Originally posted this over at /v/, but I suppose this really

pls help

When I was a kid I was more interested in making up my own worlds, but I suppose the closest I came to that when I was REALLY young were the Chronicles of Narnia books. When I found out later on that Tolkein was similar to Lewis I tried reading his books and absolutely hated them.

>>43572848
Why? Do you still hate them?

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>>43572574
>I'm making a grand video game
sure you are, honey.

>>43572898
i'll show you!!

>>43572903
that's fine, and when you're finished we'll put it right up here on the refrigerator!


the answer to your question is probably deus ex, shallow as the 'lore' is

>>43572671
This.

>>43572922
>>43572574
I should probably explain myself, more than just say 'this' because I know that kind of thing doesn't help.

I was around 12-14, and my family was looking for good games and RPGs to play. Eventually, they found Morrowind on some site, and decided to try it out. But to their despair, it wasn't multiplayer, which is what they were looking for.
But since I loved me some RPGs, I tried it out, and I was instantly pulled into this alien world, with floating jellyfish, mushroom trees, these weird things called 'sqribs' that would paralyze you, and piles and piles of books. But at the same time it was deep, it also didn't actually *care* if you read the books, and didn't care if you knew the setting's religions or not. You could just waltz through blindly and ignore anything that wasn't related to what you wanted to do.

You could wade as deep as you wanted, so to speak. So I dove the entire way in.

This probably isn't helpful either, but that's as much as I could talk about.

Morrowind. Probably the first game I discovered that had lore greatly in excess to what was necessary to deliver its main plot.

>>43572877
It's been a long time I've read either, but I liked The Hobbit over the main line trilogy since the Hobbit seemed like more of an adventure while the main line books felt like they were just trying to shove as much of the world in front of your face as possible. I also hate the trend where every single book, game, or the occasional movie tries to focus more on the world rather than the story. When there's too much work put into something that I'm not engaged with I always think that I'm stepping on a work that's not inviting me to view it, like the authors were making it solely for themselves and for nobody else to look at.

>I ask because I'm making a grand video game and would like varying opinions and differing experiences than my own
I'm afraid to say this, but if you're asking /tg/ of all people on help for writing for your game you're probably not making a very grand videogame. Unless you're a top notch programmer/artist/designer/musician chances are you're not going to get your idea noticed. Nobody in the industry will ever be interested in an "ideas" guy because everyone that works in the industry is already that with practical skills. If you just want to make a world write a book.

>>43572574
Bionicle. Do toylines count? It had its movies and comics and whatnot.

It was different to everything else at the time. What caught me was the very idea of everything being biomechanical and also magic being there, not as a separate "now we're casting the spell" thing but more of a cosmic force powering everything. Mixing futuristic robots & lasers with maori themes helped too. Despite sounding like a mess it was all really coherent and all the parts complemented each other instead of just standing there. I remember I hated generic fantasy and sci fi back then, so this seemed interesting from the start.

The characters looked really cool. Especially in the movies.

And it was Lego. I liked building things already, but now the things I built could be badass monsters and robots with magma swords and masks of power and whatnot.

>>43572996
hey he purchased his copy of RPG maker fair and square

>>43572996
lol
i am plenty skilled and have plenty of others working on this with me. this is just so different and ambitious than our other projects we aren't sure how to tackle it in a way that could appeal to anyone. this is why i have come to you asking for different experiences than my own to better understand the appeal from all sorts of angles. my opinion is not the only opinion.

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Homeworld; At face value it's extremely compact but it's such a well put together universe with a genuine flavor to it. It has that lovely balance of showing you just enough to be a solid, interesting world but much of it is only mentioned offhand or left open to conjecture and makes you huger for more.

As a sci-fi setting it's got almost everything you could want - FTL travel, space fighters and/or colossal capital ships depending on your preference, unfathomably ancient ruins from a progenitor civilization, diverse cultures & races, established economics, cybernetics, (possibly) psychic abilities in certain individuals, trans-dimensional alien beings that herald the doom of all things, etc.

