Lore

Why not have some kind of themed in-game compendium or almanac then. Completely optional to use, if you want to know more you look it up in the sci-fi database/fantasy tome, and get your lore that way. Hell, have the fantasy tome have maps inside the pages that you can pore over as if it were an actual fantasy novel.
Nothing wrong with doing it that way. You could even gate some of the content behind in-game quests or whatever to give completionists something to sperg about.

Isn't that just a Diablo 2 esque lootfest?

I am perfectly okay with lore. In fact that's not my issue with it. My problem is god damn continuity. It's really easy to compare with old and new Beth games for instance. Older games had the idea of trying to fit actions and dialog within a theme and keep themselves consistent throughout. This may have been limiting at times, but it guaranteed that the immersion was consistent. But as Beth began streamlining, things got shifted. Continuity was replaced by a shift to an increase in simplistic quests. Dialog was now more specific to just the npc and with refusing to do things the way they were intended, due to the game letting you do so, you would find that all your actions would lead to the same action. Thus showing an illusion of choice. That in itself made the lore immersion breaking.

Let's take another aspect from Beth games, the world. In older titles the focus is the environment and characters. You are a foreigner that must learn the rules of the world and abide them. There are events happening far beyond your control and you must work to become politically and socially relevant. Then comes the newer games. Every little event is focused around you and your help. The rules are not only not mandatory now, but you are inclined to break them as you are supposed to make all the choices. Then comes a problem with this design decision due to how story is handled. The focus of npc's and the apparent illusion of choice makes the player feel dragged around. Due to these established rules that you're supposed to make choice, the idea that all of this is irrelevant during every single major quest breaks immersion.

The issue isn't the lore in-game itself. It's the vastly poor writing and poor design for said writing.

Don't even think about it you son of a bitch. "Walk down a long hallway while some retard talks over the radio" is worse than cutscenes because at least you can skip cutscenes. Fuck Half Life 2.

Show, don't tell, and all that. The issue isn't that games are more narrative heavy, but how said narrative is introduce to the player. Also, there's this really bad habit in writing in the past few years of needing to explain every little detail away, especially in already established universes, leaving nothing to the imagination.

A few games do have that, the older AssCreeds and Mass Effect, for example, but it's usually so lazily written and condensed that it's barely worth reading through or just ends up being ignored altogether. Normalfags either don't seem to mind sitting through hours of cut-scenes, want their lore simplified and delivered in small doses so they don't have to think, or don't give a shit about it at all. For example, regardless of what some may think of it, Destiny had a shit-load of lore available to read outside of the game. But people bitched about the actual game having no lore or story and wanted it all in game, so in D2, they added a ton of cutscenes and and actual story line, but nobody cared about it (to be fair though, they fucked up their own lore and the story is generic shit).

I can understand hate for lore. Most of the time it is just text on the side which has nothing to do with the game or doesn't affect the world your in in a meaningful way. Honestly if it doesn't really affect the game in any way they shouldn't make it. Final Fantasy XIII really hit me when all the etro story and origin of the universe was just thrown out and shoved in lines of text when that story of the origin of the universe actually sounded interesting instead of the nonsense story FFXIII was focused on.

I especially hate this in games with stupid fucking stories that affects gameplay. Like KoF and not being able to play the orochi team because they're cannon dead.
ITS A FUCKING FIGHTING GAME
I'm there to play the characters not masturbate to a too deep for you story that fanboys will defend to the death because "its supposed to be goofy XD" and wait another fucking decade to hopefully get what I want. I have to take these stupid stories seriously as I don't get content I want from the games

Bungie used to know how to tell a story. Marathon's narrative never felt intrusive, and if you wanted to ignore it you could. Also, Halo 1 did a good job at not drowning the player in exposition and keeping cutscenes at a reasonable length.

pshh.. doesn't have to be like that. It's all about being succinct and not making "long hallways" to justify a long talk.

Like don't pay attention to it fam.
I love me some lore, why would you want to ruin my fun huh?

Yup, Lore Puritanism is so much Cancer, that Shadow of War is a masterpiece.

can you justify my example about King of Fighters?

