Do you need a "complete" experience?

There's a slight catch here: I don't consider games that don't conform to my "demands" to be flawed as such, but at the same time, I don't try to play them. There was a time when I fully believed I could play anything. And I did. I shake my head at the memories of horrible gaming experiences I've had expressly because I forced myself to play games I didn't like. Had I the presence of mind to actually stop and think about it, I'd have dropped Baldur's Gate like a hot potato the moment I got kicked out of the plot and made to explore side quests, and been a happier man for it.

Look at it this way - the more you know about what kind of gaming experience you prefer, the more fun you'll have with whatever games you pick. If playing a wide variety of everything works for you, then more power to you, guys. You're better off than me. But here's where that plays up - I knew ahead of time that Dragon Age was "lore-rich" and "like Baldur's Gate," so I never bothered to begin with. Did I miss out? Probably, but I don't regret it. As it turns out, I'd rather replay Darksiders over and over again. And, hey, so long as I don't bother anyone by doing so...

But again, applying a specific question to a broad field is precisely the point. Granted, if you can't give a specific answer, then your preferences are diverse and expansive. But if you CAN give a specific answer to that specific question, that this instantly gives an easy measuring stick to pick your games based on. I know I don't like "unnecessary" lore, so regardless of genre, I know I won't try games that look like that's what they're about. And that's not just Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age, by the way. Gothic, Fable, Hard to Be a God, Deus Ex and games of that type also fit the bill. And while I'm sure they're perfectly good games in their own right, I know ahead of time that I won't like them, so I avoid them to instead play other, "simpler" games.

---

If I had to put down an example of what I like, ideally that would be the Soul Reaver model, which got cloned all over the place in recent years. To explain, the Soul Reaver model gives you a basic explanation of the world, and then proceeds to reveal storyline elements only as they become relevant to the current action at hand. For instance, we'll know Dumah exists because Raziel will have mentioned him, but only in passing. It's only when entering Dumah's fortress that Raziel will go into detail about that particular brother's story and motivations. Of course with a plotline as labyrinthine as the Soul Reaver one, you're bound to get a lot of clues dropped in out of sequence (though how many of those are ret-cons, I'll never know), but those themselves are only really explored as they are revealed.

It's not just Soul Reaver, either. That's the same basic premise behind UbiSoft's Prince of Persia trilogy. In fact, you can map the three game's progress by that of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 plus Defiance, to a point. Basically, the Prince tells his story as it develops, introducing plot elements as the story gets to them, exploring them as necessary, and then moving on. That's more or less what I find to be ideal. I know it's probably not enough for people who want an expansive, immersive world in which to create and integrate their own characters, but I know that that's what works for me.

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.

This is where your arguments don't quite add up. And why I say you're asking what is essentially a simple question on something that is not a simple topic.

You describe additional information that is not directly tied to the plot of a game as extraneous and not needed to enjoy the game. But then you say that you know a lot of people enjoy having that in their games. If a lot of people enjoy it, it is most certainly something that contributes to the enjoyment of the game for the majority of people playing it.

In your original post you write:

I say that's incorrect. Games that do that almost entirely fall into the RPG genre with titles such as we've described. Oblivion has a crapload of books to read with detailed history and background on characters you'll never meet and places you will never go. Those things can, if you wish to, be ignored and you can do whatever else you want to. That's how it is with most games such as you describe.

To say that developers believe that this is the only way to make a good game is actually misleading. On the whole(and there are probably only a few exceptions), developers who make a certain type of game, include things in their game which are commonplace and expected in the genre. This is because their target audience is generally expecting these things.

Some things, you can argue are not needed. Like multiplayer being tacked onto every FPS game under the sun, when statistics show that only a few games ever retain a large and thriving multiplayer population after initial launch if the game is not multiplayer only.

Other things, like what you are describing, are not so easily separated out and placed in a 'worthwhile' or 'worthless' box when you weigh their overall impact on the gaming experience of the larger audience.

Then let me tell you that you are not the target audience for Baldur's Gate.

I can't argue with that.

The thing is that I think you did miss out, but that's only because I'm applying my way of thinking to your choices. In my mind, if a single aspect of a game was something that would turn my mind off a game, it would be something that the game tries to do but fails horribly at that nagged me all through the experience. Lore is something that can be ignored. To quit a game over its abundance would suggest to me that you have other issues than not liking lore, since you don't have to pick up every book you see or read through every scroll you find.