>>43572960
Actually, thinking even further back, there were older games with extra lore that drew my interest.

One would be a C-64 game called Heroes of the Lance. It had names for all the characters but also short histories and name-dropping in those to various times and places. What I didn't know at the time was, this game was (of course) based on D&D Dragonlance settings, it helped that it was a pirate version so there was no box or manual to inform me. And this was published around 1988 so there was no internet to dig up extra information. I connected the dots maybe five years later when I discovered the Dragonlance setting.

Even earlier game that piqued my interest with its setting was a 1984 game, also for C64, called Lords of Midnight. That's because it also came with an audio tape that told the events leading to the start of the game (the story was also in the manual).

And even before that, there was a text adventure game called The Hobbit... I would discover the books only later.

>>43573058
futuristic travel options are so interesting

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Probably Halo was my first. I remember liking the game. Then I read the Fall of Reach and just kind of got sucked in. This book still hasn't been topped in sci-fi military for me. Fuck modern halo though.

>>43573502
Ghosts of Onyx was fucking amazing holy shit dude.

>>43572574
I really really liked Eberron when it came out. It appealed to the side of me that wanted DnD settings to be more advanced and magical. A lot of the ways magic was used made sense to me too.

>>43573502
>>43573518
This, everything you said. Halo CE was my first video game that i owned, then i read First Strike when i found it at a garage sale and it built from there, all the way up until Halo 4 left me butt-devestated. I was about seven or eight when CE came out. Basically, OP, leave hints, books, lore etc lying around, don't make it a necessity to learn it, dont shove it in our faces more than a bare minimum. Primarily, make a game thats fun and has enough replay value and bonus media for people to go exploring for a bigger picture.

Probably we're all big nerds, since the 'normies' i hate the term but it fits just enjoy and discard these things. Look at Star Wars, LotR and Halo-all massive universes that most people just scrape the top off and go find something new.

>grand video game
Make a game first and a universe second. You can have the most developed universe and trash it through shitty gameplay and decisions-look at the later Mass Effects for that. The first had average gameplay with a bunch of bugs, but the universe and the exploration were top-notch, whereas the second took the exploration away and a bunch of the universe, leading to a mediocre shooter with a decent story. Then the third happened, and we all know what that was like

>>43573502
What happened to modern Halo? I stopped caring after 3.

>>43573557
Microsoft bought it off Bungie. It polarised the fanbase, with a lot of people hating the changes they made. I personally think that they focused on the weakest parts of the setting and the series suffered for it.

>>43573557
Too much 'space magic', a series of fetch quests constituting the entire game of 4, not enough thought into storyline, shoehorned covenant because people like the original four species, plot holes aplenty, dumbing down of the setting's established physics hard light stopping a nuke, alright, if breaking established rules. Hard light made of Cortana? that made fuckall sense except to dumb it down and still left casuals confused, the list goes on. Microsoft took the most boring area of the series and expanded on it, because they cant write a storyline without constantly expanding the powerlevels-muh human souls suffering in bodies of steel, muh grimderp. It was a shit attempt at a sequel.

Single digit age... Books... A whole series... Oh hell, I can't remember the title.

The boys formed a club, and they raised money by having a western show, except two boys went Jousting, and they bought a military submarine by bidding the price down against another group of kids, and there was an automatic doughnut machine...

I'm going to hate myself until I remember...
HOMER PRICE! Homer Price and the doughnut machine. It was like hardy boys mysteries, but more outlandish oddities of life, like a city made of completely identical pre-fab houses which nobody could figure out whose was whose because the street signs weren't put up yet.

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>>43573502
Didn't you hear ? Spartans never die.

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>>43573557
Pretty much this>>43573585 and this>>43573608.
They had so much potential, but they squandered it. Halo 4 wasn't all bad, spartan ops aside, but the expanded universe suffered after 3. Major characters being killed of in ways that were absured. Halsey was turned into a supa villain and compared to Hitler. The original cast and spartans got put on the back burner for their new spartan rangers. The list goes on. Granted the forerunner lore isn't too bad and doesn't deserve a lot of the hate it is getting, but the lore in 5 campaign wise is just horrible.
>>43573638
I think I actually teared up and got a bad case of the feels after finishing that. Kurt was based. All of the old spartans were based as fuck.

>>43573650
Halo 4 was underwhelming for me. I went in optimistic and came out just kinda shrugging. I thought it was alright at least compared to the Traviss books that built up to it while one was just dumbfounded why Chief gave so many shits about Cortana when based Sam is dead and he thought Blue Team was dead.I kinda agree but I thought maybe they'd have Halo 5 be a Blue Team reunion and Chief can function as a good killing machine again to hunt down Didact. Which I kinda got that with Escalation and Blue Team was just underwhelming. They were just kinda there and Chief still has his boner for Cortana. Osiris is underwhelming, the only SIV I like is Buck and at this point I'm just waiting to see how the Reclaimer trilogy ends.

>>43573009
This was my first too. I was around since the line first launched to boot, so I got to watch it evolve into the glorious clusterfuck it became by 2010.

>>43572574
Star fuckin' Trek baby

>>43572574
I remember reading a bunch of Dragonlance novels in middle school, which eventually got me into tabletop games in general.

I think what made it nice from a lore perspective is that all the stories tended to focus on a lot of different characters from different places, rather than just having it in one big exposition or index. If the book focused on a dwarven character, you got insight into dwarven culture. If they were a wizard, you found out more about how wizards were organized.

It was similar with events too, as the books often referenced the history of the world, along with having stories set depicting those events to learn more about them.

To apply that to a video game would pretty much be 'show, don't tell'. It's one thing to ask a wizard about the magic system in the world and get a monologue. It's another thing to play as a wizard and have this information showed off or mentioned as it becomes relevant.

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The Hobbit or Morrowind (>>43572950 and >>3572960 nailed it).

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>>43572574
>no Talos
>This is what the Thalmor actually believes

thank you for your answers

>>43572574
Keys to the Kingdom and Abhorsen series, Garth Nix. Both take place in these very non-standard fantasy worlds, with all sorts of weird things going on. Keys to the kingdom's description of the universe as a House built atop Nothing, with the female Architect gone missing and the enactors of her will corrupted was just...neat. And then Abhorsen had necromancy via bells.

>>43573009
>and also magic being there

Then the writer came forward to point out that there was never any real magic, it was all tech.

>>43572574
I love the universe of Halo more than anything. Who knew an FPS had such an extensive and rich setting?

6 years old when I first played Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

7-9 years old when I played Warcraft II

14 years old when I played Warcraft III

Now I know that the lore has become a joke thanks to World of Warcraft, but holy shit there was some quality stuff here. The guys that wrote the instruction manual lore for those games alone are better than any/all writers they have at Blizzard these days.

Then after that I got heavy into Middle Earth, Morrowind and Wheel of Time in high school. The Middle Earth shit particularly just surprises me how three works (Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion) could hold so much lore. In Morrowind I did the whole pilgrimage thing, read the book, etc. and while I didn't really put together that it's called CHIM I figured out what it was and damn that I think along with defeating Hircine in his hunter form without abusing spells and the spellmaking system in general that were among the most rewarding things in that game.

Now while I kinda don't like Wheel of Time today cuz it's pretty terribly written looking back some of that lore was some crazy epic shit, too and it's easier to digest form helped me digest Middle Earth and Morrowind's more abstract stuff.

>>43572996
>I also hate the trend where every single book, game, or the occasional movie tries to focus more on the world rather than the story
There's no such trend.

>>43572574
Probably Morrowind. What made it enjoyable and immersive was the way everything could be seen as very simple, common RPG style, and the story and world still worked, but if you wanted to you could look deeper and find more. If I'd been forced to understand the more complicated and hidden stuff to advance in the game it wouldn't have worked.. You need to make it work on many levels of complexity, because people don't always want to put in much effort on understanding every little thing. Not to mention the veiled complexity was much more fun to discover.

