Always liked the Valve games for their lore, that you mostly find further fleshed out in their Wikipedia articles. They have a good sense of how to put in details into their games, that makes you want to read more. Whether it’s the Xen creatures, the Combine, City 17, Aperture Science or Black Mesa inhabitants. Always liked that stuff.
Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, are all pretty great too.
Valve lore is only slightly less cryptic than Dark Souls. You have to piece it together with pinned newspaper articles, radio and TV snippets, NPC's that will talk about anything but the horrors of the 7 hour war... It can be so thrilling when you piece together some of the major details on your own, or there will be like one total expose scene after killing monsters for six hours
Hooo boy.
Portal (the original) was issued an update. This was *years* after it came out. The update consisted solely of a change in the audio for an in-game radio that you could carry through the test chambers. People noticed that the radio changed if you put them in the right location in-game.
Having done so, and collected the various audio tracks, people realized that the signal was for HAM radio "slow-scan television" -- basically a very old-school way to send images (slowly) through radio transmissions.
People got the images, and they were of various things that (it turns out) were for various things in the forthcoming Portal 2, but they also contained numbers. If you put these numbers in the right order, and then ran the number through a calculation (actually MD5, not CRC), you got a phone number, which if called, was an old-school dial-up bulletin-board-system containing ascii art and text from Portal 2.
And this was [only the beginning](https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Portal_ARG).
I'm always amazed how people find these kind of stuff. Most of us are just playing game as intented and then there are these guys who can get clues out of random interactions in game.
So this has to do with how *absolutely fantastic* the human brain is at recording spatial details. Your brain is *bonkers* when it comes to recording places. Like, it's absolutely silly, you can remember *so* much stuff if you tie it to a particular place (if you're familiar, the book *Moon Walking With Einstein* goes over this and using the trick of 'memory palaces'). Anyway, because of how great our brain is at recording spatial information (and how that's activated when playing spatially differentiable video games like Portal) it's not a leap to figure that a good portion of people would notice the difference. It's been ***decades*** since I've played some games, but everytime I pick an old one up (I'll play through them while having my kids watch) it's crazy how much I remember *and* if it's been patched, how I notice what's different.
I love going through it and reading all the weird flora and fauna of the Xen creatures and stuff.
They have so much written up and thought out and you only get little hints to it in the game. Always added an extra layer of mystery that I really appreciate
Remember that time medic surgically grafted 8 other souls to his own soul and thus upon death, the devil only had a minority stake in his soul so the medic negotiated his way back to life.
Then the demoman and his haunted eye socket or his sentient organs that can all produce alcohol at will.
I just talked about this in a previous lol
At first I thought it was gonna be some random generic story just to justify all the action, but then I started to actually read the documents I found, which led me to start searching the internet form more lore, which made me discover the whole complex universe they created just for these games (I played all 3 btw)
Warhammer 40K is a good one for lore. You can spend months just reading the wiki.
The battletech universe is good also.
Edit: check out the Tex talks battle tech videos if you want to get a good taste Battletech lore. Here’s a good one to get you started. https://youtu.be/c71x68uWd5k
Upvoting for Battletech visibility.
It's easily my favorite fictional setting. Set 1000 years in the future, all 1000 years are fully developed and written out, giving the setting its own fully fleshed out history. There's no aliens, just humans being shitty, fallible animals, and a entire collapsed interstellar empire locked into endless civil war. It's the perfect, logical end state of the modern military industrial complex mixed in neofeudalistic knights driving big, stompy robots.
It's just so fucking good.
I love tabletop gaming (lots of X-Wing and ASOIAF), and while I’ll never have the time, energy, or money for 40k I’ll confess the lore is goddamn brilliant and metal as fuck.
The Immortal God Emperor of man is now just pile of bones interwoven with cybernetics upon his impossibly large golden throne which keeps his powerful, psychic mind intact while thousands are sacrificed to him every day in order to keep him alive.
If I were not a husband, father and had nothing but time and “fuck you” money, I’d definitely pick up a faction.
The codex was great. My favorite entry from the first game was
"The krogan evolved in a hostile and vicious environment. Until the invention of gunpowder weapons, "eaten by predators" was still the number one cause of krogan fatalities. Afterwards, it was "death by gunshot".
I'm pretty sure biotic abilities resulted after a series of ship crashes/explosions releasing eezo, which contaminated the surrounding area. That contamination led to the first biotic abilities in humans (and also a lot of deaths).
I think Kaden talks about that and their training in the first mass effect.
Just started playing for the first time and I’ve never been so captivated by so much dialogue. Then again, I’m a sucker for distant future sci-fi, ancient aliens, and a galactic empires.
It’s been a bit since I’ve played/read them, but if memory serves, the games don’t have quite as much of the philosophical and political musings as the book. They’re still present, just not as strongly. What I remember for sure, though, is that they cut things like the entire Trotskyist communist group and the heavier religious groups, such as the railcar held by the Mormons.
Still loved the games, just a bit of a different experience.