I'd say that your issue is that you like to play straight up action(y) games with very little divergence from the main and immediate goal. Hence your references to things like Darksiders and Street Fighter. But you're trying to apply those principles to the wrong genres(or sub genres) of games.

And yet I have no trouble at all knowing what games I want to play and which ones I don't. What I want to play at any given time, largely depends on my mood more than some arbitrary number of lore entries/side quests that I may or may not encounter while playing a game. What games I buy and invest time in are determined by the quality of the game and richness of the experience as it relates to the type of game it is.

Oddly, I've heard you say you like Mass Effect. That series is no less lore-filled than other Bioware games. They have whole novels based on it to fill in additional backstory. And about a novel's worth of lore in the in-game Codex.

This entire thread is personal opinion and personal preference. I don't pretend to speak any universal or absolute truths. The cornerstone of the whole thing was "Do YOU need these things?" as a driving question, yet you spend the majority of your time doing... I don't even know what that is.

A lot of people enjoy additional information. I don't. Where is the contradiction here?

The feedback loop of developers doing things because people expect them and people expecting things because developers do them is what's caused almost every MMO currently on the Market to be just about the same as every other MMO. Apparently, that's people want, if that's what people want, then more power to them. But you contradict yourself. You say developers don't feel like this is the only way to make a game, then you say that that's the only way to make such a game because that's what people expect.

And I intentionally left this vague. Can you really argue that "some" developers don't feel that adding extraneous bits of unrelated lore is the only way to make an engaging and immersive game? This is statement so general that you can't really argue with unless you know all developers out there, which I don't think any person alive does.

I never did. I specifically put "need" in quotation marks because I'm not using it in its literal meaning, and I expected this to be obvious. It's the same kind of "need" as people who "need" to have the best gear in order to play an MMO. They DON'T, but they WANT to, and if they can't get what they want, they lose interest and stop playing the game. Therefore, they don't physically need these things in order to play the game, but they psychologically "need" these things in order to enjoy themselves. I don't need to play computer games to live, food and water are sufficient. But I "need" to play computer games because, really, that's all I enjoy doing these days.

Isn't that exactly what I said?

Again, isn't that exactly what I said? I know I missed out, and that doesn't bother me, because what I missed out on, I wouldn't have liked anyway. I don't mind missing out on things other people like that I don't. I don't mind missing the FIFA World Cup, I don't mind missing Lord of the Rings, I don't mind missing a Metallica concert, I don't mind missing a free trip to Paris. These are not things I like or want.

My issues really consist of being irritated when something I don't like is a large part of a game I chose to play. If the game is doable enough even when ignoring these things I don't like, which tend to be extraneous lore and loads of side quests, then I will obviously stick around and play it while ignoring those things. I still play City of Heroes, right? I mean, I wouldn't be able to post here if I didn't have an active account.

However, consider the games that do this: Every fan of Baldur's Gate I've spoken with has told me the same thing. If you ignore the lore, the side quests and the exploration, then you may as well just play another game, because that's what this one is "about." And I agree with them. Baldur's Gate never really had a combat system that I would describe as "good" (nor did Icewind Dale, for that matter) and its graphics were bad even for the time. There really wasn't much to it other than just the persistent world of the... Sword Coast, was it? I don't know.

Point is, there really is no purpose to playing a game by ignoring the central feature of that game. Let's take something I played more recently: Gothic 3. Originally I surmised that this would have at least a somewhat linear main story like Gothic 2 did, but at several points I liberated a city and was left with no further instructions. I assumed the idea was to go liberate more cities (or join the orcs, which I didn't want), but this just really doesn't work for me. So I dropped the game and never went back. And will never go back, not just to Gothic 3, but to any Gothic game made thereafter, Gothic 4 included. These are not games for me. People who like them are well in their right to, but there are different games for different people.

Which, again, is exactly what I said. If you can't give a simple answer to the simple question, then your tastes are broader than mine, and that's just fine. Unlike you, I don't have moods. I like what I like and that is always the same and always immutable. It's just a question of finding a game that fits that specific mould, or at least one that can be shoehorned into that mould without chipping off too much of its content. You already HAVE an answer to the question, which makes me wonder what it is you're arguing FOR when you're just repeating things I said earlier in the thread, but phrasing them as to appear like you're putting me down.

