Lore, Huh, Yeah, What Is It Good For?

Absolutely nothing? Or does Optional Lore (which we conveniently have a wiki page for) actually enhance a game and, in some cases, provide an equally riveting alternate to a traditional narrative?

This week, rather than demonstrating how not to get TPK'd in Temple of Elemental Evil, I'm discussing how different games are able to provide their backstories in an optional, unobtrusive format and the pros and cons of each feature. I'm not sure why I felt the need to spell that all out like this was the introduction to an essay. Forgive me for putting on airs of professionalism, y'all, and let's get on with this shiznit already.

Most early games - as we all know from the many "games ain't got good stories yet but maybe soon?" blogs, editorials and articles that spouted up around the time Ebert was decrying the artform (or just "form". The jury might be still on out that) - used to lead with a scrolling marquee or some pixel anime folks despairing of their lot in life as a cybernetic man derided them over their missing military camps in broken English. As the years went on, though, games started developing ways to convey the plot to the player while also making sure not to distract too much from all that interactivity people had grown to expect from games. So cutscenes began to be phased out in favor of interminable periods of time where dispassionate NPCs droned on about where the story was going next to players as they impatiently jumped and crouched around the room and politely pointed guns at the NPC to hurry them up.

An interesting but rather elementary method to provide info to players who cared, and easily ignorable trash to players that didn't, was Doom 3's perhaps most notorious addition to the medium: Jump scares. Being too dark to see. Diet Squish vending machines. Why can't I hold a gun and a flashlight simultaneously. No seriously, why is so goddamn dark. Audio logs. These logs provided key parts of information in a jigsaw-style "put these all together for the full plot", which meant the players took their time to explore every corner of the setting to find them all. Of course, they were invented entirely so players would deliberately open closets to see if there were any more audio logs, thus making the cheap jump scares inserted in said closets a thousand times more effective - hence the audio log thing would catch on and spread to other shooters of a general horror bent. It also helped create little sub-stories about survivors who usually didn't make it, but somehow survived long enough to travel across the game world haemorrhaging audio diaries.

Moving up, we have the optional lore of games like Elder Scrolls. While not alone in doing this, especially among CRPGs, the Elder Scrolls games proved their mettle with slightly excessive attention to detail by crafting many, many tomes that ranged from practical tips about monsters, spells and legendary items to miniature novel serials about dark elf Mata Haris sleeping around and Arthurian-esque crusaders who are constantly beleaguered by minions of the demonic ruling class. Any Mage's Guild worth its salt would have entire bookshelves of these novels, generally having the same three over and over - this sort of suggested that the mages were either all children when it came to sharing, or simply weren't able to read. Players who found themselves immersed in the Elder Scrolls world might spend ten minutes away from swinging wildly at monsters who appeared closer than they actually were to read these books whenever a new one appeared, while the slightly more pragmatic players would just steal them all and sell them. Bless their hearts. Likewise, games with similarly dense settings like Mass Effect or Dragon Age - or those from a larger external franchise like Batman: Arkham City with plenty of comic lore to shoehorn in for added flavor - would occasionally pop up with lore entries after talking to people, finding books/scrolls/computers or reading newspapers over people's shoulders like a bunch of deadbeats. It's then all conveniently stored in a database half the players probably won't bother to read.

Then we have games like Demon's Souls and its "spiritual" sequel Dark Souls (honestly, saying Dark Souls is a spiritual sequel is like saying Ocarina of Time is a spiritual sequel to Link to the Past. Except OoT happened first, or something. Christ, Achron makes more sense than Zelda's timeline) which seem to eschew plot all together, besides an exposition-dropping opening movie and the occasional dying NPC that tell you to go ring a bell. I mean, if you wanted. Then you're thrown into a world of death and more death and left to your own devices, if those devices include an inevitable and overzealous navel piercing by an eight-foot-tall black knight. The Lore in that game has to be scrabbled together from notes you find and dubious cloaked NPCs who might well be lying to you, because the little player notes on the ground sure do. It all adds to that particular game's "discover by doing, and then making a mental note not to do that next time" approach to progression.

Ultimately, like a great many things, the effectiveness of optional lore in any given game is entirely dependent on how that game presents itself. A linear action game, moving from one set-piece to the next, would fill the blanks between levels with cutscenes. They're generally content to ape movies in that sense, which is perfectly fine in the case of the newly released Uncharted 3, currently putting the bombastic Summer blockbusters it liberally borrows from to shame. It's the more open-world games, which depend more on player agency, that allows those players to discover the world on their own terms - whether it be optional lore, a new dungeon to explore, a cache of valuables or that giant beating heart hidden in GTA IV. What the hell was that about, anyway?

BONUS COMICS

Dark Souls

Batman: Arkham City

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Part 5 of this ongoing exposé into the entirely too wholesome world of Namco's animu RPG series. The world needs to know: