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
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.