Guild Wars 2

Even wildstar has it. And I hate that game. I hate everything about it.
Yet I play it – only because it has lore system.

I wonder, are there really so few players out there who enjoy exploring the world and finding lore, and reading it? Because I did search on ‘lore’ in this forum and came up nada (maybe the search is just bad).

Anyway, lore system – would also provide a way to get those short stories into the game, more achievements, more reasons to explore the map; would just add more depth (on the lore side) to the game and make all of us explorer bartle types out there oh so happy. (or at least me)

Pretty please?

Gimli.9461:

Even wildstar has it. And I hate that game. I hate everything about it.
Yet I play it – only because it has lore system.

I wonder, are there really so few players out there who enjoy exploring the world and finding lore, and reading it? Because I did search on ‘lore’ in this forum and came up nada (maybe the search is just bad).

Anyway, lore system – would also provide a way to get those short stories into the game, more achievements, more reasons to explore the map; would just add more depth (on the lore side) to the game and make all of us explorer bartle types out there oh so happy. (or at least me)

Pretty please?

This is a guild war’s 2 forum, not Wildstar forum, Nuff said.

This game probably needs a explorer type slower leveling more detail version. Look up types of MMO players. Explorers like detail and don’t want to level up fast and enjoy the story. Advancers probably be best to just give them their 80’s and let them skip leveling up as it just a pain to them and they push changes that make leveling faster and remove details like visiting trainers every few levels and remove things like repair costs that make Explores feel like being in a fantasy story that Explorers love.

The search is terrible on this forum, because there’s an entire forum dedicated to discussing lore.

I find this game is fairly friendly to both kinds of players, those who take their time to enjoy the lore in game, and those who skip it as fast as possible for higher stats. I’m of the former myself. There are several achievements that encourage hunting down pieces of lore, such as the plaques in Lion’s Arch, or those books in Ebonhawk. Also there are some explorer achievements that have players going to areas they wouldn’t normally travel to, to see new things.

Finally, they simply have lore existing off to the side of areas you’ll get doing normal exploration anyway, from characters having fairly fascinating dialogue, to reading books in the Priory. There are also very strange Easter eggs for the attentive players, like the 3 swinging boys in game. (By the way, as far as I know, no one has found the third one. And the one in the vigil keep is the same one who used to be in Lion’s Arch, so he isn’t it… we think.)

I don’t believe all lore related things should be part of the normal map exploration, or achievement line, because it wouldn’t be fair to players who don’t care about the lore at all. They make just enough of it part of exploration and achievements so some players have direction when seeking lore, and not too much so some players don’t feel ‘forced’ to participate in it.

in-game lore codex? …that kind of reminds me of Dragon Age…

which is actually a good thing. make it happen

Cyanchiv.2583:

I don’t believe all lore related things should be part of the normal map exploration, or achievement line, because it wouldn’t be fair to players who don’t care about the lore at all. They make just enough of it part of exploration and achievements so some players have direction when seeking lore, and not too much so some players don’t feel ‘forced’ to participate in it.

They wouldn’t . They whole reason I mention wildstar is because their lore system is great, imho. What you have are lore books/journals/articles in an organized lore codex which you unlock as you explore, and can read at your leisure. I do not suggest making this part of map completion. You would be able to completely ignore lore as a player, or get books to get the unlock lore achieves – and never read them.

However this lore system would provide a whole different immersion level for an explorer gamer type. Right now all you get is 3 sentences per interaction in the living story, or personal story, and while it summarizes the story ok, it still feels like regular shallow mmo story due to low volume / lots of action ratio. Not to mention you can never go back to that dialog.

Now with the lore system like wildstar (sorry, I know, gw2 forum, but why not borrow a good feature or at least look at that feature to see how they do it? I’m sure they will or already did.) – half way through a quest they dropped a book, which you don’t have to read, but if you do read it, you are immersed on a wholly different level because it’s a whole page describing current events.

I’m really enjoying it.

Yes there are explorer achieves and plaques and whatnot, again, low volume of lore. And it is exactly because there’s a whole forum dedicated to lore, and massive amounts of lore in gw2 wiki, and they do write short stories for christ’s sake! (which never make it into the game) This is exactly why I want a lore system to be able to experience this fully in -game. It is wasted right now on most players, they never see it, and immersion breaks if you just google it, for me at least. I guess it’s me reading the lore vs ‘my character’ reading and learning the lore. While I might be knowledgeable, my character is dumb as a .. whatever you think is a good comparison.

