Former 38 team members have been posting more work-in-progress assets, and I wanted to honor the team’s efforts by passing them along. It should be noted that I’m only linking this material–some of the coverage of my last post made it sound like I’m the one releasing them, which is not the case.

The first video shows off Jottunhessen, seat of power of the Amaranthine. It was built upon the ruins of the Kollossae floating city of Pelios, which was brought down through the combined efforts of the Dokkalfar, Jottun, and Tyrgash about a hundred years before the start of the MMO. This event would cause the collapse of the Hyperian Empire and usher in the Age of Heroes. The city retains elements of Kollossae architecture, but was deliberately perverted as a way to remind the haughty giants that they were brought low thanks to the manipulation of the dark elves. (How’s that for a lorebomb?)

The first video shows the city as it was originally built, but we found that it exceeded our performance budgets and made the client engineers’ heads explode. An optimization pass had to be made, which is what the second video captures. This kind of rework is a reality of game design, especially when your engine is still being optimized along with the art. The lessons learned here saved us a lot of time on subsequent cities, such as Valiance.

I wanted to call out one of our philosophies in world design: if you could see a point of interest in the distance, we wanted you to be able to get to it. If you notice the huge spire hanging over Jottunhessen, that was the ruling seat of the dark elves and you could make your way up into that tower for an awesome view of not just the city, but of surrounding zones. You could jump out a window in the spire, and if you lined up your jump correctly, land in the Well of Souls that was positioned below. That was a ton of fun to do!

Again, please understand that these are artist-created milestone review videos intended only for the team, and should not be thought of as trailers or something that was meant to show off to an outside audience.

One of our composers has also posted some samples of the excellent music he wrote for the project. We had some great music written for the game, and this is just a taste of what had been recorded over the years. We believed that music and sound effects were every bit as important for storytelling as art or design, and I was always delighted by how seriously our audio team took that philosophy to heart. They really sought to understand the story and world we were crafting, and were regularly running their work past me and others to make sure that what they put together matched the tone of the zones and the races who inhabited them.

I hope you enjoy these bits of beauty as much as I do.

Yes, internet news, Kingdoms of Amalur would have been free to play. The idea was to have no cost for the client and no monthly fee–as few barriers to adoption as possible.

Curt’s “atom bomb” comment was referring to how we planned to market the title. We would have revealed the game, teased its ongoing storyline and world-changing events, demonstrated cool gameplay, and shown off its gorgeous world, characters, and best-in-class animation. Then, when the audience saw how vast and fun the game was, we’d reveal that there was no cost to play it.

It wasn’t going to be crippled. You weren’t going to be kept from certain parts of the world if you didn’t pay. The transactions were intended to enhance your experience, to give you more options (like buying vanity appearances, stuff for your house, pets and mounts, etc.), but would not limit your play of the core game. And there would be a premium membership option, much like a subscription, that gave you perks and currency so you wouldn’t need to fiddle with microtransactions if you didn’t want to.

Here is an environmental fly-through made by the head of our city building crew for our May milestone presentation to the team–an event that never happened because the studio went under. It was shot in engine with population turned off; again, this was built as an internal asset to show off art, not as a game trailer. It does an incredible job of demonstrating how gorgeous the world of Amalur was.

There’s a lot more I’d like to tell you about the game, such as how our fully planned four-year story arc was driven by player participation. How the theme of choice and consequence permeated our systems, content, and world design. How the choices players made during our chapter-based story arc would cause permanent and lasting changes to each server–changes that could be different from other servers. How expansions to the game world had already been mapped out and were tied into that chapter storyline, so the world would grow in a very organic and logical way rather than feeling like expansions were tacked onto the core game by a new team that was bored with the work that had been done before. How our storyline had a real conclusion–because you can’t tell a great story without an ending.

But I should probably keep my mouth shut. The glorious state of Rhode Island now owns the assets and code that would have been our game, and some company might come along and buy it… though anyone who does won’t be releasing the same product we had planned to put out–only a pale imitation of it.

I wish you could know what we were shooting for during the years we labored to build Copernicus… a game that was loving crafted, that was starting to show how fun it would be, and that absolutely did have members of the dev team playing it, no matter what anyone else might tell you.

But sadly, we’ll never really know what could have been.

