Attn Obsidian: Hyperlinking Lore

[septembervirgin]

I remember in playing through Lionheart, a game I rather liked, and at the time I would also occasion to play Civilization 3. I wondered if the lore in Lionheart might be indexed and hypertext linked, like the internet and like Civilization 3. I realized that an interesting idea would be a role-playing game where the lore utilized hypertext and one could click on a link to yield more information one had already gathered. Hyperlinks in itself would be useful, especially in the wealth of names and places and items an immersive game tends to yield to the player. I tried my hand at a NWN campaign world (and failed due to hardware limits) but I had a morass of data on a world and history and personages and artifacts. I know Obsidian will have a small library about their game world before the third expansion for Project Eternity is due (and might even now have such a thing).

 

What helps in developing lore is to have an internal corporate wiki. Even small, jocular facts written as a lark can be refined and used.

 

Now, this can come in handy if you have family trees (as in Rome: Total War), something most CRPG don't have a need for because they lack depth in lore and passage of long periods of time isn't an important issue. Descendants and ancestors can be an important gameplay element and in fantasy game worlds family is often a link to ancient power. It's also an interesting assistance to immersion, makes the fans happy, and inspires loads of fanfic (what doesn't?). At the very least it can be useful if you plan to permit wide variety in choice in your game and permit marriages, children, old age, and death. And what if a suit of armor was worn by a person centuries ago and only the record of a name and the armor remains. The soul of that person has incarnated and the person remembers their armor.

 

All of this could be done with linear quest-solving, but if the clues exist in the game journal, the perspicuous player can discover some very interesting and hidden facts.