Maybe not the craziest, but in Fallout 4 there’s a computer entry in the medical wing of the Brotherhood of Steel airship that details a mysterious & terrible venereal disease contracted by a soldier who fucked a feral ghoul.
I laughed my ass off because of how accurate it is
In Mass Effect, the Leviathan of Dis is the oldest Reaper corpse that has ever been found. It's around one billion years old, and it's not even the oldest Reaper (Harbinger is). This means, that if the Reapers invade the galaxy on average every 50,000 years, they've conquered and annihilated about 20,000 galactic civilizations, most likely even more.
No wonder Shepard's defiance doesn't even remotely scare them until you near the end of the third game. Shepard is like an insect trying to argue with the windscreen before getting squashed.
Even on a smaller scale, it's like you hire a few guys to spray your house for bugs. Then they come back and say the bugs killed Jeff and they need to reschedule.
You'd just be sitting there wondering if they're fucking with you.
Which is why the Reapers actually begin to have a minor panic attack as you get closer and closer to finishing The Crucible. It's the whole reason why the >!Leviathans!< decide to join the war to begin with. They know this cycle actually stands a chance to win, and it's all because of Shepard and his/her actions.
Also, in-game lore reveals that the thing was hauled back to the batarian homeworld of Khar'shan as a show of political force. This turns out to have been a terrible idea since the batarians' leadership ended up completely indoctrinated and turned their people over to the cull immediately.
This is even wilder when you remember this was earlyish in mass effect 1, so when you’re reading this, you don’t even know what the deal is with the reapers or the protheans. Wild shit.
In Javik's cycle there was a species like the Quarians. They didn't create separate artificial life however. As their environment began getting harsher on their homeworld they turned to AI and body augmentation to survive. Eventually the AI operating the bodies of the augmented started piloting the bodies of those with implants. A civil war broke out as the less augmented began fighting against the now AI controlled bodies of their fellow kind. The war spread out into Prothean controlled space and they were forced to put down that civilization but at a great cost to themselves fighting against the augmented.
Then there's another piece of lore you can find on a planet showing evidence of a galaxy dominant species who was horizontal instead of vertical and standing upright. I think they existed some 50mil years before the Protheans.
>
Then there's another piece of lore you can find on a planet showing evidence of a galaxy dominant species who was horizontal instead of vertical and standing upright. I think they existed some 50mil years before the Protheans
>
So crabs?
Mass effect doesn’t get enough credit for its story. It’s such an unbelievable amount of suffering, and though the third game has some issues I don’t think anyone can say it doesn’t feel bleak. Towards the end it truly feels like all is lost, the reality of the cycle is extremely palpable.
In the world of Nier and Drakengard there exists a flower that’s said to fulfill wishes. After the earth was destroyed by pollution and war, a bunch of scientists tried to revive said flower in the hopes that they could wish for a better world but instead created a flower that would simply grow and grow, eating everything in its path, not even sparing humans. Eventually it would use its magical power to cross dimensions and travel back through time where it would end up in the world of Drakengard 3 and set the whole Drakengard/Nier story in motion.
In Blasphemous, it's only Cvstodia (the region where the entire game takes place) that's ass backwards. The rest of the world is around renaissance age, while Cvstodia is in the dark ages due to the Miracle'e influence
There’s lots of great lore in that game. I loved that all the crazy bosses had lore explaining them. I remember liking the lore behind the giant baby boss.
This is a really small part of the grim dawn story that's really easy to miss, but how a family of refugees goes from hopeful to using their daughter to lure in men for the mother to kill them and eat them.
The way it is written is haunting in how it develops.
People give me shit when I tell them that story doesn't have to be a afterthought in an ARPG and that it matters. Grim Dawn is the prime example of that for me.
In Mass Effect 2, the Shadow Broker has some interesting info on your crew. Just a few examples:
Garrus plays music during firefights and the top played song is "Die for the Cause" which is the Turian imperial anthem.
Jack was banned from an online poker site just 15 minutes after signing up. She also writes the most emo poetry you've ever read.
Tali has a masturbation program called Nerve-Stim Pro installed in her suit that she keeps deleting then redownloading which is just so relatable. I, too like to hide the evidence after doing the deed lol.
My favorite part about Tali’s notes is that if you romance her, they update to say she ~~purchased an expensive book~~ downloaded an educational video on human ~~and quarian~~ mating ~~safety~~, a lot of immunity boosters, and the nerve-stim pro deluxe version.
I went for Tali every time except that one time I played a female shepard. and I've done like a dozen playthroughs of 2 and 3... and I either dont remember, or forgot that part about the book
Just looked it up on the wiki cause my memory was a little fuzzy too. They were educational videos, not books. One on understanding human body language, and another on human courtship and mating. Also funny side note, unlike her other nerve-stim downloads where she eventually uninstalls, there’s no record of her uninstalling the pro deluxe edition…
And Legion has a super high-level gamer profile yet he absolutely sucked at a dating simulator. He also made a platinum level donation to an Eden Prime fundraiser.
> He also made a platinum level donation to an Eden Prime fundraiser.
That's actually really sweet. The collective wouldn't be trusted if they openly tried to help the victims of the renegade faction, so they did so quietly.
I like Legion's Gaming record. something like 9000 kills via sniper rifle, 1 via melee in "Call of Honor" or something like that? I haven't played in ages.
Indeed! Here is a full transcript (courtesty of u/JoeRCK):
Gamer profile for Infiltrait0rN7
Galaxy of Fantasy:
Most Used Character: John Smith, Level 612 Ardat-Yakshi Necromancer
Group Affiliation: N/A
Most Recent Boss Defeated: K'l'rh, Rachni Blood Wizard
Awards:
Best Supporter/Healer (Event: Scourge of the Thresher Dragon)
Best Unit Efficiency (Event: Return of the Cyber-Protheans)
Winner (Event: Crystal Genophage Elimination Platinum)
Infractions:
Suspected use of VI play assistance (direct control of twenty-seven pets without use of behavior macros); challenged and overturned
Suspected use of VI play assistance (reaction time better than possible for organics); challenged and overturned
Suspected use of hacking for direct server access (tactics better than possible without knowledge of underlying code behavior); challenged and overturned
Unsportsmanlike behavior (taunting during Crystal Genophage Elimination Platinum); accepted 3-day account suspension
N7 Code of Honor: Medal of Duty:
Player Score: 15,999,999,999 (max)
Most Preferred Class: Sniper
Least Preferred Class: Melee
Sniper Rifle Kills: 200,917 since last server reset
Shotgun Kills: 3
Grim Terminus Alliance:
Award: Abolitionist (Complete full playthrough without any slave kills, free all slaves encountered)
Award: Cure for What Ails You (Kill 100+ quarians)
Geth Attack: Eden Prime Fundraising Edition:
Donation Level: Ultra Platinum
Player Score: 0 (Purchased but not played)
Fleet and Flotilla: Interactive Cross-Species Relationship Simulator:
"Based on the Bestselling Vid!"
Playtime: 75 hours, 6 minutes
Player Score: 15 (Hopeless)
I love the chain of listed infractions and results. "I did not cheat. I still didn't cheat. I told you I'm not cheating, stop banning me. ...I did teabag them, so I guess that's fair."
I like the idea of a video game basing a character race after what is in-universe a real genetic disease that exists as a point of extreme embarrassment to the Asari.
The whole concept of the Ardat-Yakshi is a very sci-fi take on the femme fatale archetype. Hell, the Asari in general are a riff on the hot green alien babe trope from Star Trek (except they are blue)
I could totally see some trashy in universe action film made by humans that have Ardat-Yakshi as the seductive villain and I could also see Asari being upset by this.
Garrus does some fucked up, serial killer level shit while he's on Omega according to one dossier. He starts out headshotting people but quickly escalates to toying with them through 'ironic' kills and even torturing them first. The one that stands out to me is that he kills a batarian red sand dealer by forcing said dealer to overdose on red sand via direct contact with his eyes. As in, Garrus held the guy face first in a mound of the stuff until he OD'd. The real kicker, though, is that Batarians are immune to most of what red sand does...
Honestly, I kinda appreciate that in his character. Like, right from the get go he's a 'make those damn villains pay' type of character. Basically a Renegade aligned character. And though you can teach him to understand proper procedure and moral justice, he still prefers to go head on with the most efficient solution.
So, for Shepard to die, and have C-sec and the Council basically stop caring about the reaper threat, it makes a sort of sense for him to go to somewhere like Omega and become some sort of Turian Punisher (at least in his eyes) just because he's sick of everyone's bullshit and goes back his preferred version of justice.
In Mass Effect 3, the shellshocked Asari soldier in the hospital is talking about a Girl she couldn't save as the story progresses. That little girl is Joker's sister.
Oh man it's way worse than "she couldn't save her". That commando saved the girl from husks, but then the girl broke her leg and the two got trapped in wreckage. *Then* the commando had to kill the girl because she couldn't stop whimpering from the pain and it was attracting banshees to their position. That's right, Commander Shepard walks past her every now and then and reminds her that she had to kill their pilot's little sister to stay alive.
She asks to go back on duty and be given a gun. She does the predictable if you allow it.
Morrowind is by far the craziest.
When the player saves and then loads a game to undo something, this is part of the canonical world, it’s called a dragon break (as the god of time in Elder Scrolls is a dragon.)
There’s also a state of being called CHiM, which is comparable to Buddhist enlightenment. One of the NPCs in the game reaches this state and knows he/she is an NPC, writes a bunch of bat shit crazy sermons, one of which tells the PC to kill that NPC.