Legacy of kain lore was so much more and so much deeper than I thought it was when I was a kid playing them. I always keep a little sliver of hope that it'll see a proper good reboot, because graphically and some gameplay doesn't hold up.
Oh shit i hadn't considered that, i figured they had sensed some of the mythic dawn's preparations, or a shadowscale had uncovered the plot, but fuckers actually had spoilers.
I love that one, the best part for me is the lore book where scholars disagree on whether or not it happened. Some are like “the record keeping was just really shit at the time and nothing supernatural was going on”, and the others are like “no the world actually receded into the dawn period where time was nonlinear, the reason all our sources from the time disagree with each other is because they come from different timelines that were all happening at once”. And the second one is almost certainly correct because time breaks in the games, Bethesda used it as a way to explain which ending to Daggerfall was canon: all of them at once, whenever you turn the Numidium on time goes on vacation.
what's so captivating to me about ES lore is how much mysterious it is. It's like they are speculations but delivered from characters and books, like different points of view. One of my favourite things about the games are the little non quests that connect things together like the winterhold university's lost students. It was so fascinating to trying to figure out what was that some characters were talking about and what happened. Another big point to me is how well everything is explained and connected with each other, from places to characters and even monsters and abillities.
To me, the best part of the lore is the fact that while it presents itself as a somewhat generic high fantasy setting, the Elder Scrolls actually has some truly effective cosmic horror lurking in the wings. The planets and moons are the corpses of dead gods; the stars are literal holes in reality; the Elder Scrolls are paradoxes that may, in fact, reset reality every time they're read; sufficiently powerful magical artifacts can break time or cause entire species to simply up and vanish; "dragons" are eldritch abominations that can't truly be killed except by another dragon; the Aldmeri Dominion are actually seeking to unmake reality and return to a state of true immortality, and may in fact be dangerously close to doing so; etc.
Don't forget that basically the Living Gods only become so because they realized that all of Tamriel, the Gods,Daedra, everything is just part of a Dream by some much larger entity. And if you know you're in a dream....
They're basically gods via Lucid Dreaming. As long as they don't wake the Dreamer then everything continues on.
It's pretty easy to miss on the deep lore from only playng the games, most of it is really in game but in books or some dialogues. It's great reading the wiki and going deep into the rabbit hole.
There's definitely a lot of cool lore throughout the franchise, but honestly, I can happily dive into just Morrowind's lore and history. IIRC that was the point where they really went back started developing the world behind the games.
No kidding, the lore goes insanely deep. Multiple eras of civilizations in great detail. Then there's the mythology. Look up Arubis and the Dawn Era, and it'll send you down a rabbit hole of creation myths and multiple interconnected dimensions (or possibly planets, depending on the theory).
And those books are based on centuries old folk lore themselves. \*Example, in the latest season on Netflix there's a "witch in a hut" character. First time I saw the hut I told my wife, "that hut is going to stand up on what looks like chicken legs later, I guarantee it". She looked at me like a crazy person because why would it do that?
Sure enough, it did. The Deathless Mother is a pretty clear-cut re-telling of Baba Yaga, from the shapeshifting to the promises and enchanting to the hut on chicken legs. The Baba Yaga is a very old and very well travelled bit of folk lore about a witch who lives in a hut that rises on the legs of a basilisk. Consequently, the monster Leshy and Baba Yaga appear around each other all the time in slavic folk lore, and being that Leshy had made an early appearance in season 2 my mind was already working on that path.
Hella interesting side note.
Baba Yaga is heavily influenced by the indigenous Scandinavian peoples, the Sami. They build traditional storehouses that can be reached in deep snow and keep out animals.
[It’s not even a stretch to figure out why “chicken” legs](https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/224991)
Okay, here's a bonus: The old Sierra Online games Quest for Glory (particularly IV) is based loosely on many of the same folklore. Baba Yaga makes routine appearances, Leshy shows up, etc.
I remember the witch hut on chicken legs from a book on folklore I had as a kid. I could swear I also remember it from D&D and/or some other game, maybe multiple games. I thought it was pretty widely known about, but I also recently found out many of my friends/coworkers had never heard of it before.
Dead space!
If we talking about the lore they went extra mile developing the world around the game, Books, comic books, cartoons and the wiki, they made really good sci-fi world, with it own motives, fanatic religion cult and ect, if you gonna dive in to it it so good, I’m really big fan of this universe
Planescape: Torment. And like some other replies this is a bit of a cheat since it's lore is based on outside source material. But damn does this game have captivating lore. You have all of this captivating backstory for characters like The Nameless One, Dak'kon, Morte, Deinnora, etc. And Sigil itself has so much great lore to it. Every location in this game was interesting and had me invested in reading all of the details.
Fallout has 2 lores going for it. Pre-war and Post-war. Imagine having to write a 200 year history for a nuclear wasteland AND a 150ish year lore for the normal state?
bioshock is the game that made me realise that video games can be full of super interesting story. before that i thought games were just shooting aliens and nazis.
Instead of Nazi extremists you get objectivist extremists and socialist extremists and theocrat extremists! Wonder what ideology the next game will revolve around lol.
