#Lore Games

[cosmic-ships]

3 11 15 for the watch dogs s/i >:3c

Ask Game: Self-Insert Lore

3 - how do the other characters generally feel about your self insert?

At first everyone was a little weary about Kaden. (They were right to feel that way tbh considering who my s/i is at the start of this. they just don't know it) after awhile Sitara warms up to Kaden and they soon become fast friends. Marcus and Wrench follow soon after. Josh basically tolerates them, neither likes or dislikes. Saying "oh good, now there's two of them" (referring to how loud both Kaden and Wrench can be at times lol) Horaito welcomed Kaden no problems and they instantly become friends. Eventually it feels like a found family to Kaden and vice versa. Co-Workers at blume have a lot of trust and faith in Kaden. Kaden ends up sharing all the same enemies as DedSec does later on.

11 - what kind of outfit(s) does your self insert wear?

Here's some examples! I was going to make like cool collages and stuff but my pc is being a weiner and I'm using my slow laptop lol but basic fashion for Kaden would include the following:

15 - how does your self insert play a role in the plot of the story? do they help directly defeat the villain, support the heroes, etc.?

They are the villian at the start of the story. Kaden was sent in by Blume to infiltrate the DedSec group and leak information from them back to Blume. At the start it was all a show. Kaden leaked thousands of files back to Blume at the start. Eventually however, Kaden came to love their found family and even caught feelings for Wrench. They didn't want to be the bad guy anymore and they stopped leaking information. Then a little later after that Wrench and Kaden entered a romantic realationship together. Kaden tried so many times to tell everyone the truth but they didn't know where to start. That was until some months later when Blume directly contacted Kaden as they were working along side their fellow DedSec fam and everyone found out about Kaden's betrayal and Wrench was hit the hardest, he thought everything up until this point was a complete lie, that Kaden lied about their feelings for him and everything, which wasn't the case. Eventually Wrench spoke for the group and told Kaden to leave and NEVER come back. As for canon events while Kaden was undercover, they helped assist DedSec in any plans they had like helping with the cyberdriver car and when all the shit hit the fan with the FBI and Wrench got captured, Kaden helped rescue him and get his mask back to him. (Even managed to use their prime mode of transportation (a skateboard) to crack an agent across the face in order to escape with Wrench. It as fun! :D ) Kaden supported the 'heroes' while simultaneously was a 'villain' don't worry though, eventually it has a happy ending...just not as soon as one would hope. It took defecting from Blume, anonymously leaking information from Blume to DedSec, running away to the UK, and joining the DedSec Resistance there for Wrench and Kaden to reunite and work out things. (That's years after the events of WD2!) As for everyone Kaden has met in the UK for the most part they get on well. Hell Kaden's best friend is an AI DedSec stole! (Bagely) (Kaden plays roles in the resistance just as they did with Wrench's group however, this time there are no lies or betraying. They've grown and they've learned who the real enemy is.)

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF movie Mike would fight game Michael if he knew

[antirepurp]

top 10 most ominous tweets in recent memory

[theophagie]

I thought I was losing it but no, kh1 Sora's fast swimming animation really does change after you've been to Atlantica. It's a small detail, but also a cute and smart one 🥺

[retrogamingblog2]

[neishroom]

Gabriel is not so little anymore

[passerinesoncaffeine]

I’M SORRY. WHAT

Achilles writing the codex:

[mo-mode]

Okay but if the Mythomagic cards were so accurate about the Minotaur and his underwear, and Grover used them to “train” Percy, does that mean the satyrs designed and mass produced these cards themselves? Whose idea was it? Did they like have a big meeting about recruitment and go “What do the kids like these days? Pokey-man? Let’s make a Greek myth Pokey-man game. That’ll help,” and they interviewed a ton of campers like, “Hey, I know that time you almost got killed by a Gorgon was super traumatizing, but we just wanna make sure our cute little card design is accurate. Were her snakes green or purple? Also, would you classify her as Class A or B in power?” Did the campers get super into it too? Was it a group effort? Do they have to update the decks regularly based on new information? Which generation of Mythomagic cards did Percy use? Is the OG packaging limited edition? How popular are they in normal life? Do they get covered by the Mist, and people like Rachel think they’re just insane when they see Mythomagic in a shop window, and everyone else thinks it’s a Pokémon deck? Are there satyrs out in the world running game shops, and whenever someone asks about Mythomagic, they’re like “Do you come from a single-parent household, and also do you want to be friends?” How deEP DOES THIS GO??

