Lore

[tuturto]

I have been coding the end boss for Herculeum and the level for him to reside. This got me wondering, how players like the lore being presented to them. Should I try and hide it in the game, in form of scrolls and tomes that the player can read to get hints about what's coming? Or should I just state the lore in the manual at appropriate section and not try to hide it at all?

What is your preference and how did you do it in your own game?

[TheCreator]

Hide as much as possible. One can't hide everything, but it's fun to play for 1000th time and still find previously unseen stuff. That's the essence of roguelikes.

[kraflab]

I think tucking the lore inside in-game objects is indeed the best way to do this.  It works wonderfully in games such as the elder scrolls and tome4 for instance.  The players who don't care can easily ignore it, and it is a treat for the players that are looking for it.

[guest509]

  It's a balance. People like me love the mechanics and achievement of game play, others like a story and the feeling that they ARE the avatar. The immersion is what they like.

  Anything that caters to both is good. Putting the lore into scrolls that lore lovers can search for and lore skippers can skip sounds pretty awesome.

[Quendus]

Don't hide things that are required for survival and completion of the game. The balance to be struck is between giving the player enough information so that good runs don't get killed by random nonsense that they had no way of knowing about, and giving them little enough information not to feel overwhelmed. Striking that balance can be made easier by restricting the amount of random nonsense that causes instadeaths, or spreading out the information-delivery through the game.

If it's just backstory and world-building, then go ahead and hide as much as you want. Completionists will gobble it up, non-completionists will ignore it or be impressed by all the new stuff they see each time, and completionists who don't have time to spare to win a game 10 times just to read its story will read it in the source files. Everyone wins!

[Alex E]

Lore is always fun, but I hate it when it comes to me in pages upon pages of writing. I prefer seeing events or environments that allow me to visualize what could have happened there.

Who knows that old game "Neverhood"? Here's a great example of how to not incorporate lore into your game.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rtz9FSQrbA
The worst part was that you HAD to walk to the very end of it to get a disk.

[tuturto]

Lore is always fun, but I hate it when it comes to me in pages upon pages of writing. I prefer seeing events or environments that allow me to visualize what could have happened there.

Who knows that old game "Neverhood"? Here's a great example of how to not incorporate lore into your game.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rtz9FSQrbA
The worst part was that you HAD to walk to the very end of it to get a disk.

Oh, that's pretty bad

True, showing is better than telling I think. But that is much harder than just slapping a wall of text on screen.