Tome Be or Not Tome Be, pt.3

An in depth look at Warhammer Online's Tome of Knowledge with Carrie Gouskos

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One of the things that has been a major selling point of Warhammer Online:Age of Reckoning is the Tome of Knowledge. This inovative idea adds a level of ownership to your game that no other game can boast. With the ability to track your quests, your kills, your crafting, etc., it creates a biography of your character and what they've done the entire time they've been alive. However, tracking everything you do has it's good and bad sides. Did you die a lot during PvP? Did you turn into a chicken x amount of times? These could be logged in your "history" as well! What else can you expect from the Tome of Knowledge? Ten Ton Hammer got a chance to sit down with Carrie Gouskos, ToK Queen(a title unlock that she earned through designing and reworking the Tome all these months), and ask her a few questions about her baby.

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No, I doubt there's a He-Man unlock, big guy. Sorry.

Ten Ton Hammer: How exactly is the Tome of Knowledge different from other story based quest lines? We know it offers a lot of lore, a lot of “fun” type items and titles, but how is it different from just a book of, well, regular quests?

Carrie Gouskos: That’s a good question. I guess it’s really more about the ethos of the Tome and less about the activity. If you take the sum of its parts, you could say that it has similarities to lots of other little systems combined. Some of the bestiary things smack of quests, just without the quest interface and some of the tracking things smack of achievements, etc, and they all have little bits where you can say “Oh, I can see where this has been done before.” However, it’s more than that because it’s a central core tenet of our game that the Tome of Knowledge expresses who you are and what you’re doing. So, it’s almost hard to explain in actually referencing things because as soon as you begin to pull out separate examples you think “Well, I’ve seen that before” and it’s really more about the feeling and how it comes across, how it enhances who it is you are and tells what it is you do.

I find in a lot of games have objectives where players need to fall in line with the objectives and not before them. This isn’t quite that because we have 12,000 Tome unlocks in game. I don’t mean to make that sound like that’s every single Tome of Knowledge unlock that you’re going to get necessarily, but we have over 5,000 that an individual player character can get, maybe closer to 10,000. So it’s not like you look at this huge list of 10,000 different things “I’m going to do every single one of those”, it’s not like that. They happen because it is what you do and it is who you are. The Tome begins to tell the story of the kind of playstyle that you have.

Sure, people are going to seek out Tome unlocks and seek out specific ones, but it’s almost like they want to find certain unlocks because they want to be known as that kind of person. An example would be going out to kill as many players as possible because you want people to know exactly how badass you are and the Tome will reflect that in a number of different ways. Number of total kills, number of total things accomplished while in RvR, number of cities sacked, number of keeps controlled, etc.

I feel like that’s the difference between the Tome of Knowledge and just another book of quests. It’s one thing to give people a list of things and say “You can go do these”, and another thing to say “We’ve got this huge fundamental, hidden list of things and if you do it, purposefully or not, we’re tracking it.”

 

Ten Ton Hammer: What sort of additional features have you added in the last few months to the Tome of Knowledge or is it still very much the same as it was in April/May?

Carrie Gouskos: Wow, I’m trying to think of where we were in April/May, that’s like light years ago *laughs*.

So, one of the last things we were doing was the Armory and it was really, really tough because we wanted to do a lot of things. It’s the item/crafting section of the Tome. There were a lot of things about it that we wanted to work on. So, I would say, kinda figuring out what we were trying to do with that section was the last big thing we were working on, and that’s what we’re working on now, kind of wrapping it up. Also, a lot of polish and implementation of additional tracking mechanisms.

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The perfect example of the "John Woo" unlock, where you and your RvR opponent pose during a slow motion action scene

One of the things that’s really kind of been driving me, in particular, right now is the sense that if I want to track anything, I have to get it in before launch. I hate that concept of adding it later and someone saying “… but I already did that 30 times.” So that’s what’s been driving me right now. Making sure that we thought of everything. Of course, we’ll never get everything. I’m sure we’re going to launch and that day I’m going to go “Oh, Darn it! If only we had known to add this!” So getting in additional tracking mechanisms has been a big thing for us and additionally, polishes.

Recently, we pulled some guys over to work on the Tome that had been working on particular content in the game and we told them “Ok, we put all these Tome unlocks in. We want you to make sure that it really tells the story of this area or this section and if it makes sense.” So these guys are going through and iterating and polishing. What’s interesting about that of course, I think, is that they’re basically just changing Tome unlocks. Which I think is going to drive some of our Beta players mad because I know people are writing down where they’re finding the those things*laughs*. We’re still continuing to make sure that the Tome unlocks are as good as they possibly can be and if that means moving them, then we’ll move them.

 

Ten Ton Hammer: It was mentioned that the ToK might be available to view online, out of game. Is that something that’s still in the works or has it already been decided? Will it be part of the Realm War tabs?

Carrie Gouskos: *laughs* Man, before I give another interview I really should find out what my official answer is to this question! It is something that we’ve been talking about and has been in the works for awhile. It’s not something my team works on. We have a specific web team that works on displaying things on the Realm War and all that. As far as I know, I can’t say anything about that just yet. It definitely something we’re hoping to do; it makes perfect sense. It’s definitely something we’ve been talking about doing, but it’s just not my team working on it so I can’t verify for sure or not.

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Look for more Carrie and Tome of Knowledge goodnes tomorrow!