Do you need a "complete" experience?

I like it to be there. In general, I am an "ooooh what's this do?" kind of player and all of the tchkes and mintue do a lot to bring me deeper into the experience. I tend to lean towards games that can give a "novel-like" experience and shun games that are thinner on story.

I also tend to replay my games a lot, particularly if I blew through it the first time and I always relish finding something that I skipped or missed the first time.

Now on the other hand, I like the option of hitting "esc" to break out of whatever cutscene I'm trapped in so I can move on, but on the whole, the complete experience is what makes me want to buy a game so I can do it over and over again.

No, I hate having all the details filled in for me. I prefer some room for imagination.

I used to love reading science fiction, but I can't stand most of it now. Maybe it is my bad luck, but it seems that the writers want to write details instead a story.

One book I bought this year that had good reviews spent over half the pages giving me extremely detailed backgrounds on all the characters. I wanted to write the author a letter and tell him this: "I don't care."

Picked up some of my old science fiction that was written back in the days before word processor software. One third the pages, and three times the story.

As relates to this game, I have never bothered to seek out the backgrounds of title NPCs or enemy groups. What I know about the Council or the Devouring Earth is what I read doing their missions. I still don't know anything about The Center, other than he is the boss of the Council and of Requiem. All I know about Requiem came from the "Path of the Dark" story arc. And the souvenir from the Ubelmann arc.

Very slight spoiler -

Long ago, I was playing a Lost mission at level 29, with the difficulty cranked up a bit so that all my enemies were level 30-31 instead of 29-30. I was really surprised to see that all my 'Lost' enemies were really Rikti. A light dawned, I had wondered what they were mutating into.

For me, not knowing, but wondering, imagining, and discovering for myself is much more fun than being told.

I remember an old 'The Tick' cartoon, where the little sister of an evil kid genius begged her brother to "please stop 'splaining things!" I'm with her.

Provided it's not required to play the game (this is an MMO, not a puzzle/riddle game), give me as much information as you want. People who don't want it will click their mouse, find out that they need to "Free John Smith from the Freakshow" and skip the ending blurb, rushing along to find out that now they need to "Disable Three Terminals". There's nothing really wrong with that and it's good that the game allows you to play that way if you so choose.

On the other hand, if you're into plot then it's great that the game provides it. You want to know esoteric lore, you can find it out. You want to actually read all those plaques and signs and statues and learn the early history of Paragon City, it's all there for you. Or just click them and run on, looking for that badge. Whichever.

I need enough lore up front so that I can create characters that expand on/derive from it, without fearing that they're later going to be contradicted.

I have a pretty specific example for this one. Back in '04, when the game went live, the only information we had on the Clockwork and the Clockwork King himself was the text in a couple of 10-20 arcs and the second TF (plus, as of Issue 1, one mission in the 40-45 bracket). There was no villain group article for them, no background except what was in game, and of course all of the Faultline stuff was years away. I and at least one other player made some guesses and assumptions and off we went.

In 2006, someone finally gets around to writing that article - and among other things, we find out that the canon proto-CK was basically a punk kid rather than an older man. Oops. Cr*p. Gosh, it would have been nice to know this two years ago. What now?

There are certain bits of specific lore in CoH that are limiting, storywise. Especially the in-game explanations for powerset proliferation and the origins. I flat-out ignore the whole 'no mutants before the atom was split' stuff.

But I find little, pointless things like the name of a hero that a statue is created after, or an important event that took place in a certain location, or even specific examples of different NPC's pasts to all be very enriching things for the game. In my opinion, anyway.

Even though there are some big inconsistencies that pop up if you read too closely into the background information... (How could Mayor Spanky Rabinowitz have been born in the late 1800s on a certain block in Talos Island if the island didn't exist before Talos and Chimera fought, rupturing the ocean floor in the 1960s?)

I decided against quoting people, as there was too much to quote, so let's see if I can free-hand a response from memory.

