Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interview
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There seems to be a real depth of narrative in Age Of Reckoning that's perhaps missing from most online games.
It's a hard role in an MMOG. You constantly fight against the need for narrative, and the push against it by players or designers who don't think that it's important. You have to balance out the impact on the game. So what we've done is tied it in to the Tome of Knowledge. So we have this great narrative. There's, I believe, a prologue and 22 chapters for every race. As you move through the game, physically, you'll get a '˜Tome Unlock'. Boom you've entered chapter three. You open up your Tome and sure enough, there's all the information about chapter three. All the information about public quests there, about the rewards you can gain in that chapter by gaining influence, and two or three pages of the story behind that chapter, which is cool because it tells the story about the things that are happening around you. You read the story, and then you go do the quests, and it all ties together.
So, you don't have to read the story. But if you open up the Tome and read a couple of pages each chapter, it really makes it very fulfilling. It ties together so well. We try to keep quest text fairly short, and try to tie it in to the narrative of each chapter, and then if we have a lot of lengthy text we put that in the Tome. We start to tell this story that Warhammer players have previously had to imagine.
