Sam Winkler @ThatSamWinkler Follow Dark Souls revolutionized games, in the sense that instead of a story now you can just have some guy with a big SWord named Myrmidon of Loss who gasps “Zanzibart… forgive me” when he dies and then twenty YouTubers will make an hour long video about how deep your lore is
LOL
Yup.
I’ve never understood people getting into the lore of Souls games. It’s just that cool, grimy 80’s aesthetic and weirdly named characters.
I think it’s like piecing together a mystery, which can be interesting as you find clues and tidbits. Most of the lore is hidden in the item descriptions and explains the details of your environment. I didn’t really pay attention to it much at first, most things I just reacted to like “that’s fucked up”, but it was kind of neat when I started to realize how some of these enemies had a history within the world. Then I started rereading some of those descriptions, and what was a jumbled mess started making more sense. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle come together.
That said, there’s still a lot I don’t get and I still go WTF… ok time for unga bunga
I’m over here just enjoying the memes, like the frog down in the red lake. That was a good one.
Oh basilisk of rot, what is your wisdom?
It’s 100% this and I absolutely love the story-telling method of FromSoft’s soulsborne games, makes you work for it instead of just handing it to you.
If you want to dive into the lore, its there, in the item descriptions, and that NPC that’s absolutely no-where near the area you are currently in that you’d have to backtrack to in order to hear the the new snippet of conversation before they disappear.
Is there something to actually piece together, or is it just Lost all over again?
There is something, but the top-level answers that would involve explaining the nature of and relationships between some of the forces involved in the setting are deliberately obscured. By paying attention to descriptions and dialog it is possible to learn specifics about a lot of characters and events, but you have to speculate a bit about cosmological questions.
Ah that seems pretty cool then, actually.
I love games that don’t just spoon-feed you the story and the world, and in which you have to work to actually piece things together. Cyan’s absolutely fucking fantastic although ultimately a bit ill-fated (suits made stupid decisions, news at 11) MMORPGish Uru was very much like that: eg. when new content was released, they wouldn’t tell players what it was, and they’d have to collaborate to explore and understand the world to find it out. There was also no way to tell players and NPCs apart, and there were some NPCs (human-operated iirc and that’d make the most sense because chat, but it’s been a while) that folks thought were players. This meant that players really had to work together to get to the bottom of what’s going on and we were actually discovering the game’s world together – it was absolutely one of the best gaming-related experiences of my life and I’ve been doing this shit since Space Invaders.
The sense of community was just something else, and I really miss that feeling of discovery, of having to pay much more attention to the world.
It is like lost. Aka community outsourced lore.
I like their method of storytelling because it’s fairly unique in the gaming landscape (at least, the landscape of the last 20+ years). 95% of stories in other games use the very traditional, straight-forward format with a ton of exposition and cinematic cutscenes and can be easily understood by anyone at an elementary reading level. I don’t say that with disdain and there is nothing at all wrong with that method, as long as it is interesting and well-written, but it’s refreshing to see them doing something different. I also like it because it’s sort of the best of both worlds; you can either completely disregard the story if you’re not interested (which is easy to do because Souls games don’t have much in the way of forced exposition) and it won’t really hinder your enjoyment of the game (if you’re primarily interested in the action elements), or you can dive in deep with all of the discussion and theorizing in the community and the abundance of lore videos. It sort of reminds me of gaming in the early days. For example, when the original Legend of Zelda came out, one of my favorite aspects of that and similar games was the hours of discussion and speculation me and my friends would have as the game was exceedingly sparse on details. I think FromSoft does this intentionally as a nod to early game design and the fact that it is inherently more engaging (again, for those that are interested) as obviated by the wealth of discourse you find in any Souls game forum. Go look at God of War or Last of Us forums, for example. There is some, but not nearly as much story or lore discussion in those communities because everything is provided to the gamer and it is all clearly laid out (though I do still enjoy those respective stories for what they are, also).
It’s really just a matter of preference and play style. My SO loves their games and enjoys watching tons of lore deep dive videos on YouTube, whereas I just run around killin and dyin.