/v/ - Video Games

Bump for interesting topic

Probably around the same time marketing companies hired people like game theory faggot and vaati to shill their garbage behind the veil of plausible deniability.

>>16300178

It didn't though. We were still getting things like Mirrors Edge and Dead Space from the sort of people that pull this shit now. This seems to have come later and the earliest i can say concretely falls into this category is Five Nights at Freddies in 2014. Thats 7 years after the fall of man began.

>>16300163

No, 2007 is about right. That was the year I remember my friends at the time talking about every new game that came out in a different way than before. It used to be, "I did this and then shot x" or what have you, and later it became, "my favorite part of the lore/I found this cool video online about it." I was always sort of confused about why they cared for shit like lore all of a sudden, but now I understand.

When Dark Souls came out. Why do you think game journalists are still making nonsensical Dark Souls comparisons?

imagine playing a shooter and wanting lore instead of playing like hundreds and thousands of visual novels

>>16300190

But what games though? that was 2 years before Demon's Souls came out, 7 before Five Nights at Freddies and 11 before the current day shit like Breath of the Wild.

>>16300163

i hope youre not implying that lore is bad because marketers can market it.

>>16300184

>>16300200

Half Life 2 you dopes.

>>16300208

This. Environmental storytelling is a thing that only videogames can do, and it's the best non-intrusive way of delivering a story and displaying a setting.

>>16300222

There is nothing environmental about slapping inexplicable wiki pages to every item.

>>16300229

>Environmental storytelling is reading stuff from the game's wiki

You're retarded

>>16300235

Reading comprehension. He's saying that the items have long-winded in-game descriptions.

>>16300208

however lore obsessed fags deserve to hang.

>>16300238

Fug, I'm retarded

>>16300208

Good use of it is things like environmental storytelling. Bad use of it is walls of text in item descriptions and vagueness for vagueness' sake.

The good kind is seasoning on a meal, the bad kind is a cripple on a crutch.

It's the desire to have story telling without the interruption of game play. In early WRPG's massive amounts of world building was left in tomes and non-essential NPC dialogue, however that left a massive amount of time for the player to go out of their way and read a novels worth of words while they were supposed to be playing a game. Cut scenes were follow changes where storry could be given a more theatrical presence to emphasis its importance, but still doesn't change the fact that the player is no longer playing the game. The next big evolution came in the form of audio logs like in Bioshock. Now the player could get exposition at their own pace while still being able to play the game. Another notable method was the Metroid Prime series use of scanning datalogs. In this case story was now a collectible and with highlighted passages the player who just wants essential information could get the important bits, while those enthused with the story were rewarded for their exploration. Now were in the implied / lore story telling phase, where the world indicates a story without directly informing you of all the details. The trend originates from Demon / Dark Souls success at being an action / rpg on the surface while still having a lot to say implicitly. It also works for the souls games and Hollow Knight as both their stories take place after the more important story beats have taken place and you're left with the repercussions of what had happened.

TL;DR It's part of a constant trend to have story not impose upon game play, but to coexist in the same space. It's a unique problem and solution to the medium of vidya.

>>16300209

Half Life didn't exactly have giant text boxes dumping endless fucking lore about shit no one cared about. Aside for the Vortigaunt cave, it was just some details you can theorize about. There's a difference between leaving room for interpretation and theories and telling you what brand of toilet paper the orcs use and how much sugar elves like in their tea. That's what Dark Souls and games like it have, Hollow Knight included.

>>16300251

People poorly ripping it off doesn't mean it isn't responsible for starting it.

>>16300229

The items themselves and their location are environmental, though, as are the locations and art.

While I do agree that item descriptions are not "environmental", and there should be a better nomenclature for that, I don't think that's what he was referring to.

>>16300235

No, I think he means item descriptions in Souls games.

>>>/v/16300186

There's a difference between dissenting with good reason and a respectable, educated opinion.