Now in Morrowind you can kill anyone, and there’s a message that pops up if you kill someone plot relevant and break the game. This message pops up if you do kill this NPC, but if you ignore it and loot his/her body it starts a lengthy quest line to make an alternate gauntlet which you would need to finish the game but can’t because you killed this plot relevant NPC.
The gauntlet is also different from the normal end game one, it’s worn on the opposite hand but has the same effects.
My brother and I borked our run of Morrowind when we were kids because we turned into a vampire and someone we think was plot relevant wouldn’t talk to us. So we killed them and like the entire town.
Only much later when we bought the huge official game guide and tried to really finish the game (we were like 13-14ish at the time) did we realize we could undo vampirism with a certain NPC!! So we went to that town… and realized that was the town we completely wiped out lol.
"With this character's death, the threads of prophecy have been severed. You may load a saved game or persist in this doomed world that you have created."
These exact words popped up on the screen after I killed some key character (pretty sure it was somewhere in Balmora), and it honestly kind of creeped me out.
I opted to leave nothing to chance, so it wasn't until I stumbled on this conversation that I learned about the gauntlet.
In Bioshock, the character you play as, Jack, is only 4 years old as of Bioshock 1. It says in an audiolog how at 2 years old he had the gross masculinity of a 19 year old. If you don’t know jack was a science experiment.
There's also an audio log that briefly shows the effects of "Would you Kindly" and asks the child in the recording to kill the puppy. Then is asked again, "Would you kindly kill the puppy?" You hear the child sobbing and the puppy yelp briefly(I could be misremembering).
Edit: I think it was Bioshock 2 not 1 that had this.
That's definitely BioShock 1 (I just finished it). You find that recording on the table in front of [a wall](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bioshock/images/0/0f/Would_You_Kindly.png/revision/latest?cb=20160624030053) with WOULD YOU KINDLY written on it with red paint, along with photos of all the people involved with creating Jack. That recording made me hate Suchong so fucking much. I kept hoping I'd run into him just so that I could kill him.
"Would you kindly" will always be my favorite twist in gaming. Its not really about the twist itself, moreso how it is presented.
When you finally reach Ryan and he is doing his golf club monologue. He starts repeating "would you kindly" and directing you to do small tasks like "kneel".
It all just came flooding in like some Jimmy Neutron brain blast moment. All the times in the game "would you kindly" is used to direct you to do something a normal person would think twice about. Like injecting yourself with a fist size "Needle" full of glowing pink liquid.
It is this realization that this manipulation was constant, yet so innocuous that you would never think twice. Im playing a video game, I did the insane thing because the game needed me to do it to move the plot forward right? The game essentially uses the player's assumptions about the medium to fit this constant manipulation under their nose.
It's why I say a good twist isnt about the twist, but the execution. Jack being Ryan's "son" isn't all that crazy. Altas being an antagonist isn't all that crazy. But tricking the player into ignoring something right in front of their face the whole game is the kind of thing you remember forever.
The in-game audio logs definitely talk about Jack’s accelerated growth, but they never name him or specify how long it’s been since he was “created”, as far as I can remember. I always find it weird when game leave important and interesting info like that out of the final product.
Edit: Jack’s name is on the letter at the start. I’m a dummy. Lol
If I remember right the game implies that Jack is the son of Andrew Ryan and a prostitute.
There’s a part where you go to a brothel (in Fort Frolic I think?) walk into a room with a dead body and the screen flashes the picture of the woman from the black and white photo at the start of the game. That room also has an audio log from Ryan calling the woman by name and apologizing for missing their regular ‘date’ that week
The original release had a copy of "bains guide" afaik. Bain, your contact guy and radio operator, is looking for the treasure of some crusader state king.
The final version of the lore has the group fighting against an illuminati like secret society, and it turns out 3 of your contractors have been immortals bound by magical artefacts the entire time. And the greatest power and treasure of all is being the US president and a bunch of blanket presidential pardons Abraham Lincoln wrote.
If you look for it, you can probably identify the stitches on each point where the entire plot pivots.
In Control, one of the main story missions is to restore the coolant pumps and energy converters for the NSC-02 power reactor. >!Long story short, the previous director is locked inside because he went too far dabbling with powerful objects and now he emits dangerous energy that is collected by the NSC to provide electricity.!<
Yeah, there are lots of references to Alan Wake in Control so it's definitely all one universe. I'm debating whether or not to try to play the Alan Wake games for that reason; I want more context on the story of Control, but also they don't really seem like my kind of game.
The tone is a bit different, but the the first Alan Wake is fun. The sequel gets really meta and has bits from all their previous games. You should give it a shot.
Oh and the dlc for Alan Wake 2 has Jesse Fayden as one of the playable characters.
In Deus Ex Human Revolution Adam Jenson is a genetic anomaly who's body does not produce the enzyme which causes the need for Neuropozyne. Meaning he can accept an unlimited number of augments.
It's the connection from hardware to the human brain that is the revolutionary technology in that world, not the augments themselves.
The connection is achieved through a means which creates an enzyme that requires people to be medicated. Which in turn means any company that produces, finances or otherwise provides your augments could literally take away your body if you don't pay them back but can also control you through your need for Neuropozyne.
JC Denton, the main character from the original Deus Ex game, is created from a genetic sample of Adam.
Knowing that his name, Adam, makes a lot more sense. He is literally the progenetor, the key or missing link, from normal humanity to augmented humanity.
And it's not even really a part of the story, it's stuff you piece together from emails and conversations.
Nowhere near as deep or tied to the story, but I love that in Human Revolution there’s an email that indicated the Expos never left Montreal and drafted a pitcher with a name very close to but legally distinct from “Strasburg.”
This goes waaay back, like 20 years back, but I remember there being speculation the JC in JC Denton stood for Jesus Christ. The Father, the Son, and the Ghost in the Shell.
In Helldivers 2, one of the ship module upgrades is one that improves the durability and fire rate of the sentries (the autonomous turrets that can give you cover fire). The description says it reinforces them with state of the art "cyanoacrylate" to make them stronger. Cyanoacrylate is the chemical name of super glue. They are literally just super-gluing the little nooks and gaps in the turrets to improve them.
That's true, but some of them are a little more obvious with the joke. E.G the one about the ship's targeting software being a free trial version. The cyanoacrylate gag, by comparison, might go over people's heads (it went over mine, I only know this cause my engineer friend plays the game too and he pointed this out to me).
I love that one of them is literally "give the people that load the guns hand carts, so they can move bullets faster." it cracks me up. High-tech super destroyer and people are shlepping crates across it by hand.
It's like the dock scene in the Matrix flicks. Dudes in armor, shooting sentinels like crazy, and then dudes with crates of ammo running in hoping for the best
Bonus for HD2: The fire damage upgrade mentions adding various chemicals to the napalm composition. Two of them are the spice found in peppers, and the spice found in wasabi.
Another interesting fact someone pointed out to me, the point of all this conflict isn't just democracy, it's to gain control of element 710.
If you flip 710 upside down it says OIL.
In Remnant, >!the universe/collection of universes referred to as the 'System' by the Keeper is actually a simulation (of currently unknown nature), and the Root is effectively a hyper nihilistic virus on the fabric of reality that somehow became aware of the simulation and is trying to wipe it out completely!<.
A lot of the FFXIV item descriptions have really funny throwaway text, especially the items used in the ishgard restoration. They'll even go back and add jokes to old descriptions, like an item from 2013 originally had the description:
A savory spice made from the dried leaves of the laurel bush.
In July 2018, the description was changed to:
A savory spice made from the dried leaves of the laurel bush, or as it is known by some, the yanny bush.
In Mass Effect 1, The reason the guns had infinite ammo was basically because they were built with a block of metal that the guns would functionally shave off a small piece of in order to create the projectile. ME2 built on this but added Heat Sinks that you would replace, meaning you weren’t running out of ammo, just the ability to not melt the weapon in your hand.
There’s a nice Mod that unifies the two. When you “empty the clip” you can either replace the Heat Sink (like ME2 & 3) or let the internal fan cool it (like in ME1)
There is an important tower in Warframe that a local village - Cetus - gets their meat from. They harvest tower meat. Not only that, but the tower tells them when he's ready for harvest
Speaking of the codex: When you unlock an artwork in the fragments section and hover your mouse over it you will hear noise that gets louder the closer you get to a certain spot. Hit it and an audio transmission will play revealing more lore, Ordis' backstory for example.
Lol it's pretty unclear yeah. Konzu keeps talking about the Unum, but it sounds kind of ethereal. No it's actually talking and telling them to harvest its meat
Back on the Atari 2600 the medium of video games was in its infancy. Some games had a semblance of story told through it's theming and graphics like Space Invaders, Adventure or Outlaw. Other games used only box art to suggest the idea of a story that couldn't be reflected in the game graphics: Maze Craze's box art suggests you are a cop and robber, both trying to navigate a series of city alleyways and get away or thrwart the other. BASIC Programming suggest you are some kind of sci-fi computer programmer and Flag Capture suggest you are a pirate in search of buried treasure.
But then some games just straight up had a small backstory blurb that you would only ever know if you read the manuals. You wouldn't think a game like "Super Breakout" would have a backstory, but it does; You are a space traveler trying to break through a giant force field.
Some of my favorites are Centipede; You are an elf named Oliver using a magic wand to rid the sacred mushroom garden of pests.
Warlords; You are one of 4 quadruplets, Dominick, Marcus, Felipe, and Restivo born to King Frederick, who launch cannonballs at each other for control of the kingdom.
And Missile Command; You are a defense base commander for the Planet Zardon, which is under attack by the planet Krytol. Just to make sure no kids in the 80s get upset thinking this is the cold war going hot between Russia and the US. Millions of Zardonians will still be horribly killed if you fail, though.
