When talking rpgs: the word "lore" is a good moron indicator

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Lore done well can really support and further the narrative and make worlds come alive, particularly if represented in item descriptions and histories, significant locations the party/player passes through etc. Lore done poorly, without enhancing narrative can make a decent game shitty to play because you have trudge through bad content.

 

[Beastro]

Lore is essentially the substance of a setting, and setting - alone or in tandem with some other elements - is what usually makes or breaks a game, especially a cRPG.
Without Planescape to butrress it PS:T would be a faintly weeaboo smelling game about an emo dude trying to die. It's how it's story and themes are rooted in the setting that gives it enough weight and texture, apparently, to change the nature of many a man enough to want to bear another man's (MCA's) children.

From what I understand nobody has any problems with "lore" in PS:T because it is not just meaningless stuff there, but integrated into core gameplay and drives the plot forward. In contrast we have stuff like Mass Effect's Codex which is full of "lore" that nobody gives a fuck about and probably nothing would change if it was removed from the game. Yet we use same "lore" term to describe both of these instances.

So, shit games are shit but good games are good?

The issue is good game "Lore" is world building in action, told as much as said (and said mainly because history is written and things like history books in game add to the world building).

In contrast, MAs Codex entries are the very essence of what people in this thread hate about "lore", the lore dump. A cynical, lazy and shallow attempt to get world building done in the most convenient way possible for a developer who doesn't give a fuck about the setting.

I am the only one who finds reading books in a game very weird?

nope

i never do it because they are universally trash

Sadly that is true, but there are exception

A big part that helped me get caught up and sucked into Morrowind were the many good quality books. IMO, a problem with the TES series today and it's crap quality are these legacy books they keep putting into the games that fool newbies to the series into thinking that they were made specifically for Oblivion or Skyrim and thus reflect a higher quality of game than is the case.

 

[Archibald]

Legacy books? So its same books that were found in previous games?

 

[Lostpleb]

I love good lore in a game, even moreso when the combat feels visceral.

 

[Archibald]

Truly an incline of 2016 members.

 

[adrix89]

There are two types of worldbuilding: Things that actually makes sense and players sees in action and "lore".
If it has no impact what is its purpose?
It's the old form versus function debate. Nobody questions function.

 

[Doktor Best]

Lore done well can really support and further the narrative and make worlds come alive, particularly if represented in item descriptions and histories, significant locations the party/player passes through etc. Lore done poorly, without enhancing narrative can make a decent game shitty to play because you have trudge through bad content.

There really isnt much more to say about the topic.

 

[Freddie]

Lore done well can really support and further the narrative and make worlds come alive, particularly if represented in item descriptions and histories, significant locations the party/player passes through etc. Lore done poorly, without enhancing narrative can make a decent game shitty to play because you have trudge through bad content.

Quoted because I can't fist. I can't express what is said here any better.

 

[Ninjerk]

Lore done well can really support and further the narrative and make worlds come alive, particularly if represented in item descriptions and histories, significant locations the party/player passes through etc. Lore done poorly, without enhancing narrative can make a decent game shitty to play because you have trudge through bad content.

Quoted because I can't fist. I can't express what is said here any better.

I got you, fam.

 

[DeepOcean]

While I get what the OP is saying, lore is a legitimate part of an RPG, if your are making a made up world, there will be lore about it unless you make an effort to not develop any details about this world but I see no merit on that as this doesn't make the game better. Maybe the right criticism is how lore is rarely integrated within the game and most developers are lazy enough to be happy with some blobs of meaningless text here and there as an excuse for story.

Bethesdards talking aboout Elder Scrolls games as having rich lore really doen't make much sense anymore, last Elder Scroll gme with good lore was Morrowind, after that, the games got so terrible on this aspect... won't even mention the Bethesda Fallout games. Now if you say Fallout 3 had great lore, that is a problem, not that lore itself is a problem but that this person may be a psychiatric problem.

 

[aweigh]

here's something that hasn't been brought up yet:

guise, remember when games had manuals? remember how awesome Arcanum's manual was and how chock-full of game "lore" it was?

that shit was incredibly fun to read! but i think the most important thing for any type of writing in an RPG is simply that it is good. that it is interesting.

this does not mean that it has be written well or that it has to be objectively good in a literal sense: it means that whatever you, as a player, are doing (and in this context would probably mean reading something); what the player is reading should dovetail with the game's characters and towns and dungeons and quests and weapons and armors and the player should be able to experience the lore through the act of playing the game.

if the game's lore only exists inside a menu entry or an in-game book item that has no use other than assault the player's eyes with terrible writing: then how can it possibly add anything to the game?

