Pretentious lore

[MRY]

This actually perfectly describes the Ultima series. :D (The absurd Ye Olde Englishe is second only to the weird sprite pitch among things that make it impossible for met to engage with the game. The moralizing is actually fairly interesting given its coherence -- in some ways, the problem with the moralizing you're complaining about may be that it is not prominent enough...)

 

[Frozen]

I read this thread title as "Dark Souls"

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I was watching a let's play of Tyranny, and the little series of choices that they have you do in the beginning, and the gameplay that unfolded after and my eyes kept rolling. I remember the last Dragon Age was extremely pretentious in a similar way too and I uninstalled it after only 2 or 3 hours of play.

I don't know if I am the only one, but I am completely losing patience for game stories the more I grow old, especially if the game is trying to dump a lot of lore on me, especially made up races, made up kingdoms, fancy magic being omnipresent, or made up creatures and heroes "fighting for noble ideals" or whatever that means. I am losing all patience for villains having Shakespearean dialogue with me. I don't know who the hell started this trend (is it Josh Sawyer?), but I don't think there is a single human being except the game designers themselves who enjoy this.

I have never seen this kind of pretentiousness in any PnP campaign. The original DnD campaigns for instance were very simple and had a Dark Ages atmosphere, and not tons of pretentious made up races with Shakespearean villains.

It seems to be only the youngest generation of game designers who think this is how things should be done. But who are they kidding? You're never going to find the Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables in a fantasy game, so why continue?

Give me simplicity any day.

In my opinion, the only time where a convoluted game setting works, is in a sandbox game where there is a sense of foreboding mystery, and where I must gather clues myself here and there, to interpret gradually what is going on, and figure out who is trying to do what. This is why for instance Age of Decadence, and the Fallout Resurrection mod, worked extremely well, eveen though they both had elaborate lore. They used it very sparsely and didn't run it in your face at any point, and if they had a Shakespearean villain or NPC he told you a few lines and then left you alone.

Possibly "pretentious lore" is in fact a side effect of poor writers craft. This is not unique to RPG writing: TV chefs, braggarts or even hipsters all tend to overdo it because what they started out with wasn't up to scratch in the first place.

What writers fail to appreciate is that we (the gamer) don't owe them a brass farthing. Why would we care about their story? No, the interest must be developed over time, and then we are receptive.

 

[MRY]

Incidentally, I've been playing through a bunch of adventure games with my kids, and I'm struck by how dialogue in adventure games bloated over time. Since the kids don't particularly care for adventure game dialogue sequences, I wind up noting every time they arise and how long they go on for. MI2's dialogues are much longer and more frequent than MI1's, and by Grim Fandango almost everything is based on interminable dialogues with short puzzles mixed in. (Primordia's certainly not innocent here.) It seems like the causes might be different here -- dialogue is cheaper and easier than visual information or puzzles, dialogue can help justify what's going on in the gameplay or make obscure puzzles more feasible. But it is quite striking.

 

[MRY]

Speaking of "who could possibly be out there encouraging writers to include such lore?":

Whether you’re into the geo-political sci-fi of Deus Ex, Portal’s cake-based comedy, or the enigmatic high fantasy of Dark Souls, video game plots – and the lore behind them – have grown as diverse and varied as the people who love them. And with each passing year our appetite to unearth, digest and discuss every nugget of backstory only becomes more and more insatiable. ... Nothing quite scratches that itch like deep-diving into an expanded universe.

Does he have a mixology degree for those metaphors? Here's the whole thing. (Hat tip Infinitron.)

 

[eggdogg]

Lore should always be an extracurricular activity in a video game. Obliviously some lore has to be included for the player to get some bearings but beyond that it should be up to the player if they want a better grasp of the game world.

 

[FreeKaner]

Setting can easily be part of story and story can derive from setting and thus lore, what you said is only one step removed from considering story optional.

 

[Skittles]

Setting can easily be part of story and story can derive from setting and thus lore, what you said is only one step removed from considering story optional.

I fail to see the problem.

 

[Tramboi]

Incidentally, I've been playing through a bunch of adventure games with my kids, and I'm struck by how dialogue in adventure games bloated over time. Since the kids don't particularly care for adventure game dialogue sequences, I wind up noting every time they arise and how long they go on for. MI2's dialogues are much longer and more frequent than MI1's, and by Grim Fandango almost everything is based on interminable dialogues with short puzzles mixed in. (Primordia's certainly not innocent here.) It seems like the causes might be different here -- dialogue is cheaper and easier than visual information or puzzles, dialogue can help justify what's going on in the gameplay or make obscure puzzles more feasible. But it is quite striking.

