“Yah Alex whats up with that?!”

They don’t keep track of dwarf lore because they’re not in the Horde.

Nice of them not to simply say, “oh, yeah, we actually killed that guy, we just haven’t told you how yet.”

Lore is kinda important. Some people like the stories (consider how many video games are you basically playing through a story). Furthermore, this is Blizzard’s demographic. If you’re going to mock the lore people, you might as well mock the tradeskill and hardcore people.

That having been said…

It’s odd to put lore over balance issues. I cared about EQ lore, but not as badly as having things fixed. And this guy clearly has not been out much in public. The arcane question combined with the zit face, stilted talking and pitchy voice could get this guy the lead in a remake of Revenge of the Nerds.

I guess it’s true ; some people can’t write lore and chew bubblegum.

Lore is kind of unimportant. Blizzard has never made any bones about the fact that their lore in all their games exists to provide luscious window dressing for the gameplay: nothing more and nothing less. It is unapologetically subject to the daily whims of designers’ brainstorming.

Complaining and nitpicking by of lore hounds is a prerelease tradition for every Blizzard game and expansion. Remember when there was NO WAY the Draenei could work with the Alliance and there was NO WAY the Blood Elves could be a Horde race because they were either too evil or not evil enough and there was NO WAY that Death Knights – unholy un-paladins dedicated to the eradication of life – could be a player class and there was NO WAY that Mages could get Blink (along with the other heresies from WC3).

Personally, I find this admirable on the part of Blizzard. You can’t blame them for flagging down dump trucks full of cash if suc-ehr, customers are willing to lap up a line of pulp novels. But they don’t let their side action dictate their main business.

Kid just likes his game, poor bastard has no idea the price of his newly found internet fame.

I wonder how long until this kid is a jaded raid-sick player on the verge of quitting? I wish I could enjoy games as stories, instead I enjoy them as conquests. I find game lore as interesting and relevant as how my gfs day was, I can pretend to enjoy one of them if needed though.

In related news, my father actually purchased a tractor. A Massey-Ferguson. I get to ride it. Eat your hearts out!

Blizzard should hire this kid.

Anyone remember how wow got so successful in the first place? It certainly wasn’t because it was world of WARCRAFT or anything, right?

John Smith:

Anyone remember how wow got so successful in the first place? It certainly wasn’t because it was world of WARCRAFT or anything, right?

Wait… there people and place names in WARCRAFT?

If that’s how they treat canon, they should be lucky it’s “World of Warcraft”, not “World of Lovecraft”. They’d get ripped to shreds if they took liberties with the latter.

But I really have to ask, has anyone, either on Blizzard’s team or among WoW’s players, really expected World of Warcraft to be dedicated to lore, when it’s far more content to rip off pop culture with such NPC’s as “Haris Pilton”? Tolkien this ain’t.

As for embarrassing World of Warcraft-related videos, how about this one?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LScxvPB1OJQ . Even worse, if you ask me, because this is an official Blizzard promotional video, in which the subtext is all about worldwide homogeneity, American cultural hegemony, the stupidity of masses, and the triumph of Mammon generally. This poor little guy obsessed with his pointless discussion of lore seems quite harmless in comparison.

Every time they have a lore and quests panel Q&A, it’s pretty much Metzen saying something like “I don’t know, but when we answer that it will be AWESOME.”

On a side note, does anyone else think that Metzen is turning into Bono?

–Rawr

Story matters(well, to some people).

Eventually the story ends and you want to stick a fork in your loot pinata and collect your shinies but I find the story just as compelling as the gameplay itself. I do love a good tale and it bugs me when the story teller doesn’t take their craft seriously enough to tell a good one.

I’m not a purist by any means and it doesn’t have to be Shakespearean….so long as it’s consistent and makes sense. Mostly I’ve been happy with WoW’s story but every once in awhile they do something that makes me go “huh? That’s the best you could come up with?”. It makes me think they’re not really trying which is a little disappointing and makes me lose some enthusiasm for playing because I lose interest in the story.

Maybe I’m in the minority about this whole story thing though since I didn’t actually go see Transformers 2 which I understand made a lot of money and had a lot of shinies but very little story.

Lore has to take a backseat to game mechanincs all the time, because, you know, the latter is what keeps players. Sorry.

As long as is half-decent and makes sense, the lore in an MMO is good enough. Relax.