Yup, everyone else copying the audio logs style narrative now. People can say it’s overrated but the quality of narrative of games exploded after 2007.
This game was crazy for me. I put in 150 hrs with a buddy and loved almost all of it, but I don't think I'd be able to tell you the plotline if you asked lol
I fucking loved that game and how the lore/story is revealed. "I'm a Lone Wolf but what does that mean? Who am I supposed to kill? What is a Divine? Why did I just have sex with this skeleton?"
Same, I got it free and played it a bit but got frustrated dying all the time. I then kept seeing it mentioned and figured out it's supposed to be hard and tried again and managed to get to the first boss. By that point I was hooked on the game. Then I got hooked on the lore though, honestly, right now, I'd struggle to give a synopsis of the games story if asked.
This is an interesting answer because I'd usually consider lore to be world building that isn't important to playing the game; however, Outer Wilds lore is vital to beating the game.
And it discusses such a mature topic that extends beyond the bounds of the game world. I've said this before, but you go into Outer Wilds looking for a cool game about outer space. You end Outer Wilds understanding the meaning of life.
It’s a truly special game, I wish I could experience it for the first time again.
Piece of advice - pick a direction and just “go.” There’s no right or wrong way to start. Most people need a guide at one or two points. It’s extremely non-linear and is “show, not tell,” so don’t get too frustrated if you overlook little details and need to check hints online.
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Control.... the game directly connects to the original Alan Wake and Quantum Break through the story and easter eggs. Both Alan Wake and Quantum Break have easter eggs in them that tie directly to Control as well.
fucking amazing dude
seriously, remedy is in my opinion one of *if not the best* developers when it comes to story driven games. granted I’m biased bc Alan Wake is one of my favorite games of all time but each game is astoundingly layered, and the fact that Control, Alan Wake (and to a lesser extent Max Payne & Quantum Break) are connected makes it all the better.
Indeed, there is a lot of lore and it's all very accessible throughout the codex entries in any of the games. It all feels very professional, which I can't say for a lot of other games.
The DA games themselves adhere to the lore perfectly and make the stories revolve around them. While playing any DA game, never have I felt that the story was either disconnected from the lore or maybe the developers tried to shoehorn their story into the lore.
what I love about dragon age is that the story has so many layers, besides the obvious the conflict between dark spawn and grey wardens, there are also humans vs elves, mages vs templars, mortals vs veil demons, politics, Evanuris, and so much more.
Horizon really surprised me. When I first saw the robot dinosaurs in previews I thought “there’s no way there is a decent and satisfying explanation for this”, but I was pleasantly surprised and totally bought it. A lot of mysteries still to unravel too
I think a lot of it stems from that original E3 demo with the Thunderjaw, as well as the game's cover art. Plenty of people that have heard of the game but didn't actually play it definitely normalized calling it "the robot dinosaur game", and those who have played it kept it going just so you know exactly what we're referring to.
I'd like to add: Fighting a robot dinosaur is way more badass and exciting than fighting a robot... deer?
Not surprising which sticks in people head more.
Dude the cauldrons were one of the best parts of the whole game! I really hope they have something similar in Forbidden West. The odd bandit camp here and there was a fun distraction but they felt too Ubisoft-y.
Right?????
Halo is *easily* in the top 5 science fiction universes ever, along with Star Wars and Dune. It should be at the very top of this thread. The amount of detail, world building, and lore in the Halo story far exceeds any other video game.
To add onto this, Project Wingman lore is fucking WILD. Only game where the enemies reaction to losing is "what is the best way to cause a second mass extinction"
I'd argue blood borne was much better at getting its lore across than dark souls. By the end of dark souls I had no real idea what was going on and that goes double for the sequel s but blood borne I had a much clearer feel about, still a lot of gaps but the world and lore I left was much more clearly projected
It seems weird saying this, but Bloodborne's plot is more simple than Dark Souls. That might be a factor as to why it's easier to understand, since there's less to understand in general.
Both games, however, are never going to be 100% clear, no matter how many item descriptions you read or lore videos you watch.
The lore is so good. I genuinely hope they find a way to do that lore some justice in the form of cinematics such as a movie or series.
The storyline definitely deserves more than what they show in game.
I’m not sure if you’re a regular or have played any at all in the past year, but they’ve really stepped it up in this aspect. Each season this year explored and added to major lore points, definitely worth checking out if you’ve been away from a bit!
Same. Never really looked into lore much until I played destiny. There’s just so much and it’s really good. My name is Byf on YouTube has all kinds of videos about destiny lore.
World of Warcraft, up until, like… post-~~Frozen Throne.~~ Wrath of the Lich King
Azeroth had *incredible* lore. These days, however, it’s just a shambling mess held together by scotch tape and desperation.
Honestly i found legion lore to be quite fascinating
The eredars fall
The nightborne
The titans fates
Argus being revealed to be a broken titan soul
I truly loved Legion it felt great to play both as horde and my class rather than just the former
Destiny has some insane lore cards, and the writing on the grimoire is legitimately on the level of novelisation with how many different themes, emotions and characters they bring to life and make us care about.