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[zhukzucraft]

=> Martyn: Have a flashback

Your adventure started, as they often do, with some daring exploration. You gave Jimmy the good old soulmate punch test and felt nothing. And yet, it felt only natural to stick together.

The two of you happened upon some fortuitous surface iron, which you bartered for some provisions for the road.

The provisions ran out sooner than you expected.

...But with your soulmates, whoever they were, seeming more than ready to eat for two, your adventure didn't have to end there.

Unfortunately, wood isn't something that can be shared through the soulmate bond. You had to leave, pronto.

Martyn: Phew! Was that a productive trip or-

Jimmy: Martyn I'm not healing!!

Martyn: Wha-

Jimmy: The hearts!! They're not going up!!! What if something shoots at me now??

Martyn: Damn, really? Hold on, let me get us into a boat at least

Jimmy: Oh man oh god oh man

=> End Flashback

Start Over -- Go Back

[noxious-muck]

ok im obsessed. admittedly.

[grayeet]

I love the pale garden and how it's like a parallel to dark forests. I love how the two divert expectations.

Dark forests, despite their name, are saturated and full of life. Even compared to regular forests, there's a lot more biodiversity than many of the "basic" biomes. There's three whole different trees found there, giant mushrooms, and plenty of flowers. They're one of the biomes capable of spawning a lush cave underneath it. It has its dangers just like any other overworld biome, obviously, but it's nothing overly more than anywhere else. Traversing it can be tricky sometimes and illagers may take residence in the biome's woodland mansions, but it's ultimately a very colorful and lively environment.

Opposing it is the new pale garden. Usually white and light colors are seen as pristine and good, but the pale garden takes it the opposite direction and goes right into uncanny valley territory. It has none of the color of dark forests, none of the biodiversity, none of the liveliness. It has trees and moss that look familiar, but something is off. It has a signature mob, but even the creaking is just a puppet of the trees, not really sentient, not really even plotting against anything. There's "life", but, once again, it's wrong.

I think the pale garden is a wonderful addition to Minecraft's world building as it is, but the deliberate parallel to dark forests? Delicious.

[nolongerapileofashprobably]

But what happens if my world is falling to their doom?

[felassan]

🔍👀..

So about how the Mass Effect board game includes pronouns on the character sheets for the characters that are in the game e.g. Garrus he/him, Wrex he/him, Shepard he/him or she/her. according to this, Liara's pronouns are canonically she/they !

[source: the Mass Effect The Board Game - Priority: Hagalaz Rulebook]

[verflares]

say, what do you think ever happened to that boy from the forest? you think he ever found what he was looking for?

[just-ornstein]

[JK]  My first job was as an Assistant Producer for a video game company called Interplay in Irvine, CA. I had recently graduated from Boston University's School of Fine Arts with an MFA in Directing (I started out as a theatre nerd), but also had some limited coding experience and a passion for computers. It didn't look like I'd be able to make a living directing plays, so I decided to combine entertainment and technology (before it was cool!) and pitched myself to Brian Fargo, Interplay's CEO. He gave me my first break. I packed up and moved out west, and I've been producing games ever since.

[JK] I loved my time at EA. I was there for almost a full decade, and learned a tremendous amount about game-making, and met the most talented and driven people, who I remain in touch with today. EA gave me many opportunities, and never stopped betting on me. I worked on The Sims for nearly 5 years, and then afterwards, I worked on console action games as part of the Visceral studio. I was the Creative Director for the 2007 game "The Simpsons", and was the Executive Producer and Creative Director for the 2009 game "Dante's Inferno".

[JK] I haven't played in a long while, but I do recall that after the game shipped, my wife and I played the retail version for some time -- we created ourselves, and experimented with having a baby ahead of the actual birth of our son (in 2007). Even though I'd been part of the development team, and understood deeply how the simulation worked, I was still continually surprised at how "real" our Sims felt, and how accurate their responses were to having a baby in the house. It really felt like "us"!