So….basically, instead of exploring on your own and finding things out within the game, you want Anet to puke out pre-digested lore ‘books’ for you to read because you’re too lazy to go out and look for it yourself?

Blazing Liger.1236:

So….basically, instead of exploring on your own and finding things out within the game, you want Anet to puke out pre-digested lore ‘books’ for you to read because you’re too lazy to go out and look for it yourself?

i think he is saying, in addition to what exists in the game, they could have a better system for cataloging lore, as well there will always be more lore than they can show with events.
I think it would be a good system, especially if you may be able to hunt it down. Lets say the durmond priory gave you hints where to find lore books that you were missing.

However, i dont know if arena net would bother, since its probably a small amount of players who would be interested, and would probably require work.

Wish they would do it, but i doubt they will.

There’s already some achievements tied to “lore” in the game. One relates to the founding of Ebonhawke, and the other relates to something involving LA (Marriner’s Plaques).

Sages.3496:

This is a guild war’s 2 forum, not Wildstar forum, Nuff said.

The issue is actually that the video game vocabulary and taxonomy is… well floating somewhere at the level of mentally stunted chimps. I blame the lack of an academic component to the field of video games myself.
Either way, this leads to a situation where we need to express mechanics and ideas in terms of examples. It’s stupid I know, imagine going through your day to day life with only being able to use a hand full of very common nouns. And the terms we do accept are hardly well defined.

smekras.8203:

in-game lore codex? …that kind of reminds me of Dragon Age…

which is actually a good thing. make it happen

I usually think Mass Effect, but basically the same idea. Frankly just copy pasting the wiki would be a massive improvement (of course re-written to be in-universe).

Blazing Liger.1236:

So….basically, instead of exploring on your own and finding things out within the game, you want Anet to puke out pre-digested lore ‘books’ for you to read because you’re too lazy to go out and look for it yourself?

I see a shiny rock. I wonder to myself: What is this shiny rock? I having never played GW1 or read the wiki and thus have no idea the meaning of the rock and simply run past it because there’s no indication in game of what the shiny rock is or the history surrounding.
It’s got nothing to do with being lazy, it’s got to do with fleshing out the world.

Blazing Liger.1236:

So….basically, instead of exploring on your own and finding things out within the game, you want Anet to puke out pre-digested lore ‘books’ for you to read because you’re too lazy to go out and look for it yourself?

People above already clarified my position pretty well.
So no, it’s not me being lazy, it’s me wanting to do exactly that – “exploring on my own, and finding things out within the game”. It’s just what I find is 3 sentences, where it could be pages of lore, which already exists on wiki. And again like above poster mentioned, somethings aren’t at all catalogued within the game.

You could for instance take White Mantle. You can only find out about white mantle in gw2 in couple ways, off the top of my head:
- by picking the Parents story line on human
- by doing a heart in Brisban which, upon completion, if you talk to the heart guy again he will tell you their mission is about White Mantle; also talking to scouts walking there gives you tiny bit more.
There’s probably couple more places they are mentioned.

But none of this goes into the story of White Mantle, and there’s so so much! I watched youtube videos on WoodenPotatoes channel, and that channel is where I get most of my lore tbh. I can’t just go start reading entire wiki – it’s like reading encyclopedia. Would you go read book about Pyramids or Egypt right now? Probably not. But if you were inside the Pyramids or near them, you’d probably be more inclined to read about it then.

There are so many things in GW2 which have rich history (which GW players have played through) and none of it is in game. It’s just a shame.

And yes I suspect they probably will never add this. Hopefully whenever GW3 comes around, Lore system will be something every mmo has So they’ll have to put it in.

Gimli.9461:

Even wildstar has it. And I hate that game. I hate everything about it.
Yet I play it – only because it has lore system.

I wonder, are there really so few players out there who enjoy exploring the world and finding lore, and reading it? Because I did search on ‘lore’ in this forum and came up nada (maybe the search is just bad).

Anyway, lore system – would also provide a way to get those short stories into the game, more achievements, more reasons to explore the map; would just add more depth (on the lore side) to the game and make all of us explorer bartle types out there oh so happy. (or at least me)

Pretty please?

What is a lore system?

Just realized how this might be confusing, so I"m going to explain the lore system I’m talking about (the wildstar one).
NOTE: I’m not looking to flesh out a lore system in this thread; I’m just suggesting there be one. So please don’t go wild on details of the system. Or skip this post altogether if you got the gist of my suggestion.