The difference between, say, Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect is that while Mass Effect has many books written about it that I will never read, Baldur's Gate, and especially Baldur's Gate 2 has all those books... IN THE ACTUAL GAME! Do you know how much background lore Darksiders has? TONS! There's an actual crappy comic book that comes with the game, which seems to want to explain the history behind War and the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the history behind the Angels' Hellguard, the demons' plot, Samael's fate, the Charred Council's politics and so on and so forth. There's a lot there... In supplementary materials that don't make it into the game. I don't have to read these, and I don't even have to know they exist. In fact, I didn't, for the longest time.

Personally, the picture of the world of Darksiders that I'd built in my mind from what scant information there is was much, much cooler than what the comic book suggested it actually was. That stupid comic book damn near ruined the game for me by explaining how the plot was a LOT worse than what it had appeared before. Right there, lore and backstory ruined a perfectly good story for me because I had erroneously though it was a much better one. But I'd sooner mistakenly think a story is good and enjoy it than rightly know it's silly and scorn it.

To give another example, have you any idea how much plot, lore and backstory the Legacy of Kain series has? I couldn't begin to figure all of it out, and it's been how many years? And yet the way these games present their story is unobtrusive. Where Baldur's Gate will shower you in dialogues about minutiae, Soul Reaver will string you along on the main plot and build the world around that with suggestions and allusions, but no actual "story" as such. Sure, Raziel might stop to give some background info on the location he's in right now, but that'll still be contained within two or three sentences, and will focus on the broadest aspect of it. "This is the old Vampire city. It's magnificent. And it's also built for winged creatures, where my wings no longer function. Confounded!"

Again, I'm not trying to say what's GOOD or BAD in a game, merely trying to ask what YOU, personally, yourself prefer. I don't want to have to keep explaining what I prefer over and over again because... Well, "We know!" This wasn't my original intention. Please, at least try to pretend that my preference doesn't bother you and try to speak about your own preference. Objective truth on the merit of game elements isn't necessary here. We're not trying to defend a position.

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.

In short:

City of Heroes is also a beat-em-up, as well as a "make your own action figure" adventure. It's one of the lightest games when it comes to both RPG and MMO elements, and that's part of why I'm still here and not playing the myriad other RPGs out there. City of Heroes also does a good job of keeping its relevant lore in its relevant story arc and its irrelevant lore in places where I'm unlikely to run across it unless I went looking. Which is pretty much ideal, as far as I'm concerned.

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.

ridiculous over-explanation in popular culture is an epidemic with no apparent cure.

It's insulting to anyone of moderate intelligence when the storyline grinds to a halt so someone can explain either a plot point you figured out ten minutes ago, or to illuminate some completely irrelevant byway.

r/e this game, nine times out of ten I skip the fluff text. Most of it isn't written very well and the storylines are largely forgettable. The exceptions announce themselves loudly, and I always make it a point to follow the minutia of those arcs closely, figuring talented writers will handsomely reward my attention.

This.

I know that may seem like a vague position, but this is exactly what I was looking for with the original question. We all want SOME plot and SOME trivia, I think. The question is how much is enough, and from this I can sort of conclude that you're not among the people who want... Well, an expanded universe written about your expanded universe, so to speak. That's kind of what I meant.

I will admit - Arkham Asylum was the inspiration for this question, and for one simple reason: It was filled with backstory on the DC universe, but a lot of it had nothing to do with the actual game. Not being a comic book fan, much less a DC fan, a lot of it left me cold, because I neither knew these characters nor really cared about DC all that much. The bigs, like Superman, Batman and maybe the Flash I could conceivably be interested in, if written well, and Arkham Asylum's Batman is nothing if not written well. But Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum? Eh!

Even though it sounds like I hate RPGs and you like them and we shouldn't really like the same thing, I dare say we're closer in taste than it may appear.

AKA the Star Wars prequels, right? And I agree with you here. I never understood why the Force had to be explained as being Morticoccus or whatever that's called. I can never remember. It took what was originally a story of philosophy an mysticism which provoked contemplation and introspective, and turned it into... Well, the Doom movie. And, um... Why? So that Qui-Gon Jinn can test the kid's blood with a Force Measuring Device? Eh!

