.. You All Realize It's Not The Amount Of Lore That Matters, Right?

[Tesseract_The_Pariah]

Refer to Page 2, Post #36 for the link. 

Hey, wrote it up.  Tell me what you think! 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/237894-short-story-the-braton-lato-and-snipetron-origins-ballistic-weapons-in-use-by-corpus/?p=2757617

[Renegade343]

Hey, wrote it up.  Tell me what you think! 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/237894-short-story-the-braton-lato-and-snipetron-origins-ballistic-weapons-in-use-by-corpus/?p=2757617

Would you mind if I take a look at it later? It is midnight at Hong Kong, and I need to sleep. 

Edited May 28, 2014 by Renegade343

[Ionus]

But to play if safe, I would not include exclusive (at least according to DE) gear into lore.

Maybe something like "This rare Orokin sidearm was only found in a chance of only a few thousand. Only the most prestigious members of the High Council posses them."

[Fishcrunch]

I'm not quite sure the why we're comparing the "lore" of warframe and dark souls, since the only thing one can say about both is that there is a lack of it. And might I ask why the hell do the two female primes have lore now in the codex, and the males do not? I mean, I'm no Rocket Scientist, but it seems to me that frost and excal came out long before the two females.....so lets follow the logic here.............. aaaaaaannnnnnnnnndddddd nothing.

[BabyChooChoo]

The thing with Dark Souls though is that, from day 1, every part of the game that matters has some lore you can discover somewhere at some point. Warframe, however, is sporadic at best. Outside of the handful of codex entires, for example, we know virtually nothing about any of the Warframes. And yes, I know they'll add more lore later, but it's still quite the barren wasteland as it is now.

 

I will gladly concede quality trumps quantity, but you can't really wave that flag around when the majority of your game is shrouded in complete mystery because most of the lore literally does not exist within the game yet...

[SilentMobius]

What we keep getting is Orokin-era-lore-that-the-Tenno-should-have-forgotten-but-can-be-found-out, which is great stuff, but we should be _earning_ that lore out in the world, finding out about things because we're looking for it, from ships in the Void, not by leveling up a Warframe.

 

What we're _missing_ is things-about-the-world-that-even-an-amnesiac-Tenno-should-know like:

 

* "Are some/all Tenno bound into their Warframes?"

* "Do the Tenno always wear a Warframe even if it's not the same one?"

* "How does one Tenno use all the Warframes?"

* "What reason do we have to implicitly trust the Lotus?"

* "What is the _range_ of appearance for a Tenno, are we generally deformed in any way?"

* "What, if anything, do we know about the infestation, what does the lotus tell us."

 

All of that should be stuff that we know within the first 5 minutes of getting out of cryo. And we're _still_ missing that basic grounding in the setting. I only hope that some of that gets rolled into the coming ship-building missions.

Edited May 28, 2014 by SilentMobius

[Cabadath5]

It's the quality and placement...  I personally love the way DE is doing it, it's actually a bit like Dark Souls.  It lets us speculate. It leaves room for our own interpretations, and what little there is is very rich.  Much like Dark Souls, you can play through warframe without it, but with it, you gain a greater appreciation for what it is. 

I personally don't want a strict, campaign style story.  I want one where you discover what's going on using your own brain.  I want little pieces of lore peppered in, that keep adding togehter and just keep networking into something that you end up enjoying more than watching a cutscene. 

 

And so far, Warframe is on that path, and it has rich lore for what it is.  All you've got to do is look for it. 

Nope.

 

Also by "look for it" you mean open the codex or hope a guy that WILL destroy you as a newbie and barely appears every now and then, stands still enough for you to take a picture.

 

There's no quality either.The few cinematic trailers this game has barely have anything serious to do with lore.They basically go THERE LOOK A BAD GUY GETTING STOMPED.

[Muminidas]

Some wise words in OP post. i personally think it's this "thing", these pieces of lore for us to find and mix together to get the concept of Warframe's lore/story that are making Warfame such a good and mysterious sci-fi ninja game. :) 

Like, really why so many ppl are playing Warframe when there's no lore into it and they are Lore-lovers? You could say ones that play this game are masochists who enjoy farming stuff for the sake of farming.   o_O

 

I only hope DE won't throw us all this sweet mysterious lore just like that when story/quest system is out there for us. Update 14 will tell..... 