Now for some of the development and lore related questions:

[JK] So I ended up in the incredibly fortunate position of creating the shipping neighborhoods for The Sims 2, and recruiting a few teammates to help me as we went along. 

Around the same time, we started using the Buy/Build tools to make houses we could save, and also bring them into each new build of the game (correcting for any bugs and incompatibilities). With the import tool, we could load Sims into these houses. In time, this "vanguard QA" process turned into a creative endeavor to define the "saved state" of the neighborhoods we would actually end up shipping with the game.

On playtesting & the leftover sims data on various lots:

Basically, we were in the late stages of development, and the Save Game functionality wasn't quite working. In order to test the game properly, you really needed to have a lot of assets, and a lot of Sims with histories (as if you'd been playing them for weeks) to test out everything the game had to offer. So I started defining a set of characters in a spreadsheet, with all their tuning variables, and worked with engineering to create an importer, so that with each new build, I could essentially "load" a kind of massive saved game, and quickly start playing and testing. 

It was fairly organic, and as the game's functionality improved, so did our starter houses and families. 

The thought process behind the creation of the iconic three neighborhoods:

I would not say it was particularly planned out ahead of time. We knew we needed a few saved houses to ship with the game; Sims 1, after all, had the Goth house, and Bob Newbie's house. But there wasn't necessarily a clear direction for what the neighborhood would be for Sims 2. We needed the game to be far enough along, so that the neighborhood could be a proper showcase for all the features in the game. With each new feature that turned alpha, I had a new tool in my toolbox, and I could expand the houses and families I was working on. Once we had the multi-neighborhood functionality, I decided we would not just have 1 starter neighborhood, but 3. With the Aging feature, Memories, a few wacky objects, plus a huge catalog of architectural and decorative content, I felt we had enough material for 3 truly distinct neighborhoods. And we added a couple of people to what became the "Neighborhood Team" around that time.

Later, when we created Strangetown, and eventually Veronaville, I believe we went back and changed Pleasantville to Pleasantview... because I liked the alliteration of "Verona-Ville", and there was no sense in having two "villes". (To this day, by the way, I still don't know whether to capitalize the "V" -- this was hotly debated at the time!)

Pleasantview:

Anyway, to answer your question, we of course started with Pleasantview. As I recall, we were not quite committed to multiple neighborhoods at first, and I think it was called Pleasantville initially, which was kind of a nod to Simsville... but without calling it Simsville, which was a little too on the nose. (There had also been an ill-fated game in development at Maxis at the time, called SimsVille, which was cancelled.) It's been suggested that Pleasantville referred to the movie, but I don't think I ever saw that movie, and we just felt that Pleasantville kind of captured the feeling of the game, and the relaxing, simple, idyllic world of the Sims.

Pleasantview started as a place to capture the aging feature, which was all new to The Sims 2. We knew we had toddlers, teens, and elders to play with, so we started making families that reflected the various stages of family life: the single mom with 3 young kids, the parents with two teens, the old rich guy with two young gold-diggers, etc. We also had a much greater variety of ethnicity to play with than Sims 1, and we had all new variables like sexual orientation and memories. All these things made for rich fodder for a great diversity of families. Then, once we had family trees, and tombstones that carried the actual data for the dead Sims, the doors really blew open. We started asking ourselves, "What if Bella and Mortimer Goth could be characters in Sims 2, but aged 25 years? And what if Cassandra is grown up? And what if Bella is actually missing, and that could be a fun mystery hanging over the whole game?" And then finally the "Big Life Moments" went into the game -- like weddings and birthdays -- and we could sort of tee these up in the Save Game, so that they would happen within the first few minutes of playing the families. This served both as a tutorial for the features, but also a great story-telling device.

Anyway, it all just flowed from there, as we started creating connections between families, relationships, histories, family trees, and stories that we could weave into the game, using only the simulation features that were available to us. It was a really fun and creative time, and we wrote all of the lore of Sims 2 within a couple of months, and then just brought it to life in the game.

