Do you care about the story or lore of a game?

If the scenario and storytelling aren't decent, a game of D&D is rendered shit no matter how well the dice rolls play.

I'll put it this way:

I can look past a bad story if the pure gameplay mehanics are fun, but the greatest story in the world is never going to redeem shitty gameplay for me.

Eh, gameplay trumps story for me.

If I want a good story, I'll watch a movie. They typically have better writers anyway.

Yeah, I would want to have some butter on that roll.

Like everyone else is saying, it depends on the game.

But yes.

I play Tetris for the lore

in all seriousness I really enjoy story/lore. I actually prefer lore over story to be honest. I like finding out about a game's world and in fiction history. I'll spend hours just reading wikis etc just for kicks.

it just depends on my mood. I think it does for most of us.

If I'm feeling sports/competitive I'll play a multiplayer game, if I feel like killin time I'll play a puzzle game, If I feel like a story I'll play an RPG or Action Adventure, and if I feel somewhere in between I'll play a platformer, shmup or other thing..

And yet the fluff is the reason why any pen and paper RPG would ever gain any traction.

@sterling: With how atrociously bad the story is in the inFamous games they pretty much are mechanics games.

It's also weird when I read comments like yours. You don't like mechanics only? This is a medium in which the purpose of its existence is interactivity. You need the parts where you don't play to be interested? I've never understood that.

But, to the question asked by the OP, it's not important, for me. I can easily turn the sound off and listen to music and play a game and have as much enjoyment as if the sound was on. I don't skip cutscenes any more. I used to all the time when I was little. I'm there for the interactivity. Not the part where I read a text entry or watch a poorly written/constructed cutscene that is riddled with holes. I spend most of my time laughing through cutscenes, now. So, they are worth watching.

But its still a story being told non the less. It doesn't matter how bad the story is. Its still a story. And the comment about inFamous is just silly.

There is a difference in playing a game to play a game. And playing a game to be entertained. Having fun and being entertained are no always the same thing. And you are assuming story is only cut scenes. Which is an incorrect assessment of what story is. Story is the overall drive of the game. It is the reason you are doing the thing(s) (actions/mechanics) you are doing in the game. Of course this doesn't apply to every game genres. But it does to most. And if you remove the story, the games are then something else entirely. If you remove the story from a FPS campaign, you are then just killing people for no reason. You have no motivation to kill the people you are killing. And yes that can be a quick fun time. But after a short time it loses its fun. Because you have no purpose in the game. Same can be said about almost all games.Of course there are also games like Minecraft which have no story and are us a truly pure mechanics game. And how long can you play that before you get bored?

Not usually, no. I typically play games for (surprise! surprise!) the gameplay. However, even when the story of a game isn't the reason I'm there, I definitely still pay attention to it and follow along. Now that's definitely most games for me, however, on occasion there comes along a game that I do come to mostly for story purposes. Examples of this would be L.A Noire, or a game from the Bioshock series. And of course there are games which are a healthy mix of both, like Dark Souls (the story may not be explicit, but it is definitely there), or Mass Effect.

I can't agree with this, the reason you are doing the things you are doing in the game is because the action itself is fun, the story is the motivation that's been added after the fact to embellish it with pathos or intrigue or whatever else, and it's interchangeable, and optional, whether or not you pay attention to it has no real bearing on anything, either your mind incorporates it as part of the experience, or it doesn't, but either way can yield the same end result - absolute satisfaction in the game.

says who? i'm only ever killing people because it's fun, and i've been doing it since day one, and, given that mechanics and atmosphere and sound effects and everything else are consistently used to great effect, it has yet to lose it's appeal, at all.

much longer than story games because there's always a broader potential about how things will evolve and end up, and because me being responsible for that outcome is a level of interaction that draws me in independent of gameplay.

for me, without exception, the more responsibility i have the more i'll be involved.

re-tabletop gaming, if the GM can't roll with the punches delivered by the players, and be willing to tear down the story he has prepared if they trump him with an idea he had not considered, then what you're left with is bullshit, you're running through the motions because some dude wants to tell his story, which lost it's connectivity as soon as the players were gimped for having a better idea.

A GM who is willing to create on the fly in sync with his players leads to a much more unique, unpredictable, organic, and involving experience, and I firmly believe it's where the true potential of games lies.

A game that attempts to have a good story, or a game where the story is a prime feature makes me care if it's good or not. But I'm generally a mechanics first kind of guy, and mostly play games based around fun gameplay.