[Cpl_Facehugger]

I agree that quality does beat out quantity, but only after a certain quantity is reached.

 

Yeah. I liked Dark Souls' approach to worldbuilding, but such an approach only works when you've got a sort of critical mass of lore to sustain it. Otherwise you end up with where we are now. A few tantalizing hints, but not enough to actually use your imagination without doing a tremendous amount of worldbuilding on your own.

[Casardis]

Yeah. I liked Dark Souls' approach to worldbuilding, but such an approach only works when you've got a sort of critical mass of lore to sustain it. Otherwise you end up with where we are now. A few tantalizing hints, but not enough to actually use your imagination without doing a tremendous amount of worldbuilding on your own.

 

Indeed. Quality and quantity of lore is both important, and a good balance needs to be reached depending on a third, very important factor: presentation.

 

Dark Souls is top-notch (IMO) in its presentation, and thanks to that, we can uncover its rich (quality) and vast (quantity) lore, through the gameplay itself, item descriptions, hints from NPCs, areas, etc.

[Cpl_Facehugger]

The weird thing is that I'm honestly not sure what's taking so long. I mean, when I write I can crank out micro snippets like that in days, and that's with me being an utter perfectionist who goes back to rewrite things to correct extremely minor flaws. DE surely has some kind of story bible; Steve's told us details like how the corpus don't do cybernetics like the grineer do, they told us there are innocent civilians in the system in the lead up to gravidus, etc, things that show that DE clearly has at least some semblance of an idea of what the warframe universe looks like...

Yet we have so little lore. And they tell us that events and Darvo alerts and the like require all the loremasters' effort, but I just don't understand why. Codex entries should be easy. It's almost like DE doesn't have an actual writer on the team to handle this stuff and so they have to rely on Steve to find a free moment, but I thought they did hire someone for that?

[Noble_Cactus]

It's the quality and placement...  I personally love the way DE is doing it, it's actually a bit like Dark Souls.  It lets us speculate. It leaves room for our own interpretations, and what little there is is very rich.  Much like Dark Souls, you can play through warframe without it, but with it, you gain a greater appreciation for what it is. 

I personally don't want a strict, campaign style story.  I want one where you discover what's going on using your own brain.  I want little pieces of lore peppered in, that keep adding togehter and just keep networking into something that you end up enjoying more than watching a cutscene. 

 

And so far, Warframe is on that path, and it has rich lore for what it is.  All you've got to do is look for it. 

 

This is the kind of presentation that fits the Tenno, and possibly the Infested. But for the Grineer and Corpus, we need solid, concrete facts about how their society works and how they construct themselves as a people or group of communities. What do they eat? What roles do men and women play in their societies? How do they treat their mentally unfit (sent to correction camps in the case of the G3, or in Ruk's unofficial lore, assigned to menial labor tasks)? What do they do to pass the time, and what culture do they produce (some kind of propaganda theater for the Grineer?)? How do they relate to other societies (we know the Corpus are opportunistic traders who will compete with one another for markets, and that the Grineer pretty much enslave everyone they meet. But what do they do to those people?)? These are the kinds of questions whose answers help give us a face to whomever we're fighting. Why do we want to kill Ruk and Hek? For all we know, they're just obnoxious old men who have seats of power and like to yell a lot.

 

For example, a codex entry for the Amphis could say something like:

 

 

 

"There is little room for pastime in the Grineer military, but even the most seasoned generals recognize that an idle genetically-engineered supersoldier quickly grows restless. In bases across the solar system, Grineer commanders organize sparring tournaments between troops, where participants perform an ancient martial art known as [name], and these tournaments become the bedrock of Grineer military society [need a better word]. Combat involves an individual using an Amphis (set to low voltage) to force their opponent into submission by deftly manipulating time-worn staff techniques. The most proficient fighters are selected from the winners of these tournaments and are promoted to the rank of Prosecutor. As Prosecutor, these Grineer elites are given an Amphis (now fully-charged) and are tasked with guarding the Grineer most valuable military secrets. Studies by Corpus [or some other society, maybe multiple societies] scholars note a striking similiarity between the techniques of [the fighting style] and those of the modern day Tenno, suggesting a deep link between the Grineer and the Tenno somewhere in the distant past."