My own example would be the Matrix. The original movie doesn't really give out much, and it mostly suggests several interesting prospects while leaving them to the imagination. For instance, the way Morpheus talks, he almost feels like he did indeed see the future much like the Oracle does, which would be why he talks more like he has prior knowledge than like he has faith. Little is actually explained, in the "technical manual" sense, but much enough is suggested to keep a story working when it has both the hard science of the machines and the soft science of the virtual world where anything seems possible. And then we had a movie about a French stereotype, a pair of albino brothers and the complete humiliation of Agent Smith as a character I can ever take seriously.

I agree with you in general. I don't need the plot spelled out for me in lengthy exposition, and I especially don't need the story to slam on the brakes so it can explore irrelevant lore that doesn't have any bearing on the plot. I don't REALLY mind if it's there in an interactive media that lets me skip it if I don't care, but in a movie it really sucks. Basically, anything that's told to me by a story has to answer to one single question: Why should I care? If the answer is anything other than "Because it's interesting to know!" then I don't mind.

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.

Midichlorians are not the Force - they're just the way people can connect with it.
The Force hasn't been explained at all, apart from what Obi-Wan said in ANH and Yoda said in ESB.

still TMI

One, I actually enjoyed those movies. Two, that guy actually WAS French.

Considering our allegedly similar tastes, you already stated you like this game because it's allegedly a "beat 'em up." If so, show me the combo of buttons on the Martial Arts set that allows me to throw a Hadoken.

The game is a MMORPG. That's why it's a sandbox world with interlocking storylines and trivial lore. It's supposed to feel like a real world where a bunch of stuff is happening, already happened, and will happen. You take the role of your character (thus the RPG part) and intreract with the world around you. For all hints and purposes, you are that character until you log off.

I don't think you understood what I meant. I'll assume the "hadouken" commentary was sarcasm, since no beat-em-up game I'm aware of actually has that, it being restricted to Street Fighter games, all of which are fighters. But even sarcasm aside, you CAN play City of Heroes as a beat-em-up if you wanted to. I actually do want to, and that's what I do. A beat-em-up game very much CAN have a plot. Look at Oni, Soul Reaver, The Force Unleased. All of these games have stories, and pretty interesting and detailed stories, to boot. Sure, they're not very expansive, but that doesn't make them bad stories or, to make a point, non-existent ones.

It's true that City of Heroes is built on an open-world sandbox model. When you have multiple players needing to interact in a non-linear way, you kind of have to. The very least you need is a hub gathering place. This is not, however, a storytelling device, but rather a mechanical necessity. You can't have an MMO that locks people on a strictly linear path, because then finding each other and playing together would be a right pain. Multiplayer versions of singleplayer RPGs always make the concession of at the very least fast-travel locations to move players along the linear path, such as in Diablo 2 or Dungeon Siege's Utraean Peninsula campaign.

However, where more "expansive" RPGs fail me is the fact that free-roaming and lore exploration is literally all they offer. Baldur's Gate doesn't offer much of anything interesting if you just follow the main storyline, and that's if you're strong enough to complete it without levelling up off side quests. Bad guy shows up, find out about bad guy, find bad guy, kill bad guy. The end. It's not an interesting story. What sells this game is its rich, engaging world and wealth of lore scattered about it. It's not an experience so much as it's a place.

City of Heroes very much CAN be this... But it can also be something else entirely if you choose to play it that way. If you want lore, there's lore scattered about in plaques, badges and external references, as well as a wealth of information to be had just going through the game and taking notes. When I forgot who it was made City of Lore recently, lore was pulled out from all over the place, like Paragon Times articles, obscure developers posts, forgotten manuals, conflicting information and more, showing that lore is there for the taking. But I still managed to play through the entire game I think eight or nine times now, going off just what the game gave me as I went along, and what the game gave me was basically what was immediately relevant.

I learned about the Circle of Thorns thorn blades when it became a plot point to know what they were really using them for. I learned of the Rikti's true nature when I had to explain why they'd need human organs. I learned of the Knights of Malta when they made a move and Crimson decided to exposit a bit, as I needed to know what I was going up against. I learned of Cimerora when I got to it... Actually, no. No, I didn't, because Cimeroran lore is peppered throughout all of I11 missions, whether they actually relate to Cimerora or not. It's stuffed in the Origin of Powers arc, of all places, and it... Really doesn't have that much to do with the story itself, though given the narrative quality of the Midnighter's Stuff, I'm inclined to ignore it.