Someone brought up Baldur's Gate, and this immediately put a smile on my face, followed by a cringe. I played through the entirety of Baldur's Gate yelling "I don't care about any of this! Where's my plot!?!" While I understand many people like it for this precise reason - that being that it's more of a world and an experience than it is a point-to-point story - I just couldn't care less about the whole thing. When Baldur's Gate 2 rolled out, I wasn't even tempted to try it. A friend of mine did, however. He got half-way through, got sidetracked for a couple of weeks and returned to several pages' worth of quest journal and no memory of what story threads he'd left behind. Feeling like he'd opened a book in the middle, he essentially turned off the game and never returned. On the contrary, the Icewind Dale games have been much more interesting to me, and anyone who's played them can tell why I'd feel that way. If only I could ever kill the final bosses...

Plaques in City of Heroes are the same way. Once upon a time, I opened up Vidiot Maps and went about collecting exploration badges for the Atlas Medallion or whatever that's called. Very quickly I realised that... I didn't care about any of these things. Not in the slightest. I don't care where someone stood and observed whatever, I don't care about the previous mayor of Paragon City... Hell, I didn't even care either way about the Might for Right act, and that's actually relevant to the story. Anything that's presented to me as idle information with no merit other than the circular logic of having information because it's good to have it, gets filed under "I don't care."

I also have to agree with people that there is such a thing as "too much information" which can get in the way of character concepts. The Origin of Powers storyline, for instance, is a crime against the game as a whole, and is probably the single greatest example of fanon discontinuity the game has seen because it basically took ALL existing characters and re-wrote their bios for them while at the same time managing to not actually make any sense. One only hopes it was an elaborate ploy by the developers to introduce a ******** theory concocted by uninformed NPCs which will turn out to be wrong. Kind of like how Maria Jenkins now laughs at how stupid the idea that two Statesman can't exist in the same dimension because the Statesman's head is too big. It would be nice nice if one day Sister Psyche said "You know how I said there were no mutants before the splitting of the atom? Man, was I ever wrong! What was I thinking?"

Going Rogue is actually even worse than that, at least in how it's presented to us. The world of Praetoria is governed by much more stringent lore enforced much more strongly. Our morality is forcefed to us, what we can do is limited by what Tyrant would permit and we're always members of SOME organisation. Too much background info adhered to too strictly, while it may make for a good story, really cripples people's ability to make characters who conform to the world's actual background.

Which brings me to my final point - "fitting in." Years ago, I made a thread talking about how I couldn't seem to keep my characters' backstories in-universe, and kept having them come to Earth from a different planet, a different dimension, a different plane of existence, a different point in time or any combination of these. This still holds true. Someone mentioned trying to tie all of his or her characters into the plot and needing enough plot to do so, and then someone mentioned deliberately or accidentally simply never doing so. For my part, I actively AVOID tying my characters into Paragon City lore whenever possible, going out of my way to make up my own factions, organisations and even sciences. The reasons for this are twofold: On the one hand, I write my own stories and so benefit most from being able to take my existing characters into my own, personal universes and having them work. In Paragon City, they are essentially borrowed. On the other hand... I don't really like that many of the stories we have here. I tend to prefer my own much better.

One final note before I go: Brevity. While it's true that many characters' biographies can be condensed down to a few sentences, doing so is often a disservice, especially when the character has gone through a lot and had many things defining him. For instance, Batman in Arkham Asylum is defined, essentially, as a super genius detective ninja scientist whose parents died and dresses like a bat. While that's pretty much all you ever really NEED to know about him, it just doesn't make for a very interesting read. In fact, part of what I don't like about background info in general is that it's not interesting to read. It's just... Info. It's not a story, it's just information laid down in case I cared. Which I don't.

Take the counter-example: Cryostasis, a game which has no plot, because the entirety of the game "never happened." Throughout the game, you keep finding these bits of a story called Danko's Heart, which... Doesn't really have anything to do with anything, at least not that I could determine. But because it's told like a story and written pretty well, I was actually interested in hearing it narrated. Well, not so much "interested" as "not bored out of my skull," but you know what I mean. I shouldn't be reading background info because I need to be informed. I should be reading background info because it's a good story, which it simply isn't in practically any game I've played.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Originally, I felt pretty much the same way that The Distinguished Mr. Tow did. I'd get the contact, they'd ramble on about the mission, and I'd be thinking, "Yeah, yeah, whatever," and couldn't click "Accept Mission" fast enough.

But then, over time, *game fatigue* set it. It was the same thing over and over. Run in, defeat all. Run in, defeat enemies, detroy objective. Run in, defeat enemies, rescue hostages. I got tired of it.

