Character limit on blank books

As a storyteller and playwright in the world of New Britannia, I have been very reluctant to publish anything in-game due to the relatively low (8,000) character limit on blank books Yesterday, I published my first full-length story (Shadow Lore: The Origin of Wizards Rest and The New Britannia Theatre Troupe, Vol. 1) and I was forced to break it down into 11 chapters, which filled eleven books Mind you, this is the heavily abridged version (The full text would have easily taken up at least three times as many volumes ) I don't know if this would be terribly difficult for the Devs to do , but I think that increasing the character limit by 5x (to 40,000 characters) would make things a lot more convenient for writers and encourage them to publish more and players to read more (After all, how many people are willing to read a multi-volume set? ) Thoughts, everyone?

 

The reason I've seen given before is that the text in a book must be sent to each player, since it exists outside of the game data files. The larger the text limit, the longer this transfer can take, which could cause delays before the text appears in the book and make the game feel non-responsive.

That said, books load far faster than any other player content in the game currently; vendors and lots are extremely slow. So even if it adds a small delay, I think a 5x increase would be worthwhile.

 

I literally just searched "character limit" to get this exact piece of information, and wouldn't you know it, here you guys are posting it earlier today just so I would find it at the top of the search results. Much obliged.

In more relevant to the conversation news, I also fully back longer books .

I wonder if there would be a way to "permanent" a book into the game file. Or rather I question if ANY book (including story/quest items) have the same potential limit? Maybe a way to make "best sellers" a part of the system itself.

 

Game books do not have a limit; they are built into the game itself. The Release Instructions, for example, is a ginormous book.

I do wonder if we will ever have the ability to create books with a table of contents, like the Journal or the end-game Dire Prophecy. Those would be more like 8000 characters per "chapter".

 

In that case, having a system where a persons book can become popular enough to become "permanent" would be a great incentive to write, especially if considering journals, quest logs, lore ponderings, etc. Just think, they could crowd source their generic lore LOL.