What I actually criticised has been more the case lately, in fact, to the point where the game has utterly lost me on just what the Funk and Wagnall is supposed to be happening with the heroes and villains of the old world. One mission Frostfire's trying to play up the big guy and be a villain in Paragon City again, next mission he's trying to leave the Rogue Isles because he wanted to be a cop. One mission Mangle's psychic and in Paragon City, another mission Mangle's in control of the Slag Golems. And then I keep getting these intentional cross-references that I simply cannot follow, even when they're to events I should otherwise know about. There's this Council weapon in Paragon City, but then there's this Council weapon in the Rogue Isles, and for the life of me I can't figure out if it's supposed to be the same thing. The I17 story arcs keep referencing Praetoria for... No real reason other than because Going Rogue was just around the corner, and referencing each other even though I'd have no idea why a 5th Column base in the Rogue Isles being destroyed would be pertinent.

The new stories we're getting these days are not self-contained, thus I fail to understand them because invariably, I've either missed or forgotten what they're referencing and what I'm supposed to know already. I have no idea what the timeline behind tip missions is supposed to be, who starts out where and turns into what, and it isn't helped by the fact that I haven't done Safeguard missions ever and paper missions in a year so I don't know who's supposed to be a villain turning good and who a hero turning bad. And this isn't coming from a new guy who just picked up a large established universe and can't wrap his head around it. I know my lore. I've been here since the start. And even so these new missions take my head for a spin.

Why I say we have similar tastes is because we both want a story, despite your efforts to convince me I don't want one. Where we disagree, it seems, is how self-contained this story should be. I firmly believe that a story should be told in such a way that I don't need to be running other stories simultaneously in order to follow its plot. I don't mind stories referencing past events, or even concurring events, if they take the time to explain them and their relevance in the actual story, as many of the old ones do, having been built with the assumption that you haven't done the prerequisites.

"As you may know, Crey is in dire straits now." my contact says. I'm not told why or who put them there, the game not having a way to know if it was me who put Countess Crey behind bars or not, but it doesn't matter. What IS relevant is that Crey are under pressure and desperate, and the story unfolds around that. That is a self-contained story which references a past event in such a way that, if you were aware of it beforehand, it's a neat continuation, but if you weren't aware, the story still proceeds to its satisfying conclusion.

What I want is, in fact, a story which exists as a cohesive narrative, and which is structured in such a way that I can enjoy it even if I haven't done my homework, as it were. Relevant backstory should be explained or at least stated as fact, and the story should end on a satisfying conclusion that makes me feel like something is achieved. Extra lore beyond that does not detract from the experience, even if I'm tripping over it just going about my business. Where it runs afoul is when I'm REQUIRED to hunt down this extra lore if I want to know what the flying Dutchman is going on with the plot of this story.

---

But again, that's me. Since you seem fixated on telling me how this game is and how I feel, then allow me to return the favour and guestimate that you perhaps prefer a more free-ranging experience that has more a history than a specific plot as such. If you will, you prefer a world that simply exists and presents you with seeds for plots of your own, a world you can explore, learn about and immerse yourself in. If anything, this sounds more like what Everquest or one of the older MMOs would offer, as the majority of their content was just that - freedom. You are given a character, plopped into a world and told to go find ways of amusing yourself, be they violence or scholarship, or possibly hard cash business.

I'm not sure City of Heroes is built quite like this, in turn. Touting its genre as an MMORPG (something I've seen officially stated as an MMOG at least once, by the way) does us no good, since the genre itself is far too broad to extract definitions from. Once upon a time when Jack really wanted his game to be based more on an "if you build it, they will come" model where players were expected to just go around killing stuff and doing one-shot missions that gave little story tid-bits to be put together by those so inclined, I might have agreed. It would also have been, and very much was, a game I had not much interest in playing long-term, because the lack of consistent plots and the heavy emphasis on free-roaming alienated me. These days, City of Heroes is more built around the intertwined storylines than anything else, being less an amalgam of concepts, factions and backstories and more a tangle of competing (and often contradicting) storylines.