I wanted to post a few points of clarification about the Copernicus (Kingdoms of Amalur) teaser that was recently leaked to Kotaku. After we released the environment fly-through video in the last days of 38 Studios, there were a lot of misconceptions about what the video was intended to be, and I don’t want the same fate to befall this piece.

• This teaser video was a work in progress, from the illustrations to the game footage to the audio. It was a rough cut to get the pacing right; pretty much every asset would have been reworked or replaced by the time it went final. In fact, there were some tweaks to the script that had been made, but we never got around to recording the updated read-through.
• The finished teaser was intended to be released at the time of the MMO’s announcement. It likely would have been accompanied by a video of gameplay footage, or possibly with a live hands-on demo depending on when and where it was first revealed.
• The logo at the end was based upon the ouroboros, an ancient symbol of the cyclical nature of the universe. This symbol has great significance to the story of Amalur, a world trapped in an unending cycle of creation and destruction. And yes, we had this symbol before the Elder Scrolls Online announced using a similar logo (that’s what you get for basing your IP on classic themes).
• The illustrated style showcased in the teaser was something you would have seen throughout the game. Our cinematics team was packed with amazing illustrators, and we were using animation like this to introduce our races and tell little bits of history you’d encounter as you traveled through Amalur.

Seeing this video posted online gives me a mix of emotions. On the one hand, I love this teaser and am very proud of the work it represents. On the other hand, it makes me sad to be faced once more by what could have been.

Anyway, I wanted to get these points across because it would be unfair to the cinematics or audio teams for anyone seeing this to think it represented a final version of a trailer. Even though it’s really cool, it would have been spectacular by the time we were done with it. I wish you could see it with the same context we did on the inside of the studio, through the eyes of a passionate team that wanted to make something really special.

I still miss that world something fierce.

Curt Schilling was on WEEI radio this morning giving his side of 38 Studios’ demise. I would hope that anyone who’s been following the media’s presentation of this story will take the time to listen to Curt’s perspective. He deserves the chance to be heard.

I’ve had reporters and others ask me about how this situation has affected my feelings toward Curt. That’s an intensely personal question, but today’s events have moved me to answer it in broad terms–and I’d rather do it on my own blog than in someone else’s story.

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I have started and abandoned several posts over the past few weeks. I knew I needed to write something… but what story did I want to tell? An angry tirade about being screwed over? A scathing tell-all about what really happened inside 38? A self-pitying plea for a job? So many emotions inside me, a turbid swirl screaming for an outlet.

So this is what I’ve come up with.

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As of today, everyone at 38 Studios Providence and Baltimore has been laid off.

It’s a very sad end to nearly six years of great work. Despite the odds, I believed in the dream we all shared. I believed with all my heart.

I’m not sure the public will ever know the beauty of what we built… that’s maybe the hardest part of it all. We snuck out a pretty, but dated, environment fly-through and a few key images, but there is so much more that would take your breath away. I truly hope you get to see it, in some form.

I don’t know what will happen to Amalur. It will no doubt be tied up in various legal proceedings for some time, both game assets and the intellectual property as a whole.

As people lay blame and the commentators turn a heartbreaking situation into the latest industry punchline, some will probably portray the team as a bunch of screw-ups who couldn’t ship a game. The story has so, so much more to it than that. In short order, you will start hearing truths, half-truths, and lies, as well as things that are true from a certain perspective. In the end, perspectives are what makes up history… real truth lies in the midst of it somewhere.

Perhaps someday I’ll talk more about my perspective… but not today.

Today, I mourn for what almost was. Because believe it or not, we came so close to pulling it off.

On to the next dream.

Looks like shots of Project Copernicus have been released through one of our loyal fansites, 38 Watch. Wonder how they got those…

You can check out hi-res versions of the shots here.

I wish these reveals had been under better circumstances. We have a lot we wanted to show the world when the time was right.

Regardless of what comes, thanks to everyone who has shown interest in the project over the years.

Over at 38 Studios, we’ve been working on a game for a few years now. We are very proud of the stuff we’ve done. We haven’t talked much about it, but given all that’s been said about us in the last few days, we wanted to answer the best way we knew how.

This is just a glimpse of the world of Amalur as it comes alive in our MMO, codenamed Project Copernicus.

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…

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.