Contact missions, radio/paper missions, task forces, AE missions: they're all the same.

But reading the forums, I realized that you guys knew so much more about the lore of this game that I knew nothing about. And the only way to know that lore was to play the game, read the contact text, read the clues, and actually experience the story.

So I did. And the game became new again. On my 50. I took him through Oroborous, and I'm doing all the contact arcs that he's missed, and it's a fantastic experience.

So I think the presence of that immersive content serves a vital purpose: it adds an important dimension to the game that makes it more than just smashing and clicking. It makes it a game of discovery. And that appeals to me. It might not appeal to everyone, but it greatly appeals to me, personally.

Paradoxically, I do enjoy scavenger hunts, but I don't care that much about the lore. I click on all the History plaques, but I don't actually read them. In Arkham Asylum, I really liked running around after the main plot was finished, collecting all the little easter eggs I missed. Not because they were giving me vital information, but just because I loved the game so much, I wanted to spend more time with it.

When I'm playing an RPG, I'll usually plow straight through the first time, concentrating on the main plot. But then, if I enjoyed it, I'll go back through again and start trying to root out all the side-quests, find all the best gear, etc. If the game forced me to do all that on the first play-through, I'd probably find it frustrating, but as an optional thing, I enjoy it. It's a way to extend the experience. Replay value.

In a game like CoH, I don't understand where the complaint is that there's too much "plot". If you had to stop halfway through a taskforce and answer questions about Spanky's Boardwalk or had to locate the next mission door solely using clues gained from the history of Superdyne, I could see a complaint. But having a window to click through doesn't really affect gameplay for those who want to just hit the objectives and move on.

How does it negatively affect your gameplay to have an "overload" of information you don't want? The worst thing I can think of is that your own self-made bio doesn't match with game canon but that's a really minor complaint.

If I were playing a linear game with a beginning and an end, then I don't need more story than necessary to move the plot to the end, but if I am in a WORLD, then I need to know as much about that world as possible.

I haven't had time to read the further discussions, so my apologies (Just felt like typing out my thoughts as quickly as possible, as I don't have much more forum time to spend!)...


I neither need the "complete" experience nor do I necessarily dislike it (not always).

I do crave immersion, but that is not dependent on the game delivering information.
Often times, I prefer less detailed information, so that I can fill in the blanks myself with my imagination.
I think of the great times I had playing games back in the day as a child.
One jumps to mind (Yeah, I suppose that I'm breaking the rules by talking about a long dead Atari 800 single player space shooter video game from the early 1980s)... Star Raiders.
A First Person Perspective half flight simulator half space shooter.
The graphics consisted mostly of a star field and your ship's status info on your screen... and TIE fighter and Saucer looking enemy space ships and funny looking laser ball weapon missiles.
There wasn't much information (There may have been if in the booklet that I never saw, with my pirated copy of the game on a floppy disc), but that never stopped me from entering an entirely engaging world of immersion.

Turn off the lights... Nothing but me and my glowing screen, with stars, my spaceship's heads up display... some drink and pretzels by my side... And a whole universe to hyperspace around and dog fight with enemies!


Granted... playing in a multi-player role-playing atmosphere... some common ground on backstory and such is greatly beneficial.

However, to play a game and enjoy it by myself?
Nothing more is needed than fun game play... and (while not having to be revolutionary nor even necessarily great or realistic) to look well enough for me to enjoy.
Actually... there is one thing I always have tended to crave in video games above all else...
Freedom.

Give me freedom in a game and I can lose myself in it. It is sort of similar to the difference of a book and a movie.
With a book (And a video game that provides freedom) the creation and the user's imagination combine, allowing an experience more tailor-made to the individual user.
Less detailed information in a video game can also accomplish this.
Story arcs and such are a great example (Even just the text, dialog and/or the mission popup text)... The more detail written by the creators... the more chance it has to detract or disagree with the user's wants/likes.
As into depth as I can be, I generally prefer random/generic enemy mashing than written and potentially forced dialog and story arcs.

That's just me!

*dashes off... late again!*

Since I can't multi-quote across pages, I'll do this in two parts.

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Originally Posted by Jophiel How does it negatively affect your gameplay to have an "overload" of information you don't want? The worst thing I can think of is that your own self-made bio doesn't match with game canon but that's a really minor complaint.