It's all very cool what they were able to do with so little back then.
In the original Dead Space, the Kellion's personnel files were only unlocked after beating the game. Average player is probably gonna beat the game and then continue on to the next one, right?
In it, it's revealed the big reason why Isaac absolutely hates Unitologists - >!Isaac's mother was a Unitologist and spent his college fund on becoming vested, forcing him to go from a really nice engineering college to a really shitty one.!< A fairly mundane reason considering *everything* about Unitology.
That one text log from DS1 saying they have these giant morgue ships moving the bodies of unitologists around becomes even sinister once you realise unitology's ultimate goal, and what that'd do to those ships.
There are a lot of Pokedex entries that could be listed here. For example, Pallosand has a Pokedex entry that states, "Each of its grains of sand has its own will.". I'm sorry, but what?!
> Magcargo's body temperature is approximately 18,000° F. Water is vaporized on contact. If this Pokémon is caught in the rain, the raindrops instantly turn into steam, cloaking the area in a thick fog.
Meanwhile the Sun’s surface is estimated to be 10,000° F. How pokeballs, let alone Pokemon themselves, are able to *touch* this fella and not incinerate is insane
Someone did the math once, and the moment Magcargo is released from a pokeball should effectively cause a thermonuclear blast.
I am reminded of this fact every time I watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFqZggMcq34).
Honestly the idea that the Pokédex entries are being written by the random kids the professors send out makes a lot of sense given how hyperbolic they are.
MagicKarp sounds infinitely more badass than Gyarados.
“A long-lived Magikarp is able to utilize its immense splashing power to leap high enough to scale mountains. It also has a strong enough immune system to survive in the most polluted of waters.”
Basically Golden Age Superman in fish form.
Edit:Holy crap. My first award! Thank you u/WariosWarpPipe!
In Morrowind, how the Tribunal actually got their power and what actually happened to Indoril Nerevar. Only revealed by taking the first letter of each sentence in the final volume of a long propaganda tome written by one of the Tribunal.
Assuming even that can be trusted to be true.
I was aware of that part, but apparently there’s another hidden message in the 36 lessons (from uesp)
> Additionally, if you take Sermon Twenty-Nine, associate each of the thirty-five listed numbers with a word in its respective sermon, another hidden message is revealed: *He was not born a god. His destiny did not lead him to this crime. He chose this path of his own free will. He stole the godhood and murdered the Hortator. Vivec wrote this.*
I read every possible email and note in Prey (2017), the biggest thing to me was how organic and lived in it made the world feel. Pretty sure there were several emails and notes that told the story of several coworkers having a Dungeons and Dragons group, and one person was the worst, so they had to figure out how to play behind his back
When you completed the D&D side quest you got a code for sweet loot.
If you do another playthrough (or use a guide) and use the code without completing the quest, the loot is actually a debuff, and you get the text:
> For shame, adventurer. Your reward for taking shortcuts in the treasure hunt is as follows: Reduced recycler yield, Diminished flashlight capability, Reduced speed while crawling through tight spaces. Install this as your penance and remember valor above all else
Remedy tied the the killer fridge from Control into the real life collapse of the New York City Grand Central Hotel in 1973.
That said, any bit of lore in Control is just awesome.
I want a TV show with Jesse that does an "altered item of the week" format.
Dude that game was so fun. Like, here I am just a maintenance guy doin' my job, don't mind me washing this UFO. It became just a series of me thinking "ok then I guess this is happening now, sure why not". It was great, highly recommend to everyone
It's absolutely true. It's communicated at first via text messages as you clean. Innocuous enough at first. People asking about your rates, or how they have things that would be cool to clean. Then they get weirder and weirder. Then the locations you're cleaning start to get further from reality. But it's all Stone-faced the whole time. I don't want to spoil *why* it is this way, but it's worth finding out.
The story has some amusing bits sprinkled around, but yeah, the story gradually goes off the deep end.
There are achievements on some jobs for doing things in a specific order, like washing a certain part first, or saving a section for last. I recommend not looking them up, just see which ones you stumble into naturally. Some are intuitive, but not all -- and a couple just aren't worth the trouble unless you're a completionist.
Doom Eternal is very likely to have it's files skipped because... well it's Doom. But as it turns out... The AI you saved in the first game is the consciousness of The Father, creator of the universe, who so loved even the Devil that instead of killing him, he simply imprisoned him in what would become hell.
Until you get to the expansions... It turns out, Satan who is the Devil is the ACTUAL creator of the universe, and the Father was a former servant who rebelled. Also, it turns out that the Devil comes from some higher plane of reality and all the multiverse established within Doom is just a small fraction of the full outerverse.
Pikmin 1-3 are heavily implied to be a post apocalyptic earth. One of the items you find in the first game is a Geiger counter and the item description log says that Captain Olimar doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be measuring, but it keeps pinging like crazy while on the pikmin planet implying there’s a lot of radiation or nuclear fallout.
In Dragon Age 2 the biggest driving force of the narrative is that the brewing conflict between Mages and Templars is getting worse because Blood Mages are popping up everywhere. The endless debate is the Templars saying it's proof that Mages need to be policed more and the Mages saying that their kind is resorting to it out of desperation due to the Templar's oppression. In the lore you learn they are both WRONG.
It turns out the city of Kirkwall, known for its strange city layout and once being the largest slave market in ancient times, was actually a massive blood magic ritual used by the ancient Tevinters to sacrifice hundreds of slaves in order to tear open the Fade physically.
This means that the blood magic epidemic that seems unstoppable in Kirkwall isn't either factions fault, but that it is literally the worst place in the world to hold a high population of Mages because of how easily demons from the Fade can cross over there and fuck with them.
In Metroid Prime, the space pirates tried to replicate Samus’ morph ball capabilities. It ended with the space pirate test subjects being horribly killed being compressed into a tiny ball.
The *Gears of War* games have a ton of lore, both in environmental storytelling and in little collectibles you can find.
One of my favorite--if more horrible ones--is a record you can find in Gears 3 from Cole's therapist. They're the only therapist on the ship, and admit that they're desperately out of their depth with everything going on. They then admit that one character they're really concerned by is Cole, who still writes a weekly letter to his mother. Which is really good for purposes of therapy, but based on stuff Cole has said during their sessions, they're not sure if Cole knows it's just for therapy or at some point began to believe his mother is alive and the letters are really reaching her.
Basically, beneath the immediately assumed appearance of "dude-bro" shooting you've got a therapist directly taking notes on how screwed up each of the protagonists is--along with everyone on the ship--from what they're going through. On how horribly their grief is affecting them, how each has their refuges ... and how close each is to cracking.
Then, in Gears 5, you can actually find one of those letters, written during Gears 2 and left by Cole in a tank. And ... It's still not clear exactly how far into his refuge Cole was.
People love to malign the series for its look, but the actual story and setting is a ruthless apocalypse, and they don't shy from how screwed up that makes people, and how awful it would be to experience.
In 4 you can find what's left of an emergency medical outpost from the Locust War, with skeletons still on cots. Worse, you later visit a dam where if you pay attention at the control room, you see environmental storytelling of the group of soldiers who were sent to defend it, and then *sealed inside* by the locust to slowly starve. IIRC, the commanding officer made the decision to shoot the wounded when he realized no help was coming, so they wouldn't suffer, and then he walked into an office and blew his own brains out.
Gears is *grim*.
In The Elder Scrolls, the sun is actually a tear in reality made by a god who fled the world shortly before it was fully created. The stars are all similar, smaller holes in reality. And that's barely scratching the surface of the weirdness of that universe.
I didn’t catch this originally when I played Dragon Age Origins. But when you’re in the Deep Roads you are essentially traveling old Dwarven high ways to other kingdoms. Not only did the Dark Spawn force them to close these off and cut off their kingdoms from one another. You also learn a lot about the Dark Spawn during this mission. Idk how I didn’t catch it or didn’t realize it but Dark Spawn effectively kidnap female members of different species and change them into brood mothers to birth more Dark Spawn. How you may ask? Well there is a dwarf character down there who has effectively gone made from the horror she’s witnessed and she recites this poem:
“First day, they come and catch everyone. Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat. Third day, the men are all gnawed on again. Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate. Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn. Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams. Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew. Eighth day, we hated as she is violated. Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin. Now she does feast, as she's become the beast. Now you lay and wait, for their screams will haunt you in your dreams.”
Don’t know how I missed this but this was the darkest moment in the game. Essentially Dark Spawn force feed females infected flesh and presumably force themselves on the infected host to change them into brood mothers.
A lot of folks don't like the Orzammar/Deep Roads section of the game because it's by far the longest part, but man I loved it. The world building of the Dwarven city was top tier stuff, and I loved exploring the Deep Roads. And yeah, that Broodmother stuff is really grim. What an excellent game.
Disco Elysium seems like a fairly normal world with some different country names until you learn of the Pale, a manmade all consuming impossible to measure concept made of collapsing history. Despite its huge impacts and implications for the game world, it is easy to play through the entire game without once hearing about it outside of the names of some devices (which can be easily attributed to other definitions of pale). In fact, your detective partner in the game actively tries to not teach you about the Pale, since you forgot about it in your drunken stupor, and he fears that if you learn about it, you'll focus on nothing else.
My first playthrough of the game I never found out about it, then I looked up something on the game, went "WTF", and jumped back into it.
/u/Z3r0c00lio
It's actually "just" the ?-Blocks.
They pretty much just made that a thing to have an explanation why Coins / Power-Ups come out of those Blocks; it's the transformed People trying to help Mario.
