In what is possibly the longest speed run ever done, the development team behind the soon-to-be released Action RPG, The Kingdom of Amalur: The Reckoning, speed run of all the content of the game, including main quest and side quests but excluding cutscenes and text, had taken up to 200 hours to complete.
Thankfully, the game’s lead designer, Ian Frazier, says the main storyline of Kingdoms of Amalur will only take players about “30 to 40 hours” to complete, which seems slightly more reasonable for an RPG. As for the entire game, Frazier told Strategy Informer it will basically consume your life forever:
“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.”
Frazier is still undecided as to whether all this content is a good idea:
“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. But as a developer I have to look at it and think “did we overdo this?” I really don’t know.”