Our question to you today is: How much value do you place on a highly detailed game world and its background story in MMORPGs? Or is it perhaps often too much?
Lore, that is, the background story of an MMORPG, is very important to many players as it lends credibility to the world. But doesn’t this also spoil some mysteries?
Too much lore can also be too much
I am a fan of Pen & Paper RPGs, have played Dungeons & Dragons for a very long time, but now I can hardly bear worlds like the Forgotten Realms and there is a specific reason for this: It feels to me like every inch of the world has been explored. There is an elaborate background story for every little place, and there is nothing left that could surprise me.
This became very clear to me when I bought the rulebook for the Pen & Paper game Symbaroum. The map of this world is small, almost tiny. The area where the stories take place is only around a large forest. There is a background story, but it leaves many questions unanswered and does not explain everything ad nauseam.
This gives me as a player and game master enormous freedom. I can think about what lies beyond the borders of the world map or why certain ruins stand in place. My imagination then goes wild, and that motivates me to want to play in this world.
Another example from the film sector: When I saw the first Star Wars films as a child, the Clone Wars raged in my imagination, and I wondered how the Jedi Knights could have been wiped out. When Episodes 1 to 3 explained this, my illusion was shattered. The whole magic was destroyed.
Does lore ruin the atmosphere?
I feel the same way about many MMORPGs. In World of Warcraft, everything is so detailed that I no longer need to use my imagination at all. Every jack-of-all-trades I encounter tells me in detail all the events of the past thousand years in the world of Azeroth. The same is currently happening with The Elder Scrolls Online. As someone who also loves the single-player games, I feel that with the MMORPG and the increasingly detailed lore, part of the magic is being lost.
Of course, lore is important to a certain extent, as only then does a world become credible and alive, but does it have to be elaborated down to the smallest detail?
What do you think? What is your opinion on lore in an MMORPG? Can there never be enough of it, or would less perhaps be more?