 

Too many prepositions for my liking, but it'll do.

 

Or it could be a short story about one of these tournaments, from the perspective of an outside observer studying them.

 

Still, snippets of lore like these (or like those we get with the Prime frames, which are written very well by the way) are only supplements to greater narratives. Strings in the game's code reveal scrapped ideas for quest lines that task players with capturing operatives, freeing labor camps, investigating a mysterious Infestation outbreak etc., and these quests have little stories behind them. Those strange alert names you see like "Robotics scientist found" or "free labor camp"? Those were originally these quests. Giving each planet its own little "story" would go miles for making our grindfest more tolerable. It would give us a purpose for why we are Tenno. Like I said, the WF team has some good writers. I hope they're not sitting around on their hands all the time, because it would be a shame to see their talents go to waste (unless they're also some of the programmers).

 

If someone could link me that Reddit thread with the quest strings, I'd appreciate it. It's where I got the little tidbit about Ruk. The Corpus also apparently have an academy for the economically-gifted on Mars, and one quest tasks players with assassinating a professor or something who is guarded by robotic minions. Or maybe they were supposed to interrogate him for the whereabouts of some artifact. I can't remember.

 

Another quest description talks about how the Grineer use child labor from their conquered populations and how a public Grineer speaker's eyeduct implants malfunctioned during a publicity speech about "children being the future of the Grineer" (without any mention of the labor itself), melting the hearts of those who were watching and causing them to support the Grineer. And yet another recounts a rather horrifying encounter with Vor, whose troops slaughter a hapless crewman's entire ship and sends him off in an ejection pod to Earth to tell them the Grineer are coming.

 

The Darvo quest was a good example of this, though. I thought that was going to be a part of some storyline and was rather disappointed.

 

-

 

I'm thinking they probably contact a friend of theirs who is a writer, or they get someone/some people on staff who also write to do the lore snippets. The main reason why we probably don't get very much lore development is because it takes time. A lot of it. It also doesn't do much to sell the game in the short term, which is the kind of mindset that is hampering WF as a whole imo. But adding solid lore would help this game heaps in the long term.

Edited May 29, 2014 by Noble_Cactus

[BETAOPTICS]

Except that there always has to be a foundation for these theories. And the games are pretty different as well. When a section is lacking, for example variation in gameplay, it has to be compensated in some other way. We have expressed that the way is lore. And by the way DE has done the lore thus far is that it lays the foundation. Reveals very little and leaves the rest on speculation. This is great. We get lore but it all is open ended and more of that is needed. Way more.

[Renegade343]

Yeah. I liked Dark Souls' approach to worldbuilding, but such an approach only works when you've got a sort of critical mass of lore to sustain it. Otherwise you end up with where we are now. A few tantalizing hints, but not enough to actually use your imagination without doing a tremendous amount of worldbuilding on your own.

Yes. I would like if DE builds a very small base of lore for us to build and interpret upon, since as of now, the lore (or at least the 'base' lore) does not seem to be grounded solidly. 

[Lqn8r]

It's the quality and placement...  I personally love the way DE is doing it, it's actually a bit like Dark Souls.  It lets us speculate. It leaves room for our own interpretations, and what little there is is very rich.  Much like Dark Souls, you can play through warframe without it, but with it, you gain a greater appreciation for what it is. 

I personally don't want a strict, campaign style story.  I want one where you discover what's going on using your own brain.  I want little pieces of lore peppered in, that keep adding togehter and just keep networking into something that you end up enjoying more than watching a cutscene. 

 

And so far, Warframe is on that path, and it has rich lore for what it is.  All you've got to do is look for it. 

You are right in making a connection with dark souls in the terms of lore. However you are comparing a free to play game to a triple A title game. Dark souls doesn't need content to suck its players in. It might have some DLC but to play Dark souls, the get one purchase from the player and that is it. They don't need money to keep the game running like warframe. Warframe will need a story line to actually keep players in because right now, the entire plot is confusing or doesn't make sense. Also warframe tries to be like dark souls but it fails because the lack of lore. Dark souls has some amount of lore that can be found and it is enhanced by the item descriptions in the game. Now if DE made more weapons that had lots of hints about lore or back story, it would be nice.edition to have. Lore in the codex would also be beneficial to the game fleshing out the lore. Dark souls also feels more interesting to compare the plot changes between demon souls and its sequel. Warframe might have ties to Dark sector, but the lore is rather shallow and uninteresting. The theories proposed with Dark souls is far more interesting than warframe since I stopped the speculation months ago since the devs refused to really touch it.

