Favorite game lore

[Gorbles]

Yet, the Krogan were still alive. In ME, even when societies get genocide-y there's still a level of cooperation.

Even the reapers do not actually go full genocide, arguably, in that they actually collect and store DNA or presumably other comparable molecular structures from harvested species.

I'm struggling to understand the link to what I said. It doesn't really matter, everyone will (definitely, in ME's case) have their own opinion on the lore of the games.

 

[amadeus]

SimCity 2000.

I write my own story.

 

[Ordnael]

Ah!...The story of how the mayor was riding giant mechatronic spiders rampaging through the city!

 

[EvaDK]

Well, I cosplayed as Lara Croft at a Halloween party many years ago, so I guess that answers the question for me.

The lore in Diablo is also well written (better than the gameplay itself some might argue), but I never really identified with any of my characters.

StarCraft, Red Alert also had fun cinematics, but haven't played those since my teenage days.

 

[Qactus]

Dishonored was very impressive in terms of how much effort was put in to create a compelling world, characters and storyline. Never played the sequel though

 

[PhroX]

If mods count, Anbennar. It's a fantasy kitchen sink, but its a great fantasy kitchen sink, and there's a crazy amount of lore.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It depends on the type of game. The first FRPG game I ever played was Fighting Fantasy. It's got a whole chronology set out of epic battles between heroes and villains, and there are the usual archmages who are either good or evil, plenty of monsters, and a set timeline.

And I threw it all out the window when I started to develop this idea of the gamebooks - and my characters - being connected into some kind of continuing story. What came out of this was a 6-generation family of adventurers, some of whom were reasonably honest people to one who was a pirate and another who was part of the Port Blacksand Thieves' Guild. Some of my characters are definitely morally grey.

The way I hooked the stories together pays not the slightest bit of attention to the 'official' chronology, and I don't care. I've been having a blast over the past 40 years, creating stories, though it's just in the last 8 years that I started really writing them down as fanfiction (completed adapting Caverns of the Snow Witch to novel form for NaNoWriMo in 2016 and have a few others in various stages of writing or prep). I co-admin a Fighting Fantasy group on FB, and from the reactions of some of the other gamers there, I'm on the right track. Nobody has said "You can't write this stuff" or "You can't change the chronology".

As long as I make no attempt to profit by it, it falls into the fair use area that fanfiction is part of. Some of the pro authors/artists post there, and not one of them has told me to stop, so the projects will continue. The way I see it, I'm adding to the lore in my own way, and people can either accept it as valid or go with someone else's interpretation. Either is fine with me. Over the past couple of days it's been nice to find someone who agrees with me about one particular aspect of CotSW, and one specific character. It's great to have that kind of validation.

 

[Fippy]

It's old by now but the best story for me was in The Longest Journey (adventure game).
Close second was Gabriel Knight.

For rpgs i cannot look past Baldurs Gate. 1&2 only.

 

[Kyriakos]

Gabriel Knight is a classic. I have played I and III.
Broken Sword (primarily the first game, played the second too) was also good, but not dark (no wonder, with that studio).
But Rourke>Gabriel, even without underestimating the Knight family's tragic poet-samurai appeal.

 

[Fippy]

..and GK1 got a remake, no need for old pixel graphics anymore (but some find them charming, of course).

 

[Kyriakos]

The original GK has Grace voiced by Leah Remini. Also had Mark Hamill (detective Mosely) and Tim Curry (GK). Were any of those in the remake?

 

[Fippy]

featuring a remastering of the graphics and music, along with a new voice cast and minor changes to the arrangement of story events

So just the same music composer.

 

[Kyriakos]

Too bad, the old voicecast was excellent

 

[Voidwalkin]

The best part of 40k lore to me is the Tyranids. They're a little xenomorph-esque.

Neither here nor there, but the actual aerosolized genetic altering virus was far more dangerous than anything David produced with the classic Xenomorph.