Lore should be… "reachable" from within the game, but it should be communicated in a way that's organic and fits the game. You know, like background conversations or the scenery telling the story. Having "logs" where you have to stop the game to read or listen to something non-diegetic is usually disruptive. The only time I can remember not being taken out of the experience by it was the Metroid Prime games. If someone wants to make a setting bible or whatever then fine, but why would you want the lore to only be available that way?

If you like orochi team so much play that kof where they are present duh.
Like I only play GGAC because HOS isn't present in other games and he's shit in Slash/
Or I play KOF13 because I like sprites and don't give two fucks about 3D trash they turned it into.
It doesn't mean I wish those other games didn't exist.

The modern usage of the term "lore" kills me, but, yeah, I'm all for storytelling.

Don't you see how putting an emphasis on stupid needless lore has detracted from content in videogames?

No.

then you're a fucking idiot

Forced lore is shit. But if you do it good like in Morrowind for example, you will have assburgers like me search it up online and read that shit for hours instead of actually playing a fun game.

also collecting books inside the game and reading them was very fun when i just wanted to be comfy in my telvanni tree house

I hated this in skyrim. Granted, it was interesting at first but there were so many fucking books!

Prove it?
Orochi team is not in new game not BECAUSE of lore, it's just added justification, since they can't say "well it's one of less popular teams so we'd rather have K' team".
Or what can't you think logically?

Lore is for world-building which is for immersion which is critical to a RPG game actually being good.

Ok, you had your fun. It's time for you to go back now.

nigger spotted

Ayo hol up.
U be saying.
smacks meme
U be sayin
inhales
WE WUZ REDDIT AN SHIEEET

As a lorefag: Firstly, delet this

Secondly, any series with a lore focus needs to actually have a lot of it be told through environmental storytelling or referenced through it and second.third hand through dialog (such as an off hand comment about some faction or character) as such. Simply having all of it in audio and text logs or in books with no hints or details also in the actual gameplay and levels is shit.

I think how Halo handles it is pretty good: The games's actual stories are pretty simple, and don't drown you in expoisition and info, but the writing and dialog they do have reference deeper lore concepts/ideas/characters/factions/events and there's good environmental storytelling inside the levels, which lends itself to theorycrafting and people going going "hey what was that thing thast one character mentioned/that wierd thing in the level" and then going online and looking up actual info from the novels. Likewise, the novels themselves are damn good, but they don't rely on the games and with 1 exception never cover the same events as the games do, and are their stand alone stories. This way, both the games and books reference each other in subtle ways that if you read/play both add a lot of context and extra layers to both, but both are capable of being enjoyed as their own thing.

I don't know why Halo and TES are the only vidya series's with truly expansive and well done lore. The potential is there with so many other franchises. MK's got a lot of

CE was good for theorycrafting due to it;s minimalism and implying lore that way, but 2 overall does a WAY better job in this regard despite having a more in your face plot and dialog due to the sheer amount of autistic effort Joe Staten put into fleshing out the covenant and writing litteral books worth of lore and background info about stuff that the games then reference and hint towards.

Even books and new games that came out 10+ years latter after Halo 2 talked about stuff that Halo 2 referenced that obviously was already thought about way back then. This is most obvious with Contact Harvest, since staten himself wrote it, and if you read old interviews with him. There's a pre-halo 2 launch interview with him where he talks about some covenant backstory stuff that wouldn't show up in Halo 2 that he had already fleshed out mentally that then all got explained in it, for instance (How the covenant political system works and the covenant's calander/chronological system)

Seriously niggers have some fucking shame

Please hang

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Man I'm not sure if people are just pretending to be retarded or I've been so long in image boards people have forgotten how image boards work

You can shit on the gameplay all you like if you don't like it, but don't talk shit about Halo's lore or EU. It's basically unrivaled by anything other then TES both in scope and in quality for vidya.

Also, the Halo books are legimately good, not just "good for vidya books", but legimately good scifi novels in their own right

You must have pretty low standards for reading material m8.

I love 4chan memes! They're just like Facebook memes.

Are you mentally deficient?