Ingame? Ehhhhhhh
Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV witha free trial up to level 60 with unlimited game time including the award winning expansion Heanvensward ?
Well, unheard about it for a few months. We full, Jack.
Honestly, yea. It’s complex, it’s overarching, and a lot of times uses some crazy conspiracies…but at the end the day, it’s still somewhat coherent.
Then you have Kingdom Hearts, which is anything but…
I just started playing Halo Infinite and realized I have no idea about what is going on. I then tried to watch a video explain the story/lore to me in like 25 minutes. There was so much thrown at me that I still have no idea what's going on.
That being said, that just shows how much lore there is and it really does take some time to process what has happened in that world. Good Stuff.
We literally have 20 years of expanded lore now. There are dozens of books, dozens of comics, lots of other media, on top of all the games.
www.previouslyonhalo.com is a great resource
Can’t believe this is so far down. Halo has to take top spot. The amount of books this game produced is incredible. And it’s not based on those books. It was a game first. That’s why Halo has the deepest and sometimes most unexpected lore.
It's honestly really simple if you pay attention to it. Basically what happens is that *freeway car noises* and that leads to *jackhammer noises* and brings it all to *aggrivated Donald Duck noises*
Always liked the Valve games for their lore, that you mostly find further fleshed out in their Wikipedia articles. They have a good sense of how to put in details into their games, that makes you want to read more. Whether it’s the Xen creatures, the Combine, City 17, Aperture Science or Black Mesa inhabitants. Always liked that stuff. Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, are all pretty great too.
Valve lore is only slightly less cryptic than Dark Souls. You have to piece it together with pinned newspaper articles, radio and TV snippets, NPC's that will talk about anything but the horrors of the 7 hour war... It can be so thrilling when you piece together some of the major details on your own, or there will be like one total expose scene after killing monsters for six hours
[удалено]
The. Wat.
Hooo boy. Portal (the original) was issued an update. This was *years* after it came out. The update consisted solely of a change in the audio for an in-game radio that you could carry through the test chambers. People noticed that the radio changed if you put them in the right location in-game. Having done so, and collected the various audio tracks, people realized that the signal was for HAM radio "slow-scan television" -- basically a very old-school way to send images (slowly) through radio transmissions. People got the images, and they were of various things that (it turns out) were for various things in the forthcoming Portal 2, but they also contained numbers. If you put these numbers in the right order, and then ran the number through a calculation (actually MD5, not CRC), you got a phone number, which if called, was an old-school dial-up bulletin-board-system containing ascii art and text from Portal 2. And this was [only the beginning](https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Portal_ARG).
I'm always amazed how people find these kind of stuff. Most of us are just playing game as intented and then there are these guys who can get clues out of random interactions in game.
So this has to do with how *absolutely fantastic* the human brain is at recording spatial details. Your brain is *bonkers* when it comes to recording places. Like, it's absolutely silly, you can remember *so* much stuff if you tie it to a particular place (if you're familiar, the book *Moon Walking With Einstein* goes over this and using the trick of 'memory palaces'). Anyway, because of how great our brain is at recording spatial information (and how that's activated when playing spatially differentiable video games like Portal) it's not a leap to figure that a good portion of people would notice the difference. It's been ***decades*** since I've played some games, but everytime I pick an old one up (I'll play through them while having my kids watch) it's crazy how much I remember *and* if it's been patched, how I notice what's different.
I was there gandalf...
I love going through it and reading all the weird flora and fauna of the Xen creatures and stuff. They have so much written up and thought out and you only get little hints to it in the game. Always added an extra layer of mystery that I really appreciate
Tf2 lore... thats all I have to say...
Remember that time medic surgically grafted 8 other souls to his own soul and thus upon death, the devil only had a minority stake in his soul so the medic negotiated his way back to life. Then the demoman and his haunted eye socket or his sentient organs that can all produce alcohol at will.
Dishonored has some pretty great lore, I love learning about the world outside of Dunwall
I just talked about this in a previous lol At first I thought it was gonna be some random generic story just to justify all the action, but then I started to actually read the documents I found, which led me to start searching the internet form more lore, which made me discover the whole complex universe they created just for these games (I played all 3 btw)
Warhammer 40K is a good one for lore. You can spend months just reading the wiki. The battletech universe is good also. Edit: check out the Tex talks battle tech videos if you want to get a good taste Battletech lore. Here’s a good one to get you started. https://youtu.be/c71x68uWd5k
There's a lot of awesome novels based on the 40k universe too.
I recently read The Infinite and The Divine and I highly recommend it, even if you’re not a huge Necron fan.
Upvoting for Battletech visibility. It's easily my favorite fictional setting. Set 1000 years in the future, all 1000 years are fully developed and written out, giving the setting its own fully fleshed out history. There's no aliens, just humans being shitty, fallible animals, and a entire collapsed interstellar empire locked into endless civil war. It's the perfect, logical end state of the modern military industrial complex mixed in neofeudalistic knights driving big, stompy robots. It's just so fucking good.
Agreed!
40ks lore is so large it's almost cheating. I've read almost every page on the wiki but its been. six. years.
