Books are Great, Books are Challenging

One of the things that is fantastic about the game is the interactivity of books. You can see how this has evolved in that bookcases that use to have untouchable, unmovable book textures have been replaced with individual books.

However, a book shelf is more challenging than it appears. There are many things to consider when placing books in a particular scene, such as (non-exhaustive list here): availability, the preferences of the person in charge of it, the "fittingness" in the scene.

When you come across book cases right now, you find piles of what seems like mostly random selections. Some are obviously placeholders (Latin titles with Lorem Ipsum text). It doesn't help the scene, and seems just as incongruous as if you walked into a weapons shop and saw big piles of all types of weapons and parts with no apparent order. Now there are some places where you would want random haphazard piles of books of course, and those can be fun to search (in the home of a disorganized wizard, e.g.), but not everywhere.

I'm suggesting a few ways for the books to seem more natural and allow for the community to help "test" the placement of books.

1) Don't just add piles of books to bookcases and other places to make them look full. Right now place only the ones that would seem to go there according to what fits. We are still in development, it's ok to have empty bookshelves, and less books on them for now.

2) Empty places would make clear where contributions and text are still needed. We need more things that would fit various scenes. If all we're going to have at launch are big piles of virtue stories and community contributions, then we absolutely need to follow the less is more strategy. Throwing them about everywhere is just going to make the game look cheap.

3) If there is no time for more content, a wall shelf with a few carefully selected books would be better in most places than bookcases with random collections. (Does Lord Enmar really need 2 full book cases of virtue tales? Is he an aficionado (like everyone else right now in NB it seems)? Wouldn't it be natural for him to have other things?)

4) Take out the placeholder books. They really add nothing. A better choice would be blank books if you absolutely need placeholders.

I would love to have the placement and finding of books in scenes add to the experience of the game. Right now, it doesn't seem to be headed that way.

 

I suspect Librarian of the Britannia kind. Very nice presentation. You may be on to something. Lord Enmar might concur with your assessment.

 

I tend to agree with this. It seems that a lot of scenes have bookcases full of random books of lore and such... just for decoration. While I think this is a cool feature of the game, I think that books should be found less frequently, and only in more appropriate places (libraries, book shops, certain town buildings, evil wizard's lair, etc.) Finding one or two on the ground here and there in mines or dungeons is OK too to give us the feeling someone was hiding out there or something. But a bookcase full of lore stories in a crafting shop just doesn't seem to fit. I would even be OK with a bookcase full of recipes (perhaps with some hidden new recipes mixed into one special book).

The main issue I see here is that the same books are used over and over throughout. When I find a new scene that has a room with a bookcase, I start to mouse over them to see if there is anything interesting or new (perhaps leading to a quest or new info on the lore of the game). But when you see the same titles pop up that you've seen a hundred times before... and in some cases, multiple copies of the same book or set of books in the same case... this just doesn't feel like it belongs. It gives me a sense of copy/paste, just to fill up the space.

When I get that "here we go again" feeling, I stop looking for something new because 9 out of 10 times there really is nothing new to discover. And most of the time you sit there wondering why these kinds of books are even there... and why did I waste my time again looking through them all?

I do realize that we're still in early development and not enough content is finished to make everything fit perfectly. But @Vyrin made a couple very good points showing why adding "placeholder" books is a bad idea at this stage. I think it would be better to only add books that are appropriate to the scene to show us where content is lacking, which is more beneficial to the game development than having too much "filler" books that don't really belong.