I am playing GW2 and seeing how the living world lore is not working, because the media used is not the best for tell a story. Separating them is perhaps one of the leading causes of my disdain. I should also mention, if it isn’t obvious, that I blend story, lore, and ‘world’ together. I know you are too, and that’s why I’m excited to see what you guys come up with. I’m a fan of the passive ‘experience’ of a world because I feel like it blends both worlds. The atmosphere pierced the minds of the players without them realizing it.įorcing players to seek out the lore/story/world is just as bad as forcing them to read/watch it. Someone who never sees an orc would know the orcs were present by all of the players trading their shoulder pads and belts. Quest NPCs offering rewards for orc regalia gave people a reason to sell and trade them. The fact that they had camps nearby and were pouring out of Crushbone was obvious without someone having to tell me. In EverQuest I didn’t have to participate in any event to know that the orcs were constantly a threat to Kelethin. GW2 forced me to do dynamic events in order to feel like I was connected to what was happening in a zone I think it’s easy to look at a game that stuffs people into cutscenes and forces a story onto the players as an obvious extreme, but the other side can be just as bad. That’s good to hear! Now’days I hear devs talk about players interacting with the story and I immediately jump to the experiences I’ve had with past games. You’re correct that I can’t really elaborate on that at this point, but when I can, I will. The worry of being too close to PQs and their like is less on the money. Your closing comment comparing it to EQ’s method of conveying story is definitely on the right track.

Good stories well told–that’s what we’re after. You should neither be hit over the head by story you don’t need, nor should you have to play a guessing game as to what’s happening and who’s involved. It’s about giving the appropriate amount of context and using the best tools to do so. But if you see a woman weeping by a well, you need her to explain a bit about what’s going on and what you can do to help. If you charge into a village being burned by orcs, you probably don’t need a wall of text to know what’s happening. Rather, we’ll use whatever best fits the situation. What I was trying to get across is that we aren’t going to be limited by any single form of story delivery. Most of the reactions I’ve seen have been positive, though there were concerns that I was implying we were doing away with the ability to talk to NPCs and stuff like that. You guys have your work cut out for you, but if you can pull off an active version of the original EQ’s passive delivery of lore/story, I’m behind you guys all the way. Whether it was intentional or simply a result of what developers had at their disposal back then, the subtle infusion of feeling and almost inference-like quality to what was going on - heck, the lack of knowing in many cases - made the world all the more mysterious and worth figuring out. There wasn’t lore to be experienced, the lore was simply in the essence of the world. Yet somehow we knew that the Humans didn’t like the Dark Elves, and we knew the deities were running amok from the planes. We had very, very little story or lore being fed to us. I’m curious to hear feedback from other players who experienced games like the original EverQuest. Moorgard, I know you lurk here a lot and probably can’t say anything more on the subject, but will the majority of lore be delivered via the emergent AI?

For example, being able to follow orcs back to their home base or stop them from attacking the town to steal stuff, and the line about players being able to drive the interaction between AI and the world sounds a lot like a PQ. I do think it sounds like the lore is going to be delivered in the form of something close to Public Quests from Warhammer Online or Dynamic Events from Guild Wars 2. I am slightly concerned about the delivery, though. I think that’s a great way of saying there won’t be these annoying quests forcing me to live through a contrived story simply because the game follows that path.

Overall, I like that nothing is ‘forced’ on me. The EverQuest Next Round Table response video for the lore poll was posted today, and I want to follow up with some of my feedback.Â But first, let’s watch.

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