Editorial The Metaphysics of Morrowind

[Angthoron]

Divinity 2 has a whole pile of books with lore as well. Some are pretty short but others actually have a bit of substance.

Except books in Div2 don't really try to portray an interesting and cohesive gameworld. Some are fun, some are amusing, but if they were to be judged on the basis of their worldbuilding merits, they wouldn't even qualify for "E for the effort".

This is true. Very few games actually have something proper for an in-game book, the only things besides Morrowind that come to mind are Infinity Engine games (BG/IWD had tons of lorebooks hanging around, I remember reading them and being moderately impressed with some) and Deus Ex. Witcher also did this to some extent, but that's really all I can think of at the moment.

This is amusing because the dev could hire some fans and an editor to write some stories and pick the best ones. Hell, make a contest of a best story, edit it, best stories make it to your Awesome AAA-grade RPG. Where's that? How expensive is it? Damn it.

 

[phanboy_iv]

Guy is spot-on, that's why Morrowind has such an exceptional narrative. Everybody has their own take on what actually happened back then with Dagoth-Ur and Vivec and the other gods at Red Mountain. The player only begins to discover the similarities and key differences in the accounts (both official and unofficial) if he pokes around and does some critical thinking.

And even at the end there are only "many accounts", not "the answer".

Is Morrowind is the video game equivalent of Rashomon?

DISCUSS.

 

[Angthoron]

Postmodernism in my games? No way!

 

[eth]

NwN had books too. I remember them cause i had an obsession about collecting them - can't recall exactly why. Was there some kind of objective associated with them? Anyway, sure thing was that i had read and liked em all.

 

[visions]

This is true. Very few games actually have something proper for an in-game book, the only things besides Morrowind that come to mind are Infinity Engine games (BG/IWD had tons of lorebooks hanging around, I remember reading them and being moderately impressed with some) and Deus Ex

I remember Arcanum had some good ones, definitely better than stuff in BG. And Daggerfall too.

The problem with BG's books was that they mostly had very little to do with anything you encounter in the game, they just described various stuff related to Forgotten Realms history/lore. And they were written in quite a boring manner ("In 767 DR orcs razed some random city you will never encounter nor give a fuck about. In 787 the city was rebuilt. In 860 the city was besieged by a host of barbarians, orcs, giants, trolls and dragons and subesequently razed. In 883 its ruins were reclaimed by a band of adventurers." And so on and so forth...

 

[DraQ]

The problem with BG's books was that they mostly had very little to do with anything you encounter in the game, they just described various stuff related to Forgotten Realms history/lore. And they were written in quite a boring manner ("In 767 DR orcs razed some random city you will never encounter nor give a fuck about. In 787 the city was rebuilt. In 860 the city was besieged by a host of barbarians, orcs, giants, trolls and dragons and subesequently razed. In 883 its ruins were reclaimed by a band of adventurers." And so on and so forth...

This.

The problem with BG books was that they were neither particularly interesting, well written, useful or something you could relate to.

I don't know, it may be different for someone who faps to FR and has all the official history of Faerun memorized, but for me those are isolated snippets of information that:
-describe places I will never see or even know what and where they are
-have no potential use in game
-are dry and rather generic
-are part of a world that we all know to be inclusive, themepark-y kitchensink anyway.

In both Morrowind and Daggerfall the main storyline was immersed in the politics and history of their respective regions, in both the books could contain information that was relevant to the gameplay or otherwise useful. In BG? Nada.

 

[Phelot]

I thought the BG books were fine, if not filler. I'd rather hear the lore and background of a setting in ingame books that I can choose to read rather then NPCs that babble on for hours about shit my character should probably already know about.

BG books filled this in nicely. Yes, a lot of it was about things never encountered in game, but it fit the setting so was OK. And it reads like an encyclopedia, which is what it's supposed to be. It's merely without all the sensationalist filler words and the opinion of the writer.

 

[DraQ]

I thought the BG books were fine, if not filler. I'd rather hear the lore and background of a setting in ingame books that I can choose to read

Except BG books failed at that, because they were way too disjointed and fragmentary if you didn't know the setting already, and pointless if you did.

 

[Phelot]

I thought the BG books were fine, if not filler. I'd rather hear the lore and background of a setting in ingame books that I can choose to read

Except BG books failed at that, because they were way too disjointed and fragmentary if you didn't know the setting already, and pointless if you did.

I thought they were fine. But I was more responding to the opinion that they needed to pertain to the story at hand or GTFO.

I agree that the books shouldn't have been made as if the PC opened up a random page and started reading. Some general locations would have been nice rather then mentioning some random city and talking about it's history.

 

[DraQ]

But you never get any framework.

In TES you could piece the stuff together and generally put it in the context, in BG you get something like this:
"blahblahblah Hlarua (...) MEANWHILE, during the time of troubles blah blah...".

Someone not already acquainted with and well versed in FR lore, won't gather anything from this stuff.

 

[CraigCWB]

This is amusing because the dev could hire some fans and an editor to write some stories and pick the best ones.

Yeah. Because that's really what gamers like to do with their free time. Read fan-fiction in essay form.

Dude, the email I get from co-workers is more interesting than the "lore" in Morrowind. And the lore in Morrowind was written by people who were paid to be interesting.

Guy is spot-on, that's why Morrowind has such an exceptional narrative.

Exceptional narrative? Are you being sarcastic? I can't remember a single quest from Morrowind, including the main quest. I have no idea what the game was even about. And I put quite a few hours into it. That's not "exceptional narrative". That's < daytime Soap Opera narrative.

 

[CraigCWB]

I thought they were fine. But I was more responding to the opinion that they needed to pertain to the story at hand or GTFO.

I'd have more patience with Bethesda in particular for lore that had no bearing on game play if they didn't have such a bad history of implying the existence of content that isn't really there. To me, it's as silly as if a novelist spent a lot of time talking about the history and culture of a city on a different continent, when it's got no relation to the story he's telling. That's what happened with Robert Jordan in the Wheel of Time series and it got tedious real fast.