>>>Holla Forums

Or maybe you just haven't actually tried the Halo novels to judge them. Not saying they are on par with the best in the genre or classics (though the Forerunner triology actually comes close, it's a fucking fantastic blend of far future sci fi that gets more and more cosmic horror elements the further in you go and the last novel is just outright cosmic horror) but they are pretty damn decent "firm" (as in, in between hard and soft) sci fi novels.

Normalfags like games without concrete lore, like Dark Souls, because it means they can just make up whatever the fuck shit they want and still be accepted for it. You don't see those plebs talking about anything with well defined lore, like Lord of the Rings, because they would actually have to read books and remember it correctly instead of just going

It's called growing up you spastic, most people have realized they are not only childish and stupid but stale as fuck. They only exist now because reddit feats on its carcass, but sorry you're too stupid to understand that.

Yes OP, you are literally the only person on the entire planet that cares.

Why must conversations here always be venomous?

Fuck off

No, but I mostly just hate how piss-poor most game lore is and the awful communities that spring up around it and not the existence of the lore itself. Some franchises have both problems, some have one or the other and some have neither; Dark Souls, for example, did their lore right by keeping it terse, not shoving it your face and generally making it quite ignorable - you can play the entire game without talking to anyone at all and all that happens is that you might miss some vague directions about who to kill and where and have trouble figuring out where to put the lordvesel once you get it. The closest Dark Souls ever comes to making you sit through infodumps is loading screens and your conversation with Frampt or Kaathe and you can just button-mash through it if twenty seconds of dialogue is really too much to handle. However the Dark Souls "lore community" are a bunch of massive, insufferable faggots trying to make some internet shekels through spoonfeeding rampant speculation to casuals and one another when anyone could just read neatly typed summaries for half an hour and be completely up to date on the entire franchise.

jesus christ…

I feel you, OP. I think that RPG games are just on their way out and publishers try to make big bucks milking RPG while it's still in. Don't worry in probably 5 years there won't be an RPG title anymore and good riddance imo. Boring exposition shit.

He's right, the "discarded your opinion because toxic" mentality is reddit
Grow thiccer skin faggot

but if it's tons of backstory with no payoff or a carrot on the string lore that is just there so lorefags jerk off to it then there is no point to it. People should allocate resources to making moments in the game and not piles of backstory texts that won't mean shit in the long run or it has no real payoff in the game.
Sure make lore in the game, but they shouldn't put emphasis on lore in game if it is just going to always be backstory or have no payoff.

I do, I'm just lamenting the aggression. Unnecessary.

god forbid someone put retards in their place, eh reddit?

Go read an actual sci fi book. Start with Mote in God's Eye.

Let lorefags have their fun.
No one is forcing you to read in-game books.

Also, having everythnig you hear or read in-game being relevant or connceted to you is by itself immersion-breaking.

third reddit reference, easiest shout of the larping teenager. Now you got me going, you devil

Shit OP tbh, shoving walls of exposition down my throat

I do read sci fi novels, that's why I'm confident in saying the Halo ones stand on their own merits.

Give Fall of Reach or Cryptum a shot. Both can be read with no prior context of the Halo series. Cryptum in particular is one of the forerunner novels and those are by greg bear, if you want an example of pedigree.

Though, the forerunner novels are way different from the others: Fall of Reach and the halo books in general are sort of in between soft and hard sci fi and are grounded military sci fi, whereas the forerunner novels are very much science fantasy, with lots of mysticism, but go to absurd lengths to justify their own fantastical (IE absurdly futuristic tech to the point of being nearly magic) elements inside the context of the world it builds: It goes to extreme lengths to explain how particular pieces of technology are used in forerunner society and there's a astonishing amount of worldbuilding that way, so even if it's soft sci fi, it often feels hard. Also, as mentioned, the forerunner triology has a lot of cosmic horror elements that get more and more prevealent the further in you get.

play any old Bioware game, there will be a point where you are not going to want to talk with NPC's anymore. Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate have a LOT of lore and dialogue and books, isn't forced because most is optional. But these texts pieces are long, detailed, and get boring fast if you are not into dialogues

Wait for the next dream Match game, it will eventually happen

Is venemous the new buzzword?

KOF 13 had the same shit 14 had, only that instead they were pre rendered and the artists traced the models and reshade them. they still move and feel like 3d models, only with a coat of paint on it.