- when you create a character, you start out with EMPTY lore book (codex, whatever, it’s another button like ‘bring up your inventory’ only it brings up the lore storage)
- it’s account wide – ie if one character finds a page, all other characters also have it unlocked;

- as you go through the world exploring, on each map (city/pve/any map) you can find parts of books, or entire books. Once you find them it unlocks the book in lore section (or you might have to find 7 pieces of one book to unlock entire book) – you get notification and you can dive right into reading it while you are still in that location

- lore is organized by:
1. maps (shows how many books you found, and how many are there in the map in total)
or races? or major historic periods/events? maps seems appropriate for ease of fully exploring the lore on the map; but something else might work better for gw2
2. there’s another section called encyclopedia which fills in as you encounter things: plants, ores, places, animals, what have you in the world

So you can think of section 1 as journals, short stories, reports, communications, etc kind of things – something that happened to someone.
And section two more of encyclopedia type – but they both start empty and you have to fill them in by exploring.

You can add to that books that lie around as you do personal story or living story – if you missed them, you don’t get the info, replay. Some might be very obvious – lying right there for you to unlock and immerse yourself into the quest much more if you read it right away. But you have to have the info of how many total there are in the instance.

Hope this makes sense.
So you can see it’s not about being lazy, it’s about having lore in-game, in big quantities, organizing it, unlocking it, having it there as you encounter things, having it there for later for you to reference and go all nostalgic; having it there in quests for more immersion.

Devata.6589:

What is a lore system?

See description above (which I posted before I saw your question)
To give you some examples:
You create a character, and run through the tutorial in charr lands. You find a book lying around in catacombs: You read it and it’s a story of a human girl that used to lived in Ascalon before charr took it back, mentioning some stuff from GW1.

Another example, in the Black Citadel you find a journal which is an account of an episode from Rytlock’s life (ooo exciting).

Another one:
You fight a bunch of skale lurkers in Metrica province, and upon killing say 10 of them you unlock an encyclopedia entry on Skale Lurkers, where it can give some general info about the creature, but also specify more practical things: for instance that their strongest ability is to go invisible for a few seconds, and that they are susceptible to fire , or something.

Living story example:
When we got into Scarlet’s lair, there were a lot of objects to infer information from. Added to that there could be an actual exerpt from Scarlet’s journal, written by her.
The short stories put up during this year’s living story could be all added to the game as living story episodes come out. You log in, start playing the instance (eg Lion’s arch assasination one ) – and you find a book containing the short story about Evon. Or the story describing where Scarlet came from – that could be in game, under everyone’s noses, instead of on the website.

etc etc.

All these will get stored into Lore storage you have for you to read and re-read later if you wish. It will also keep track of whether you found all the lore available in that instance/map/world.

Sounds interesting. I did suggest multiple times to record Karka invasion like events (like in-game, so you might even see yourself) and make those available. Same for other lore stuff. The lore system is more like a lore quest line I guess what could be nice indeed.

There should be a Codex section in your hero panel with several sub-sections you can fill by doing stuff all over the world.

Kill an enemy, you get its entry in your copy of Haidryn’s Bestiary.
Do a dungeon, you get its entry in your Vigil’s Dungeon Almanac.
You talk to an NPC, you get is entry in the Whisper’s Intelligence encyclopedia.
You arrive at a location, you get its entry in your Lionguard Road Guide.
You read book, you get its entry in your Priory Library.

And so on.

Or you could you know.. Open up the wiki… Or the lore forums…

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Or you could you know.. Open up the wiki… Or the lore forums…

Yes, but if you’ve spent any amount of time on the lore forum or wiki you’ll notice that ANet doesn’t particularly like giving out lore. So many discussion on the lore forum basically end in speculation and the us having to admit that there just isn’t lore on the subject. The wiki mixes lore with game mechanics, so you’re more likely to get the stats for a creature than a decent description of the habits or culture.

+1 this. I have long desired something like this and also suggested on various sub-forums. Even if it doesnt give specific and dead-on correct background, and it just collects the knowledge that the universe of the game knows to be true or just clearly speculate on, such a system would be a good read and a reliable source of information in the game. I loathe when lore discussions reach to sources outside of the game into forums, blogs and interviews. I hate it when research on an ingame lore topic is not a search in the game world but on the internet.