Do you care about lore?

[Pandaman1911]

I fucking love Mass Effect lore. I don't know why, but I just sat and listened to and read the codex for hours at a time. If you want to know how the mass driver in a gun works, then god damn it, they do everything short of handing you the blueprints and showing you how to make one yourself. Plus the narrator has a sexy voice.

I also love Oblivion lore, mainly in the form of books. The Argonian Account and The Real Barenziah remain my two favorite books in that game. It just adds a touch of life to everything; the fact that you can go to a bookstore and blow 800 gold and 8 hours on just reading books in the damn game.

Overall, it just makes the game world more alive and realistic, I suppose.

 

[Giantpanda602]

Warcraft lore is some of the best video game lore ever created. Seriously, it's amazing the story these men have told.

 

[thedoclc]

It depends entirely on the setting for me. If the setting is well written, I actually get into the setting and care about events enough to modify even character builds and such to fit fluff. Likewise, if a game has a good setting and good presentation, I will read all the silly little codices, indexes, fluffy bits, and so on. Heck, I still remember most of Chairman Yang's creepy little fascism quotes from Alpha Centari just because the game did such a good job presenting the strangely dystopian potential utopia it created. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, anything Bioware, Bioshock, Alan Wake, Torment, Baldur's Gate, Silent Hill - if I like the concepts and ideas, I do care. I'll read the books in Oblivion, check the background material on Wake, recolor units to fit a Chapter/Guard Regiment/Sept, and so on. And I'll be much more forgiving to game play annoyances if a fluff I like is well represented. Vampire: Bloodlines comes immediately to mind.

There's one massive exception. Sorry, Bioshock. You couldn't pay me to read Ayn Rand's drivel again. 55 page speeches...just STFU and write a damn political philosophy treatise already!

However, a lot of games make me just not care about their setting either because I don't like the fluff, can't get into the fluff, or maybe it just suffers from the same syndrome as Seinfeld, where it's been imitated so much it just isn't interesting if you weren't there at the beginning. (Seinfeld is Unfunny for TV Tropers.) I can't get into WoW's setting, or WFB, and could care less about Halo's expanded universe. I'm not saying they are BAD expanded universes; I just couldn't be bothered. And maybe I -need- to like the setting to like the game; I'm not really a big fan of any of the games set in those 'verses...

 

[jacobythehedgehog]

Lore is amazing, whether it is in books or video games, from City of Ashes (amazing book) to Final Fantasy video game series. Lore is important to make me nerd about anything... And yes I am a big nerd

 

[chaosyoshimage]

I like it, but some games need to spend more time writing better dialogue and plots than on the lore. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had wonderfully written lore and tomes, but everything else was poorly written.

 

[Tiger Sora]

Started in WoW lore. Now I'm reading Warhammer 40K lore. The battle on Armageddon, man, awesome stuff. And this is just the Wiki I'm on. I don't own any nifty books if they have them.

 

[Reincarnatedwolfgod]

not really, i have not been exposed to much though
zelda lore is not deeply interesting in fact it as interesting as the timeline which i find has no reason to exist.

 

[The_Echo]

Digimon (if that counts), Kingdom Hearts (if that counts), and I have a feeling I might get into Skyrim's lore.

[I'm not entirely sure what constitutes as lore.]

 

[Gustof26]

The lore of the Guild wars games. I don't know what possessed me to do it, but one day I sat with wiki open and devoured the whole thing. At least, the parts that made sense. Honestly it's part of the mystery of lore that's worth knowing.

Like the God's in Guild wars. No one knows where they came from, or what they are, but their dicks that's for sure.

 

[NotSoLoneWanderer]

I appreciate anything with a carefully written lore behind it but i prefer "realistic" lore to fantasy lore. Like fallout rather then oblivion. The fallout lore is just so interesting to me and I can easily spend hours looking at the wiki's random pages or reading fan-fics because if any game should be like call of duty with its release dates it's fallout.I played 3 and new vegas to there fullest extend having 5 characters on each and am currently looking for 1 and 2 on disk I think I'm ready for Fallout 4, 5, and 6. The mass effect lore is interesting too. I just don't like lore of universes that contain magic for some raisin.

 

[Xaio30]

Lore is a useful tool for any developer to make a universe (or place) come alive. A good example is the Forgotten Realms and similar where multiple games and books collaborate to create an extensive collection of events and characters.

I do not believe, however, that all that information should be crammed into a Codex as the primary method of delivering that information to players, but instead weave it in to smaller chunks of the world itself. Newspapers, tv-news (all ingame of course).

I could compare this to meeting a new friend and either learning everything about him from reading his/her biography, or getting smaller chunks from him/her as your friendship progresses.

 

[triggrhappy94]

Yeah, when it's good enough. (this is a nerd website)

Mostly Resident Evil, Elders Scrolls, and Fallout

 

[Dethenger]

I've read most of the Halo novels, but I'm not one of those people who remembers what happened to every Spartan or something. I tried getting into Zelda lore, but it was mostly a clusterfuck of vague theories (some awesome, don't get me wrong [http://www.zeldauniverse.net/articles/the-stone-tower-why-termina-was-doomed/]) and timelines.

EDIT:

Also, I don't play World of Warcraft, but I have had lengthy discussions with my brother (who plays it religiously, to invoke a hyperbole) about the lore, and I am very tempted to at least read the books.

 

[Zhukov]

No, not really.

Most (that's most, not all) video game "lore" is crap.

Besides, it usually on serves for a basis of rampant whining whenever the writers try and do, well... anything.

"Waaah! His eyes are the wrong colour! Sacrilege!"

 

[BenzSmoke]

I certainly enjoy lore when it's there, but I don't mind if it's absent.

 

[bombadilillo]

I prefer Data myself.

 

[FilipJPhry]

I enjoyed the Dragon Age lore the best, this past summer I read the entire codex, which I ignored at first. The worst one I would say Star Wars. The movies, anyway. I found the KotoR lore much more entertaining than the over-rated movie franchise.

 

[Nieroshai]

To me, lore is icing on the cake. Anyone who's had cake without icing, though, can attest to the fact that it becomes drier and hard to finish off the slice. Even so, icing adds flavor and can even make the dessert. Sure I'm using a dessert metaphor, but it applies completely.