The lore content of the game seems extremely low. There may well do a lot in the game I don’t know, but what you can see on the official website would not fill a page of A4.

As a lore buff it worries me that the game world may be shallow in terms of background to the setting, the history, the societies and so on. Also the very first section had a line which was borderline poor grammar and was oddly worded.

Do we know any more about what the games setting is apart from that brief introduction?

They were supposedly working on a novel or mini novel for the special edition of the game, maybe it'll be something available through the NC shop, don't know, haven't heard from that project in a while.

It'd be nice to have though.

They have to start from scratch unlike WAR where it had a very large lore built up before the game ever came out.

So this part of it may take a while to unfold.

One of the appealing parts of Aion so far for me, is that it has no real 'lore'. It's not tied down to something someone wrote 40 years ago and is free to do a lot of things because of it. That could translate into any number of positive things. You can add new classes and throw them right in the middle of the story without having to go in-depth before hand.

If you think of Marvel, DC or any of the comic companies evolution, lore was never static. It constantly changed, since it involved humans and we are by nature, an adaptable being. You could kill people, bring them back (or not), Magneto was a weakling first release. But someone smart thought "Hey, he controls metal. We have iron in our blood. Doh. He could wreck us all." From 0-Hero no time flat. Thats the great thing about not having static lore with no preset or existing storylines.

Now lore games like LOTRO, War, AoC, SWG, all have so many limitations because of their great lore.

Lotro.. you will NEVER play a mage. Ever. So if youre the type of person who wants to nuke, playing an archer won't fit the bill. When they put in a RK to satisfy this part of the MMO customer, the lore fans howled and Tolkien turned a little bit. (he now rests on his right side)

SWG.. to be a Jedi (in the early mode) was extremely, EXTREMELY tough. As it should have been lore wise. In the real SWG, you probably could never be a Jedi. But when the MMO customer wanted to be a Jedi.. poof. Lore fans howled. (Lucas doesn't care much, he's got money out his ears)

AoC. No one will ever play, fight with, against, or near Conan probably. You won't even be James Earl Jones, Wilt Chamberlain, or the little funny wizard. Lore says no. (have no idea who wrote Conan)

Warhammer will have the same lore problems. It's why I usually don't like lore based games. They stifle the creativity of the developers and writers. (had never heard of the book/game til the MMO)

Thank your lucky stars theres no previous Aion novels, films, toys, T-shirts or coffee mugs. This game would not have the potential that it currently has. I love the good story for sure, but if lore took years to evolve, but gameplay was engagin, fun, and smooth, that would be fine enough with me. :)

I really like the sound of a novel Cynthe, although that’s milking the game for money. It does mean a lot of thought will have to go into the background, which is only to the good.

But I cannot agree no lore is better, the ‘freedom’ Popinjay talks about is really an excuse for a vacuum of ideas. As to your examples, comics have lore, a lot of it! They are more prone to change old lore or twist it a bit, but I am not going to brand that as totally wrong, just usually a wrong decision.

In your examples about the limitations of lore one game, SWG overcame their limitations, and what a disaster granting that wish became.

Game lore gives us foundation, a feeling of being in a real, living universe. Without that you are in a vacuum of pointless quests. WAR’s ‘tome’ is a fine example of how I wish game lore would go, more of it online and easily accessible.

We still need to find out about these 12 lords and what there role will play, The story will unfold over time and I hope the game is good enough for me to stick around long enough to find out.

I'm not so sure the game will have only a small amount of lore. It might not seem like there's much available to us right now, but the game hasn't even been marketed over here yet, it has a main string of story driven quests kind of like FFXI (given this, I'm willing to assume that it has some sort of lore backing the story), and it's also a new IP, so it's not going to have 40+ years of lore already layed out for it to work with. If it becomes a "successful" enough franchise for the developers to want to work with it some more in the future, then they would obviously have the opportunity to build upon the lore that they've already created beforehand with this game. I'd kind of relate it to watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time. You don't know what your in for untill you go see the movie and experience it for yourself first hand (assuming you're old enough to have not known about Star Wars before seeing the first one). It didn't have the amount of lore it does to this day, but with time, it grew (and is still growing). Even if the lore of the story quests was translated and available to me, I'm not sure I'd want to be informed before I got to experience playing through the game first (at least the story quests).I'd liken it to (uh-oh, another analogy) knowing what happens in a novel before actually reading it. You just need enough information to get you interested in the game and try it out (the back of the book).

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But I cannot agree no lore is better, the ‘freedom’ Popinjay talks about is really an excuse for a vacuum of ideas. As to your examples, comics have lore, a lot of it! They are more prone to change old lore or twist it a bit, but I am not going to brand that as totally wrong, just usually a wrong decision.

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Woot, I finally found something I disagree with stayontarget over! Cool, he's not a NCSoft employee! :P

Lore was not a big draw for the majority of people in FFXI. It wasn't even big after you played the game. And we are talking a pretty mature crowd age wise, so the game was pretty far from shallow. If someone joined FFXI and thought "Cool, I can be just like Sephiroth and Cloud and Rinoa will be there", and so and so.. nope. Those people usually didn't hang around that long. They wanted to be the guys from the Final Fantasy Playstation games where they could solo and kind of 'dominate' without help. The people who stayed cared about team play a little more.