And then there's shitposting for the sake of (you)s. You're the latter

>>16300163

>>16300205

This is more or less the ideal way to write videogames. That doesn't mean that every game that attempts it does it well, Horizon is probably a good counterexample, but I've never played it to be sure. The point however is that "lore" tends to be more interactive than "story". "Lore" revolves around the player exploring the world on their own, "story" is the player being dragged along by the plot. "Story" is good for books and movies, "lore" is good for videogames.

>>16300267

You've failed the moment you gave him a reply, even indirectly.

>>16300251

The information isn't as irrelevant as you're satirizing it, nor are the infodumps that huge, and besides it's completely non-intrusive, which makes your complaint worthless.

>>16300250

You know Bioshock might actually be an example of an early example of it. Sure there were audiologs in System Shock but the ones in Bioshock were particularly lazy. A notable early one has you walk through a ruined "happy new year 1958" party only to find an audiolog of a woman who apparently took a huge dictaphone with her to a party she went to by herself to explain shes at a party by herself -to who exactly the writers did not appear to think about- only for the purpose of the audio log to be there to tell the player that there was a party here that ended badly.

The one you just walked though, long since cooled corpses and blood puddles and all. They assumed you were dumb enough to not pick that up from the environment at best.

>>16300191

It was memed hard that you got actual customers saying it. I actually saw while just perusing the humble bundle, and in the Hot Date bundle, there is a literal quote under Sunrider Collection "actually harder than dark souls".

>>16300229

You know, Super Metroid had environmental storytelling.

>>16300288

>You know, Super Metroid had environmental storytelling.

This is true, hitler, but it also doesn't have long descriptions on each item.

I blame Dark Souls. Even if it didn't start it, it(or rather Vaati and the rest of his ilk) popularized it.

Is Hollow Knight worth playing?

>>16300300

Depends if you like Metroid and Castlevania or not.

>>16300278

There's good ways to do lore and bad. Kirby does it absolutely perfectly, I think, especially with how many details Star Allies revealed, relating to nearly every single other game in the series. This includes the origins of several of the final bosses throughout the series and Kirby himself.

Most games, on the other hand, tend to add needless details about elements of the world no one cared about.

>>16300300

Lots of content, serviceable gameplay and movement, super good exploration. Yes.

>>16300278

More or less. I wouldn't say story should be dropped to minimal or nothing, as it works if a particular progression is in mind. Unskippable novels of text and cinematic masturbation is where it really becomes annoying.

>>16300300

It's good. Pirate if you're unsure, but it's got very little poz and is a generally comfy game.

>>16300200

I think >>16300190 is incorrect, as you assert. 2007-2010 was absolutely filled with MMS clones whose publishers wanted to get in on the CoD money.

As a few other people have said, Dark Souls and the wildcatting done to it by faggots like Vaati probably gave rise to this more than anything. The industry had become so barren and dry, the idea of NOT having a voice shout HEY RAMIREZ in the player's ear every few minutes was novel.

The wildcatting (selling people an idea of something rather than the something itself) in particular is what bothers me the most, because it's led to legions of soy-swilling faggots who think watching a video about something equates to having a good understanding of it. As much as I hate the term, the rise of "video essays" probably would not have happened if Vaati had remained an obscure channel and

To simplify, people who play video games look at a game and think:

>that looks fun. i'd like to try it myself.

whereas the increasingly passive audience for twitch streamers think:

>wow, that looks way too tough for me to do! i can't wait to hear what [surrogate friend] thinks of this!

>>16300250

>reading a text log prevents you from playing the game

<this is bad

>hearing an audio log, which bioshock invented, allows you to get both an unsatisfying gameplay experience due to background noise and an unsatisfying lore experience due to gameplay interruptions

<this is good

You have no idea what you're describing and your English is terrible.

>>16300300

>Is Hollow Knight worth playing?