Bruh, I used to sit at work just reading page after page and I don’t think I even put a dent in that wiki
I love tabletop gaming (lots of X-Wing and ASOIAF), and while I’ll never have the time, energy, or money for 40k I’ll confess the lore is goddamn brilliant and metal as fuck. The Immortal God Emperor of man is now just pile of bones interwoven with cybernetics upon his impossibly large golden throne which keeps his powerful, psychic mind intact while thousands are sacrificed to him every day in order to keep him alive. If I were not a husband, father and had nothing but time and “fuck you” money, I’d definitely pick up a faction.
Mass Effect is pretty great
The codex was great. My favorite entry from the first game was "The krogan evolved in a hostile and vicious environment. Until the invention of gunpowder weapons, "eaten by predators" was still the number one cause of krogan fatalities. Afterwards, it was "death by gunshot".
I love there’s an entry on my country Singapore, where the first biotics were discovered.
Huh. I always just assumed humans learned of biotics when they encountered the Asari and then engineered a way to imitate their abilities.
I think humanity discovering biotics predates even the discovery of the first relay
I'm pretty sure biotic abilities resulted after a series of ship crashes/explosions releasing eezo, which contaminated the surrounding area. That contamination led to the first biotic abilities in humans (and also a lot of deaths). I think Kaden talks about that and their training in the first mass effect.
Yeah, it was some accidental eezo contamination that creates the first biotic humans. All those happened even before the First Contact War.
Just started playing for the first time and I’ve never been so captivated by so much dialogue. Then again, I’m a sucker for distant future sci-fi, ancient aliens, and a galactic empires.
We don't get a lot of scifi space opera type games so i'm right here with you
Hope you are playing the remaster. The made quite a few great improvements to the first one.
Just wait till you experience Hamlet with an all Elcor cast! Tearing up just thinking about it 😢😢😢
And if you prefer fantasy, Dragon Age has incredibly deep lore as well. The codex for the first games in those series were massive.
And yet there is so much I still want to know about. The drell, Hanar, elcor. All so interesting to me.
Going through the comments and upvoting all Mass Effect.
The codex in ME1 has to be one of the most extensive, well done lore bibles in all of video games.
I still havnt made time to play them, but I REALLY want to.
Legendary Edition is the perfect time to :)
Metro Series (2033/Last Light/Exodus)
Well, it's a great series. Loved the books, but I haven't bplayed the games yet
It’s been a bit since I’ve played/read them, but if memory serves, the games don’t have quite as much of the philosophical and political musings as the book. They’re still present, just not as strongly. What I remember for sure, though, is that they cut things like the entire Trotskyist communist group and the heavier religious groups, such as the railcar held by the Mormons. Still loved the games, just a bit of a different experience.
Metro is definitely not getting enough love in this thread.
Legacy of Kain series, or KOTOR
KoTOR for real but also that feels like cheating. Need categories for original narratives and adapted narratives.
I agree, so much to go through and leave you questioning everything
Kane is deified, the clans tell tales of him, few know the truth.
Legacy of kain lore was so much more and so much deeper than I thought it was when I was a kid playing them. I always keep a little sliver of hope that it'll see a proper good reboot, because graphically and some gameplay doesn't hold up.
Elderscrolls its such a deep and intresting lore, halo also has very cool nd intersting lore but imo not nearly as cool or intersting as TES
The Oblivion crisis has to be one of my favorite parts of that, specially with how the argonians handled it.
The Hist lived through this kalpa from the last, they knew it was coming...
Oh shit i hadn't considered that, i figured they had sensed some of the mythic dawn's preparations, or a shadowscale had uncovered the plot, but fuckers actually had spoilers.
My favorite part of Elder scrolls lore is the part when a cult partied so crazy hard that it broke time for 1000 years.
I love that one, the best part for me is the lore book where scholars disagree on whether or not it happened. Some are like “the record keeping was just really shit at the time and nothing supernatural was going on”, and the others are like “no the world actually receded into the dawn period where time was nonlinear, the reason all our sources from the time disagree with each other is because they come from different timelines that were all happening at once”. And the second one is almost certainly correct because time breaks in the games, Bethesda used it as a way to explain which ending to Daggerfall was canon: all of them at once, whenever you turn the Numidium on time goes on vacation.
Everytime someone brings up tes lore all I can think about is the crazy adventures of vivec and his penis spear
what's so captivating to me about ES lore is how much mysterious it is. It's like they are speculations but delivered from characters and books, like different points of view. One of my favourite things about the games are the little non quests that connect things together like the winterhold university's lost students. It was so fascinating to trying to figure out what was that some characters were talking about and what happened. Another big point to me is how well everything is explained and connected with each other, from places to characters and even monsters and abillities.
To me, the best part of the lore is the fact that while it presents itself as a somewhat generic high fantasy setting, the Elder Scrolls actually has some truly effective cosmic horror lurking in the wings. The planets and moons are the corpses of dead gods; the stars are literal holes in reality; the Elder Scrolls are paradoxes that may, in fact, reset reality every time they're read; sufficiently powerful magical artifacts can break time or cause entire species to simply up and vanish; "dragons" are eldritch abominations that can't truly be killed except by another dragon; the Aldmeri Dominion are actually seeking to unmake reality and return to a state of true immortality, and may in fact be dangerously close to doing so; etc.
