The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

A few days ago, Brer and I were talking about lore. He was about to drop another Lorenado upon me about… something. He’s someone who does that. A lot. So that was happening, and then we got into discussing Lore in general, and how important it is. Also, how little I care to listen to it.

Lore is boring. World-building for world-building’s sake just puts me to sleep, and I will say that with absolutely no restrictions. One of the reasons I don’t read many fantasy novels is because nothing happens because the authors are so fucking obsessed about telling you every little thing about the world they made, and I honestly don’t care. Characters, mann. It’s all about the characters.

However, during this conversation, it did occur to me how much the very extremely fleshed out lore of Warhammer 40k was enhancing my Dawn of War II experience. The fact that this world that I am murdering things in is completely fleshed out makes everything work in a cohesive way. Everything that is happening makes sense and is not pulled out of someone’s ass. Lewt drops refer to people and events, and it’s clear from the little snippets of flavor attached to their descriptions that these are probably real people with a real background in the lore. Load screens are made significantly more interesting by delivering character backgrounds as opposed to “sweet tips” for gameplay and whatnot, though there are some loading screens with that, too.
However, the reason it is so effective is because it is completely optional and unobtrusive. I don’t mind reading pure lore segments in loading screens, because I wouldn’t be doing anything during the loads anyway. The clips are short, and only take me as long to read as it takes for the level to load. I learn about the world, but I’m not forced into unescapable walls of text. The mission briefings contain some lore tidbits, but they’re more focused on the characters or on simply giving you mission info. The lore isn’t the purpose. The lore enhances, it helps, but it isn’t the point.

That’s what lore should be. Lore is created because you’re doing the amount of world-building necessary to make a living world. Real, living fantasy worlds are totally sweet. However, much like how I don’t care to see exactly how they put polygons together to make the characters in my video games, I don’t much care what happened in the past to make a world move to this point. It’s necessary to make the world believable. I’ll love lore for that. But don’t shove it in my face. Include it for people who love researching that stuff somewhere out of the way, but that’s it. You know?