I generally don't care about lore a lot, especially not if it's all in text like some kind of encyclopedia. It's important to me though that a world feels alive and coherent, which in large part is a feeling created by the lore. I like to feel that the environment and characters fit in to the directors view of what that world is. I need a lot of help in my suspension of disbelief.

Gone Home would be pretty spectacular without a story.

Yup.

Just as much as I care about all of the other aspects of whatever video game I'm playing.

Am I the only one who think it depends on the game?

Definitely right, but some people have general preferences, even though they'll pick up games with good gameplay but mad/mediocre story.

Gotta agree with @shortbreadtom, this is a silly poll. Obviously lore is important in games where lore is important. In DayZ lore doesn't matter, it is just a game about running around the wilderness, surviving zombies, not starving to death or dying of thirst, and working with/against other players. Why the world is the way it is and why you are where you are don't matter and can be written off by simply saying "it's the zombie apocalypse and you were driving through headed somewhere else and your car broke down." The Dark Souls section of the forum proves just how important lore can be though.

It is just a question of "Is this game trying to be immersive or just be a game?" If it is trying to immerse you in it's experience and get you invested in the game or the game world itself it needs lore. If it just wants you to sit down and play, it doesn't.

If a GM has no sense of vision for the world he or she has put you in, then all you are left with is a series of hollow fights and dice rolls. It's a rather boring affair. That is a rather different thing from GMs not allowing players to be creative in their roleplaying, which is what you seem to be mistaking it for.

So procedurally generated content is the true potential of games then? I bloody likely.

@turambar: i'm not mistaking anything for anything. all i'm saying is a GM's sense of vision for the world has to be adaptable and open to change, otherwise what's the point of having players?

and player determined stories, like EVE, is the true potential of games, not procedurally generated content, where did you get that from? that's just a basis for a game, an ingredient, one of many things for the players to potentially build upon.

Story as in plot, or narrative, not as important. Mostly because it's so difficult to do I'm used to it being bad.

However tone, mood, setting, "world craft", backstory, etc. are vitally important to me.

Not every game needs a good story, but almost every game can be improved by one. You gotta make sure the storytelling device doesn't interfere with the game, though.

You need a good sense of vision first before you can make it adaptable. You can't have the former without the latter. What's the point of a GM if all players really want is a string of monsters to fight with loot that drops off it at the end?

How would you suggest a single player game do the "player driven responsive story telling" that you're cheer leading without implementing robust non-player driven world building elements? How would you have the scale of potential content that you're cheer leading without procedurally generated content, or some absurd "choose your own adventure"-esque story tree?

EVE (and most multi-player focused games) is a different beast all together because you are not players interacting with NPCs. It's a game with player interacting with player, and doesn't need the game to do anything special for its stories to pop up. Games and fully support player interaction like EVE does, or make player interaction incredibly limited like Journey, player driven experiences will always pop up one way or another.

Ironically, what makes EVE exemplary is not due to how much freedom the game gives the players to act, but rather how you can contextualize the actions of the players against the overarching game world.

@turambar: i'm all for world building, i think it's essential, what i oppose is foregone conclusions.

Only specific types of games can have story telling without foregone conclusions, mostly in games where an ending isn't even a thing (MMOs). Attempting them in other genres (single player RPGs) results in very unsatisfying conclusions that lack a sense of craft.

For me it depends on what the game is.

Good story is more important than a deep lore, but the insane lore is part of what makes the Elder Scrolls such a fun world to inhabit.

But sure, it's game dependent. Cook, Serve Delicious doesn't need a codex.

yes for most genres. dont care for fighting games, shooters or platformers for the most part. or can at least look past it if the game is fun.

Dark Souls is the kind of game that defines this question to me, because it feels mostly like it's a gameplay first game but also has a level of hidden depth to the story side of things. You have to go out of your way to gleam much of a story just as much as you have to go out of your way to understand base game mechanics.

So yes, story matters to me because I'm very much into games which can back up their gameplay with a decent story. There are obviously exceptions with a game which is entirely gameplay driven with no story, but then it will have to be incredibly addictive to grab me.

That brings up an interesting point: What is the "...lore of a game"? Bringing up Dark Souls is an interesting point because I would stipulate there isn't so much "story" as "environment". Carefully crafted combat scenarios and intricate background detail allows for players to make up whatever level of lore they need to feel like the player has a purpose to beating up things instead of avoiding them. Is that a story? Probably not as much as circumstance or an explanation.