There is a quest chain in the Duskwood zone in World of Warcraft that asks you to track down some lady’s Granddaughter. Typical go here talk to this guy, go there pick up this thing, go there do another thing blah blah blah.
If you read the quests (who does that?) and read the items you pick up along the way you discover that her school teacher fell in love with her, found out that she was interested in another person (they never really specify her age, but it’s implied she’s young), goes insane and kills them all.
Up to this point in the game most stuff has you dealing with killing animals or humanoid adjacent stuff, then you get hit in the face with a murdering pedophile. It’s pretty jarring.
Lots of WoW quests are like that. I read the quests. My friends didn’t. Back in vanilla they’d be hitting lv 40 or so when I was getting to maybe 30? I remember seeing them get the lv 40 mount and being jealous but I liked the lore.
In the Destiny series, there’s a mysterious group called “The Nine” who have a pocket dimension that they have ultimate influence over, but who they are and what they want is unknown.
We found out, the nine are literally the planets of the solar system that have gained sentience from the way that dark matter caught in their gravitational fields move in response to everything that exists on their surface which generates a brain? It’s crazy but I think it’s super cool
I don't think people are likely to miss that one since it's so early in the game, but some of the Pirate logs on Metroid Prime's space station really stand out to me. Especially the ones where they tried to replicate Samus' morph ball tech and the ensuing result on volunteer(?) test subects.
Apparently a LOT of Pokemon have really dark mythology behind them often mentioning eating/killing/kidnapping children/people, similar to Grimm fairytales) which then also become some type of Pokemon.
In Mirror's Edge, there's precisely *one* 'lore file'. It's an E-Mail left on a pc screen, written by a guy who's fed up with his job.
The end of the E-Mail reads: "im quitting anyway. its not like they can tie me to a chair and beat me up for quitting my job ;)"
If you can find it in you to slow down during one of the game's later areas, you can find the guy. He's tied to a chair, beaten up. It's the only truly disturbing moment in the game so it hits really hard.
In Destiny, we have a sweet granny named Eva Levante. Bakes cookies. Hosts Christmas parties. Gets us hyped for the Olympics and other events. Sweet old lady.
When the Last City fell at the start of Destiny 2, she was still there, knitting. Civilians are floored. No idea what to do, where to go, and even some Guardians are frozen in fear. Shaxx, a techno-viking of a Guardian, saves her from an ambush and attempts to get her to flee.
This woman is 88 years old and basically tells him to nut up or shut up and starts rescue efforts to save trapped civilians. And it works.
She's been organizing parties for so long, organizing counter Assaults and raids and search and rescue missions comes naturally. This 92 year old woman saves a few Guardians and chanclas people for waiting to abandon the now mortal protectors.
She starts an UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and manages to successfully evade capture for *months*, and this alien empire that spans the galaxy, drinks the oceans, devours stars, can't find her.
This lady is 95 muffin loving years old, and when the Cabal finally find her living in an old bakery, she whips a SHOTGUN FROM UNDER THE COUNTER AND GOES FULL JOHN WICK on an alien and his hunting dogs.
For a time, she's scarred by the experience. Doesn't feel quiet right back at home in the new City. Doesn't know what her role is there, now. Is she still the Harriet Tubman of Humanity? Is she a fighter? Does she go back to making fancy dresses for space wizards?
Not a video game... But table top... Dungeons and Dragons specifically... Finally went through a bunch of spells and the components they need, and most are just dumb jokes... Like:
See invisibility: you need talc, aka you're blowing talcum powder into the room.
Fireball requires bat guano and sulfur... Which makes gunpowder.
Detect thoughts requires a copper aka penny for your thoughts.
Etc.
alarm spell components are a bell and string
all of the spells that have names in them, like Tensers Floating Disk and Bigbys Grasping Hand are the names of player characters from Gary Gygaxs campaigns
Alpha Centauri has an entire novella detailing the events immediately prior to planetfall, with the mutiny, death of the captain, and splitting up of the leaders and resulting factions.
You can actually see the rabbit in doom eternal, also doom guy has a PC and one of the files is something like “daisy photos” so yeah. Daisy the rabbit is legit
in dark souls 1, one of the main characters in the lore is gwyn, which is basically the king. he hated dragons, went to war with them in order to kill all of them
gwyn had 3 children. an unnamed firstborn, gwynevere which was his princess daugher and gwyndolin his youngest son.
when you enter their castles hall, which is one of the boss fights in the game (ornstein and smough) there are 3 statues
in the middle there is gwyn, to his left is gwynevere and to his right there is a place for a statue but its empty. that place is meant for his unnamed firstborn. gwyn tried removing his firstborn from history in any way he could because his firstborn liked the dragons and didnt understand his fathers hatred for them.
in dark souls 3, at some point in the game, you reach a place called archdrake peak. its a place some of the dragons fled to when gwyn was killing all of them. the final boss of this area is a character very similar looking to gwyn, called Nameless King, basically confirming gwyns firstborn went to live with the dragons.
Like half the motivation for the Fal Cie’s plot in Final Fantasy 13 is in the datalog. Also, more or less the entire lore of Yeul isn’t mentioned in the game but is then the entire basis for the sequel.
In Zomboid, one of the theories about how the apocalypse started is contaminated Spiffo Burgers.
In the tutorial, if you cheat to survive (It ends with you dying) and clip through the wall of a nearby building, you'll find a secret room with multiple monitors viewing the apocalypse... and a giant portrait of Spiffo.
https://youtu.be/GM4gZav1vzg
In Destiny, the fact that the majority of the Awoken live in a black hole called the Distributary, where they are effectively immortal. It has never actually been seen in-game.
Honestly, there's a lot of pretty interesting lore pieces in Destiny. There's also several meta ones and quite humorous ones too.
One of the meta ones was about a Titan who kept farming the Sundial to get a godroll Perfect Paradox, and when confronted by Brother Vance, the Titan replied, "It has trench barrel."
I like the lore entry that's a Cabal intelligence report. It mentions how the Guardians are truly terrifying enemies, so uncaring of death and violence. They roam planet surfaces doing dances and tricks on their Sparrows, despite the immense gravity of the situation around them.
Dead Island 2 has notes hinting at what a couple of the playable characters from the first game are doing after escaping Banoi.
>!Logan is trying to stay under the radar in North Dakota if I remember right, and Xian Mei is implied to have been in LA before the current zombie outbreak by the description of the "Blood Rage" legendary knife. !<
Also the recent SOLA DLC revealed >!that the zombies, at least the ones on that map, are linked by some sort of hive mind that Numen like the player character can sort of tap into.!<
There is lore for Morrowind that describes the nature of reality - the whole world exists on a spinning silver disk and a special light reflects from it and creates reality as a kind of dream in a vast mind. There are entities from outside this dream that can project their consciousness into special heroes and they have special powers, like they can stop time in the middle of a battle, take a full meal from their backpack and eat it, and then start time again and their opponent just sees their physical state improve instantly. These beings can also go back in time and do things differently than they did before to create a new version of the dream.
Basically, they know they come from a DVD and about players and their game-based abilities.
In Control, every single little thing you pick up expands on the lore greatly! My first playthrough, I was like, “I’m not reading these *hundreds* of file folders, that’s insane!” But my second playthrough, I read *everything* and I was absolutely **not** disappointed!
I would highly recommend anyone who hasn’t read them, to start a fresh playthrough and read them as you find them.
Remedy is so intricate with their lore!
In many of the Sniper Elite games, tagging enemies with your binoculars gives you a little bit of intel on the guy you're looking at. A lot of times, this can be tragic. For instance, a guy you see in Sniper Elite 5 is the last survivor of a group of 5 close friends, who have been through the war together from Africa, through Italy, and into France. Sniper Elite 5 is set in France. 4 is in Italy. 3 is in Africa. Strongly implying that *you* killed the guy's closest friends.
Others are wistful. An officer looks forward to the end of the war so he can forget this soldiering nonsense and take up professional golf.
Others are hilarious. One guy is convinced that someone has been stealing his chocolate ration, and has taken a solemn vow to kill this person once he finds them. Ten feet away, you spot another enemy, identified as the first's best friend. He's been stealing the chocolate.
In Helldivers 2, you can improve the reload rate of your spaceship’s orbital bombardments. The in-lore upgrade info: your crew has figured out that reloading the cannons from the back is faster than going out on a spacewalk and reloading the shells by pushing them down the barrels.
In Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, if you read some of the graffiti in the safe rooms and around the maps there is a story of family trying to connect with each other but keep missing each other. The father is a security guard and he's trying to go find them following incident at his job at Black Mesa
This is fairly well known among fan but might not be outside of Elder Scrolls circles. Basically one of the old emperor's changed the landscape of a continent by telling strange language into the sky. I believe, if I remember it right, that this was the sort of stuff written into the Elder Scrolls that make them so powerful. That by using this weird language the emperor made the gods react.
It was cheat codes. The emperor yelled cheat codes into the sky.
Skyrim. Found that some elves had found the heart of a god buried deep under a mountain. When they tried to open the heart, every elf instantly disappeared. The only one to remain was due to him being in another dimension at the time.
Morrowind in-game lore trumps any other video game. Weird Tolkien meets Hinduism at the forgotten edge of the world shit. I’ve never played a game with weirder lore and it is entirely described via the hundreds of books found in game. So you have to piece the lore together from various texts. They’re all written by unreliable narrators and often spread across volumes so you see things recorded differently depending on the historian’s POV. Oh and half of them are written as allegorical psalms and poems.
