With one of the most robust backgrounds for any MMO game ever created, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has potential to be the pinnacle of story telling. However, is the average player interested enough to truly appreciate the efforts? RadarX looks at the pros and cons of lore in MMO game worlds and points out why it can help and hurt at the same time.
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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning boasts one of the richest backdrops of any MMO game to date, providing an immeasurable wealth of races, locations, factions, and history from the Warhammer tabletop game. Decades worth of material has been published from Games Workshop creating an entire universe that can easily fit inside a virtual world and there is no question it's perfect for a game. With such rich lore an interesting question arises, how important is it for the average player? Does it make or break a gaming experience? There appear to be two sides to this coin, so let's start with the good.
I love the lore and it is part of what makes me interested in the game but I think the people who actually care for it are in the minority. I think the majority of the people who will play just want a quality game, the next group will be interested in RvR. I think it is needed though, without certain lore it just wouldn't be Warhammer! Nice write up though and well stated!
And then I heard the lore may lead to secret quests, then hell yes! As long as they stay secret, y'know, heh?
It will remain a secret for you until you look it up online. Unfortunately the internet culture of secret sharing has been with MMO's since Maggie the Jackcat. It's inevitable. The only way Mythic could deal with it would be to have spawn locations truly random or to keep quests limited to a short time period to minimize the time the spoilers are on the net. If you constantly have parameters of a quest changing in a random fashion, eventually it becomes a contest between content generation and how fast the spoiler sites can publish information.
Maybe have the quest giver spawn in random locations, and have a tier system for difficulty and quest reward. But then they'd be generic and have no connection to lore.
You make excellent points, both for and against the inclusion of lore.
Personally, I liked the game Baldur's Gate, which was one of your examples of lore inclusion into a game, and I read quest details, and things such as that.(Though I do turn on instant display when available, rather than scrolling, since I can generally read much faster than most games auto-scrolling of text.)
Also, as someone who does know my share of lore, the absence of it would be a rather large detraction from the game, in my opinion. I'm not one to RP really, but it's nice to have the world around me have meaning.
If someone is a player that just doesn't care, and skips over all text and dialog when possible, then so be it really, but for a game from the universe of Warhammer, which has such extensive lore background, the inclusion of, or absence of it, will much a far larger difference in game quality, than it would for a game with a less solid background.
Not to say that it would make or break the game necessarily, but it would most certainly have an effect on players' opinions. As an example, why have "Gortrek and Felix" if they don't mean anything. At that point, killing them is just like killing any other potentially powerful opponent, and thus loses its value.
Anyway, you do make some good points, as the larger part of the gaming community quite simply doesn't know, and a large part of them don't care, about the lore... I just think that the game would be lacking without it.
I think at the end of the day it's the lore of the game that sets it apart from every other mmo. The characters, the history, the whole context of the playing world grows and revolves from it. For people who say they don't need it or claim theres 'too much to read', why are they even bothering in the first place? But that's just my opinion.
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__________________ Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
To me it seems like an obvious point, games NEED lore. Without it, you have virtual rock'em sock'em robots. One of the things that makes or breaks a game for me is lore. I can't play without it. If I'm just doing a bunch of quests, then what the hell am I doing it for? To level? Bah, that's just annoying. I need a rich environment filled with lore that links to the current and back story in order to stay interested
In my opinion, lore gives the game the depth needed to keep me capitivated. I enjoy playing games in which my character plays a small part in a large overlying storyline. So YES!! I think lore is very important. As a fan of the warhammer and warhammer 40k table-top games, I am excited to see how EAmythic employs and adds to the lore I've come to love in an MMO.
Do We Need Lore in WAR?
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