Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Preview

Not one to be left out, IGN has put together their own hands-on preview of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Mythic has always promoted their Tome of Knowledge as a truly revolutionary feature that uses information about the world and data about your performance as a major component of gameplay. We freely admit that years of listening to developers overemphasize the importance of peripheral features left us feeling a bit cynical about these claims for the Tome of Knowledge, but a few week's play has convinced us that the Tome is every bit as compelling and unique as Mythic has claimed.

The Tome of Knowledge is basically what it says it is -- a large compendium of information about the game world and your activities. At the most basic level, it tells you where you've been and what you've accomplished. That's huge enough by itself, not simply for the way it feeds your vanity over the number of beastmen you've killed, but also for the way it points you towards specific objectives that you haven't yet obtained. And since completing objectives gives you real, practical rewards, in the form of extra experience or cash, there's a strong draw to seek them out. It's particularly useful that it tracks your influence rewards for each area, so you know where to go to reap the most rewards.

Even when cruising through familiar lands and fighting old fights, we still found that the Tome had more to offer us, from new titles based on the quality and quantity of our trades with merchants, to new experience rewards based on the number of times we've killed or been killed by particular monsters, to the entertaining bits of lore and story found by venturing off the beaten path and finding new NPCs.