Well the WAR Herald has put up the third installment of their beta update articles and it’s another good one. Probably the most interesting piece of it was the information revealed about the current state of the Trophy system.
As you may be aware, our Trophy system is one way for a player to differentiate their character visually from all of the other characters of the same career. In a nutshell, as you unlock items in your Tome you will gain access to Trophy items that you can place on your character. Up to five trophy items that you can show at once, but you’ll have from 11 to 15 slots to showcase them.
They show a tech demo of a Witch Hunter which highlights the different positioning of trophies on the character model. So although you can only showcase 5 trophies at once, you can choose from several different options when it comes to where you want them on your character.
As a note, this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Trophy system is concerned. Our artists are slaving away so that you will have access to 100’s of trophies to choose from. Just think of the combinations that you can achieve when you have 100+ trophies, five to select, and 11 different locations to equip them. Talk about visual specialization!
I guess there had to be a limit to the amount of trophies one could show on their character due to performance issues I’d guess. And if there truly are hundreds to choose from, it should provide for quite a bit of variety. I would guess it would be rare to run into the same character career as yourself, with the same five, in the same layout on the character. I’m guessing that trophies will be like loot - common, uncommon, rare, epic/fabeled/legendary, etc. So some trophies may only come through really tough quests, or from sacking a city, or killing a boss mob, or other achievements (i.e. X number of kills).
Next up on the list is what I think will be one of the most interesting parts of Warhammer Online - the Tome of Knowledge. If you haven’t read much about it, or gotten to experience the game at any of the cons and game shows this past summer, it’s really a nice mechanic. As you explore the world, the Tome auto-populates itself as you fight new creatures for the first time, discover new areas, complete quests, etc. I have personally seen it for a very brief time, and not near in what will be its final form, but I found it to be really great. I love getting achievement xp in EQII, and this mechanic to me is another almost mini-game that gives you that feeling of accomplishment. So here’s the latest on the Tome:
The Tome of Knowledge has gotten an overhaul and looks absolutely fantastic. We’ve finalized and updated all of the sections in the Tome. Not every section is going to be visible yet (because there are still tons of secrets), but we’ve outlined all the major sections and filled them with lots of really interesting and fun content so that players will be able to spend a lot of time messing around with it. This includes updating the reward systems and letting you know how you got various unlocks.
Previously on the beta, it was a big secret how to get a Title, for example, now we’ll actually tease the events that trigger them so you have a little more guidance going forward. You won’t have all the guidance though; we are trying to keep a lot of things with the Tome hidden, so you’ll have plenty of things to discover when we launch.
We’ve also given the Tome a graphical overhaul and a lot of visual polish. It’s amazing how a few changes to something like the bookmarks makes it feel and look a lot better. The ease of navigation has greatly increased with just some changes conceptually to how the Tome is built. We can’t begin to express how happy we are with where the Tome is now, and how much we’re going to be able keep on expanding it and making it even more interesting.
It sounds like the Tome I saw has undergone some significant changes since August. Again, it sounds like it will be a great repository for information, for discovery, but also a record of all your achievements and accomplishments to date. I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that the devs stated that you would actually be able to view someone else’s Tome potentially to see what all they had accomplished.
So go take a read - there is info about their work on the Elven zones as well as more info on the Swordmaster and Witch Elf Careers. Good stuff. 
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November 19th, 2007 at 3:20 pm - Edit
I really like this trophy system but is it me or does the knife on the hat look damn weird?
I still think it was a great idea on their part to shut down the beta and focus on development and the feedback they received. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a developer on this game and have 10k testers looking over your shoulder on a daily basis.