Things that I don't care about constantly littering my way bother me. It's probably irrational and possibly even compulsive, but when I keep running into things that look important that I don't know if I want to explore or not, this puts stress on me. Every time I meet one, I have to wonder if I really care about this and should hunt more of it to get the complete picture or if I can safely ignore not just this, but ALL other things like it.

In Arkham Asylum, I started out trying to read all the character bios. Every time I'd get a ping to hit Tab and read one, I'd roll my eyes, but hey - it's part of the story, so I should, right? Then I started getting bios for characters who weren't actually in the game that I'd only ever heard of, people like Mr. Freeze or Two-Face. Then I started getting bios on characters who I'd never even heard of, like ClayFace or Humpty Dumpty. And then I started getting bios on characters who seemed completely ridiculous, like Calendar Man and the Great White Shark, reminding me that DC have been around for something like 80 years. Just HAVING these bios in the game bugged me, because I set out to collect all the secrets and was so constantly assaulted by bios I didn't care about, which replaced my map button for about 15 seconds. And in a game without a minimap, you bet your fake cake I was using that map all the time.

Even more irrationally, why trivia backstory bothers me is a case of "people who aren't like me are stupid." This is obviously not true, and I can acknowledge it on a logical level. Yet every time I see a person dig into obscure trivia to try and explain what happened to a character in-between movies when their life just wasn't at all interesting, it instinctively pisses me off. It's like the kind of gossip news I get told against my will from time to time. Did you know that Morgan Freeman got married at the age of 75? Um, no. Who cares? If he'd done that in a movie, then maybe I'd have cared, but even then it would probably have been a slice-of-life drama, and those bore me to tears.

In recent years, I've found my "balance," as it were, in having a one-track mind. I do what I can to find only the things I care about and weed out all the chaff. I've caught myself yelling at moves for stuff to happen when a plot point lingers longer than is strictly necessary without any contribution to the mood of the work, as well as rolling my eyes at games that insist on showing a lengthy unskippable cutscene every time you die in situations where you can die ten times a minute. I was literally salivating at the gameplay choice of the next-gen Prince of Persia game where falling to your doom or getting killed gets melded into the actual in-game experience via a short cutscene such that it feels like part of the game, rather than a start-and-stop.

At the end of the day, though, these things don't affect my gameplay, positively or negatively, once I figure out what they are and resolve to ignore them. I've nor read plaques in the City since 2004. Yes, figuring out what to ignore and what to engage in is sometimes troublesome, but that's how it goes. This was more a question if you NEED these things, rather than if you HATE these things.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The problem here, Sam, is that you're asking a one dimensional question and applying it to a very multifaceted genre.

The main issue I see here is that you, specifically, like your games to flow a certain way. The examples of you getting tired of Baldur's Gate for example and the way you feel about GR's lore etc.

When I play different types of games, I expect different types of things from them. I don't consider a game to be flawed if it does the sorts of things that can be reasonably expected from a game of its genre.

So when I say that I read most of the lore entries in Dragon Age: Origins in my first play through, you might say that I'm the type of person who has to have all the details and history of a world before I feel it is 'complete'. That's absolutely not true, because I enjoyed the Half-Life series as much as anyone.

I also enjoy RTS games and don't like the fact that Relic removed a lot of staple RTS elements out of Dawn of War to 'improve' Dawn of War 2.

To further muddy your ideas, I totally enjoyed filling in the 'web of intrigue' in Prototype, even though it is absolutely unnecessary to complete the game.

I'm enjoying the hell out of X3: Terran Conflict right now, even though most of its plot is centered in the main storylines which I have yet to even start because I'm having a blast exploring the universe and trying to build a space empire while blowing enemy ships and fighters into smithereens.

To come back to the point at hand, you seem to like an 'uncomplicated and straightforward' game experience, while I have no problems at all with games that flow toward opposite ends of the spectrum. I can enjoy all of them equally well if the game is a good game.

A game feels complete to me, when it is a well-done game. A deep RPG experience like Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age(slightly-less-so), should be filled with a wealth of information(both plot relevant and trivia-based). While Left4Dead or Defense Grid: The Awakening don't feel lacking without additional lore and storytelling past what you are experiencing at the moment of play.

I've never rage-quit a game that wasn't a badly made game. Nothing to do with how much lore is or isn't present.