@turambar: i'm all for world building, i think it's essential, what i oppose is foregone conclusions.

this sounds like an unconvincing foregone conclusion to me.

i've clocked hundreds of hours in each of the last three elder scrolls games, all purely for the sake of building characters and giving them individual stories, nothing to do with the main quest, all unique to me, and all very satisfying i can assure you, even if some of the craft, in this case, is left to my imagination, there's nothing to say that more in-game support and structure for that kind of thing (such as the traits/handicap system of rogue legacy) isn't possible - permanent injuries, racial bonuses that develop in the game depending on the type of enemy you end up feuding with the most, alliegances, betrayals, fame, disgrace, bonds with followers, relationships, etc etc. And as challenging as all that might be to execute, i can't believe that somebody talented and capable isn't out there right now committed to working it out.

EVE has plenty of craft to it's world, and there's also nothing to say that a similar set-up wouldn't work with a much richer existing lore base in place, in fact i think it's impossible to make any assumptions about EVE-like approaches, whether they're purely player based, or a mix of players and npcs, until there are more examples out there.

I'm not voting on this, the options are "yes" or "no" when there is a huge middle ground to explore.

I go to gameplay first, and if I like the game then I begin to invest myself in its story. So then things like Plants vs Zombies happen: great game, trash for a story, but I still got to enjoy it thoroughly. And at the other end: Starcraft 1&2. Amazing games for their respective times, and great stories too. So good that I even bought some of the books!

Essentially I don't ever count on the story to justify my desire for the game, but when it's good then that's just icing on the cheesecake.

Half Life, above all for both the first and second game and the episodes the story is what carried me through if you pay attention you get all these extra things, no audio logs... no "notes" just stuff in the area for you to take part in if you choose. They really took the small hooks from the first Half Life and twisted them into 2 in a wonderful way and I always found the gameplay to be really solid of course now I've played so much of it and stuff like Garry's Mod where to me it feels like Half Life 2 brought so much more then even itself ever did, but I still really...really want to have an ending or continuation because Episode 2 was a Baller fucking experience and I really want that wrap up.

Sooo yea I think story is pretty important.

We have two entirely different definition for what is a "foregone conclusion" then. Your completely blank canvas approach to Elder Scrolls for example is not something I would ever come to a single -layer game for. It's simply incredibly boring to roleplay anything that has no interaction with a human being.

What do I chose when I think it depends on the game? I could give two shits about the story of a competitive multiplayer focused game but something like Fallout or even the Batman Arkham games than I can't get enough.

This is very easily a yes for me. Not every game needs lore to be wrapped around mind you, but anytime i have story or lore to pull from it makes me interested to keep going when playing a game. The way i see it we are at the age where most games are hitting the average to above average range more so than below average. So the lore and story is often the hook that make these games stand out from the crowd of games.

I think I appreciate lore in all kinds of games, including multiplayer focused FPSes or puzzle games. I'm not one who digs deep into that stuff by reading novelizations and wikis or watching youtube videos on the subjects, but I like it when developers try to add some sense of reason or purpose to the level, character or weapon designs. The interplanetary deathmatch championship thing that serves as the backdrop for the Unreal Tournament series and the whole story around the Portal games (and how they also tie it to Half-life and Left 4 Dead, despite just being a physics puzzle game) helped me get into those games despite not being a major part of them. And on the flip side - the fact that Medal of Honor: Warfighter did not put in a sensible justification for random people from military special ops groups across the world fight people from their same group did take me out of it's multiplayer mode.

So, yeah. I'm not sure there are any genres where some kind of world building lore isn't useful, so I for one will not go with the "depends on the game" reply.

Fuck yes. As far as I'm concerned, if the designers couldn't succeed at giving me a reason for what I do in the game then I might as well not do it. It doesn't need to be overt, sometimes just nods or subtle clues (or just a consistent use of the colour palette or a recurring motif, etc...) is enough. I don't care about individual tasks or mechanics, I care about the links that intertwine them.

It's the most important thing in a game. So yes.

Nope.

First game I can think of that pisses me off how they fuck up their own lore..... Street Fighter.

personally i am more of a story person, like when i was playing the first two batman games, i really enjoyed the story. Games that have a lot of lore in them where i have to sit and read lots of stuff, i dont necessarily care for