Curt Schilling and company made a lot of promises last year about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the first title from 38 Studios' long-awaited IP. He said that we'd see "combat that keeps you doing combat" along with a "deep quest narrative" and old-school RPG tropes brought around to match up with action gamer tendencies. "I don't know a way to tell you," Schilling said at the time, that "'Hey, we're taking God of War and marrying it with Oblivion.'"

That's a tall order, made even taller by 38 Studios' origins -- while there are a lot of veterans working on this game, this is the first time they've all worked together, and certainly there's enough pressure and hype on the project that it seems like it could very well fall apart in disasterous fashion.

And then we saw the game running in full motion for the first time this week here at GDC 2011. Sure, it's only an hour of directed gameplay, and sure, there's lots of work yet to do on the title. But there's this: All of Schilling's promises were up there on the screen, and it seems more likely than ever that 38 Studios might just pull this off.