 

For example, in Dark souls 2, the 4 main bosses that you fight to reach the king are actually speculated to have been reincarnations of the 4 you fought in Dark souls 1. For example Nito is speculated to be the rotten in the second game. Seath the scaleless is believed to be the Duke dear Freja which is a spider. This is the most sketchy of the comparisons but you meet a npc that tells you that his master created him because his master had a fatal flaw. Seath had a fatal flaw of being scaleless so this possibly ties him to being Duke's Dear Freja because they are found in areas that are close to each other and Seath may have become a spider to overcome his fatal flaw. The final boss of dark souls one, Gwyn, is believed to be the Old Iron king. The witch Quelagg is believed to be the lost sinner. It is believed that she tried to light the fire but failed and so she punished herself by sealing her away in the Sinner's rise. The soul you get from her boss fight even confirms its. "Prisoner of Sinner's Rise, the Lost Sinner eternally punishes herself for the sins of her past. Indeed, she committed what some would believe to be the ultimate sin - she attempted to relight the First Flame.

The Lost Sinner possesses the Soul of a Great One; she holds the remnants of the Soul of the Old Witch of Izalith. Eons have passed since the legendary Witch walked the land, but such was her power that it persists even now."

 

There are more ties that are in the games but it's for you to look at yourself. Dark souls does it right by giving hints to these ideas but doesn't actually confirm them which keeps these theories as theories. Confirming them like DE did in a live stream which ties dark sector to warframe defeated a lot of the speculation surrounding the similarities. Warframe would do better if it could have as strong of speculation as the Souls series does.

 

-Lqn8r

Edited May 29, 2014 by Lqn8r

[Darkmoone1]

Mag Prime's lore entry showed the Sentients, the social stigma of Tenno, their abilities, and some other things.  It also showed us that the Orokin were seperate from Humans.

You see, this is what I do not like about how Warframe presents it's lore. Instead of having us explore the world and presenting us with these mysterious objects or location that have a connection to something to the world we play in, we are being spoon fed information in a library of entries. This is a big difference from the Dark Souls world, as there is a tremendous difference between reading about that interesting tidbit in a library and actually going out into the world and discovering it for yourself.

[Somedude1000]

I dont mind minimal lore, as long as we have SOME (:3) lore to begin with 

 

Godspeed :D

[Jokubas]

This is actually a big issue for me right now that I was thinking of making my own thread on, but I hope posting here is good enough.

I'll start off by saying, the kind of game Warframe is, isn't really the kind to need or easily take a "plot." You can do one, sure (the campaign was the only thing I played in Phantasy Star Universe because I never subscribed), but it's not really necessary. But, a plot is the best way to quickly illustrate a world to a new audience, so if you don't have a plot, it's going to be a lot harder and you'll have to be more innovative about it.

Dark Souls is a good comparison, but not necessarily one to emulate, partially because I don't think Dark Souls did all of what it did on purpose. Dark Souls' strength doesn't come from its plot, because, well, it doesn't really have one. You do most of what you do simply because it's where the game leads you and what options it gives you, not because it's actually an intentional motivation of the character, let alone explained to the player.

And for lore, I think it only pulls off that being vague because Dark Souls has a very interesting, mythology-like universe. The setting is not like a normal fantasy world, but more like a culture's mythology, with a lot of concepts that don't really make literal sense, but work as metaphors.

I don't think Warframe can rely on that myth feel the same way. I think Warframe needs to be more concrete. Which isn't to say I want everything explained. I think every story needs a little mystery (and something I feel a lot of modern stories have forgotten).

Warframe definitely needs to start finding ways to explore it's lore a bit more though, at least in basic ways. It's okay that you wake from cryosleep, told to escape the Grineer, and fight your way off the planet before really knowing what's going on. That makes sense. My problem is... I still don't know what's going on, even in a general sense.