Garou Still has the best art direction.

Reminder that Maechen is best girl and one of the few redeeming characters in FFX.

TOXIC? WHAT IS THIS, BLIGHT TOWN?
they'll start using the word plague next time

I hope it's gone forever.

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Shit thread with shit opinions.

Personally If lore is in the game I like it when most of it is on the side lines tucked away in librarys and hints told by to us by npcs. Shit example I know but Pokemon Gens 1-5 did an ok job at what I'm talking about ok mainly gen 4 for adding a bunch of stuff. Also lets pretend gens 6 and 7 never happened

yes

Or hell, the lore's explained in the damn game. Take Front Missions 3 for instance. You want background history of the world? You got the news site in the game's version of the Internet, there's even a site for college where you voted for that year's Miss University (depending on the route you in, either your cute adopted sister won…or this lovely young lady..which you can use the pic for your wallpaper)

Front Mission 3 is a special case, that game is still technology when it comes to today.

Its tough

Bad news is she's not playable (well, unless you're in the other route where your adopted sister is playable) but cheer up..you get to have your sister's biological sister as your squad mate. Feast your eyes…

As much as people hate it TPP got this nailed down. The character have a radio where you can play music or lore stuff while playing normally the game. But nostalgia fags want codec aka 3/5minutes long exposition watching a stupid screen doing nothing

You don't see people talking about games with well defined lore because it's well defined; there's nothing to discuss. People are drawn to lore that's full of vague shit because it facilitates discussion.

lol, burger education

SEPPUKU NOW THE EMPEROR WILLS IT
I SHALL SERVER AS YOU KAISHAKUNIN TO SEE YOU BRING NO MORE DISHONOR

only a true brainlet would find choke-full of lore games like TES or Planet of Eternity to be more intelligent than Fallout 1/2

Lore is shit, it's a bandage for shitty gameplay.

meant pillars, obvious brainfart

There's my five cents before fucking off.
Problem is how lore is given and amount of it. Most obvious thing, perhaps, is to hide lore behind optional in-game information sources.
Some lore moments might be good idea to note to know basics, what's happening and etc. Maybe, it would be good (but might be overused) idea to put some puzzle behind text, but you need right genre. But when lorefags dump GLORIOUS WALL OF TEXTS out of their brain cells (that can be printed and placed on the Great Wall of China) in game instead of focusing on gameplay - there will be a problem.
Also, for some fucking reason, i can't post gif. Have a shitty edit instead.

The "books" in Neverwinter Nights are barely a page of text, at most. Every book's text was made to fit in the item description box when you click "Examine." Neverwinter Nights is fairly light on dialogue/exposition except at the beginning, and if you want you can skip most of the dialogue and read your quest journal to get the gist.

Morrowind does lore pretty well.
Want lore? Go read it you fuck.
And the books in it were actually good, too. Of course, by "books" I mean the 5 page pamphlets with that real thicc paper.
397.5x better than cutscenes, cutscenes and cutscenes and they don't add 30GB to the game's install size.

local gaf refugee doesn't understand why people are mean on the internet :(

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Water Chip Simulator does lore the right way, by showing, not telling.
Meanwhile tes lore is books. Such creativity.

TES lore is interesting (Morrowind-wise, at least) BECAUSE it's books. They're penned by fuckers in the game world, so their legitimacy and credibility is questionable, and it feels more natural than "lol exposition dump"

Uh huh.

Gulag Archipelago is about the horrors of the Soviet work camps, so named in reference to their distribution on a map looking like a chain of islands because there were so many of them.

Will there ever be a proper place to discuss books on h8chan?

>>>/lit/

I don't hate lore, I hate ultra-lore fags. As in the soulslike crowd that decides to see lore and meaning and references in absolutely everything even if it's just reaching down someone's ass and pulling some contrived connection out of it.

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The only lore I have autism for is the lore that gets retconned

Well, obviously those are normalfags who do that.

OP is an insufferable faggot. Move along. Lore isn't cancer, bad writing and ham-fisted exposition is cancer.

Yeah, but I like laughing at niggers.

Baldur's gate is shit
and SM >>>>>>>>>> prime, one of the reasons is not having to scan stuff every 15 seconds

No it's not, but it can get AIDS though.

