Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning is Teasing Me in all the Right Ways.

EA did their best to ease the boredom of the Summer game release doldrums by chucking six big announcements at us last week.  There were two that really caught my eye, though.  There’s Darkspore, which appears to be some kind of abomination born of the copulation between Maxis’s adorable sandbox affair Spore and the gothic dungeon crawling of the Diablo-clone genre, but most interesting to me is Kingdom of Alamur: Reckoning.  It’s being developed for XBox 360, PS3, and the PC, and this game really has me all tingly with anticipation because of the names involved at the top:

R.A. Salvatore is creating the story and fantasy world – something he has some experience with I hear.  Todd McFarlane is helming the art design (I think he draws cartoons professionally or something).  And lastly, there’s lead game designer Ken Rolston, who you may remember from such games as Elder Scrolls III & IV.  The pure dark-fantasy action-RPG pedigree on hand here is enough to drive a room full of nerds like me into a mouth-foaming frenzy.  The game is the first game to come from 38 Studios, which is a game company founded by Curt Schilling.

Yeah, the retired pitcher.

I know right?  I was like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot when I heard that the first time too.  But what can you say?  There’s gotta be some kind of credibility inherent of the man’s ability to bleed on a sock and get it shipped off to Cooperstown.

And regardless of all that, it’s a game I plan to follow closely in the coming months before its planned Fall 2011 release, and the teaser trailer that EA just released at Comicon is pretty damn hot.  Head on over to reckoningthegame.com to check it out, or click the conveniently embedded youtube video below.

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That’s right.  I take care of you.  Oh yes I do.

What do you think? Are you excited for another open world RPG, or as I like to call them, time-sucking-peasant-harassment-simulators? Or does the very involvement of big ticket nerd-baiting names like this and the surrounding hype belie the inevitable mediocrity of most big budget affairs from major studios?