 

[Hyperion]

remember how awesome Arcanum's manual was and how chock-full of game "lore" it was?
if the game's lore only exists inside a menu entry or an in-game book item that has no use other than assault the player's eyes with terrible writing: then how can it possibly add anything to the game?

Manuals stopped being a thing because of extensive tutorials and the money saved on the paper and printing required for potentially millions of them. Besides, most players never read them because they "took you out of the game." The painful irony is it's considered perfectly acceptable by these same turbonerds to sit and read garbage that borders on fan fiction in the fucking pause menu for hours on end.

There also needs to be a balance in all things. When that balance is thrown off, you end up with situations like PoE, or Shadowrun where you get bombarded with pages of background info from choosing one of the dialogue options.

I'm surprised there's been no mention of quest markers and hand holding abound that made quest-related dialogue worthless. What's the point of descriptions and directions when an arrow and circle do all of the work for you? It only furthers a developer's wankery with pointless lore dumps instead of just giving us the crucial shit to solve the task at hand.

 

[Alienman]

Lore dumps are probably the worst part of this new age of isometric RPGs. This kind of lore I can agree with is a bad thing. It seems all these new-old school developers have decided among themselves that the amount of text in their game is what makes the game, and are constantly trying to outshine each other on this. POE is the biggest current offender. But all new games seems to suffer from it.

 

[AArmanFV]

Your beloved third Wizardry scenario doesn't have lore, right?

Whatever, I don't know exactly what the fuck is lore anyway; the story, the world, what? I think that the world of an rpg has to be presented with the videogame things (i.e: gameplay) rather than walls of text, ultimate graphics, etc. The First Wizardries did a good use of the graphic limitation with the abstract descriptions of the scenario. i.e: The Beach and the pirate headquarters in Legacy of Llylgamyn. Nowadays videogame devs don't take advantage of the media, now we have better graphics and aesthetics posibilities, maybe they could use the visuals to represent better the game world, letting to the players the interpretation of the world, using the text just for specific cases.

Most of the RPGs I played and I like to play are from the 80s, when the "background" was in the manual, so the actual lore (I think) was inside the manual and the game itself was in the disk, so you could play just the fucking game and read the lore (I think) when you wanted. Then the "story" didn't interfere with the playthrough.

 

[aweigh]

Every Wizardry game has lore, except back in the 1980's nobody used the word lore. It was simply called "story". I don't think the word "lore" should be used at all when discussing an RPG.

In fact the only instance where I can think of the word "lore" being accurately utilized would be if a Bard or a Bard-equivalent character was orally telling stories.

 

[AArmanFV]

Thanks for the explanation. So, the thread purpose was to complain about the players who qualify the game based on lore? or complain about those who don't understand shit what lore means and talk about that like experts?

 

[DaveO]

You lost any chance of intelligent conversation by using the word moron in your subject line. Please move this thread to Retardo.

 

[Lilura]

I like Lore checks that go further than just
right-click item to ID and then read wall of text copy-pasted from AD&D source books (Baldur's Gate)
or
click on Savant and have it dump a load of shit on you from html links (Morrowind).
That sort of shit can go and get fucked.

I like how in select NWN modules there are proper Lore checks, where if you pass the check you get to tell your companions about the nature of an artifact, the history of an area.. or maybe you don't have lore but your Bard companion can help you solve a riddle contained within a poem, that when solved opens a warded door.. lore that is alive in the world and not just tacked on as an afterthought to give the world a false sense of depth.

 

[Ludo Lense]

Cohesive world building with a sense of verisimilitude just don't have the same ring to it.

 

[Somberlain]

Games that teach you about their settings and backstories in a natural way through relevant stuff that's actually happening are doing it right. Games where you have to go out of your way to read in-game books & codex entries or listen to NPCs giving you boring lectures about it are doing it wrong. I don't mind the in-game lore book stuff as long as it's only a small part of it, though.

P.S. PoE sucks ass.

 

[AdinsxBejoty]

Not all stories need lore, but I enjoy stories that do lore well more than I enjoy any other stories. If the dive is deep enough (and good enough), I'll usually take the plunge until I've read every page on the wiki and scrutinized the source material to death. Good lore basically gives me the ability to poke and prod and play with history, something I've fantasized about doing with real history since I was a kid.

But I'm also probably a super autist.

 

[skaraher]

Joined:
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