When I first started playing, I thought it took place in some sort of far-off (time-wise) post-space-apocalypse. I thought that, wherever my Tenno was from, he had now awoken in the ruins of the Solar System, occupied now by nothing more than a deformed clone army, evil robots, and infested zombies. The more I'm exposed to the game though, it sounds like that might be wrong. But 44 hours in, I'm still not sure.

The Corpus are a corporation? If there's a corporation, there's presumably a society they're the corporation for, right? But I don't know. Earth seems to be in ruins. The Corpus are said to be humans though. Are there still humans elsewhere in the solar system? Are there any normal people left in the solar system?

My Tenno shouldn't know those things in the first mission, but I should definitely know them by now. Those aren't things that should be mysteries or secrets (unless the secret is that everyone thought they were dead, but there's some hidden colony somewhere).

Basic elements of the setting like that need to be established, even if the game isn't going to have a concrete plot that explains every bit of what's going on. Perception is key for the audience. The exception isn't the exception if it's all the audience ever sees. If every time we see security officers go on an away mission in Star Trek and they're the only ones who die, the security officers start to look utterly incompetent. If all we ever see are aggressive Grineer and Corpus (with the only exceptions being in enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend situations), it's going to start looking like there's no normal people left in the universe. The authors may even have all these details planned out behind the scenes, but it's all moot if the audience the story is made for never knows it.

The big challenge is figuring out how to portray that. Of course, by the nature of the game and our characters, it's not like we're going to go around delivering pizzas in a friendly city or something. That doesn't mean it's impossible though.

Assuming there are still some sane humans in Warframe, which I honestly still don't know, here are some example solutions:

1) Introduce some kind of minor space pirates "faction." Not a full on army, not something that's going to dominate planets. Just an enemy type that represents smaller groups of outlaws doing nefarious things out in the solar system that show up in missions from time to time (and at least one early on, to establish that not everyone are evil mutants or robots).

2) Introduce a social hub or two (like the personal ships, or maybe even instead of them), like a space station orbiting Earth (or wherever sane people might be), that shows normal people doing normal things, and evidence of the Corpus being a corporation and not just a faceless, evil military.

Edited May 29, 2014 by Jokubas

[Joyfulmama]

The opinions are so confusing. Basically we want quality and quantity. We want good quality and just enough quantity to know a story or background or something

[Jokubas]

Because it's not really about quality or quantity right now. It's about establishing the setting. Once that's done, then we can worry about whether it's explaining too much or not enough.

Edited May 29, 2014 by Jokubas

[Renegade343]

Hey, wrote it up.  Tell me what you think! 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/237894-short-story-the-braton-lato-and-snipetron-origins-ballistic-weapons-in-use-by-corpus/?p=2757617

I wrote down another piece of Corpus history on my thread (I have acknowledged your thread for giving me some inspiration for that) (see Sniper-Rework, Snipetron): https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/236973-some-suggestions-to-make-gameplay-more-engagingrewarding-now-with-sniper-re-work-more-corpus-history/

[Azawarau]

More lore would be nice though

 

Speculating is fun but without more to taste it gets to be too much of a cliffhanger to really be enjoyable

[CatScratch]

It's the quality and placement...  I personally love the way DE is doing it, it's actually a bit like Dark Souls.  It lets us speculate. It leaves room for our own interpretations, and what little there is is very rich.  Much like Dark Souls, you can play through warframe without it, but with it, you gain a greater appreciation for what it is. 

I personally don't want a strict, campaign style story.  I want one where you discover what's going on using your own brain.  I want little pieces of lore peppered in, that keep adding togehter and just keep networking into something that you end up enjoying more than watching a cutscene. 

 

And so far, Warframe is on that path, and it has rich lore for what it is.  All you've got to do is look for it. 

The reason lore in warframe is presented to the players in current way is because lore implementation is an afterthought in this game. Original budget that went in development did not included lore. It was the passionate community that requested to know more about warframe universe. I like the fact devolpers are listening to their fan base and are delivering,

The point of my post is that I too see simmilarities between dark souls and warframe on how lore is presented but that definetly wasn't the DE intention. I am confident the one day in the future we will have fully realized campagin across the solar system and much more in-depth universe.