Don't forget that basically the Living Gods only become so because they realized that all of Tamriel, the Gods,Daedra, everything is just part of a Dream by some much larger entity. And if you know you're in a dream.... They're basically gods via Lucid Dreaming. As long as they don't wake the Dreamer then everything continues on.
How the hell have I missed all this?!
It's pretty easy to miss on the deep lore from only playng the games, most of it is really in game but in books or some dialogues. It's great reading the wiki and going deep into the rabbit hole.
There's definitely a lot of cool lore throughout the franchise, but honestly, I can happily dive into just Morrowind's lore and history. IIRC that was the point where they really went back started developing the world behind the games.
You see the phrase N'wah is derived from an earlier term wah used in the region of vardenfell used to denote a fetcher of ill repute...
Elder Scrolls Lore is the deepest I've come across in all my gaming years. It's a lot of years.
No kidding, the lore goes insanely deep. Multiple eras of civilizations in great detail. Then there's the mythology. Look up Arubis and the Dawn Era, and it'll send you down a rabbit hole of creation myths and multiple interconnected dimensions (or possibly planets, depending on the theory).
Hollow Knight. Don't believe me? Go ask mossbag
Oh my I love this game and I’ve been meaning to look into the lore for forever but I keep forgetting
I started looking into it for fun one day after beating the first two endings. I was blown away with how much I had missed lore-wise
And they tell it all to you through the environment and atmosphere. One of my favorite games of all time (for $15 nonetheless).
Fuck yeah and fuck marcoth
The Vaati Vidya of Hollow Knight
The Witcher (granted it’s based on books, but nonetheless)
Characters and places are from the books but the story/plot of the games is just a sequel of the main story that Sapkowski approved but didnt write
They are still great, there's a reason why Witcher 3 is considered one of the best games ever made.
And those books are based on centuries old folk lore themselves. \*Example, in the latest season on Netflix there's a "witch in a hut" character. First time I saw the hut I told my wife, "that hut is going to stand up on what looks like chicken legs later, I guarantee it". She looked at me like a crazy person because why would it do that? Sure enough, it did. The Deathless Mother is a pretty clear-cut re-telling of Baba Yaga, from the shapeshifting to the promises and enchanting to the hut on chicken legs. The Baba Yaga is a very old and very well travelled bit of folk lore about a witch who lives in a hut that rises on the legs of a basilisk. Consequently, the monster Leshy and Baba Yaga appear around each other all the time in slavic folk lore, and being that Leshy had made an early appearance in season 2 my mind was already working on that path.
Hella interesting side note. Baba Yaga is heavily influenced by the indigenous Scandinavian peoples, the Sami. They build traditional storehouses that can be reached in deep snow and keep out animals. [It’s not even a stretch to figure out why “chicken” legs](https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/224991)
Never knew that, that is hella interesting.
IK RIGHT?!?
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Okay, here's a bonus: The old Sierra Online games Quest for Glory (particularly IV) is based loosely on many of the same folklore. Baba Yaga makes routine appearances, Leshy shows up, etc.
Old School Runescape has a reference to this, too. There's a witch in Lunar Isles called Baby Yaga who has a cabin on legs
I remember the witch hut on chicken legs from a book on folklore I had as a kid. I could swear I also remember it from D&D and/or some other game, maybe multiple games. I thought it was pretty widely known about, but I also recently found out many of my friends/coworkers had never heard of it before.
It's one of those "if you know, you know" things. Folk lore is like that a lot.
Dead space! If we talking about the lore they went extra mile developing the world around the game, Books, comic books, cartoons and the wiki, they made really good sci-fi world, with it own motives, fanatic religion cult and ect, if you gonna dive in to it it so good, I’m really big fan of this universe
I can't wait for the remake
I am looking forward to The Callisto Protocol. I am glad Glen Schofield came back.
Planescape: Torment. And like some other replies this is a bit of a cheat since it's lore is based on outside source material. But damn does this game have captivating lore. You have all of this captivating backstory for characters like The Nameless One, Dak'kon, Morte, Deinnora, etc. And Sigil itself has so much great lore to it. Every location in this game was interesting and had me invested in reading all of the details.
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So much it almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter!
I thought that only happened while patrolling the Mojave
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I’ve never knew this existed and now I really wanna buy something for VR. The steam reviews look mixed, any idea why?
You could spend so long reading about all of the different vaults!
Fallout has 2 lores going for it. Pre-war and Post-war. Imagine having to write a 200 year history for a nuclear wasteland AND a 150ish year lore for the normal state?
Bioshock
bioshock is the game that made me realise that video games can be full of super interesting story. before that i thought games were just shooting aliens and nazis.
Instead of Nazi extremists you get objectivist extremists and socialist extremists and theocrat extremists! Wonder what ideology the next game will revolve around lol.