THAT ASIDE. There is great potential for a game series to use a Tyranidoid, xenomorphoid entity as an existential threat, exploring some of the themes of contagion and direct conflict with associated social themes like militarization and utility of ethical actions completely dubious absent that existential circumstance.

I'm desperately waiting for that game. Maybe Gears of War was vaguely adjacent, but the characters ate steroids like normal people eat pizza, and the enemy was insofar as I know not a hivemind nor entirely foreign.

The Last of Us used similar themes, but I hated the gameplay, and thought the story implausible. Humanity could not be realistically threatened by a melee only species to the extent it was: the advantage of ranged weapons is more than sufficient to overcome the disadvantage in numbers. Tyranids still make sense as a plausible threat, because they bring numbers with a ceiling far higher than what zombies could convert from the existing human pop, and I think something comparable from the sci-fi genre would work for me where all else falls short.

For rpgs i cannot look past Baldurs Gate. 1&2 only.

Why not 3? It's the only one I've played.

 

[Ajidica]

Dominions. Its based on historical and mythological nations, but all sorts of crazy stuff happens between the different ages. For example, in the early age, the Egyptian themed lizardmen taught death magic to Ermor, who then tried to resurrect their Jesus figure and broke reality so hard it resulted in an undead apocalypse in the middle age.

Oh yeah, Dominions is so awesome.

 

[Angst]

From my Steam library:

Freedom Force is weird and campy in a fun way.

Path of Exile doesn't present its story well, but it's very well-toned, all lining up in bleak, inscrutable ways.

Fallout's worldbuilding carries most of its franchise at this point, so it has to be good as the gameplay has faltered.

Enderal must be mentioned, but there's not a lot to go by.

Amnesia series have a good grasp on lovecraftian theming, even if some of the payoff/ingame expression is really off.

Pillars of Eternity has an amazing world and the pantheon it revolves around is a really cool way to do it, in a lot of ways drawing from internal contradictions of real world pantheons.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Does Redneck Rampage have lore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck_Rampage

 

[Ajidica]

Pillars of Eternity has an amazing world and the pantheon it revolves around is a really cool way to do it, in a lot of ways drawing from internal contradictions of real world pantheons.

I actually found Pillar's lore really boring. It felt like a standard medieval fantasy, but made depressing.

 

[Voidwalkin]

I actually found Pillar's lore really boring. It felt like a standard medieval fantasy, but made depressing.

I didn't like the gameplay. I think I was overwhelmed with available mechanics. I coulda overcame that, but nothing I saw in my brief time playing made me think it was worth the time.

Fallout's worldbuilding carries most of its franchise at this point, so it has to be good as the gameplay has faltered.

I'm baffled. I thought the plot of 4 was pretty ghastly, but as a shooter/looter, it was great.

My favorite fallout 4 run, I imagined myself as a man who did wake up from cyro, but cut the family restoration story out. It was much more enjoyable imagining myself as a man from a different time adjusting to a far more violent world; I ended up living out of the basement of a Sanctuary Hills house. Very reclusive, paranoid even, next to no building(low profile), defenses obscured and intricately mined, venturing out only to gather supplies and hunt(crop farming advertises presence).

I formed a community much later, but it was via random encounters. Marcy Long, who I never recruited, is correct: a radio tower guarantees attack, but it is never attacked without this advertisement. Even then it was heavily obscured and did not rely on farming. I essentially formed an extremely reclusive, highly territorial tribe(and raiding was acceptable in times of dire need).