Depends how much you like atmosphere, which the game has in droves. The gameplay is simplistic (jump, slash, some poorly coded movement options), but I spend 50 hours wandering around the game world and loved almost every minute of it. Simply being able to explore the different areas and accidentally wander where you aren't supposed to go was so interesting it made every place I entered feel larger than it actually was.

Past the first two areas (Crossroads and Greenpath), you have tremendous freedom, which led to me falling into an area I wasn't supposed to be able to access, or have a reason to visit, until hours laters. I nearly jumped out of my skin because of how sudden it was and how far out of my comfort zone it threw me. I haven't had experiences like that in many other games.

Hornet is cute.

>>16300312

Depends on the gameplay.

>>16300300

Don't blame Dark Souls, blame the loser faggots with no lives who strained themselves to obsess over creating a story where none existed/a very barebones shitty story was told.

I got DS because I heard it was hard and enjoyed creating my own story as I went along. These faggots aren't even that minimally "creative".

>>16300349

I didn't even consider the story, I was so happy to have a game where no exposition was dumped on me and I was free to fuck shit up without a care in the world.

2009.

Everything started in 2009.

Shitty streamers, muh lore, muh communities, everything you can name that makes gaming terrible today, started in '09.

>>16300361

>everything you can name that makes gaming terrible today, started in '07

FTFY

>>16300360

Yeah fuck the story I was interested in just surviving areas. First thing I did (after getting the zweihander) was run to where the dragons were and farmed them for whatever the fuck rare thing they dropped and XP. Took a while and was hard, but was fun. Had to fuck them while they were turning.

>>16300163

>When exactly did "watercooler gaming" actually take root and make 'lore' more in demand than story?

When Oblivion came out.

>>16300163

Probably when e-tubers decided to make money playing games and doing walkthroughs online, and broke, incapable, or not allowed kids could watch and live thru them vicariously– taking over from the Gamefaqs written form of old.

Lore is sign of a weak game. It tells you what is instead of you finding out what is. Asking a human being to learn bullshit unreal made up names for worlds and races and cities that do not exist is taking up valuable space in an information heavy centered life. Personally, I blame Bioware.

>>16300360

But that only works for people like us who are super into mechanics and gameplay. If you want to make a mass market success in today's market, you need something. But this is where the good news comes in. It doesn't need to be much. When you start a new game in ARK, your chracter wakes up on a beach and scratches at the weird device that's been embedded into their arms. That alone creates enough intrigue to get players moving through the world even though there's no actual explanation as to why you're there with sci-fi shit in your arms.

>>16300300

It's pretty good. Definitely worth a playthrough.

>>16300163

The devs have literally said they developed the areas and gameplay first and then just filled it up with "story" afterwards.

>>16300297

I think that's his point. Item descriptions is not environmental storytelling, it's straight up reading a fucking book. Metroid is an example of environmental storytelling, Dark Souls is an example of reading a fucking book with some environmental storytelling.

>>16300517

get ready for some autism.

>>16300525

>get ready for some autism.

Autism as in the game actually does have lore, or autism as in the only proof is gay theory tier videos on the internet which exist for every franchise imaginable?

>>16300536

Only when you understand the truth of [Z A B U T T A F L Y] will you understand that there are levels of mental survival that man is willing to sink to.

>>16300517

You have no idea how wrong you are, anon. Every game is connected,including spinoffs like Rainbow Curse. About as close to non-canon you get is a certain creature looking different in early games and getting a consistent design since Return to Dreamland.

Man, I fucked that last post up miserably.

>>16300536

Unlike Matpat theories, most of these lore videos tend to just stick to actual in-game content and mostly-proven things.

Embed related seems like a better video than the one the other anon posted, that guy sounds like a fucking faggot.

>>16300340

>>Is Hollow Knight worth playing?

>Depends how much you like atmosphere, which the game has in droves. The gameplay is simplistic (jump, slash, some poorly coded movement options), but I spend 50 hours wandering around the game world and loved almost every minute of it.