In a sense, the more the game develops, the more it turns into the kind of game I like, with a heavy focus on continuous storyline to be experienced at the expense of a broader world to be explored and lived in. In fact, each new update has brought more and more story and less and less realestate, adding more depth to the experience, but adding very little breadth. Even City of Villains, easily the largest of our expansions, only brought us a handful of unique factions and mostly expanded on City of Heroes storylines.

Praetoria, popular as that may be, consists of exactly three factions, those being PPD, Resistance and Syndicate, around three minor factions, those being Ghouls, Destroyers and I believe Clockwork count. There is a wealth of storyline in there, to be sure, but at a total of three zones, there isn't much to explore. Furthermore, practically the entirety of the Praetorian backstory is part of the ongoing storylines, because everything that there is to know about the world (that is so far currently knowable) is an integral part of one story or another. The interconnectedness of the storylines does confuse me more often than not, but once I've played through all of the arcs presented, I'm sure it'll be easier to follow the timeline.

But this isn't really the discussion I was interested in. The game is what it is, and I either pay for it or I don't. I haven't set out to change the developers' minds, or to show players some absolute truth. It's a question of what we prefer to experience. In fact, most of the people I DIDN'T quote game me pretty much the answer I asked for. The reason I didn't quote them was because there isn't much to say about how someone likes his gaming experience. Not much that would be meaningful, anyway. In fact, Arilou previously stated that "I love getting information about cultures, societies, economies and religions of the fictional worlds I explore." I love that someone is this clear on what they enjoy and seek out, even if our tastes differ, and knowing what people prefer gives me a better understanding of just how alone I am in my position.

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.

Baldur's Gate II had an excellent story actually, (even BG1 actually had a couple of pretty nice twists, for it's time, though the game really hasn't aged as well as it's successor) It gets even more complicated since in both BG2 and Dragon AGe the distinction isn't all that clear between side-quest and main quest (and some of those stories are pretty good in their own right, too)

Guess what: You don't need to know. The mission tells you everything you need to omplete it. The rest is a bonus for people who like to do that sort of thing. Consider it a narrative version of the difficulty settings.

At no point are you not give enough information to complete your task.

But there is only one story here: The stoy of City of Heroes. All the arcs are just that, story arcs, within the greater narrative.

Again, at NO POINT in the game are you even remotely required to do thatWh. Heck, you're not even required to do that in Baldur's Gate! (because most of the time it is obvious from context what is going on) What you are doing is in fact going beyond demanding that the game be comprehensible: You're demanding that it be dumbed down since you don't want to eal with optional content!

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is the one game which utterly confounds me, personally. Not because I can't follow its plot, however, but because I never understood why it's so popular. Then again, I really couldn't stomach the endless brown and the crappy controls long enough to see much of its storyline, so I assume that's where the fascination comes from. Good game with a crappy story is much easier to stomach than a crappy game with good story, I suppose.

What confounds me more, however, is I never, ever hear anything about Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, which I feel was a far superior game. Sure, it wasn't a very GOOD game, as it was a heavily dumbed-down click-n-kill RPG, but its story, I feel, was pretty immersive, in the way Christoff went about his whole transformation into a vampire and his quest to free his love of all of one chance meeting. I never really understood what Vampire: The Masquerade actually is (either a series of books or a pen and paper RPG), but Redemption balanced gameplay and story much better, in my opinion. And it started off with a bit more class than dumping you in the middle of a ghetto.

See, this I will agree with. If the actual POINT of the game is to figure out a mystery based on things you learn and hear, then I agree with story elements being scattered about the world for the player to go out and look for. However, in this case I don't think we can class them as extraneous, because they are actually part of the specific storyline. Whether the game leads you on a linear path through said story elements or plops you down in a time and orders you to go find those story elements, they're still within the self-contained story.

The best example of this is probably the CSI games. In those, you don't really have a plotline to follow as such, you more have a collection of clues and your task, more than anything else, is to find all the clues and put them together. The point of those games is to know everything there is to know, because eventually, that'll tell you the identity of the murderer, and usually his motivation and methodology, as well.

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.