 

[Angst]

I actually found Pillar's lore really boring. It felt like a standard medieval fantasy, but made depressing.

it's dark-edgy medieval fantasy indeed (which is 2x indeed the standard at this point), but the gods utilize fantasy pantheons in a cool way and with a small, neat twist (that's not that original either, no). most fantasy videogames have divinities fall into one or more of the categories of gods being black and white, gods just being elements, and then that it's pantheonic. i think it's fair to say a generalization of that is such a broad scope because it's most of the stuff out there. it's basically what warcraft and d&d and its descendants do, and it's dull. most dark-edgy fantasy does the same thing, just cutting off the pantheon design process after they've done the evil gods.

pillars' gods are cool to me because they encapsulate forces that aren't necessarily good, but they are true. they're all double-movements similar to the real world pantheonic trope of pairing god of agriculture with the realm of death (ie, consumption requires something to perish). pillars extrapolates such functions onto most gods (rymrgand is pretty one-note, and is the sole exception). wael's quest was really cool, for example. he's the god of mysteries, ie fantasy's inquisitive science, and - spoilers for anyone who hasn't played the game and don't want to read -

Spoiler :

wael's quest is mechanically just a fetch quest. but it sees you sent by a wael-worshipping librarian to unearth a scroll of knowledge, as that's what's research is all about, no? but when you find the scroll, wael does a divine revelation thing and asks you to bury the scroll to be forgotten. it's not because wael hates the librarian, but because that's what a force of science does. you can't learn if you know everything. so he deliberately obfuscates knowledge from his own worshippers. wael as a force embodies that learning and the unknown are part of the same force or function, that is what makes him true.

other settings somewhat draw from this idea of knowledge and obfuscation, like elder scrolls' hermaeus mora, but it's usually poorly executed in gods of knowledge and secrets just being medieval esotericists. hermaeus mora's degree of complexity is that it hoards books and that the knowledge people learn can be used for both good and evil. i mean, yea, i guess we don't like it when people are bad? and then throw a lovecraft squid at it, revelation is madness, and done.* forces and functions are rarely explored that much, mostly just being dungeon set dressing. elder scrolls has a lot of intricate god stories in its worldbuilding, but it's mostly set dressing, and doesn't ask that many questions; it's very silmarillion in that sense, intricately detailed, not very deep. not to pick on elder scrolls, but compare boethiah to skaen...

stuff like that is what's cool about pillars' world to me. the ending choice encapsulates this quite well, as the gods call on you to make a choice that align with their respective way of being. random smaller stuff like the godhammer and wael's sidequest then means something for the core plot. you get to explore the perspective of most of these beings to understand why they align as they do in the end. some are less explored in the base game of course, and the dlc deals with the rest, but it is kind of its own side tangent from to the themes of the base game.

*and on this quip, most of pillars's divine designs are outright wild, using signifiers we recognize while just having enough twists to be interesting. like, the god of cold, plague and collapse is a giant, blue aurochs; it has connotations of fenrir while being its own thing. twists like this is more common among AA releases and beyond/below, but it still bears mentioning

I'm baffled. I thought the plot of 4 was pretty ghastly, but as a shooter/looter, it was great.

My favorite fallout 4 run, I imagined myself as a man who did wake up from cyro, but cut the family restoration story out. It was much more enjoyable imagining myself as a man from a different time adjusting to a far more violent world; I ended up living out of the basement of a Sanctuary Hills house. Very reclusive, paranoid even, next to no building(low profile), defenses obscured and intricately mined, venturing out only to gather supplies and hunt(crop farming advertises presence).

I formed a community much later, but it was via random encounters. Marcy Long, who I never recruited, is correct: a radio tower guarantees attack, but it is never attacked without this advertisement. Even then it was heavily obscured and did not rely on farming. I essentially formed an extremely reclusive, highly territorial tribe(and raiding was acceptable in times of dire need).

worldbuilding is what carries it, was the point. my note on gameplay is kind of misphrased here. so. the gameplay is snappy, yes, but there's not much substance to most of the plot choices you make. the point is that worldbuilding is more than plot. there's a reason fallout's aesthetics is compelling with its art decor bizarro nuke world and a reason why bethesda mostly reruns the older designs of the original game. the brotherhood of steel keeps showing up for a reason, even if they go pure paladins in bethesda's vision of the setting; the art direction and the way that faction ticked made it a really cool thing. the plots and the vast majority of quests suck in 3 and 4 though, yes. haven't played 76.