Lore was not an issue as this game took place in a different timeline. So the game was not just stuck around the Steam city aspect. The game had a very good combat system and enough diversity among the classes. Being able to mix jobs (Ranger/Ninja) made things 2x as interesting. This is one example of where lore plays very little into the overall game, but the game did very well in Japan anyways. I think the devs realized if they stayed true to the Final Fantasy 'lore', the game would suffer later due to restraints that were set before they even had anything to do with the game. That freedom was needed to make a full MMO, but not in a 100-hour gameplay cartridge.

Again, while I think lore is very good to have and makes you more interested in the game (loved the cutscenes as things evolved), if the game mechanics and content is done correctly... you won't really miss it that much. They 'backfilled' a lot of lore with the Sea and TAU zones in FFXI. That lore didn't wholly fit but no one cared because the new classes were super fun and the areas were fantastic. So I still say:

Gameplay + substance > Lore

We'll probably have to agree/disagree on this one :)

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As to your examples, comics have lore, a lot of it! They are more prone to change old lore or twist it a bit, but I am not going to brand that as totally wrong, just usually a wrong decision.

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This topic has many people still going all these years hehe. Again here, I think changing lore and not being set in stone brings good things. If lore isn't changed in the comic world:

The X-Men would not be as big are they are today without Magneto's rise. They did well because of Wolverine for sure.. but when they re-introduced Magneto as having power over any living human due to the metal in our bodies... that series took off.

Should they have killed the unkillable man? Superman? Some say no. But you know, when they did, look how many people ran out and bought collectibles. That injected life into Superman, who was getting long in the tooth.

Should they have crippled Batman with Bane? When they replaced him with Azrael, people saw that as rough as Batman was.. Azrael could have been much worse. So as 'mean' and assholish as some saw Batman, they realized he wasn't really that bad in comparison and you actually needed him. Did better for the sales and later movies though.

Should Hulk ever have talked? Should they ever has allowed the 'Smart Hulk'.. allowing Banner to be huge, green, strong, but with Bruce's mind? Dunno, but it helped pick up the Hulk series.

Thats just the main guys. Spidey, IronMan, Wonder Woman (she no longer needs an invisible plane.. she flies herself) all these types of things happen because there are people who realize if they just stay limited to the 'lore', the product will eventually suffer.

You quoted me mate not stayontarget, but anyway:

Oh I agree game play and substance is more important than lore. But good lore will keep people playing after the substance runs out as it does in every MMO. It helps to inspire players even when content is thinning out.

All the comics quotes in your last post were interesting but do they reflect the MMO situation? Comics have to dish out a regular new story, MMO’s are more fixed. The titles you mentioned took several years to decades to decide they needed those changes. Maybe after Aion has been out for 6 plus years something like that might be needed, but that’s a long way of and the devs realy think that’s needed then OK.

In a sense MMO 2 is the comics book equivalent of what popinjay is talking about. AC2, EQ2, turning the old lore on its head.

I'm actually really looking forwards to a brand new game with brand new lore that we get to discover from playing the actual game. In FFXI since it's been mentioned you discovered more of the story that way too, some people who've done certain quests or missions may have more insight then someone else.

But that's going beyond what I wanted to say which is simply that we get to see a new story unfold and emerge as we go. We've gone a bit further then knowing nothing other then Atreia is shaped like apple core and it's denizens have wings. And more is to come.

:)

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You quoted me mate not stayontarget, but anyway:

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I sure did!

My apologies to that. Got to check the /reply thing better next time. Thx for clearing :)

I too,  am not too concerned about the lore aspect, although I really like lore, to me its not game breaking.  As before posters have said I think it's nice to have a fresh start.  Where no races have any class/gender restrictions

However, to be honest I knew very little about the lore of other games such as WoW and War before I started playing them.  It wasn't untill after I played through them that I started to become interested and I stared to do my own reading into the history.   Now when I play them I reconize the important NPC's and the role they play in the world.  I stared to think   "Ahh, I know you!  You're that a**hole that killed X and Y and did Z."

In my opinion it was nice not knowing much about the world 'till you actually play it.  If the questline and story are there it does add that bit of more immersion, but visually the world of Aion and it's charatcter customisation are enough immersion for me.

Just my 2 cents.

Check out the EU website of Aion.  I prefer it much more over the NA one. 

Originally posted by Squinny

Check out the EU website of Aion.  I prefer it much more over the NA one. 

So do I, that's the one I have bookmarked.

I think I read somewhere that Aion's devs, NCsoft Team 5 in Korea (now known as the AION Team), has four people whose job it is to work on the lore almost exclusively.

I am fine with the lore being discovered as you go along. I am happy to read before hand and/or find out as I go along, as long as the lore is there thats fine.