Streets of Rage is also 20 years old, if not more. Beat-em-ups these days have a solid, if vague storyline. Shank, for instance, is nothing more than a Grindhouse style violent slaughterfest focusing on a guy shanking people in a 2D side-scroller, yet that has enough of a story to make for a Hollywood blockbuster worthy of Machete. I understand that's not saying much, but story is very much there. Hell, look at Capcom's all Aliens vs. Predator arcade and you'll notice that has enough story to make up a movie, too, and that's also about 20 years old.

The mission objective gives me enough information to complete a task. That's not what I'm talking about. Quite a few of the new missions don't give me enough information to understand what's happening, however, beyond the very immediate next objective. However, I can't follow the story without background information which the story doesn't provide.

Easy example: When Praetorian Penelope Yin calls me, I see a picture of Metronome. Erm... Who the hell is Metronome? How do I know what he looks like? Have I met him before? Well... No, actually. Metronome is part of a Loyalist Responsibility arc where his nature is revealed, and Penelope Yin is part of a Resistance Warden arc. What's more, having run the Responsibility arc that had Metronome in it, I understood that he has no physical bodie and instead jumps between the different clockwork, therefore there there wouldn't be a picture of him to see, unless I saw a picture of a random Clockwork.

Most Praetorian story arcs are written well enough to where you don't need to have run parallel arcs to understand them, as the basic premise is given to you. However, Penelope's arc in particular is... Well, not.

There isn't "one story" because a story assumes a beginning, a linear middle and an end. If your story branches out, then it's multiple stories. If a story is comprised of multiple unrelated storylines, then it's multiple stories. There is one world - that of City of Heroes (as a general catchall for CoH, CoV and GR), but there are many stories within it. Saying there's just one story in City of Heroes is like saying "But there is only one story herE: The story of DC."

I'm not required to seek out additional lore in the same sense as I'm not required to play the game to begin with. No, I don't need extra lore if all I wanted to do was to push buttons and see things explode, but I rather enjoy an interesting story, one story at a time. I prefer being able to understand that story while I'm experiencing it, as opposed to two weeks later when I do a tie-in story and go "Oh! So THAT'S what they meant! Well, it all makes sense NOW! If only it had made sense then..."

I hardly think that asking for a story to be self-contained is asking for it to be dumbed down. I'm simply asking for a complete experience. Stories don't have to be fully appreciated by people with a loose grasp on obscure lore, as everything should feel like it ties together, but stories should be capable of being comprehended by people with a loose grasp on obscure lore just the same. I should know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, just just what I need to press and who I need to kill to appease to octopus that lives inside my head.

A week ago I jumped into Splinter Cell: Conviction, having never played anything beyond the original Splinter Cell, and remembering precisely ZILCH from that. As such, I didn't really know who many of the people in that game were, but luckily, I didn't have to. These people introduced themselves, their backstories were given in brief, their motivations and roles were made clear and I was able to follow the plot and follow the story just fine, despite missing completely and entirely any backstory the game may have wanted to build on. I'm sure that if I were actually aware of these things, I'd have understood more and probably been more immersed much better in the experience, but the game did a good job of NOT alienating me if I weren't a fan of the franchise.

That's a self-contained story with room for expansion if you know more than nothing starting out. That's all I'm talking about. You make it sound like all I want is to shoot people in the face and skip all the cutscenes, when that couldn't be farther from the truth.

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.

For me, at least, there are several things about Bloodlines that make it great. To begin with, it's got wonderful atmosphere. The voice acting is great with few exceptions, and the setting is very gritty and immersive (the graphics even still hold up pretty well). In addition, it has wonderful roleplaying options. I can try to interact with people by persuasion, intimidation or seduction, and how I treat people has an actual effect on things. There are actual choices to be made, and missions I can ignore or miss without ruining the game. It's amazingly deep. Another thing I like is no combat levels. I've never liked that, skill systems like Bloodlines has are much more realistic.

Redemption had some wonderful points to it too, but it wasn't as engaging to me because I couldn't make my OWN character, and it became all about combat (and rather repetetive combat, at that).

The Masqerade RPG appeals to people who enjoy that little bit of angst and the gothic horror theme. I'd love to see an MMO based on it, frankly, but I've lost nearly all faith in game designers lately.


Backstory and lore should be in the game. Most of it should be completely extraneous, but it SHOULD be there to facilitate stories and situations when it will be valuable.