That's right but it doesn't necessarily mean "the terser, the better". I think something like MI2 is the sweet spot.
I always thought that Infocom games would have been even better with dialog trees, instead of the false pretense of parsing a conversation (ask about, tell me about).
We had a heated discussion somewhere with Bee (a heated discussion with Crooked Bee being more civil than most debates at the Codex, of course (which doesn't mean I'm not always right and other people are wrong)) about typed keywords because I strongly believe that you shouldn't try to make the player believe you can do more than you really can, dialog-wise.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...roken-age-popamole.95422/page-12#post-4072538

I think inflated dialog trees is the result of trying to please everyone : a vast variety of subjects and authorial dialog design.

 

[Harry Easter]

I think of Pillars of Eternity as mixed bag: the first act was good at introducing the premises (Hollowborn Children, Awakening of the Soul, etc.) and the third one showcased how the gods are implemented in the setting. The middle is always the problem and two of three places in the second act aren't adding anything to the plot, while they are anchored in the world. They are just generic places, which don't add to anything and lessen the identity of the world. This can be a problem as big, as too much lore.

Personaly, when I think of unnecessary Lore Dumps Dragon Age: Origins comes to my mind. Say what you want about PoE, at least all the stuff about the souls and gods adds to the themes and the understanding of the story (and the setting), but in Dragon Age, they tell you every detail about dwarven ancestry and do you need it, to progress in the game? No, but they want to tell you, why Thedas is so friggin special. It get's worse, because every line is voiced and I can't skip it as fast as I want. And I find this more annoying than reading it. The problem in that game was: they threaten it like a movie, but the character are talking like book characters and that's one reason why I can't play DA anymore.

 

[laclongquan]

Today one post strike me as revelant to this topic, so I want to share it here
Upside down: Insight first, revelant thought lead to that, thequote to make basis of fact, the source
Disclaimer: The post is from a cult-like tier female author who is not that well known outside of the niche genre, but quite well loved within. Wen Spencer is author of Tinker series, with characteristics of EVERYTHING move within move, every detail linked together in a piece that only known very long after, if at all.

Okay, Insight:

Game writers do it pretentiously and lots of it because today, these five years, their words are being priced cheaper comparatively to two decades ago. So they have to write more of it to satisfy some bullet points requirement coming from accounting department. And pompous writing lend itself well to longwinded paragraph. That's the economic basis of the phenomenon.

Two three decades ago the amount of text in a game is necessarily smaller, much smaller than today due to resources being what it was, the chance to display more text simply didnt exist. So the game writers have to concentrate their brain power in a limited-size result. Today they have to FILL all those empty space with anything writeable. Quality is not a concern, quantity is. And the pay for game writers remain same, I think, allowing for inflation.

The cherry-picked quotes from a longwinded post of a professional author (more than ten books printed, and very well done books).

Writers continued to make two cents a word.

“Professional fiction market” is now considered six cents a word. An improvement you might think but non-fiction is at a dollar or more per word. Five dollars a word for non-fiction is not unheard of."
...
If you’re one of the lucky authors who aligns everything correctly and catches the public eye, yes, you can make lots of money writing. TWILIGHT for example or 50 SHADES OF GREY have made their authors rich. If you write good, solid, entertaining stories and don’t catch the eye, then the sad truth is, you don’t make enough money writing to be much above the poverty line in USA. Seriously. Genre writers like science fiction and fantasy are niche market writers. A handful have made it. George R.R. Martin. J.K. Rowling. The rest of us are still either have a spouse the works and supports us, or are living hand to mouth. Add in the fact that we have to pay through the nose for health care if our spouse doesn’t provide insurance through their company, and it sinks us below poverty level....

Bolded part is my emphasis. And this come from a very good author with 1 book a year, great books that I certainly can recommend anytime, anyplace. I posit that a professional author who is definitely better than game writers, for sure, in term of writing ability.
The whole thing is here https://www.facebook.com/wen.spencer/posts/1242900499134242 I encourage ya all to give her a visit.

SO what does it mean? Longwinded text is a fact of life and continue so for the foreseeable future.

We can only pray that we meet more QUALITY longwinded text.

 

[Luckmann]

I was watching a let's play of Tyranny, and the little series of choices that they have you do in the beginning, and the gameplay that unfolded after and my eyes kept rolling. I remember the last Dragon Age was extremely pretentious in a similar way too and I uninstalled it after only 2 or 3 hours of play.