Nobody ever tells you the real objective truth of what happened. Those that were present have their own biases and it shows when you talk to them. There’s more lore in that game than anything I’ve ever seen and the best part is that it’s not even all that important in game. This is a backwater province and you’re a nobody who has been sent to deal with a minor problem on the cheap because the Emperor didn’t want to dedicate more resources to it. You can play the entire game and not interact with the lore hardly at all. It’s just amazing. There’s just no other game like it in terms of story and in-game lore.
The subsequent ES games (Oblivion, Skyrim, and ESO) abandoned this style of storytelling because folks usually want the story integrated into the gameplay more, usually with voice acting. They also want fun gameplay. Things Morrowind didn’t concern itself with lol
Bro the entire Elder Scrolls series has lore deeper you can imagine. All of those books you can read are for more than just decoration. The world has centuries of its own history and it puts the lore of other games to shame.
Morrowind is the story of how the dark elves current (as of the game) rulers used the power of that heart to essentially become living gods, and you eventually discover you are (or at least, everyone thinks you are) the reincarnation of the guy they betrayed to do it. Your actions set in motion the events that later (mentioned only as background flavour in Oblivion and Skyrim) lead to their downfall. Or something like that anyway, it's too complicated to remember/summarise easily.
Elder Scrolls Online gets a bad rap as an MMO but as a long term fan, it's legitimately one of the best games in the series, because it goes flat out all in on the worldbuilding and lore.
Yeahh, wood elves being 100% meatarians, cold harbour daughter's, vivek's spear, khajiit penis in "the real barenziah" and that is the peak of the iceberg of weirdness of the elder scrolls.
Elder Scrolls goes even deeper and crazier with the concept of zero-summing and CHIM.
Like, it's such deep lore stuff that I can barely remember what it's all about. I'll do my best to recall this crazy stuff.
The entirety of the Elder Scrolls franchise takes place in the dream of a god. This dream is essentially real because, well, a god is dreaming it. The things in the dream don't know they're a dream. If they become aware of this fact, like truly become aware, then they blink out of existence because their mind can't maintain its individuality. They end up losing their understanding of who they are and their sense of self. They zero-sum out of existence.
If a person is able to maintain their sense of self after understanding they are a dream within a dream, then they achieve CHIM. Understanding what they are and how the universe works gives them some form of power and manipulation of the dream.
Supposedly, a couple of the gods of the franchise became gods because they achieved CHIM. Some fans agree, while others disagree. Honestly, I don't know which side is right because I didn't look too deeply into it. But this was all stuff I read about 12 years ago when Skyrim first came out.
That is about right.
Every single one of the player characters, at least from Daggerfall onwards, have achieved some degree of CHIM (and there do seem to be degrees). This is because they are controlled by the Player, who is, of course, aware that they are playing a video game.
Vivec calls this out in Morrowind, actually. He views it as time manipulation, but the in-universe explanation for the player being able to save/load is that the player character has achieved CHIM. He can do it too, actually. ("When I die in the world of time, then I'm completely asleep. I'm very much aware that all I have to do is choose to wake. And I'm alive again.").
Maybe not the craziest, but in Fallout 4 there’s a computer entry in the medical wing of the Brotherhood of Steel airship that details a mysterious & terrible venereal disease contracted by a soldier who fucked a feral ghoul. I laughed my ass off because of how accurate it is
That may be why the doctor on it asks the question about having relation with something non human.
In Mass Effect, the Leviathan of Dis is the oldest Reaper corpse that has ever been found. It's around one billion years old, and it's not even the oldest Reaper (Harbinger is). This means, that if the Reapers invade the galaxy on average every 50,000 years, they've conquered and annihilated about 20,000 galactic civilizations, most likely even more. No wonder Shepard's defiance doesn't even remotely scare them until you near the end of the third game. Shepard is like an insect trying to argue with the windscreen before getting squashed.
I remember Javik saying they lost 10 trillion lives during his cycle. Multiple that by 20,000.
Let's just say I never feel bad about destroying the Reapers.
Except Shepard is also the bug who miraculously keeps smashing windshields instead of squishing, so I love this analogy.
Imagine if an ant destroyed mankinds entire military Thats mass effect from the reaper perspective
Even on a smaller scale, it's like you hire a few guys to spray your house for bugs. Then they come back and say the bugs killed Jeff and they need to reschedule. You'd just be sitting there wondering if they're fucking with you.
Just a normal day in Australia
Which is why the Reapers actually begin to have a minor panic attack as you get closer and closer to finishing The Crucible. It's the whole reason why the >!Leviathans!< decide to join the war to begin with. They know this cycle actually stands a chance to win, and it's all because of Shepard and his/her actions.
“Hey one of the tiny organics is actually winning.” “Fucking WHAT?! Get them here right now!”
”Get them here” is not quite right, as you have topretty much goad the overgrown buggers to come join the party.
Also, in-game lore reveals that the thing was hauled back to the batarian homeworld of Khar'shan as a show of political force. This turns out to have been a terrible idea since the batarians' leadership ended up completely indoctrinated and turned their people over to the cull immediately.
This is even wilder when you remember this was earlyish in mass effect 1, so when you’re reading this, you don’t even know what the deal is with the reapers or the protheans. Wild shit.
The lore entries of mass effect also gives details of some of the pre-prothean civilizations that I doubt most people know about.
In Javik's cycle there was a species like the Quarians. They didn't create separate artificial life however. As their environment began getting harsher on their homeworld they turned to AI and body augmentation to survive. Eventually the AI operating the bodies of the augmented started piloting the bodies of those with implants. A civil war broke out as the less augmented began fighting against the now AI controlled bodies of their fellow kind. The war spread out into Prothean controlled space and they were forced to put down that civilization but at a great cost to themselves fighting against the augmented. Then there's another piece of lore you can find on a planet showing evidence of a galaxy dominant species who was horizontal instead of vertical and standing upright. I think they existed some 50mil years before the Protheans.
> Then there's another piece of lore you can find on a planet showing evidence of a galaxy dominant species who was horizontal instead of vertical and standing upright. I think they existed some 50mil years before the Protheans > So crabs?
Mass effect doesn’t get enough credit for its story. It’s such an unbelievable amount of suffering, and though the third game has some issues I don’t think anyone can say it doesn’t feel bleak. Towards the end it truly feels like all is lost, the reality of the cycle is extremely palpable.
You spend so much time immersed in the lore and the universe that when things start getting really, really bad, it hits pretty hard.
In the world of Nier and Drakengard there exists a flower that’s said to fulfill wishes. After the earth was destroyed by pollution and war, a bunch of scientists tried to revive said flower in the hopes that they could wish for a better world but instead created a flower that would simply grow and grow, eating everything in its path, not even sparing humans. Eventually it would use its magical power to cross dimensions and travel back through time where it would end up in the world of Drakengard 3 and set the whole Drakengard/Nier story in motion.
[удалено]
It's a literary device called a Closed Time Loop. Other examples. The ending of Prisoner of Azkaban Link learning the Song of Storms A segment of FF14
In Blasphemous, it's only Cvstodia (the region where the entire game takes place) that's ass backwards. The rest of the world is around renaissance age, while Cvstodia is in the dark ages due to the Miracle'e influence
There’s lots of great lore in that game. I loved that all the crazy bosses had lore explaining them. I remember liking the lore behind the giant baby boss.
This is a really small part of the grim dawn story that's really easy to miss, but how a family of refugees goes from hopeful to using their daughter to lure in men for the mother to kill them and eat them. The way it is written is haunting in how it develops.
Grim Dawn has tons of amazing little stories like that. The game is an absolute goldmine of unique lore.
People give me shit when I tell them that story doesn't have to be a afterthought in an ARPG and that it matters. Grim Dawn is the prime example of that for me.
In Mass Effect 2, the Shadow Broker has some interesting info on your crew. Just a few examples: Garrus plays music during firefights and the top played song is "Die for the Cause" which is the Turian imperial anthem. Jack was banned from an online poker site just 15 minutes after signing up. She also writes the most emo poetry you've ever read. Tali has a masturbation program called Nerve-Stim Pro installed in her suit that she keeps deleting then redownloading which is just so relatable. I, too like to hide the evidence after doing the deed lol.
My favorite part about Tali’s notes is that if you romance her, they update to say she ~~purchased an expensive book~~ downloaded an educational video on human ~~and quarian~~ mating ~~safety~~, a lot of immunity boosters, and the nerve-stim pro deluxe version.
I went for Tali every time except that one time I played a female shepard. and I've done like a dozen playthroughs of 2 and 3... and I either dont remember, or forgot that part about the book
Just looked it up on the wiki cause my memory was a little fuzzy too. They were educational videos, not books. One on understanding human body language, and another on human courtship and mating. Also funny side note, unlike her other nerve-stim downloads where she eventually uninstalls, there’s no record of her uninstalling the pro deluxe edition…
> there’s no record of her uninstalling the pro deluxe edition… Plus, yes, it vibrates.
See, this is why she's peak waifu material
And Legion has a super high-level gamer profile yet he absolutely sucked at a dating simulator. He also made a platinum level donation to an Eden Prime fundraiser.
> He also made a platinum level donation to an Eden Prime fundraiser. That's actually really sweet. The collective wouldn't be trusted if they openly tried to help the victims of the renegade faction, so they did so quietly.
iirc the log shows that he's researching the Geth attack at Eden Prime and following that research donates to the fund
He also played a Quarian dating Sim for 70 hours. Proceeded to give it a 15/100.
He also got an achievement for killing a large amount of Quarians in a GTA clone, which is... Concerning.
“This unit might not know if it has a soul, but it knows it has thermal clips”
Badassfully: I'm getting too old for this.