I remember reading a series of books called "The Seventh Tower" or something like that in third grade. I can't find the books anywhere, but remember the main charcter had a magic shadow that was like an extension of himself, but it thought and could act on it's own, And could interact with the world around it. I barely remember the world, but I remember it and its customs fascinating me

>>43572574
>first
Nope.

Specifically first game though... I guess that would be Planescape Torment. I didn't care much for Dune, BG1/2/ToB or Warcraft.

>>43573058
I usually get drawn in by the game's setting abd story telling. That said, the first game that really got me hooked was FF7. It was my first JRPG I was around 12 at the time. I didn't even have access to the net back then. It just felt so new and fresh to me, with a host of interesting characters with their own stories.

Homeworld though wasbone of the first games that got me scouring any and all sources for additional information on the setting. That and starcraft.

These days though, I mostly play stuff like KSP or from the depths. I'm not sure what put me off from playing RPG's. Though from time to time, I still play arcanum or Fallout 1,2 or new vegas.

>>43573548
On a tangent

Funny thing about starwars. My favorite aspect of it were the clone troopers, specifically the null-arcs. I tried finding materialnfor them, but all I got were comicbook clippings. Any direction will be much appriciated.

>>43579451
Forgot to add, suikoden 4. That game with all the side games you could play was amazing at the time. I felt bad when I had to finish it.

>>43572574
Probably Star Wars

>>43579881
>suikoden 4
Really? That's generally regarded as worst of all the mainline Suikos.

Star Wars, especially with the KOTOR games, expanded universe and wookiepedia. Around when I was 14-15.

Yeah, I played Warcraft and Final Fantasy and stuff before that but I didn't really read about their lore for hours and hours like with Star Wars.

>>43578216
The ebooks are at bokzz, if you are into that.

Apparently they are by Garth Nix, which is a pretty well known author, usually for his Sabriel series though.

I gotta say Redwall was the first thing. I just started reading it until I read 'em all.

I picked up a used copy of Fire Emblem 7 in 2004, when I was 14.

It was the first time I saw the characters talking to the player behind the screen, even though I knew I was merely playing a faceless protagonist with the green icon of an NPC. I never let a recruitable character die after finding out they can talk to me after deployment but before the chapter began proper.

From there, I began to look into the logistics of Elibe: how secret shops would stay in business, why a Silver Card shown anywhere would get you a 50% discount, how a Light Rune would deny anyone from crossing its area but ignore projectiles.

It sparked my desire to speculate, and to write.

>>43580811
It was the only one I had access to. Only a few of my friends had Gaming consoles and even fewer of them had any interest in RPG's. It was post 2000 when I found copies of the other games. Sadly my PS was history by then.

The part I enjoyed about it the most were the Mini Games

>>43582114
>>43580811

Lol, Miss remembered, I Played suikoden 2, The one with the bright shield and hungry friend

Everquest 2. It seemed like generic fantasy at the time but the promotional art really did wonders with actually pulling me into a world of adventure. I played D&D for a while before that, but Everquest appealed to me for whatever reason.

>>43582182
Ah, Suikoden 2. Luca Blight, holy shit. Now THAT was a boss battle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9bV9Lx5SFI

>>43582666
I remember going into that battle under prepared. After retrying several times. I left viktor and flick alone and set all my strongest allies on the hero's party.

I think I might replay the game.

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Deltora Quest.

Book series was absolutely incredible to my young mind, though as an adult any attempts to reread result in me getting through the book in like an hour. They seemed a lot longer as a kid.

There's really interesting characters all over the place that come back time and again, and pretty much everything has interesting hints at what's going to happen. I can particularly recall in book 2 a bit where this old couple were speaking in reverse, but it wasn't clear, so then later when it was revealed that they were monsters in disguise, you could read back and discover that in the scene in which they were supposedly saving the protagonists, they were saying "Quick, fresh meat in the trap, get it out" to each other.

Apparently there's a cartoon of it. Never seen it though.

>>43586299
HOLY SHIT YEAH DELTORA QUEST

thinking way back on it now that may have been my own start to enjoying this kind of storytelling

>>43586299
And here I thought I was the only person that read those books.