How many people have read those books in-game? Is there a number somewhere?

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I was able to read until "problemtunity".

Mediocre-Average Writers are cheaper than good developers
And the skillgap is much smaller, eat a dick english majors

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You think reading a Wikipedia entry for each NPC you talk to is intelligent? You lorefags are on the same level than people who play AAA games for the story. For them I say, watch an actual film (something outside of Hollywood). For you I say, read an actual book, preferably non-fantasy shit.

Yes, reading is hard when you read shit, a thing that doesn’t happen when you read Houellebecq or Borges. Same shit when I choose to ignore the shitty story in your average vidya. Have some fucking standards you brainlet

all i csn hear is hurp durp my man
"REEEE REMOVE STWORY FORM TE GAM"

All I can read is “REEEE I NEVER READ REAL BOOKS NOR I READ ABOUT HISTORY SO I NEED THIS NPC TO TELL ME THE ENTIRE STORY OF THIS INCONSEQUENTIAL VIRTUAL LAND TO FEEL INTELLIGENT”

Also if you knew how to read you surely have picked examples of story heavy games that do story right without drowning you into wiki-lore madness. Quality will always trump quantity, and it will be the reason why the older Fallout titles will always be better than the newer shadowrun games which can’t stop throwing bricks of shitty, uninteresting dialogue to your face.

I refuse to believe that any lorefag is above 25 years old. They’re a direct consequence of Harry Potter books and lotr movies. Only them seem to enjoy shit like PoE or Shadowrun: HK

Why haven't you fags listed games that do lore right, Jesus.

I'm fine with lore, but I usually don't like games with a strong emphasis on lore or story because it's very often done poorly.

With better technology, lore should be present in game instead of kept separate. There's no reason to separate lore from the game if presented correctly. NPCs or books scattered around the world should be able to present lore in a manner appropriate to its situation or location within the game.

I agree with this. Games need to minimize parts of the game with no gameplay as much as possible. The bigger issue is that developers treat games as movies with interactive scenes that don't affect the story, or even worse, pushing buttons just to advance to the next cutscene.

Because a good game with heavy lore can let you interact with the world you're learning about and make you feel like you're a part of it. I'd provide an example, but I haven't played a game that's done this well.

If the NPCs or the information given is important to the main story, then I feel it should be shorter and more to the point. However, if they aren't vital to the main story, then it doesn't matter. The point is that it's additional information for those who want it. However, if an NPC will be presenting long speeches of unimportant backstory, there should at least be an option to end the chat after X amount of text given. I hate when I accidentally talk to an NPC I didn't mean to and have to keep mashing buttons to fast-forward and end the conversation.

See above. Many developers are treating games as movies you push A to advance, but it turns out they're terrible movie directors and writers. They're bad directors in that they can't properly present their story so they resort to lengthy dialogue and exposition, but they also can't write so their story just ends up being an incoherent mess.

Motherfucking Tyrian, yo.

I have started to hate it. For some reason, I have stopped enjoying some things in a lot of mediums. gayming, anime, movies. I believe it was because I listened to That Anime Snob and watched Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Suddenly, I felt like most stories people put are generic bland shit. There is barely any creativity, everything is too cliche. Nowdays I enjoy reading history and watching news more than the lore of these games.

What has happened to me, Holla Forums?

The best piece of lore for me was this thing

It was not an exposition dump, it wasn't a book, it wasn't even mandatory, but it was by far the most eyeopening thing if you went to look for it.

More things need to be like this

Warhammer Online did that and it was really well executed, it's a shame the game never lived up to its full potential

Back to r/Jordan_Peterson

Yeah like in ffxiii

People (read: whites) are told they do not have any culture or history and should not go looking for it. But the human mind needs it, so they substitute fantasy.

Back to leftypol with you.

Back

I know you're talking purely out of your ass but it seems plausible enough

If you want excessive lore, my opinion is that you should just write a fucking book. Lore should be optional, perhaps providing you with better (or stealthier) ways of completing your objectives. NPCs should also not vomit exposition over you, just say enough. Then you can bother them until they have nothing to say. Also, I enjoyed real life book excerpts from Deus Ex, more games should do that.