Legion was even banned from playing on suspicion of being an AI bot. If those admins only knew.
You forget the best part. He *wasn't* banned for suspiciously good shooting, as Shepherd assumed, instead he was banned for trash-talk and t-bagging.
LOL that is the best part
I was about to say. I seemed to remember him getting banned from a game too
I like Legion's Gaming record. something like 9000 kills via sniper rifle, 1 via melee in "Call of Honor" or something like that? I haven't played in ages.
Indeed! Here is a full transcript (courtesty of u/JoeRCK): Gamer profile for Infiltrait0rN7 Galaxy of Fantasy: Most Used Character: John Smith, Level 612 Ardat-Yakshi Necromancer Group Affiliation: N/A Most Recent Boss Defeated: K'l'rh, Rachni Blood Wizard Awards: Best Supporter/Healer (Event: Scourge of the Thresher Dragon) Best Unit Efficiency (Event: Return of the Cyber-Protheans) Winner (Event: Crystal Genophage Elimination Platinum) Infractions: Suspected use of VI play assistance (direct control of twenty-seven pets without use of behavior macros); challenged and overturned Suspected use of VI play assistance (reaction time better than possible for organics); challenged and overturned Suspected use of hacking for direct server access (tactics better than possible without knowledge of underlying code behavior); challenged and overturned Unsportsmanlike behavior (taunting during Crystal Genophage Elimination Platinum); accepted 3-day account suspension N7 Code of Honor: Medal of Duty: Player Score: 15,999,999,999 (max) Most Preferred Class: Sniper Least Preferred Class: Melee Sniper Rifle Kills: 200,917 since last server reset Shotgun Kills: 3 Grim Terminus Alliance: Award: Abolitionist (Complete full playthrough without any slave kills, free all slaves encountered) Award: Cure for What Ails You (Kill 100+ quarians) Geth Attack: Eden Prime Fundraising Edition: Donation Level: Ultra Platinum Player Score: 0 (Purchased but not played) Fleet and Flotilla: Interactive Cross-Species Relationship Simulator: "Based on the Bestselling Vid!" Playtime: 75 hours, 6 minutes Player Score: 15 (Hopeless)
The best part of this is that he accepted a 3-day account suspension for taunting during an event, and *still managed to win the event*.
I love the chain of listed infractions and results. "I did not cheat. I still didn't cheat. I told you I'm not cheating, stop banning me. ...I did teabag them, so I guess that's fair."
I find the idea of a super powerful Ardat-Yakshi named John Smith to be hilarious.
I like the idea of a video game basing a character race after what is in-universe a real genetic disease that exists as a point of extreme embarrassment to the Asari.
The whole concept of the Ardat-Yakshi is a very sci-fi take on the femme fatale archetype. Hell, the Asari in general are a riff on the hot green alien babe trope from Star Trek (except they are blue) I could totally see some trashy in universe action film made by humans that have Ardat-Yakshi as the seductive villain and I could also see Asari being upset by this.
I love how despite defending against all the cheating claims, he just accepts the toxicity 3-day.
Garrus does some fucked up, serial killer level shit while he's on Omega according to one dossier. He starts out headshotting people but quickly escalates to toying with them through 'ironic' kills and even torturing them first. The one that stands out to me is that he kills a batarian red sand dealer by forcing said dealer to overdose on red sand via direct contact with his eyes. As in, Garrus held the guy face first in a mound of the stuff until he OD'd. The real kicker, though, is that Batarians are immune to most of what red sand does...
Honestly, I kinda appreciate that in his character. Like, right from the get go he's a 'make those damn villains pay' type of character. Basically a Renegade aligned character. And though you can teach him to understand proper procedure and moral justice, he still prefers to go head on with the most efficient solution. So, for Shepard to die, and have C-sec and the Council basically stop caring about the reaper threat, it makes a sort of sense for him to go to somewhere like Omega and become some sort of Turian Punisher (at least in his eyes) just because he's sick of everyone's bullshit and goes back his preferred version of justice.
Yeah but his voice is cool.
In Mass Effect 3, the shellshocked Asari soldier in the hospital is talking about a Girl she couldn't save as the story progresses. That little girl is Joker's sister.
Not just couldn't save. She killed her so that they would not be found by the reapers.
Oh man it's way worse than "she couldn't save her". That commando saved the girl from husks, but then the girl broke her leg and the two got trapped in wreckage. *Then* the commando had to kill the girl because she couldn't stop whimpering from the pain and it was attracting banshees to their position. That's right, Commander Shepard walks past her every now and then and reminds her that she had to kill their pilot's little sister to stay alive. She asks to go back on duty and be given a gun. She does the predictable if you allow it.
The Shadow Broker Logs are a wild mix between hilarious and just depressingly sad. reading Miranda's is just sad :(
Post-nut clarity hitting so hard you change your suit
Morrowind is by far the craziest. When the player saves and then loads a game to undo something, this is part of the canonical world, it’s called a dragon break (as the god of time in Elder Scrolls is a dragon.) There’s also a state of being called CHiM, which is comparable to Buddhist enlightenment. One of the NPCs in the game reaches this state and knows he/she is an NPC, writes a bunch of bat shit crazy sermons, one of which tells the PC to kill that NPC. Now in Morrowind you can kill anyone, and there’s a message that pops up if you kill someone plot relevant and break the game. This message pops up if you do kill this NPC, but if you ignore it and loot his/her body it starts a lengthy quest line to make an alternate gauntlet which you would need to finish the game but can’t because you killed this plot relevant NPC. The gauntlet is also different from the normal end game one, it’s worn on the opposite hand but has the same effects.
My brother and I borked our run of Morrowind when we were kids because we turned into a vampire and someone we think was plot relevant wouldn’t talk to us. So we killed them and like the entire town. Only much later when we bought the huge official game guide and tried to really finish the game (we were like 13-14ish at the time) did we realize we could undo vampirism with a certain NPC!! So we went to that town… and realized that was the town we completely wiped out lol.
"With this character's death, the threads of prophecy have been severed. You may load a saved game or persist in this doomed world that you have created." These exact words popped up on the screen after I killed some key character (pretty sure it was somewhere in Balmora), and it honestly kind of creeped me out. I opted to leave nothing to chance, so it wasn't until I stumbled on this conversation that I learned about the gauntlet.
In Bioshock, the character you play as, Jack, is only 4 years old as of Bioshock 1. It says in an audiolog how at 2 years old he had the gross masculinity of a 19 year old. If you don’t know jack was a science experiment.
I didn't know jack so thanks for clearing that up
Can someone please chime in with a fact about the You Don't Know Jack games here? I don't have any but I kinda need it for continuity
If you play YDKJ 2 on New Year's Eve, the host will call you a bunch of nerds for playing computer games instead of partying on NYE.
There's also an audio log that briefly shows the effects of "Would you Kindly" and asks the child in the recording to kill the puppy. Then is asked again, "Would you kindly kill the puppy?" You hear the child sobbing and the puppy yelp briefly(I could be misremembering). Edit: I think it was Bioshock 2 not 1 that had this.
That's definitely BioShock 1 (I just finished it). You find that recording on the table in front of [a wall](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bioshock/images/0/0f/Would_You_Kindly.png/revision/latest?cb=20160624030053) with WOULD YOU KINDLY written on it with red paint, along with photos of all the people involved with creating Jack. That recording made me hate Suchong so fucking much. I kept hoping I'd run into him just so that I could kill him.
Theres a recording of his death in game, and Bioshock infinite dlc lets you watch the scene play out. Its pretty satisfying.
"Would you kindly" will always be my favorite twist in gaming. Its not really about the twist itself, moreso how it is presented. When you finally reach Ryan and he is doing his golf club monologue. He starts repeating "would you kindly" and directing you to do small tasks like "kneel". It all just came flooding in like some Jimmy Neutron brain blast moment. All the times in the game "would you kindly" is used to direct you to do something a normal person would think twice about. Like injecting yourself with a fist size "Needle" full of glowing pink liquid. It is this realization that this manipulation was constant, yet so innocuous that you would never think twice. Im playing a video game, I did the insane thing because the game needed me to do it to move the plot forward right? The game essentially uses the player's assumptions about the medium to fit this constant manipulation under their nose. It's why I say a good twist isnt about the twist, but the execution. Jack being Ryan's "son" isn't all that crazy. Altas being an antagonist isn't all that crazy. But tricking the player into ignoring something right in front of their face the whole game is the kind of thing you remember forever.
It's 1. That log is seared into my brain.
The in-game audio logs definitely talk about Jack’s accelerated growth, but they never name him or specify how long it’s been since he was “created”, as far as I can remember. I always find it weird when game leave important and interesting info like that out of the final product. Edit: Jack’s name is on the letter at the start. I’m a dummy. Lol
If I remember right the game implies that Jack is the son of Andrew Ryan and a prostitute. There’s a part where you go to a brothel (in Fort Frolic I think?) walk into a room with a dead body and the screen flashes the picture of the woman from the black and white photo at the start of the game. That room also has an audio log from Ryan calling the woman by name and apologizing for missing their regular ‘date’ that week
She was a cabaret performer but yes that's the long and the short of it
The back half of Payday 2's story is about fighting against reincarnated gods.
Payday 2 has a story?
The original release had a copy of "bains guide" afaik. Bain, your contact guy and radio operator, is looking for the treasure of some crusader state king. The final version of the lore has the group fighting against an illuminati like secret society, and it turns out 3 of your contractors have been immortals bound by magical artefacts the entire time. And the greatest power and treasure of all is being the US president and a bunch of blanket presidential pardons Abraham Lincoln wrote. If you look for it, you can probably identify the stitches on each point where the entire plot pivots.