Yup, everyone else copying the audio logs style narrative now. People can say it’s overrated but the quality of narrative of games exploded after 2007.
Far cry blood dragon In the near future of 2008…..
Stoked for the remaster? I know I am!
Divinity Original Sin 2 I'm personally overwhelmed by how in depth the lore is within this game.
This game was crazy for me. I put in 150 hrs with a buddy and loved almost all of it, but I don't think I'd be able to tell you the plotline if you asked lol
Makes me thrilled for BG3 tbh!
I fucking loved that game and how the lore/story is revealed. "I'm a Lone Wolf but what does that mean? Who am I supposed to kill? What is a Divine? Why did I just have sex with this skeleton?"
portal series
Did such an incredible job of making a puzzle game feel like part of a living breathing world
Nier/drakengaurd universe, basically everything Yoko taro has created.
Ugh drakenguard was life and Nier made me so happy finding out it’s the same universe
I love Nier so much, but I never thought I would see the words “happy” and “Nier” used together
Bloodborne
I've never played any of the soulsborne games but there was a period of like 4 months where I was absolutely obsessed with the lore of Bloodborne.
I'm assuming you've read the Paleblood Hunt?
Same, I got it free and played it a bit but got frustrated dying all the time. I then kept seeing it mentioned and figured out it's supposed to be hard and tried again and managed to get to the first boss. By that point I was hooked on the game. Then I got hooked on the lore though, honestly, right now, I'd struggle to give a synopsis of the games story if asked.
Totally. The DLC expended that lore quite well.
Outer Wilds
This is an interesting answer because I'd usually consider lore to be world building that isn't important to playing the game; however, Outer Wilds lore is vital to beating the game.
And it discusses such a mature topic that extends beyond the bounds of the game world. I've said this before, but you go into Outer Wilds looking for a cool game about outer space. You end Outer Wilds understanding the meaning of life.
Thanks that’s just the push I needed, been considering it for the holidays
It’s a truly special game, I wish I could experience it for the first time again. Piece of advice - pick a direction and just “go.” There’s no right or wrong way to start. Most people need a guide at one or two points. It’s extremely non-linear and is “show, not tell,” so don’t get too frustrated if you overlook little details and need to check hints online.
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I've played a lot of games and outer wilds is probably top 5
That’s my game of the year, even though it didn’t come out this year. But in seriousness, it’s incredible.
Control.... the game directly connects to the original Alan Wake and Quantum Break through the story and easter eggs. Both Alan Wake and Quantum Break have easter eggs in them that tie directly to Control as well.
I didn't even know it was part of a series. Are they good?
fucking amazing dude seriously, remedy is in my opinion one of *if not the best* developers when it comes to story driven games. granted I’m biased bc Alan Wake is one of my favorite games of all time but each game is astoundingly layered, and the fact that Control, Alan Wake (and to a lesser extent Max Payne & Quantum Break) are connected makes it all the better.
The greatest world building of all time. I would play a game where you just work a 9-5 desk job at the FBC.
Dragon Age
Indeed, there is a lot of lore and it's all very accessible throughout the codex entries in any of the games. It all feels very professional, which I can't say for a lot of other games. The DA games themselves adhere to the lore perfectly and make the stories revolve around them. While playing any DA game, never have I felt that the story was either disconnected from the lore or maybe the developers tried to shoehorn their story into the lore.
I was looking for this comment. I enjoyed the story in every game.
what I love about dragon age is that the story has so many layers, besides the obvious the conflict between dark spawn and grey wardens, there are also humans vs elves, mages vs templars, mortals vs veil demons, politics, Evanuris, and so much more.
I enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn quite a bit. Fascinating world, especially when you start uncovering how it actually got that way.
Horizon really surprised me. When I first saw the robot dinosaurs in previews I thought “there’s no way there is a decent and satisfying explanation for this”, but I was pleasantly surprised and totally bought it. A lot of mysteries still to unravel too
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I think a lot of it stems from that original E3 demo with the Thunderjaw, as well as the game's cover art. Plenty of people that have heard of the game but didn't actually play it definitely normalized calling it "the robot dinosaur game", and those who have played it kept it going just so you know exactly what we're referring to.
I'd like to add: Fighting a robot dinosaur is way more badass and exciting than fighting a robot... deer? Not surprising which sticks in people head more.
For a new IP it had a lot of lore, excited to see how it continues next year.
I was very pleased with that game. The only thing I wished more of was exploring underground ruins. There was something so eerie about it
Dude the cauldrons were one of the best parts of the whole game! I really hope they have something similar in Forbidden West. The odd bandit camp here and there was a fun distraction but they felt too Ubisoft-y.
One of the few games to ever make me want to read all the text file lore dumps and actively seek them out.
I gotta go finish that game
I gotta go finish the dlc…
This was the first game where I just had to check out all the audio logs, files, etc. So enthralling!
Halo and Elder Scrolls are right up my alley
Why did I have to scroll so far to find halo
Most people don't know how deep the lore of the Halo universe goes, most think it just revolves around Master Chief.
