I would say that author is an idiot.
As much as I have disliked Schilling over the years, KoA wasn't made by his video game company. It was a project that was mostly complete by the time it was brought in house from THQ. 38 had very little to do with this besides (from my understanding) use existing art assets and switch IP and some story processes to reflect that. The majority of the story was even written around the older game before BHG was purchased. I have still only played the demo, but I have heard that while some of the game can be mundane, some of it was also very well done.
With that said, from what I have played (Demo, admittedly) and from what I have read everyone saying about it over the year, it doesn't deserve that ranking. Saying it was a passion project for Schilling is off too, as stated, the game was fairly complete when it was Ascendant.
That's not accurate. (Well, the part about the author being an idiot is right, but the rest is not.)
What existed when 38 acquired BHG was very mature tech built specifically for a single-player RPG. Ascendant had some cool assets built for it, but it was far from a complete game. There was framework for an IP, but it wasn't very well fleshed out.
At 38, we had a complementary situation in that we had a huge IP with a lot of depth, but all our MMO tech was still in progress. We'd built Amalur's history initially as backstory for the MMO, but quickly realized we were making something that could genuinely support multiple products and media. There was a notion that someday we'd make single-player games set within the world, but didn't think it would actually happen until after the MMO shipped. The timing of BHG's availability dramatically affected that timeline.
The same week the BHG acquisition was being finalized, we sent some MMO assets down to the Baltimore folks and they had them working within their engine within a day. I still have the videos they made. It was a huge shot in the arm for the 38 team, although we also felt the trepidation that it wasn't going to be the MMO that revealed Amalur to the public. As with any situation where two companies join together, it took some time to build up trust in each other.
After the deal was done, we spent the next several weeks working hand-in-hand with the BHG narrative guys on how the RPG would fit into our universe. We handed them our timeline and extensive lore documentation, and kind of pointed them to a couple areas we thought were well-suited to tell a single-player storyline. They delved into the Age of Arcana, which was exactly the spot we thought would work best. We at 38 had already written the overview of the Crystal War, including the Tuatha and the part they played, and we had dragons and their life cycles as one of the big plot lines of the IP. The BHG guys ran with that, and came up with the addition of Tirnoch as the driving motivator behind the Tuatha's actions. This was perfect, as it fit into the bigger picture and actually set up a ton of hooks that would pay off in the MMO. Thus began a very fertile time of cross-pollination, during which the 38 and BHG narrative teams would regularly have summits together and riff on each other's ideas. Instead of them just following along with our IP, their ideas were pulled into it, making the RPG and MMO all the richer for it. My job was to be the conduit between teams, making sure that the consistency and continuity of the overall IP was maintained, and looking for opportunities to tie the products together as tightly and organically as possible.
As the story for the RPG was being developed, so were the art assets that went into the game. While there were some bits reused and reworked from the Ascendant days, the vast majority was created after the 38 acquisition. Certainly to imply that the RPG was mostly done before 38 came into the picture is completely inaccurate.
If Reckoning ended up feeling to some like a single-player MMO, it wasn't because 38 wanted BHG to make it that way. In some cases, I think it's players with the knowledge that an MMO was in the works projecting those feelings onto the game, but in other cases (question marks above heads, etc.) that was a result of the way the tech and tools were built. The feel of the gameplay--especially the action combat core experience, as well as the dialogue and quest design--was what carried over from Ascendant, not the art assets or game lore.
Once they had the stakes in the ground, BHG proceeded to make the game they wanted to make. The Providence team didn't micromanage them, but we kept in regular contact, attending milestones, visiting back and forth, etc. So it's not accurate to say that "KoA wasn't made by his video game company" by any stretch--a bunch of us, including Curt, spent many, many hours in Baltimore helping the BHG folks in whatever way we could. And as production on the MMO ramped up, we were regularly taking their concepts and reworking them to fit within the needs of Copernicus. Both teams loved that synergy.
The fact is that Reckoning was, by nature of the EA deal, under an insanely tight budget and production schedule, and all aspects about it didn't come out the way any of us really wanted. I can say with absolute confidence that the Reckoning sequel, which was in pre-production when the doors shut, was off to a really strong start and addressed the weaknesses of the first game in a very compelling way. I'm as heartbroken that the next RPG wasn't made as I am that the MMO wasn't finished, and I'm extremely sad that Impossible Studios was cut loose by Epic because they had some really great folks there who I'd happily work with again someday.