Item Lore

[DThreeIVever]

I know this has already been posted on blizzards main D3 forum, but I thought id bring it here and let the idea circulate if its not been introduced to these forums yet. What do you guys think about a system in game that allows you to look up the history of unique and set items? Say you find a sword called "Century Redblade". The graphic of the item depicts an old sword tainted red by many years of being weilded by a deadly warrior? Or maybe it was a sword that fell into a pool of demons blood where it sat for a few hundred years before being recovered? It wouldnt be a huge feature or anything, just something to give you insight to the items you find. Perhaps it could be something that Deckard Cain does being hes got knowledge on pretty much everything.

[Sein Schatten]

Ugh... I think there will be so many sets and uniques that such a feature is not feasible. Makeing up stories for hundreds of items is too much work for too little gain. Maybe create stories for really rare items, okay, but not for all uniques.

[stillman]

Yeah, I'm kind of opposed to wasted memory space. Plus, there will be plenty of time sinks in the game without having so many things to read.

Now, if it actually AFFECTED your chr in some way I'd be Ok with it (since then it would not be wasted memory space imo). Like the more points you drop into intelegence or mana or w/e gives you more info on the history or propper way to use the items so you get slight bonuses in addition to the lore.

[PlasmaTorture]

Well, unlike Sein and stillman, I care about the lore and environment in the game. I think it's a fantastic idea. Some Uniques and sets really feel like they've got a lot of lore to them, especially the ones that moved from Diablo into Diablo 2, and the character sets (specifically Griswold's and Natalya's I think). It'd be awesome if, isntead of taking 5 minutes to come up with a weapon, they spent a little more time to make sure it was a cool unique that fits with the universe.


And "wasted space"?

All the text for all the items would take like 1 MB max, and including the graphics and such to have the system to show up properly (however that is) would not take much more than that either. You could try to make a (bad) argument about how it wastes time, but space? You've got to be kidding me.

[stillman]

Here's what I mean and why I am opposed to added details...
In d2, the classes are very poorly animated. They used the minimum number of pictures to animate the hero chrs who we are staring at for hunreds of hours. If you look at the walls, you can see extreme detail. You can see all the grit, dust, wether wear, cobwebs, cracks, etc. Now, the walls don't really do anything besides act as a barrier. Why did they invest so heavily in making dozens of different types of walls with such extreme beautiful detail? I wish they invested all that work in making the chrs better animated. When a chr swings a weapon, you can really see how cheap it is as they use about 3 different still frames to make the animation, kind of like how nintendo would do it...the cheapest, fewest frames possible.

I think they need to get their priorities straight. Even if it doesn't waste too much memory space to add details, I'd rather see the effort going into something we're all forced to look at throughout our playing experience.

[PlasmaTorture]

Part of that is different people were doing different things. If I remember correctly, they had the art guy like paint the backgrounds and such and he made them enormously detailed which is awesome. Someone else was, presumabley, in charge of the animations and apparently didn't do as good a job. Additionally, 2-d games are limited in their ability to show smooth animations (especially ones like D2 with a 10 year old engine or whatever) and have unilimited ability to show brilliant backgrounds, which is the inverse of the way 3-d games are.

If I had to choose between some gameplay feature and a lore feature, I guess the gameplay would be more important. However, I can't imagine a feature like this taking more than a week or two to develop. Or they could go full-fledged, and steal the Tome of Knowledge from Warhammer Online, and if done correctly could be a hugely awesome part of the gameplay.

[Lyrs]

One thing I absolutely loved about Diablo1 were the stories behind the unique items. Arkaine's Valor is not only a great armor, it had game expanding depth and lore. Harlequine's Crest might've just been a cowflap dropped by some traveling mage, but the story behind getting the cap for a reward is pretty neat.

I belive that this is one aspect of the game where using ID scrolls, perhaps multiple times could reveal facts or stories about an item that may make the game more colorful or perhaps even to the player an edge. That pitiful cracked 1-1 dagger that you were about to sell, it turns out it gaines ED based on the number of monsters you kill with it.

Btw, it'll also cause your experience to be .1% less. =P

[Dwovar]

I really enjoyed all the lore books from D1, even if they didn't do a thing for you. It made the place feel more alive.

Besides, is every book you read in the real world going to 'increase your stats'? It's more natural to have books that are both 1) Unrelated to the current events of the story (as in, books written in the past) and 2) Not related to your character directly (you ain't famous yet son!).

Random books are a hoot, and as an added bonus if you don't care about them, just skip 'em! It's that easy. Fun for those that like it, absolutely irrelevant to those that don't.

[Flux]

it's a cool idea, and it's something that's been talked about for a lot of RPGs. It was actually a topic of conversation during the HGL development days, and the team said they loved the idea, but didn't know if they'd be able to implement it. Needless to say, they didn't even get the game finished for release, much less go through every unique/set in the game and write a story for them.