Yeah I was really disappointed with it for the same reasons. It was pitched to me as a metroidvania game, but it's not really that at all. Combat was shit, and the screen shatter/freeze effect drove me insane.

games used to be made by actual computer scientists, i.e. people that care very little about their external appearance and have a rich inner life

games are now made by "game designers" aka complete and total brainlets, who are more occupied with what others think about them

this is also the reason why most games suck ass and are so badly optimized

>>16300562

>cuckchan speak

>>16300200

How are Demon Souls or Dark Souls water cooler games? They're non-trivially challenging.

>>16300679

>They're non-trivially challenging.

Even my niece beat Dark Souls.

>>16300679

You might want to go back and replay them. Or not. Maybe the memory is better than the reality.

Environmental storytelling/muh lore has been around for a while, hell From even did it long before souls with KF/ST. I liked what they did with Armored Core because you get to experience the civilizations in their zenith and in their decline/post apocalypse.What I don't like is when everything is left vague for fags like Vaati to fill in by basically making shit up. At least in Demon's Souls you felt like you knew what had happened and why and by the end you had a good idea of what the future held.

>normalfags start obsessing over writing while ignoring gameplay instead of wanting BOTH to be good

<"uh oh, we made diversity hires for writers too, so our writing is dogshit and the story is so garbage even braindead retards won't like it much."

>enter lore

>it's just worldbuilding so no need to take care of pacing, figuring out ways to string the player along, creativity with objectives, etc.

>can just write down whatever any ideas guy comes up with

>usually doesn't interact with other lore too much so multiple interns can write it at the same time with minimal coordination

>vague enough that normalfags won't notice holes and contradicitions in it

>can just tell autistic /v/irgins that "it's just a game :^)" when they complain and get away with it because normalfags have even lower standards for lore than they do for story writing

>most importantly, it can be absolutely anything anyone comes up with without actually needing to represent it in the game. Here's a wall of text about some ancient battle which will be refferenced exactly once in the whole game by naming a sword after it :^)

The lazier studios and publishers get, the more they will make the narrative reliant on lore since making a decent story actually takes effort and skill. Making good lore also requires effort and skill, but considerably less and it doesn't need to be in line with what you see in the game due to it being vague/dealing with stuff outside the game world.

>inb4 writing muh lore is sooo hard

No it's fucking not, dipshit. Making lore that is tightly tied to in-game shit and works as part of environmental storytelling is hard, but the vast majority of games don't use it that way and everyone jacks them off for lore despite that. Planescape: Torment did lore well. Mass Effect did fuck all with the vast majority of its lore except maybe having some random faggot say three sentences about something, yet everyone is pissing his pants over how ME's lore was SOOO GOOD.

>>16301280

I wonder what people would say about the Drakengard franchise.

>>16300163

>>16300172

Dark Souls popularized the trend and every indie and their dog started copying it.

>>16300163

Probably all started with the Star Wars Expanded Universe, to be honest.

>>16300708

>>16300689

Bullshit.

>>16302228

That game doesn't have much lore. Journey was pretty good though.

>>16300163

When people started getting fed up with forced unskippable 20 minute Kojima tier cutscenes getting shoved down the player's throat every 10 minutes of gameplay, or 20 minute JRPG dialogues that put Golden Sun to shame. In other words, around 2008, when the bloat from cutscenes and dialogues started getting extremely bad in a lot of games.

Lore became a welcome return to form, where the story was there but you didn't need to interrupt gameplay for the sake of it if you didn't want to, and you didn't run the risk of skipping a 30 minute cutscene and getting lost due to missing the 90 seconds of actual information in the middle of it.

Lore happened because people were getting fed up of developers trying to turn games into movies.