Boanerges:

Lore is kinda important.

Lore is” kinda important” for degenerate 1% of poulation of rollplayers. Rest of the player base doesn’t give a shit as long as your ‘lore’ is little bit more complicated than “kill 10 rats over there” add nasuem.

In other words: With lore you need to meet minimum acceptable standard of not having glaring inconsistencies within single quest chain, anything else is highly optional and will not make you game more enjoyable for 99% of your player base.

Blizzard’s response:

http://i.imgur.com/FRLiJ.jpg

I dunno, I couldn’t really give a hoot about the lore, but if you make a world with a mythos you should try to get the story right. There are probably more people into the lore than most think.

Let the players build the lore.

The kid said in his follow up vid that he didn’t want to give out his name.

VPellen…I tend to agree with that sentiment about enjoying it for what it is.

However, my expectations are a bit higher when it comes to the main storyline and plot elements.

@Joe

Well presumably you play an MMO not for the lore, but for the depth of world and rich gameplay mechan-oh, I see what you’re getting at.

I suppose my point is simply that lore really isn’t. In most games it’s just a loose pile of writing that serves as garnish for quest descriptions. Now, you could have an MMO where lore actually matters, but..

.. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t know if you could have a game where lore actually matters, simply because a game with lore mattering implies a game with a story, and a game with a story implies a story with an end, which, in turn, implies a game with an end. If it doesn’t end, the story again gets reduced to the realm of flavor text and a black box for why the goblins are besieging the town.

But really, most of my objections are probably just about my own personal convictions. What I want to see is a game that runs and breathes on its own. Even the most plot-based MMOs I’ve seen have the devs behind it constantly shunting the plot forward, or else everything grinds to a halt.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you’ve got a lore-heavy MMO with humans behind the plot, you don’t really have a lore-heavy MMO; Just a static game with a lot of content patches.

@VPellen

But isn’t that why many jaded MMO players “burn out” on these types of games? Because MMOs, by their very nature, are extremely static.

Even if you were to create a a plot-heavy MMO — let’s say it’s based on a best-selling fantasy epic — the game world, no matter how well described and built, is still static. When you go into area R, the main character F is still standing there and spouting the same flavortext about how the big bad is going to ruin everything, blah de blah blah. Oh, and you, the player, have to help save the world. Of course.

When you run an end-game instance in WoW, it is always the SAME instance. The same environment, the same monsters, the same end boss, the same rules…. It may be challenging/difficult, but in reality, the only variance is in the reward, not in the gameplay.

Lore allows the world to change without actually changing.

Boanerges:

D-0ne:

I have to ask, when did you play EQ? They changed the “world’s lore” going from beta in 1998 to release in 1999 and then they changed the lore again with the release of RoK a year later… Then lore was re-written every expansion and even in some patches after that. If there was ever a “game world” that didn’t care about lore at all, EQ was it.

I played EQ from 1999 to 2006. I can’t speak to beta, but the lore in EQ was pretty consistent for a while (I even remember that annoying movie that used to play on startup with base EQ lore). It wobbled some in Luclin and during the Gunthak expasion, came back strong in Planes of Power and then crashed and burned in Gates of Discord. It’s come back in recent years. SOE finally realized that critters and zones named by banging your head against a keyboard (plus their weird alien look) doesn’t work well in a fantasy game.
Every game strains credulity some (“Look, the princess got captured AGAIN!”), but lore IS important on a certain level (although some games have great backstory but no gameplay). Very few games work without a story (mostly puzzle games) and for a game that (on some level) competes with D&D (which is more story than game) I’d say they wouldn’t go too far.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t nitpick a small point of lore in an open panel.

Not small things. RoK just appeared out of thin air… As did all of the expansions.

All of of a sudden the entire worlds “history” and “lore” and even the system(s) of “faction” would change with each expansion.

Planes of power a “come back?” How did the “library”/ “plane of Knowledge” exist unknown to the Euridites(whatever they were called) for basically an eternity? I remember their (Euridites) lore from beta and trust me they “knew it all” by destiny.

From a purely academic standpoint, EQ was not designed to expand. There was no forethought in regard to expanding the games’ lore or even the worlds’ “level” or “class” systems or even in the software codes’ functionality and these expansions were forced on the original game design with brute force.

How /dare/ he ask a lore question on the lore panel!