I don't know if I am the only one, but I am completely losing patience for game stories the more I grow old, especially if the game is trying to dump a lot of lore on me, especially made up races, made up kingdoms, fancy magic being omnipresent, or made up creatures and heroes "fighting for noble ideals" or whatever that means. I am losing all patience for villains having Shakespearean dialogue with me. I don't know who the hell started this trend (is it Josh Sawyer?), but I don't think there is a single human being except the game designers themselves who enjoy this.

I have never seen this kind of pretentiousness in any PnP campaign. The original DnD campaigns for instance were very simple and had a Dark Ages atmosphere, and not tons of pretentious made up races with Shakespearean villains.

It seems to be only the youngest generation of game designers who think this is how things should be done. But who are they kidding? You're never going to find the Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables in a fantasy game, so why continue?

Give me simplicity any day.

In my opinion, the only time where a convoluted game setting works, is in a sandbox game where there is a sense of foreboding mystery, and where I must gather clues myself here and there, to interpret gradually what is going on, and figure out who is trying to do what. This is why for instance Age of Decadence, and the Fallout Resurrection mod, worked extremely well, eveen though they both had elaborate lore. They used it very sparsely and didn't run it in your face at any point, and if they had a Shakespearean villain or NPC he told you a few lines and then left you alone.

I realize that there's 8 pages of this thread that I haven't read, but your issue really seems to be with pretentious lore-dumping, rather than pretentious lore. Like you say, gradual exposition as part of a setting is great. Having it immediately waved in your face how unique and wacky this setting is is fucking awful. I can say that I really liked the Tyranny setting, for example, even though Tyranny itself had some truly awful, awful, awful parts, and I genuinely enjoy non-standard settings - hell, I'm still hoping for that one setting that doesn't even have humans. I also adore much more grounded settings steeped in versimilitude and realism, such as Warhammer Fantasy.

What all settings I enjoy have in common, however, is that whatever is core to the setting, it's treated as natural and has a veneer of causality and historicity, a context that "makes sense". If someone feels like they have to dump everything in the players lap, you know it's going to be terrible.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Personaly, when I think of unnecessary Lore Dumps Dragon Age: Origins comes to my mind. Say what you want about PoE, at least all the stuff about the souls and gods adds to the themes and the understanding of the story (and the setting), but in Dragon Age, they tell you every detail about dwarven ancestry and do you need it, to progress in the game? No, but they want to tell you, why Thedas is so friggin special. It get's worse, because every line is voiced and I can't skip it as fast as I want. And I find this more annoying than reading it. The problem in that game was: they threaten it like a movie, but the character are talking like book characters and that's one reason why I can't play DA anymore.

It's not even the lore dumps, DA:O is just way too verbose for its own good. Everyone unnecessarily yaps on and on about every little thing and with full voice overs, you can't just speed read through that crap. It might be the worst perpetrator of this I've ever seen. Clicking on merchant dwarves launches them into these long, multi-sentence speeches about how their father-in-law personally approved their merchandise, or how they are offering your their special discount, just like the 400 times you shopped with them before. In-game dialogue can be bad or long, but not both.

 

[laclongquan]

The critical point of mine is "accounting department" and "cheaper word price". Any and all team must have their wage slip go through accounting, so the beancounters have some say. And the accountants so love a meter to measure the amount of work that justify the wage slip go through their hands. Coupled that with the cheaper word price in the market and you have word inflation.

 

[Harry Easter]

It's not even the lore dumps, DA:O is just way too verbose for its own good. Everyone unnecessarily yaps on and on about every little thing and with full voice overs, you can't just speed read through that crap. It might be the worst perpetrator of this I've ever seen. Clicking on merchant dwarves launches them into these long, multi-sentence speeches about how their father-in-law personally approved their merchandise, or how they are offering your their special discount, just like the 400 times you shopped with them before. In-game dialogue can be bad or long, but not both.

Yeah, but they got better in DA:2 with it. DA:2 had a lot of faults, but at least the story was alriht (until Act 3, where they chickened out).

I think you get large gobs of lore dumps because a lot of devs are fielding large teams of writers and the games easily suit the style (PoE).

Being a writer is not easy, though, and not just cause the pay is garbage.

And I guess there will be always the Leadwriter or a real Editor, who will, well, edit your work or demand rewrite. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but you have to see, how you get paid.


On the other hand, there are games, where I wished we had more lore or more lore-relevant quests. See for example Two Worlds II. If you just play the quests, it isn't special, but if you take your time and start to read the books, you see how much love they put in their world, but it isn't reflected in their quests. But lore doesn't mean just history lessons or details about religion or people talking in slang. Lore is more. One of my favorite examples is the talking shell in Original Sin. It's just smal detail, but if you can accept that there a talking bivalvias in this world (and a cat-man-person-thingy) then you can accept anything and see Rivellon as a world where everything is possible.