If anyone could do that it would be blizzard, with their resources and development time, but I don't think it's their priority. They'd need a couple of extra people on the team who did nothing but write plot and story to come up with the ideas, but the hard part would be keeping them internally consistent. If the lore says that some ancient's king was renowned for his great strength, and that he defeated some famous demon, then you've got to make sure his armor or helm or sword or whatever has a big +str, and that his eq is stronger than whatever eq you put in with that demon's name on it. And if someone tweaks those values during game dev and balancing, then you've got to make sure the story isn't contradicted, and that some other story doesn't mention the king's sword being broken, and that everything matches up with the existing world fiction, and all the past books and the future books, and that some items you reference aren't deleted, etc.

It quickly morphs into a huge project, one that can tie the hands of the devs during play balancing, and I don't think the d3 team would see the benefits outweighing the liabilities.

[Sein Schatten]

If the lore says that some ancient's king was renowned for his great strength, and that he defeated some famous demon, then you've got to make sure his armor or helm or sword or whatever has a big +str, and that his eq is stronger than whatever eq you put in with that demon's name on it. And if someone tweaks those values during game dev and balancing, then you've got to make sure the story isn't contradicted, and that some other story doesn't mention the king's sword being broken,

I don't think it is that difficult. Whoever creates the story, sends the story to the item maker (if not same person). That item maker creates this kings items and the demon items. Then he comments both items like
/*if you tweak this, look at XX and tweak accordingly. XX must be weaker then YY. also YY sword is broken, do dont make a weapon for YY*/
Of course, this is more work. ;)

[Lyrs]

Another answer for consistency:
Diablo Universe Wikia.

Maybe restricted to the team only, but the lore and items are posted there. Team members can fact check and balance out the items. Everyone gets to contribute and players get awesome new lore.

[Flux]

You guys realize that a huge game like D3 has maybe 50 or 60 people directly contributing content and item info and descriptions and such, over like 5 or 6 years of development? The artifacts and errors and bugs and redundancies that creep into the game code are legendary, and projects have far fewer programmers than they do content/item/lore developers. Literally every employee at Bliz North contributed directly to various items/quests/stats aspects of D2, and crunch time is a fairly insane rush of far too many cooks squeezing their 2 cents into the vast boiling pot of soup.

the development of a major computer game is an incredibly sprawling and organic process, and maybe it would be possible to organize every bit of item lore and keep it all consistent and balanced, but it would add a lot of dev time and effort to the process, and require regular meetings and updates to some internal db and wiki, and I think the team would say it's not worth it for the benefit. I will ask some of the ex bliz north guys I know about this, though. see if they think it could have happened with d2.

[stillman]

Flux, could you also ask them about archery and what they think bow skills will be like in d3? Lol.

It's just that we know almost nothing about this other than the 2 semi-mercs in the gameplay video.

[Ivaar]

I know this has already been posted on blizzards main D3 forum, but I thought id bring it here and let the idea circulate if its not been introduced to these forums yet. What do you guys think about a system in game that allows you to look up the history of unique and set items? Say you find a sword called "Century Redblade". The graphic of the item depicts an old sword tainted red by many years of being weilded by a deadly warrior? Or maybe it was a sword that fell into a pool of demons blood where it sat for a few hundred years before being recovered? It wouldnt be a huge feature or anything, just something to give you insight to the items you find. Perhaps it could be something that Deckard Cain does being hes got knowledge on pretty much everything.

You know there have been several games that did something similar to this, at least the idea of every unique and some magical equipment having a story behind it... surprised that no one has brought it up: Baldur's Gate, BG2, Icewind Dale, just about anything built on that engine, Neverwinter Nights, yada yada. Personally I enjoyed reading the item lore in these games, was something to do when you wanted a break from exploring the world.

I don't think that having backstory on the unique items would "take away" anything from the development of the game. One good lore guy can crank this stuff out ad nauseum. It would be very minimal from a storage standpoint (assuming they don't put VOCAL lore files in for each item... that would just be too uber :yes: ). I don't know, the previous diablos didn't seem like big item lore type games to me. I'd welcome it if they put it in though.

[Kijya]

(assuming they don't put VOCAL lore files in for each item... that would just be too uber :yes: ).
Stay a while and listen? :whistling:

Cain voice actor would get a lot to do.

[Sein Schatten]

Baldur's Gate, BG2, Icewind Dale, just about anything built on that engine, Neverwinter Nights, yada yada.

The lore is already there with D&D. That is a different kind of beast. ;)

[stillman]

I like the idea, but I still think it's a bit too much work. I'm only guessing here, but I think d3 will expand on many old ideas. On thing they may expand on is the sheer number of items in the game. There were many in d2; I'm guessing there will be even more in d3. They felt they had to add several more unique rings for instance, perhaps to keep players from all using soj's and to give them other options. Again, I'm guessing, but they'll likely start d3 off with many more unique items in the first version.

So more items means more work. Maybe the "break from exploring the world" Ivaar talked about will come in other forms, like more gossip from NPCs. I think this sort of thing would be nice, but there are simply too many items for item lore.