"I hated the names," Salvatore said. "That was the biggest fight I had with people." He created the names of the the different cultures and major characters, but the individual character names were all made up by Ken Rolston's team at Big Huge Games. Salvatore wrote the backstory of Amalur, but he didn't have a hand in the writing of the script. If he did, Salvatore might have handled it differently.
"Peter Jackson's LOTR movies did a great job of introducing characters by condensing the cast," Salvatore said. Movies tend to err on the side of less is more with naming conventions, and Salvatore wondered if games should consider condensing the amount of lore exposed to the player. The characters are what drives the players into the story.
"I loved the character of Alyn Shir," said Salvatore," and I wish she was in the game more." He also thought there might have been too many sidequests because, as a completionist, he felt too distracted by them to progress through the main story at the right pace.
All the quibbles aside, Salvatore absolutely adored the final product. "I wrote a long letter to Big Huge Games and I was almost crying as I wrote it," he told me. Salvatore is immensely proud of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, especially how fun the action combat ended up.
