Tome Be or Not Tome Be, pt.4

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

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.

TenTonHammer: The Tome of Knowledge tracks an almost ungodly amount of information during the game. What has been the hardest thing that you’ve come across while designing/creating the Tome of Knowledge?

Carrie Gouskos: Living up to expectations, I think, is the hardest thing. You know, the length of the time that I’ve been working on the Tome and developing it and designing it and thinking about it, we had to live up to the expectations set before us. Initially by Mark, of course, where he said “This is a concept, run with it.”, but secondarily by the players.

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The Tome will be in RvR

It’s been so easy to go talk about the Tome and to speak to individual people playing the game at a Games Day or something, or talk to press sites because as soon as I talk about what we’re doing, people’s imaginations just go wild. Almost every single interview I’ve ever given or any conversation I’ve ever had about the Tome has turned from me telling people about the Tome into the end of the conversation with the person going “Oh! You can do this and this and that…” and usually ends with me grabbing a pen and paper, writing down ideas. Which is awesome, but it bears a tremendous burden on us to make sure that we’re doing it.

The unfortunate aspect of it is that there’s no stopping point, there’s nothing that we look at and go “We’re done.” It has definitely been important to make sure that we are living up to expectations and by that token, not doing too much. Like, I’ll want to do everything and then I think “Oh god, I’m doing too many things, people are going to get confused” or that people will think “Oh man, this is too much. I can’t even stand it.” Actually some of the work we’re doing right now ties into your previous question. One of the things we’re working on is finessing the Tome of Knowledge. This includes an option to turn the Tome unlocks off, if you choose and hand guiding the beginning experience for players. For example, right now when you log into the game, you get 20 Tome unlocks within your first ten feet, and it’s too much. We’re trying to hand craft the experience, so that players coming into the game are brought into this warm, good feeling as opposed to the “Oh my god! What is happening all over my screen?!” So, it is a combination of making sure we’re doing everything that we set out to do, that we’re doing it well, and that we’re easing players into it. Also, providing all the options for players who want nothing to do with it.

TenTonHammer: I have to be honest with you; I can’t imagine anyone not wanting anything to do with the Tome of Knowledge. For me the game is based on the Lore, the Story, all those little things that drive your character to do the things they do.

Carrie Gouskos: Yeah, I’m the same way. I can’t imagine not wanting the Tome, which is, of course, why I’m working on the Tome. They found me and said “Ha HA! You’ll obsess over this enough! COME!” It’s wonderful because the story and the lore is so critical in our game. Everything about our game is about Warhammer. It’s made it very interesting because a Bright Wizard is a Bright Wizard is a Bright Wizard and we really want to make sure people understand that “This is me, this is who I am, this my story. This what I care about.” There’s so much to draw from in Warhammer, it just seemed that making the Tome so critical and such a natural part of the game was a great way to express that

TenTonHammer: Will there be special tidbits of information that you can unlock that deal with the tabletop game lore or is it all related to what you’ll find in Age of Reckoning?

Carrie Gouskos: That’s a very interesting question. I will attempt to answer that but I am not the lore person. The short term answer is the people that wrote the Tome, and all of our story for that matter, are infinitely familiar with the tabletop and the books and all that stuff. The Age of Reckoning is kind of like a parallel universe, where it includes lots of different events but not necessarily in the proper sequence. If you try to fit in in, you’re like “Where does this go?” It’s kind of like a Zelda game. You know there’s Link, you know there’s Zelda, but you’re not really sure how they fit in sequence with each other. So, there are a lot of references to things that are outside of the Age of Reckoning, but at the same time we had to make sure that everything was a part of the Age of Reckoning. We didn’t want to start getting players confused with when things happened and where and who and when and how; so, we were allowed that freedom to reference things and tie them back into our story. Of course everything that was written has gotten final approval from Games Workshop, so they were very helpful with what we could and couldn’t talk about. They were instrumental in helping us form that story.