The weird thing is, a shitton of my coworkers discuss vidya all the time (for the most part they're late teens and early 20's), but it's almost never about lore and story. Always gameplay (and sometimes mods). Caught a couple of them today talking about Starcraft of all things, discussing which race they used to main, the kind of strategies they used, and how they get ass-fucked by random Koreans every time they tried playing online. There's this other guy that likes to talk about the 500 mods he has for Skyrim, about the custom spell types, and how it makes his shit crash all the time. Because many of them are casuals sometimes they talk about Fortnite and Apex, which don't really have story/lore AFAIK. But from my point of view, story in a game has always been part of a personal experience that you just don't talk about. I dunno, it just seems a bit… feminine… to talk about a game's story rather than the gameplay. Like how women are always talking about "their feelings" or whatever.

>>16300163

I really don't see a problem with “lore” games as long as it's a subtle as it was in Dark Souls or Half-Life 2. For me, the real issue is the fact that the widespread use of internet ruined the fun of discovering such things for yourself. Good luck having your own theories, you'll just get send a link to some YouTuber whose speculations are treated as facts. One of the reasons I like to play old mods for Half-Life released before the announcement of Half-Life 2 or Portal mods released before Portal 2, is because you get to experience someone's take on the game's lore or alternative vision of the events.

>>16301372

i want to play this shit

>>16300163

its mostly because it's far easier to write lore than it is to write a good story

Lore overtaking story is one of the few decent things about modern gaming. Lore is far easier to ignore than story, which feels the need to constantly interrupt you with shit you don't care about, even worse when they don't allow you to skip it.

>>16300163

I don't know, i've always been more interested in the setting and world building than the actual story, i don't think there's anything wrong with focusing on that

>>16302882

>>16302765

>>16302323

This

This has been happening since the 80's. It only stopped for a relatively short time frame that was the terrible "Story with a shitty linear game slapped on it" era.

People used to even invent lore where there wasn't any, like the green thwomp in mario kart or the mysterious door in lego island.

I understand OP is talking about something more specific (Devs doing it specifically to bait people), but this is just like it used to be only on steroids. People always wanted this.

Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.

>>16303048

I'd say it's very important, but in a different way.

It's there to give the player motivation to do things and frame the world of the game.

Context is a very powerful thing, and without it nothing matters or makes sense.

>>16300383

>Oblivion

Nope. Morrowind. Bethesda has been remaking that shitty game ever since they first released it. It was an absolute disappointment to the people who enjoyed Daggerfall, but it brought in a new audience of Morrowfaggots, obsessed with Michael Kirkbride's "inspired" writing, such as that one time he made his Mary Sue OC self insert (Vivec) suck demon penis. Daggerfall had so much potential, but it was all for nothing when Morrowind came out and shat on the slow, gradual legacy that had been getting built up from Arena.

>>16300205

wtf even is "Man vs Reality" and "Man vs Author"?

>>16303478

stupid meta shit that means absolutely nothing

it literally says so at the top

>>16303478

man vs layered concepts

man vs purpose

>>16300340

>X thing was in the game Bioshock

>Bioshock didn't invent X you retard!

Are you autistic?

Also your criticism of audio logs is bad. You can just sit there and listen to the log uninterrupted if you desire so that the lore is not unsatisfying. Alternatively you can skip the log and just go to playing the game if you do not care about the lore and want to be undistracted while playing. The audio log vs text just allows for the option of both listening and playing at the same time.

>>16304304

>Wanting to fuck a bird.

Raphtalia's unconditional, adult love is better than disordered sexualization of youthful innocence.

>>16300286

That's not really exclusive to Bioshock, though.

In most games, the existence of most logs the player finds - be them audio, or written - doesn't really make logical sense.

>>16304304

>>16304851

Atla is superior in every way you filthy secondaries.

>>16305781

Who's gonna read the LN though.

Lore is the prototype for walking simulators. Therefore it's garbage. A good game will explain to me its objective and mechanics while still allowing me to mash through any and all dialogue. Otherwise it's a bad game.