Strangetown:

Strangetown was kind of a no-brainer. We needed an alternate neighborhood for all the paranormal stuff the Sims was known for: alien abduction, male pregnancy, science experiments, ghosts, etc. We had the desert terrain, which created a nice contrast to the lush Pleasantville, and gave it an obvious Area 51 vibe.

The fact that Veronaville is the oldest file probably reflects the fact that it was finished first, not that it was started first. That's my guess anyway. It was the simplest neighborhood, in many ways, and didn't have as much complexity in terms of features like staged big life moments, getting the abduction timing right, the alien DNA thing (which I think was somewhat buggy up until the end), etc.  So it's possible that we simply had Veronaville "in the can", while we put the last polish on Pleasantville (which was the first and most important neighborhood, in terms of making a good impression) and Strangeville (which was tricky technically).

Veronaville:

But my personal favorite was Veronaville. We had this cool Tudor style collection in the Build mode catalog, and I wanted to ship some houses that showed off those assets. We also had the teen thing going on in the aging game, plus a lot of romance features, as well as enemies. I have always been a Shakespeare buff since graduate school, so putting all that together, I got the idea that our third neighborhood should be a modern-day telling of the Romeo and Juliet story. It was Montys and Capps (instead of Montagues and Capulets), and it just kind of wrote itself. We had fun creating the past family trees, where everyone had died young because they kept killing each other off in the ongoing vendetta.

[JK] You know, I have never seen The Lone Gunmen, and I don't remember making any kind of direct references with the Strangetown Sims, other than the general Area 51 theme, as you point out. Charles London helped out a lot with naming Sims, and I'm pretty sure we owe "Vidcund" and "Lazlo" to him ... though many team members pitched in creatively. He may have had something in mind, but for me, I largely went off of very generic and stereotypical ideas when crafting these neighborhoods. I kind of wanted them to be almost "groaners" ... they were meant to be tropes in every sense of the word. And then we snuck in some easter eggs. But largely, we were trying to create a completely original lore.

[JK] Well, I think we kind of pushed it with The Sims 2, to be honest, and I remember getting a little blow-back about Bunny Broke, for example. Bunny Broke was the original name for Brandi Broke. Not everyone found that funny, as I recall, and I can understand that. It must have been changed before we shipped.

We also almost shipped the first outwardly gay Sims in those neighborhoods, which was bold for EA back in 2004. My recollection was that we had set up the Dreamers to be gay (Dirk and Darren), but I'm looking back now and see that's not the case. So I'm either remembering incorrectly (probably) or something changed during development.

In general we just did things that we found funny and clever, and we just pulled from all the tropes of American life.

[JK] The alien abduction started in Sims 1, with a telescope object that was introduced in the "Livin' Large" expansion pack. That's when some of the wackier ideas got introduced into the Sims lore. That pack shipped just before I joined Maxis in 2001; when I got there, the team had shipped "House Party" and was underway on "Hot Date". So I couldn't tell you how the original idea came about, but The Sims had this 50's Americana vibe from the beginning, and UFOs kind of played right into that. So the alien abduction telescope was a no-brainer to bring back in Sims 2. The male pregnancy was a new twist on the Sims 1 telescope thing. It must have been that the new version (Sims 2) gave us the tech and flexibility to have male Sims become pregnant, so while this was turned "off" for the core game, we decided to take advantage of this and make a storyline out of it. I think this really grew out of the fact that we had aliens, and alien DNA, and so it was not complicated to pre-bake a baby that would come out as an alien when born. The idea of a bunch of guys living together, and then one gets abducted, impregnated, and then gives birth to an alien baby ... I mean, I think we just all thought that was hilarious, in a sit-com kind of way. Not sure there was much more to it than that. Everything usually came from the designers discovering ways to tweak and play with the tech, to get to funny outcomes.

[JK] Possibly we were just testing the functionality of the Wants/Fears and Memories systems throughout development, and some stuff got left over.

[JK] I can't remember, but that sounds like something we would have done! I'm pretty sure we laid the groundwork for more stories that we ended up delivering :) But The Sims 2 was a great foundation for a lot of continued lore that followed.

--

I once again want to thank Jonathan Knight for granting me this opportunity and taking the time from his busy schedule to answer my questions.