First and Second Impressions: Warhammer Online
With this in mind, the quests I received were, in no particular order:
Kill three bandits.
Kill five squibs.
Open some barrels.
Kill zombies and loot their body parts.
The second and third quests didn’t get much better.
At this point I would like to issue a retraction of my prior statement. This wasn’t 2004 all over again. This was 1998 all over again.
I decided that I’d seen enough to get the ball rolling with some starter questions, and, after concluding my interview with Adam Gershowitz—in which I had to forcibly restrain myself several times from bringing up comparisons to WoW—I was eager to find out if RvR would smooth over my jadedness in a way that PvE had not.
I am pleased to say that it was some of the best PvP I’d played in years. Which shouldn’t be at all surprising, based on the lessons they’ve undoubtedly drawn upon in the time since DAoC was released.
In particular, the factoid that I was most pleased with was that it’s entirely possible to go from level one to cap doing nothing but killing people. I, for one, am very likely to put that claim to the test.
As my last round of RvR drew to a close I lingered around the booth, discussing aspects of the game with anyone I could get to listen. I brought up my concerns over the starter quests, and asked what they thought was really going to set the game apart from its competition. After mentioning the game’s focus on RvR, and its abundant instanced scenarios in which to practice it, one of the staffers suggested:
“You might want to talk to Carrie about the Tome of Knowledge.”
This was how I came to meet Carrie Gouskos.
If you ever ask someone involved in the process of hiring people to work in the gaming industry what they’re looking for in an applicant, nine times out of ten the answer will be, “Passion!” It takes a whole lot of passion to work fourteen hours a day for thirty thousand dollars a year on salary.
The next time Carrie Gouskos is up for a promotion, “lack of passion” will most decidedly not be an issue at her review.
She bounded up to us, grinning from ear to ear, seemingly giddy with excitement at the prospect of being able to discuss what I quickly discerned to be her pride and joy. “Did someone say Tome of Knowledge?”
She immediately began laying out for me some of the finer points, but I stopped her long enough to retrieve my voice recorder, and subsequently went on to conduct what would turn out to be my shortest published interview to date (though, the record for the site overall is likely held by our interview with John Romero).
We had already been introduced, but I asked her to offer up her name and position again for the record:
Carrie Gouskos: My name is Carrie Gouskos, I’m the designer on the Tome of Knowledge.
The MMO Gamer: Tell us about this Tome of Knowledge of yours.
Carrie Gouskos: The Tome of Knowledge is one of the things that we think is pretty defining of the game. It’s a great big resource that touches every part of the game, and it has all kinds of different aspects to it. One aspect is it has a sort of an encyclopedia where it tells you all the things that are in the game, so that if you don’t know what a squig is, the first time you encounter one you’re going to get a little bit of information, some lore…
The MMO Gamer: So it’s a bit like Wikipedia from within the game?
Carrie Gouskos: Exactly. And I like to say it’s Wikipedia meets Xbox 360’s achievement points system. What we do is we then incorporate all that information into the game, and then mix it up by having it unlock things, hidden things to find, you get XP, you get rewards, items, titles, things like that.
All of that kind of plays into the idea that we want you to want the things the Tome of Knowledge has, and desperately collect them. We want to reward people who do crazy things. If you’re the person that climbs the top of the mountain, just because you want to know what’s on top of the mountain our intention is to try to reward those people in fun ways that other people who play the game in different ways might not be able to experience.
The MMO Gamer: Aside from being a lore system, what sort of specific rewards could a player expect to receive from it?
Carrie Gouskos: There’s XP bonuses, there’s all kinds of rewards. Most of them we like to call rewards that you want to covet. They’re not so much necessary. We’re not going to force anyone to use the Tome of Knowledge to get something they have to have later on—it’s more like you do something and you get this really cool looking trophy that only you have, or this really funny title that only you have, and then you’re playing the game and someone comes up to you and says, “Hey, how did you get that?” and you’re like, “Well, I killed a hundred million squigs, what are you gonna do?!”
I would have liked to have continued this line of discussion, perhaps getting into the relative merits of such a system versus other possible methods of advancement and lore dissemination… but, you try coming up with intelligent questions when a hundred nerds are shouting “WAAAAAAGH!” at the top of their lungs from the opposite end of the convention hall and see if you fare any better.