>>16306258

The LN (and the WN also, which is completely translated into English at this point) are far better than the anime. They're more in-depth, and they show more of the setting and don't rush things so much. Watching the anime, it felt like everything is rushed and they just speed past stuff that made good reading material in the LN.

>>16306445

Oh, hey! It has pictures. I dunno, I've done the jump from anime to manga on some franchises, but LNs make me think I'd be stepping too deep and I'd never get out.

>>16300251

>Half Life didn't exactly have giant text boxes dumping endless fucking lore about shit no one cared about.

You're right. Instead they had NPCs spouting endless fucking lore about shit no one cared about.

>>16306608

Not really. It was explaining the plot. Either building up what was to come or what had happened prior. They didn't go into detail about what Dr. Breen's favorite cereal brand is, or how stretchy a Vortigaunt's foreskin is, like Dark Souls would have done. HL, especially 2, is not some masterpiece but it wasn't quite that shit.

>>16306482

I think it's worth it, just because some of the really cool shit that happens that I doubt will be reached in the first season of the anime, even though it's 24 episodes. That being said, the Web Novel would have to be relied on if you wanted to finish the story within the next year or so; the LN is currently only around the halfway point, and only 2-3 volumes are coming out in English each year, whereas the original Web Novel is long-since completely translated. The LN expands the WN's plot in certain ways, though; it's better imo.

>>16306613

>Not really. It was explaining the plot. Either building up what was to come or what had happened prior.

And, the game needs to spend the first hour establishing absolutely NOTHING that could have been condenced into 5 minutes because…

>>16306625

I agree. And nothing in Dark Souls Lore couldn't have been condensed to five sentences, total.

>>16306615

So the actual story is completed?

>>16306384

>A good game will explain to me its objective and mechanics while still allowing me to mash through any and all dialogue.

You could have just said you were retarded, that would have been less words for you to write

>>16306634

>Dark Souls

<From intro to gameplay is 5 minutes

<First enemy encountered is 10 second later

>Half Life

<No intro, "all gameplay"

<First enemy encountered is 20 minutes later

>>16306719

But half life is an experience, man

Not at all like those dumb walking simulators with their stupid action game mechanics

>>16306729

If you're going to make a sarcastic post, it generally helps if you apply a flag make a spoiler.

>>16306734

It's not my job to make reading accessible for the disabled

>>16308161

At some point I started interpreting that last pic in Jordan Peterson's voice and now I can't stop please help

>>16308238

Jordan Peterson probably wrote it. We all know he's a nazi who goes on 8chan every day. TV told me so.

>>16300163

>Horizon Zero Dawn

Is it?

everyone I know who played it said it was shit especially when BotW came out around the same time

>>16310721

Reading vidya books is absolutely not normalfag

Biker dude sounds like a pretty cool guy

>>16311778

>This just makes be believe they blew up a bunch of communists, whoever put that there is retarded. Also Eggman is equally retarded for wanting to build a massive hedonist land and defiling nature to do it. No one is right here.

It's easy to think they had McCarthyism in mind when writing it, especially given Gerald Robotnik's slavic-sounding name. Regardless, no economics were discussed. Just curing AIDS and saving the world from aliens that wanted to eat everybody. This is a world that already seems to use a single currency, rings, which have been used since ancient times and are frequently found just floating in the air. Economics don't come up much.

Eggmanland seems to function pretty well until Sonic Forces came out and made Eggmanland completely different from how it was always shown before. The games post-Unleashed might as well not be canon with how little they give a fuck about story. But fine, they're canon. Something must have changed Eggman's vision some time before Forces. Perhaps the fact that his previous attempts at a more whimsical Eggmanland kept getting destroyed. He had to get more serious.

Also, using animals to power his robots is a bit of an issue, sure. But that's just being no fun allowed.

>>16300163

>Game devs create games with no story, just 'lore' instead.

Probably has something to do with Dark Souls.