Baseball player turned gaming impresario Curt Schilling has ambitious plans for his company’s first product. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a huge, open world RPG with action combat elements that is planned as the first release in a franchise that will span consoles, PCs, mobile games, and the MMO space. The problem: Many gamers’ first real taste of Amalur was in the form of a demo that is reportedly very, very buggy. So glitch-ridden, in fact, that Schilling has apologized personally to gamers on the popular NeoGAF forum.

“The demo? Ya, it is way way WAYYYYY more buggy than anything ANYONE should ever release, much less a demo,” Schilling posted, going on to promise that, from a bug perspective, the demo is “in NO WAY representative of the final code or product.”

By way of explanation, Schilling gives some insight into the difficulty inherent in releasing a demo, posting:

“In a partnership there is a lot of give and take, and I believe in my team, they are world class, but when you have a publisher there are things happening you'd rather not choose. Shipping old code out 3 months prior to gold master to a 3rd party with no stake in the demo success can be problematic. I am sure they made the best demo they could but as a studio packed to the gills with gamers, we refuse to believe code has to be unplayably buggy at launch, it doesn't.”

Make no mistake: Schilling isn't pinning the blame on publisher EA. Schilling says that, ultimately, "it's on us." 

Schilling’s apology came after reading NeoGAF's less than stellar reactions to the demo while flying from LA to Boston, returning from a media tour promoting the game. It must have been a rough flight. Before he left Los Angeles, Schilling seemed very happy with the demo, telling X-Play:

“One of the challenges around the demo, which has gotten phenomenal response --EA absolutely, nailed it with the intent of doing this demo. I didn’t believe you could do this and show – how can you show 300 hours of gameplay in 45 minutes? It’s like watching one pitch of a baseball game and saying, ‘I don’t like this sport.’.”

Check out the rest of X-Play’s interview with Curt Schilling on February 6 at 6:30 PM EST. Schilling goes way in-depth about the game; it is not an episode to be missed.

Glitchy demo or not, we love Curt Schilling because of his uncompromising honesty and his legit hardcore-gamer tendencies. We also love him because he posts things like this:

"Generally people that post the real bad stuff about me are Democrats and Yankee fans, and that's cool, I get it. But you Yankee fans, keep hating, that's cool, I understand. Please don't come here and post 'You" have 27 or 28 rings or whatever, unless your Derek Jeter because YOU have none, I have 3, I was honored to play with 3 very special groups of men and be a part of 3 World Championships, and that made some folks mad..."

That's how you silence haters! Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning comes out on February 7.

Source: NeoGAF

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