The Daily Grind: Do you care about the lore of non-playable races?

Yep. Loved the lore behind the Sarnak and froglok in EQ before they were introduced as playable. Oh well I just loved the whole EQ lore :)

I'm not interested in fully knowing the lore of the world - including the non-playable races - but fleshing it out means the game world will be that much more consistent, and thus have way less moments where the immersion is broken.

There are plenty other examples of why fleshing out parts of the story that players/readers are not likely to see or care about is a good idea. Tolkien, for the Lord of the Rings books, did the rough sketches of the world story from creation until well after the books. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, based on how Tolkien did his masterpiece, sketched 3000 years of story for their Dragonlance scenario before writing the famous Dragonlance Chronicles, creating one of the best written RPG scenarios ever. The creators of the old King's Quest series of games would flesh out their characters fully, including details that were never directly presented to the players, because this allowed for a way more consistent behavior of the characters. And so on.

So, I don't personally care much about the lore of the non-playable races. But I do care that it exists, because this leads to a better scenario overall.

NPC Lore is like a smoke detector, not much use for it, but glad it's there.

The lore of the NPC races adds to the lore of the world, which is one area that many current gen MMOs are missing.

Blizzard did this to an extent, through questing, allowing the players a bit more insight into the various races of the world. CoH also has a bit of lore tied to the various enemy groups, though I wish that the various dossiers were available somewhere in-game. Anet seems to be going a step forward and detailing out us much as possible, which will then allow them to fit them into the world on a more personal level.

On the flip, Rift had barely passable lore for the PC races and next to nothing for the NPCs, at least from what I played. What little there was seemed to be handed out in tiny bits every now and then, and seemed to be tacked on. If this has changed since then, I would not know, but this is one thing that really stood out in my mind when I played it. STO fell into this category as well, with fairly shallow writing and next to no lore presented to the player. Again, it has been over a year since I played STO, and I cannot comment on anything that has been added since.

These are mmoRPGS - so yes, the lore of all characters and factions IS the main part of the game. All these console-crossovers seem to forget that and MASSIVELY seems to love catering to those that level rush and dont play mmorpgs correctly.

Oh well, it will be remedied soon enough.

-X

It makes them come alive. Of course i care.

It's a very good indicator of the care going into developing the game as a whole.

I love lore, not only lore, but also flavor text.

"Basic short sword"
-These short swords were mass crafted in order to give the farmers of Pitchforkington some arms to defend themselves against the Pumpkin Fanatics.

Short answer, yes it is a good thing that such lore is there.

absolutely! I play for the story

I'm interested in non-playable race's lore as long as I can interact with them. Just like the zillions of dudes in WoW that are actually killable. And thats sort of interesting!

But aside that, i just think they're just making to noisy issues about it all, don't think they matter all this.

It really depends on if I find the world or at the very least the story subject those NPC's are a part of interesting. If I do then yes by all means I want to know how the tangled web unfolds. ^_^

I really like the attention to detail that ArenaNet is giving its NPC races in Guild Wars 2 and I do believe it to be important for the sake of immersion and depth to the overall story of the world.

That said, I do not go out of my way to study each little aspect of these races when information on them are released, but I do very much care that the information is there and available. Many times I've stumbled into an interesting area of a MMO world, perhaps encountering something memorable ... a story, a setting, architecture ... which compels me to find out more.

It's very rewarding to then go to a blog or WIKI and be presented with all this information and it just makes the game so much more entertaining.

Why not? I certainly do and it seems many do, too, even if it is to poke fun at a particular race.

Example : WoW's Murlocks.

No. The inner workings of NPC societies and their social structures are of no interest to me - except when it directly impacts the society of the character I'm playing. After all, even player magi and priests aren't scholars and details beyond the level of "The Grawl are a savage, primitive people with a shamanistic religion that inhabit Ascalon and the Charr Homelands and who the Charr conscripted in their attacks on Ascalon" (example because of the article image, natch) are, frankly, not really needed even from a role-playing perspective.

Maybe a bit more detail than that if there are any library settings in the game, but purely for the sake of putting a couple of 'books' (a couple of short paragraphs - not multiple pages) around the place for atmosphere.

More lore is good. But means absolutely nothing if everything else is a hackfest wow-ified quest-on-rails game.

Of course I do care.

When there's quests and there's not a little market pointing to the target, you must rely in texts and lore.

If you know that you are looking for a creature that lives in water, you won't go up a hill, you'll go to the lake.
If you know that two creatures hate each other and you have to direct a temporary settling for refugees, you won't put them together, you'll put some other race neutral to both of them in the middle.
If you know that a certain race is composed of cowards that gather around strong individuals, when fighting them you'll focus on the boss knowing that the rest will run away.


There are countless more examples.

It's not that lore is not important in games. It's that is EXTREMELY UNDERUSED.

I prefer my lore IN GAME -- not when it is handed out like crumbs to keep me interested in a game that has not been released yet.

The more I hear about NPC race lore the more I want to play that race.