I can’t boil the plots and motivations of our characters down into simple terms that a child can understand, we’ve probably over-designed the experience–which means grown-up players won’t get it, either.

That’s not to say stories and gameplay have to be written like an episode of Dora the Explorer. The nuances and depth should be there for those who want to delve into them. But at the base level, the primary motivations of your characters and storylines need to be clear and obvious. Otherwise, all the fancy dialogue and pretty graphics won’t matter, because the drama of your game won’t resonate with the audience.

On the whole, 2010 was a fantastic year for new music. A lot of my favorite bands released albums, and a whole crop of new artists showed up with awesome material.

It was a struggle for me to name a single Album of the Year; for the first time since I’ve been doing this feature, any entry in the “Gotta Have It” category could easily have earned the distinction. So please, consider every album in that group a required purchase.

This year’s list comes with a brand new feature: an iTunes playlist showcasing some of my favorite tracks of the year. In addition to picking standout tracks, I tried to create a nice flow from one to another. Let me know what you think.

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The Cataclysm trailer and news of the 4.0 patch lured me into resubscribing to WoW a couple days ago. After two lunch hours re-familiarizing myself with the game, I was actually enjoying myself and digging the interface improvements.

This morning, I received an email saying my Battle.net account password had been changed. After resetting the password and logging in, my characters were naked. A petition to a GM followed, and this evening I got mail that my items had been restored–though my account was now locked.

I’ve added the iPhone authenticator to my account, and I probably have to wait until next week for my account to be unfrozen. So it goes.

Without the ability to log into WoW tonight as planned, I had time to ponder the lousy life of the account hacker. I tried to picture the poor sap who logged into my characters, only to find them wearing crap gear with very little gold to their names. I mean, I only have one level 80, and he’s got mediocre instance gear–maybe a piece or two of heroic anything. My next highest is a level 70 with raid gear from Burning Crusade. How demoralizing it must be working in a basement somewhere, having to strip characters like this of their pitiful equipment.

There is room in my heart for sympathy. So long as I get my account back soon, that is.

The EA Louse blog is all the rage these days, and I’m sure anyone who visits this site will have encountered many observations on its content already. I can neither confirm nor deny the author’s assertions, though of course over the years I’ve heard my share of stories about the dark secrets of various game projects. It’s a small industry, after all.

This phenomenon–disgruntled employees venting anonymously for all the world to see–is hardly new or unique. Any time an MMO or its developer hasn’t lived up to expectations, someone on the inside has leaked “the real story.” You can easily find similar posts by former employees of SOE, Sigil, Cryptic, Origin, and many other dev houses. And of course the fans and watchers of the industry pounce upon these posts and eagerly debate their merits, often with a hearty dose of “I told you so.”

The thing is, while there’s a certain amount of irresistible schadenfreude to be gleaned from these tales, one must keep in mind that they’re often written from a finite perspective. The average employee at a game development house is usually no more privy to the reasons behind the high-level decisions being made than employees in any other industry. There is no shortage of rumors and speculation–some more rooted in facts than others–but often enough bits of truth make their way into the mix to seem plausible and even likely.

Assuming that EA Louse believes everything he wrote to be the truth (which is a mighty big assumption to make, but let’s do so for the sake of argument), that does not mean that everything he wrote is factual. Another person on the same team may agree with some points and disagree with others; that doesn’t mean this person would be a lair, it just means that their experience and knowledge led them to a different perspective on what the truth is.

Again, I write this post neither to agree nor disagree with EA Louse’s post. Rather, I write to point out that everyone who posts on the Internet–me, you, EA Louse, David Jaffe, Perez Hilton, and any other goofball with a blog–does so from a certain perspective and with some kind of motivation or agenda. We mustn’t take for granted that truth is an absolute, even if it fills us with delight to believe so (there’s that old schadenfreude thing again). This is why honest post mortems are so difficult to come by; many of those involved are busy either covering their asses or looking to blame others for mistakes they themselves could have helped to avoid had they put the same degree of passion into fixing problems that they did complaining about them.

No doubt many other perspectives will be forthcoming in the days ahead (some have already been expressed in the copious comments section of the EA Louse blog), but no matter what is said, the objective facts of the situation will probably never be known to the public. Nor should they; even in our gossip-drenched culture, I hope we can collectively realize that it isn’t our right to know the details of what goes on behind a company’s closed doors any more than we’re entitled to know what Brad and Angelina ate for breakfast this morning. The Internet has done funny things to our perspective, to be sure.

That said… yeah, I got a kick out of reading it, too. I’m only human, after all.

I have not given up on blogging, despite all appearances to the contrary. It’s just that, well, I’ve been busy.

Lots of great stuff going on at work. As you may have heard, we announced our first product and have been talking about it at various shows. I know many of you are anxious for more news on the MMO, but our promotional efforts are focused on the RPG right now. All good things to those who wait.

If it counts for anything, I have started (or thought about starting) several articles over the past few months, but never finished writing them for one reason or another. So for your own amusement, please pretend that you read timely, thought-provoking, and highly entertaining posts on the following topics:

• Are used video game sales a blight upon the industry?
• The subscription MMO isn’t going anywhere
• “Truth, Lies, and Frogloks: A Cautionary Tale”
• Please buy me an iPad

That last one isn’t really an article; I’d just love for someone to buy me an iPad.

But honestly, you should really be grateful that you’re getting a break from my ramblings. You’ll probably be sick of me again soon enough.

Speaking of which, I’ll be on a panel at GDC Online next month talking about transmedia stories. Looking forward to it!