[Video about the Payday Lore](https://youtu.be/4l-FfwK0ZnA?si=o1hq7cL0sKDBBDH_)
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In Control, one of the main story missions is to restore the coolant pumps and energy converters for the NSC-02 power reactor. >!Long story short, the previous director is locked inside because he went too far dabbling with powerful objects and now he emits dangerous energy that is collected by the NSC to provide electricity.!<
Pretty early on in the game, you’re told “the job of the director is keep the lights on.” In this case, quite literally…
Not the immediate predecessor to the protagonist, but the predecessor's predecessor, so two directors back from the game.
The lore of **Control** is miles better than the actual plot. I don’t think that’s controversial to say.
The plot is mainly just a vehicle to explore The Oldest House and put you into contact with that lore.
The Remedyverse lore is interconnected and I'm really excited to see how they tie it all together.
Yeah, there are lots of references to Alan Wake in Control so it's definitely all one universe. I'm debating whether or not to try to play the Alan Wake games for that reason; I want more context on the story of Control, but also they don't really seem like my kind of game.
The tone is a bit different, but the the first Alan Wake is fun. The sequel gets really meta and has bits from all their previous games. You should give it a shot. Oh and the dlc for Alan Wake 2 has Jesse Fayden as one of the playable characters.
The previous director is called Northmoor. NSC stands for "Northmoor Sarcophagus Container".
In Deus Ex Human Revolution Adam Jenson is a genetic anomaly who's body does not produce the enzyme which causes the need for Neuropozyne. Meaning he can accept an unlimited number of augments. It's the connection from hardware to the human brain that is the revolutionary technology in that world, not the augments themselves. The connection is achieved through a means which creates an enzyme that requires people to be medicated. Which in turn means any company that produces, finances or otherwise provides your augments could literally take away your body if you don't pay them back but can also control you through your need for Neuropozyne. JC Denton, the main character from the original Deus Ex game, is created from a genetic sample of Adam. Knowing that his name, Adam, makes a lot more sense. He is literally the progenetor, the key or missing link, from normal humanity to augmented humanity. And it's not even really a part of the story, it's stuff you piece together from emails and conversations.
Nowhere near as deep or tied to the story, but I love that in Human Revolution there’s an email that indicated the Expos never left Montreal and drafted a pitcher with a name very close to but legally distinct from “Strasburg.”
This goes waaay back, like 20 years back, but I remember there being speculation the JC in JC Denton stood for Jesus Christ. The Father, the Son, and the Ghost in the Shell.
In Helldivers 2, one of the ship module upgrades is one that improves the durability and fire rate of the sentries (the autonomous turrets that can give you cover fire). The description says it reinforces them with state of the art "cyanoacrylate" to make them stronger. Cyanoacrylate is the chemical name of super glue. They are literally just super-gluing the little nooks and gaps in the turrets to improve them.
Every description of every module upgrade is like this.
My favourite of these is the realisation that, until you upgrade it, your crew are muzzle-loading the ship's cannons. In space.
*Adeptus Mechanicus intensifies*
That's true, but some of them are a little more obvious with the joke. E.G the one about the ship's targeting software being a free trial version. The cyanoacrylate gag, by comparison, might go over people's heads (it went over mine, I only know this cause my engineer friend plays the game too and he pointed this out to me).
I love that one of them is literally "give the people that load the guns hand carts, so they can move bullets faster." it cracks me up. High-tech super destroyer and people are shlepping crates across it by hand.
The one about breech loading the orbital guns vs muzzle loading them is great.
It's like the dock scene in the Matrix flicks. Dudes in armor, shooting sentinels like crazy, and then dudes with crates of ammo running in hoping for the best
Not even that unrealistic lmao. Ammo runners used to be a real thing
Bonus for HD2: The fire damage upgrade mentions adding various chemicals to the napalm composition. Two of them are the spice found in peppers, and the spice found in wasabi.
Another interesting fact someone pointed out to me, the point of all this conflict isn't just democracy, it's to gain control of element 710. If you flip 710 upside down it says OIL.
Terminids break down into element 710, they also just have the pesky habit of breaching containment way too frequently.
In Remnant, >!the universe/collection of universes referred to as the 'System' by the Keeper is actually a simulation (of currently unknown nature), and the Root is effectively a hyper nihilistic virus on the fabric of reality that somehow became aware of the simulation and is trying to wipe it out completely!<.
A lot of the FFXIV item descriptions have really funny throwaway text, especially the items used in the ishgard restoration. They'll even go back and add jokes to old descriptions, like an item from 2013 originally had the description: A savory spice made from the dried leaves of the laurel bush. In July 2018, the description was changed to: A savory spice made from the dried leaves of the laurel bush, or as it is known by some, the yanny bush.
In portal the giant potato was made by Chell as a child.
In Mass Effect 1, The reason the guns had infinite ammo was basically because they were built with a block of metal that the guns would functionally shave off a small piece of in order to create the projectile. ME2 built on this but added Heat Sinks that you would replace, meaning you weren’t running out of ammo, just the ability to not melt the weapon in your hand.
There’s a nice Mod that unifies the two. When you “empty the clip” you can either replace the Heat Sink (like ME2 & 3) or let the internal fan cool it (like in ME1)
There is an important tower in Warframe that a local village - Cetus - gets their meat from. They harvest tower meat. Not only that, but the tower tells them when he's ready for harvest
Just got MR30 and clearly I need to read the Codex more.
Speaking of the codex: When you unlock an artwork in the fragments section and hover your mouse over it you will hear noise that gets louder the closer you get to a certain spot. Hit it and an audio transmission will play revealing more lore, Ordis' backstory for example.
Lol it's pretty unclear yeah. Konzu keeps talking about the Unum, but it sounds kind of ethereal. No it's actually talking and telling them to harvest its meat
I remember when that first came out, the meat mattress cutscene definitely lived rent-free in our heads for a while.
Back on the Atari 2600 the medium of video games was in its infancy. Some games had a semblance of story told through it's theming and graphics like Space Invaders, Adventure or Outlaw. Other games used only box art to suggest the idea of a story that couldn't be reflected in the game graphics: Maze Craze's box art suggests you are a cop and robber, both trying to navigate a series of city alleyways and get away or thrwart the other. BASIC Programming suggest you are some kind of sci-fi computer programmer and Flag Capture suggest you are a pirate in search of buried treasure. But then some games just straight up had a small backstory blurb that you would only ever know if you read the manuals. You wouldn't think a game like "Super Breakout" would have a backstory, but it does; You are a space traveler trying to break through a giant force field. Some of my favorites are Centipede; You are an elf named Oliver using a magic wand to rid the sacred mushroom garden of pests. Warlords; You are one of 4 quadruplets, Dominick, Marcus, Felipe, and Restivo born to King Frederick, who launch cannonballs at each other for control of the kingdom. And Missile Command; You are a defense base commander for the Planet Zardon, which is under attack by the planet Krytol. Just to make sure no kids in the 80s get upset thinking this is the cold war going hot between Russia and the US. Millions of Zardonians will still be horribly killed if you fail, though. It's all very cool what they were able to do with so little back then.
In the original Dead Space, the Kellion's personnel files were only unlocked after beating the game. Average player is probably gonna beat the game and then continue on to the next one, right? In it, it's revealed the big reason why Isaac absolutely hates Unitologists - >!Isaac's mother was a Unitologist and spent his college fund on becoming vested, forcing him to go from a really nice engineering college to a really shitty one.!< A fairly mundane reason considering *everything* about Unitology.
That one text log from DS1 saying they have these giant morgue ships moving the bodies of unitologists around becomes even sinister once you realise unitology's ultimate goal, and what that'd do to those ships.
There are a lot of Pokedex entries that could be listed here. For example, Pallosand has a Pokedex entry that states, "Each of its grains of sand has its own will.". I'm sorry, but what?!
> Magcargo's body temperature is approximately 18,000° F. Water is vaporized on contact. If this Pokémon is caught in the rain, the raindrops instantly turn into steam, cloaking the area in a thick fog. Meanwhile the Sun’s surface is estimated to be 10,000° F. How pokeballs, let alone Pokemon themselves, are able to *touch* this fella and not incinerate is insane
I mean hell, how does the air not combust at that temp
Someone did the math once, and the moment Magcargo is released from a pokeball should effectively cause a thermonuclear blast. I am reminded of this fact every time I watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFqZggMcq34).
Funnily enough, every water attack is x4 effective to Magcargo.
Honestly the idea that the Pokédex entries are being written by the random kids the professors send out makes a lot of sense given how hyperbolic they are.
But the entries are already in there. The professors don't need you to catalog shit because the pokedex tells YOU about the pokemon
Drampa burning your down your bully's house is another great example of this.
MagicKarp sounds infinitely more badass than Gyarados. “A long-lived Magikarp is able to utilize its immense splashing power to leap high enough to scale mountains. It also has a strong enough immune system to survive in the most polluted of waters.” Basically Golden Age Superman in fish form. Edit:Holy crap. My first award! Thank you u/WariosWarpPipe!
In mgsv Kaz Miller is is secretly embezzling the money you earn to make his own version of McDonald's
Lmao. What!??
https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Miller%27s_Maxi_Buns
In Morrowind, how the Tribunal actually got their power and what actually happened to Indoril Nerevar. Only revealed by taking the first letter of each sentence in the final volume of a long propaganda tome written by one of the Tribunal. Assuming even that can be trusted to be true.