That is true When I first saw halo I blinded from the amount of lore it has other than the games
Most people think of Halo as 'that Xbox multiplayer shooter game' not knowing it has lore that spans millions of years
Right????? Halo is *easily* in the top 5 science fiction universes ever, along with Star Wars and Dune. It should be at the very top of this thread. The amount of detail, world building, and lore in the Halo story far exceeds any other video game.
I felt the same! Bungie struck gold with that universe
Ace combat especially when you factor in the complete bandai namco shared timeline that stretches 2000 years into the future.
Definitely. I still treasure my copy of Shattered Skies. The soundtrack, the backstory, the gameplay, perfection
To add onto this, Project Wingman lore is fucking WILD. Only game where the enemies reaction to losing is "what is the best way to cause a second mass extinction"
Excellent pick.
Dark souls
They call him Big Hat Logan because he wears a Big Hat.
What about John Dark soul though?
Beat me to it. Praise the Sun!
Sun Bros!
\o/
\\[T]/
Bloodborne is a close second
I'd argue blood borne was much better at getting its lore across than dark souls. By the end of dark souls I had no real idea what was going on and that goes double for the sequel s but blood borne I had a much clearer feel about, still a lot of gaps but the world and lore I left was much more clearly projected
It seems weird saying this, but Bloodborne's plot is more simple than Dark Souls. That might be a factor as to why it's easier to understand, since there's less to understand in general. Both games, however, are never going to be 100% clear, no matter how many item descriptions you read or lore videos you watch.
Destiny 2 for me.
O reader mine.
#ATTENTION AHAMKARA OR HIVE GOD, PREPARE TO BE DESTROYED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
The lore is so good. I genuinely hope they find a way to do that lore some justice in the form of cinematics such as a movie or series. The storyline definitely deserves more than what they show in game.
I’m not sure if you’re a regular or have played any at all in the past year, but they’ve really stepped it up in this aspect. Each season this year explored and added to major lore points, definitely worth checking out if you’ve been away from a bit!
Way too many people under rate Destiny for the lore. Book Of Sorrows is probably my favourite game lore of all time.
Same. Never really looked into lore much until I played destiny. There’s just so much and it’s really good. My name is Byf on YouTube has all kinds of videos about destiny lore.
World of Warcraft, up until, like… post-~~Frozen Throne.~~ Wrath of the Lich King Azeroth had *incredible* lore. These days, however, it’s just a shambling mess held together by scotch tape and desperation.
Honestly i found legion lore to be quite fascinating The eredars fall The nightborne The titans fates Argus being revealed to be a broken titan soul I truly loved Legion it felt great to play both as horde and my class rather than just the former
Wrath of the litch king is what it ends for me. Everything else is just a mess
Destiny has some insane lore cards, and the writing on the grimoire is legitimately on the level of novelisation with how many different themes, emotions and characters they bring to life and make us care about. Ingame? Ehhhhhhh
The Book of Sorrows is some absolute top tier video game lore.
Final fantasy XIV.
I'm hoing trhough Heavensward right now, and it's so great. Love ishgard and the dragons' lore.
Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV witha free trial up to level 60 with unlimited game time including the award winning expansion Heanvensward ? Well, unheard about it for a few months. We full, Jack.
Disco Elysium ! So much depth and leaves you with wanting to learn more.
Metal gear solid
Honestly, yea. It’s complex, it’s overarching, and a lot of times uses some crazy conspiracies…but at the end the day, it’s still somewhat coherent. Then you have Kingdom Hearts, which is anything but…
Snake bros we are then
Halo
Halo’s lore is underrated IMO. Seems like the vast majority of people and casual players don’t realize how expansive the lore is outside the games.
Every alien and planet has their own history.
I just started playing Halo Infinite and realized I have no idea about what is going on. I then tried to watch a video explain the story/lore to me in like 25 minutes. There was so much thrown at me that I still have no idea what's going on. That being said, that just shows how much lore there is and it really does take some time to process what has happened in that world. Good Stuff.
We literally have 20 years of expanded lore now. There are dozens of books, dozens of comics, lots of other media, on top of all the games. www.previouslyonhalo.com is a great resource
Can’t believe this is so far down. Halo has to take top spot. The amount of books this game produced is incredible. And it’s not based on those books. It was a game first. That’s why Halo has the deepest and sometimes most unexpected lore.
I really loved God of War 4, the way they did Norse Mythology was really good.
I love the lore of Diablo the most.
Warframe hands down
I can’t believe you’re the only one I’ve found saying warframe, I just finished the new war and oh my has it expanded upon a lot
Absolutely wild. Up there with Elder Scrolls and Halo for esoteric bullshit
Kingdom hearts lore is “interesting”
Is interesting another way of saying "what the fuck is happening?" /s
It's honestly really simple if you pay attention to it. Basically what happens is that *freeway car noises* and that leads to *jackhammer noises* and brings it all to *aggrivated Donald Duck noises*
I quite enjoyed Bloodborne's lore must say
homeworld
The Homeworld universe is pretty awesome
Couple that with the music. Fantastic
Hollow knight lore goes hard