[alt text: a semi-surreal meme image on a plain white background. Two characters from Dark Souls are saying, “My lord, we have absolutely ESSENTIAL lore information for the player. Should we make a cutscrene for it?”. They are looking at Hidetaka Miyazaki, who has the From Software logo emblazoned over him, and he is replying, “NO…Put it in the description of a COOKBOOK”. There are several cookbook item icons floating between the characters.]
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I don’t always pay attention to the deep lore in games, and that sometimes hits me all at once. I’ll find myself thinking, “Wait, why did I come all this way down a giant tree full of monsters to kill this lady? What the heck did she do to me to deserve that?”
Riddle me this:
I never look online for game hints, I played ER for a while, got frustrated.
Looked at hints, they explained how you get tempest like it was the most obvious thing in the game to sleep in the church after level 5.
Wtf?!?!?!
I hate from soft games because they seem to expect you to look online.
I can’t wait to find out that Marika learned the ability to transform gender from Cap’n Crunch in the FromSoft x Quaker collab
And then the lore is the most generic. boring nonsense
Makes sense then that entire YouTube channels got big by explaining said “boring nonsense”.
That is just, like your opinion man.
If it’s boring and generic, how is it also nonsense? That seems contradictory to me, but maybe I don’t understand.
It’s nonsense because it is boring and generic.
You could have just not read it and it wouldn’t change a thing.
Is it generic? It seems pretty rich in Elden Ring when compared to most games.
I think they just mean that it’s not necessary for playing the game. It isn’t like if you know the lore then you can find a secret cave, that gives you access to extra content. It is there for its own sake.
The value add that it gives is entirely dependent on the individual. It would be nice if there was some gameplay reward for reading it.
“Essential lore” is an oxymoron in these games
because all lore is essential, right?
You’re thinking of “redundant”.
Because of the lore I know why we fight Maliketh. But also because of the lore I don’t know why we fight Maliketh instead of just asking for Destined Death.
Because he’d say no. Better to ask for forgiveness.
We fight him because he’s behind a fog wall.
As someone still playing through vanilla Elden Ring, none of that means anything to me. And if my first 80h are any indication, I’ll finish the game and still have no idea.
That is the beauty of these games; you only get told the story if you go looking for it. You can still play the entire game and even all the extra content and not have a single thing straight told to you that’s out of your control. Every time I go and play something else, the biggest frustration for me is that I’m just there for the game part, but it takes control away a lot just to give me half an hour of exposition to a story I’m not paying attention to.
This might be a shit complaint on my part because these games are specifically for those type of people but I’m playing ff14 atm and they fuggin make me go across the world to talk to someone through a cut scene then make me go across the world again to rinse and repeat and that’s the game. I understand repetition is to be expected in mmo questing, I played wow for 17 years but at least for wow there’s some actual world exploration to be done to some degree and it isn’t usually forcing you to cross the world constantly. Ff14 doesn’t even have proper world exploration, they have teleport stones everywhere so you don’t truly get to see what’s up beyond following the quest lines. Glam, posing and rp saves that game.
I’m usually that person as well. BG3 was the first game in probably 8 years that hooked me on the story. If I sprinted through it, I would have probably saved like 80% of the time I spent playing it, but I enjoyed it. Maybe I’m simple, to me it felt like the decisions mattered.
The way I see it, if it’s a rule of film to “show, don’t tell”, then it should be a rule of games to “engage, don’t show and tell”.
…and the cookbook is in the DLC locked in a secret room behind an optional (but very hard) boss.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.From is run by Vogons!
That would also explain why piecing the lore together gives me a headache. What sweet poetry