TenTonHammer: Mythic has said the Tome will tailor itself to the individual’s playstyle, almost making it so that each character has a different ToK. Is it possible to unlock and do every single quest in the Tome of Knowledge?

Carrie Gouskos: *laughs* the short answer is no. There are some that are specific to realm, so there are Order only unlocks and Destruction only unlocks. There are some that are even specific to career, so there might be a tome unlock based on how much healing you’ve done, which is really only relevant if you’ve made a healing class. There might even be a Tome unlock, for example, that’s specific to the class you’re playing in as much as it has to do with some ability you have that no one else has. However, for the most part we’ve tried to make Tome unlocks not mutually exclusive. So there isn’t going to be a Tome unlock that is, for example, die five times before you hit level two and don’t die before you hit level two. We tried to do that so that we’re letting the players do the Tome unlocks however they wanted, and not feeling like they had to find out what they were before they went and did anything. Like that sort of petrified “Can I go to the next area? What if I lock myself out of the Tome unlocks?” feeling. That was the justification for that decision. Can you get all current 12,000 Tome unlocks on a character? Definitely not. However, will you be able to get 12,000 total Tome unlocks on a single character? Absolutely, because we are going to just keep adding. The goal is to adding them faster than people can get them. You’ll never be done, but you’ll never be able to get every single one either.

And I wanted to clarify this so I can sleep at night, but I wouldn’t say that the Tome is dramatically different from character to character even if you pick characters from different realms. We originally looked at doing Tome unlocks per race, but there we discovered all kinds of issues not to mention the sheer writing involved, writing in different playstyles, and writing in different voices, for each one. A large percentage of the Tome unlocks will be the same and gettable by everybody, so as you play different characters you will be getting the same Tome unlocks over and over again. They’re more separated based on area, so if you decided to play a Empire character vs. a Chaos character, you’re going to get different Tome unlocks for each character for awhile based on geography.

TenTonHammer: What’s your favorite ToK quest that you’ve worked on so far?

Carrie Gouskos: *laughs* One of the guys on my team made me promise that I would stop announcing new Tome unlocks every interview because the time the game comes out I’m going to give them all away.

A little while ago, I don’t know if you guys remember, I mentioned (by accident) that there’s a Tome unlock if you to complete a PQ naked? Let’s just say the engineers took that idea to the next level, and there’s all of a sudden quite a few naked unlocks. I’m not suggesting that players run around naked all the time, however, there are definitely a few “naked” unlocks. To see that develop through the Engineering dept., like one Engineer completing a PQ naked and then someone else saw that in the code, saw how he did it, and all of a sudden it became “oh, we could do this naked or we could do this naked” So, that is definitely my favorite thing about it, both in the concept and in the way it evolved. It was completely out of my hands, wasn’t even remotely my idea, but I’m so glad it exists.

TenTonHammer: What’s your Army of choice?

Carrie Gouskos: Man! That’s actually really tough, because actually I kind of have three favorite classes to play and they’re in different armies. Right now, it’s Empire, just because I’m playing a Bright Wizard currently and sort of loving it. I’m playing on our beta, and I’m playing a male Bright Wizard. When I play, I ask people questions and they don’t have any clue that I’m a dev, so I’ll ask “How does this work?” and also been very instrumental in getting people to explain the game to me and see how well they understand it and what they know or don’t know. So right now, I’m really enjoying the Bright Wizard; however, I played Greenskin for a loooong time. I was playing on a Greenskin last night and I have to say my favorite thing about it is I was in this PQ with a bunch of people and they were talking like Greenskins and I just sort of jumped in and started doing it. I guess they were roleplaying, I’m not sure, but it was just really funny because Greenskins are so hilarious. I almost got emotional at that point because I thought “Man, people are really enjoying themselves.” and that feels really good.

TenTonHammer: I happen to know that you’re a fan of the movie “The Hudsucker Proxy” and so I have to know, Is the Tome of Knowledge round? Y’know, for kids?

Carrie Gouskos: *laughs* that’s perfect! Not round, but definitely for kids