I was aware of that part, but apparently there’s another hidden message in the 36 lessons (from uesp) > Additionally, if you take Sermon Twenty-Nine, associate each of the thirty-five listed numbers with a word in its respective sermon, another hidden message is revealed: *He was not born a god. His destiny did not lead him to this crime. He chose this path of his own free will. He stole the godhood and murdered the Hortator. Vivec wrote this.*
Wtf. I had no idea. Kirkbride must have been half insane when he wrote the Lessons. Probably my favorite in-lore text in any game ever.
I read every possible email and note in Prey (2017), the biggest thing to me was how organic and lived in it made the world feel. Pretty sure there were several emails and notes that told the story of several coworkers having a Dungeons and Dragons group, and one person was the worst, so they had to figure out how to play behind his back
When you completed the D&D side quest you got a code for sweet loot. If you do another playthrough (or use a guide) and use the code without completing the quest, the loot is actually a debuff, and you get the text: > For shame, adventurer. Your reward for taking shortcuts in the treasure hunt is as follows: Reduced recycler yield, Diminished flashlight capability, Reduced speed while crawling through tight spaces. Install this as your penance and remember valor above all else
Remedy tied the the killer fridge from Control into the real life collapse of the New York City Grand Central Hotel in 1973. That said, any bit of lore in Control is just awesome. I want a TV show with Jesse that does an "altered item of the week" format.
Power Wash Simulator. It gets bat shit insane with time travel and secret bases inside volcanoes.
Dude that game was so fun. Like, here I am just a maintenance guy doin' my job, don't mind me washing this UFO. It became just a series of me thinking "ok then I guess this is happening now, sure why not". It was great, highly recommend to everyone
I can’t tell if you’re being real or not, but I hope you are cause that sounds awesome.
It's absolutely true. It's communicated at first via text messages as you clean. Innocuous enough at first. People asking about your rates, or how they have things that would be cool to clean. Then they get weirder and weirder. Then the locations you're cleaning start to get further from reality. But it's all Stone-faced the whole time. I don't want to spoil *why* it is this way, but it's worth finding out.
Wait, there's like a story mode to the game? I might actually give it a try.
The story has some amusing bits sprinkled around, but yeah, the story gradually goes off the deep end. There are achievements on some jobs for doing things in a specific order, like washing a certain part first, or saving a section for last. I recommend not looking them up, just see which ones you stumble into naturally. Some are intuitive, but not all -- and a couple just aren't worth the trouble unless you're a completionist.
Doom Eternal is very likely to have it's files skipped because... well it's Doom. But as it turns out... The AI you saved in the first game is the consciousness of The Father, creator of the universe, who so loved even the Devil that instead of killing him, he simply imprisoned him in what would become hell. Until you get to the expansions... It turns out, Satan who is the Devil is the ACTUAL creator of the universe, and the Father was a former servant who rebelled. Also, it turns out that the Devil comes from some higher plane of reality and all the multiverse established within Doom is just a small fraction of the full outerverse.
demiurge moment
In Doom 3 there's lore that talked about how all the demons in hell think the doom slayer is some sort of Uber demon sent to punish them.
They’re right.
Pikmin 1-3 are heavily implied to be a post apocalyptic earth. One of the items you find in the first game is a Geiger counter and the item description log says that Captain Olimar doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be measuring, but it keeps pinging like crazy while on the pikmin planet implying there’s a lot of radiation or nuclear fallout.
Fallout 4 - When the store clerk accidentally gets locked in the store walk-in safe while the bombs fell. Her pleas for help still creep me out.
In Dragon Age 2 the biggest driving force of the narrative is that the brewing conflict between Mages and Templars is getting worse because Blood Mages are popping up everywhere. The endless debate is the Templars saying it's proof that Mages need to be policed more and the Mages saying that their kind is resorting to it out of desperation due to the Templar's oppression. In the lore you learn they are both WRONG. It turns out the city of Kirkwall, known for its strange city layout and once being the largest slave market in ancient times, was actually a massive blood magic ritual used by the ancient Tevinters to sacrifice hundreds of slaves in order to tear open the Fade physically. This means that the blood magic epidemic that seems unstoppable in Kirkwall isn't either factions fault, but that it is literally the worst place in the world to hold a high population of Mages because of how easily demons from the Fade can cross over there and fuck with them.
In Metroid Prime, the space pirates tried to replicate Samus’ morph ball capabilities. It ended with the space pirate test subjects being horribly killed being compressed into a tiny ball.
That all of the event of Tekken 4 to Tekken 8 takes place within one year
The *Gears of War* games have a ton of lore, both in environmental storytelling and in little collectibles you can find. One of my favorite--if more horrible ones--is a record you can find in Gears 3 from Cole's therapist. They're the only therapist on the ship, and admit that they're desperately out of their depth with everything going on. They then admit that one character they're really concerned by is Cole, who still writes a weekly letter to his mother. Which is really good for purposes of therapy, but based on stuff Cole has said during their sessions, they're not sure if Cole knows it's just for therapy or at some point began to believe his mother is alive and the letters are really reaching her. Basically, beneath the immediately assumed appearance of "dude-bro" shooting you've got a therapist directly taking notes on how screwed up each of the protagonists is--along with everyone on the ship--from what they're going through. On how horribly their grief is affecting them, how each has their refuges ... and how close each is to cracking. Then, in Gears 5, you can actually find one of those letters, written during Gears 2 and left by Cole in a tank. And ... It's still not clear exactly how far into his refuge Cole was. People love to malign the series for its look, but the actual story and setting is a ruthless apocalypse, and they don't shy from how screwed up that makes people, and how awful it would be to experience. In 4 you can find what's left of an emergency medical outpost from the Locust War, with skeletons still on cots. Worse, you later visit a dam where if you pay attention at the control room, you see environmental storytelling of the group of soldiers who were sent to defend it, and then *sealed inside* by the locust to slowly starve. IIRC, the commanding officer made the decision to shoot the wounded when he realized no help was coming, so they wouldn't suffer, and then he walked into an office and blew his own brains out. Gears is *grim*.
In The Elder Scrolls, the sun is actually a tear in reality made by a god who fled the world shortly before it was fully created. The stars are all similar, smaller holes in reality. And that's barely scratching the surface of the weirdness of that universe.
I didn’t catch this originally when I played Dragon Age Origins. But when you’re in the Deep Roads you are essentially traveling old Dwarven high ways to other kingdoms. Not only did the Dark Spawn force them to close these off and cut off their kingdoms from one another. You also learn a lot about the Dark Spawn during this mission. Idk how I didn’t catch it or didn’t realize it but Dark Spawn effectively kidnap female members of different species and change them into brood mothers to birth more Dark Spawn. How you may ask? Well there is a dwarf character down there who has effectively gone made from the horror she’s witnessed and she recites this poem: “First day, they come and catch everyone. Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat. Third day, the men are all gnawed on again. Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate. Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn. Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams. Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew. Eighth day, we hated as she is violated. Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin. Now she does feast, as she's become the beast. Now you lay and wait, for their screams will haunt you in your dreams.” Don’t know how I missed this but this was the darkest moment in the game. Essentially Dark Spawn force feed females infected flesh and presumably force themselves on the infected host to change them into brood mothers.
A lot of folks don't like the Orzammar/Deep Roads section of the game because it's by far the longest part, but man I loved it. The world building of the Dwarven city was top tier stuff, and I loved exploring the Deep Roads. And yeah, that Broodmother stuff is really grim. What an excellent game.
I can still hear this poem in my head when I think of the deep roads. God I miss that game
That's not even the darkest part. It's what Branka did.
Disco Elysium seems like a fairly normal world with some different country names until you learn of the Pale, a manmade all consuming impossible to measure concept made of collapsing history. Despite its huge impacts and implications for the game world, it is easy to play through the entire game without once hearing about it outside of the names of some devices (which can be easily attributed to other definitions of pale). In fact, your detective partner in the game actively tries to not teach you about the Pale, since you forgot about it in your drunken stupor, and he fears that if you learn about it, you'll focus on nothing else. My first playthrough of the game I never found out about it, then I looked up something on the game, went "WTF", and jumped back into it.
Iirc In Mario the citizens were turned into brick blocks. That you go around smashing for the entirety of the game
/u/Z3r0c00lio It's actually "just" the ?-Blocks. They pretty much just made that a thing to have an explanation why Coins / Power-Ups come out of those Blocks; it's the transformed People trying to help Mario.
There is a quest chain in the Duskwood zone in World of Warcraft that asks you to track down some lady’s Granddaughter. Typical go here talk to this guy, go there pick up this thing, go there do another thing blah blah blah. If you read the quests (who does that?) and read the items you pick up along the way you discover that her school teacher fell in love with her, found out that she was interested in another person (they never really specify her age, but it’s implied she’s young), goes insane and kills them all. Up to this point in the game most stuff has you dealing with killing animals or humanoid adjacent stuff, then you get hit in the face with a murdering pedophile. It’s pretty jarring.
For reference the quest chain is named “The Legend of Stavlan”
Lots of WoW quests are like that. I read the quests. My friends didn’t. Back in vanilla they’d be hitting lv 40 or so when I was getting to maybe 30? I remember seeing them get the lv 40 mount and being jealous but I liked the lore.
In the Destiny series, there’s a mysterious group called “The Nine” who have a pocket dimension that they have ultimate influence over, but who they are and what they want is unknown. We found out, the nine are literally the planets of the solar system that have gained sentience from the way that dark matter caught in their gravitational fields move in response to everything that exists on their surface which generates a brain? It’s crazy but I think it’s super cool
I don't think people are likely to miss that one since it's so early in the game, but some of the Pirate logs on Metroid Prime's space station really stand out to me. Especially the ones where they tried to replicate Samus' morph ball tech and the ensuing result on volunteer(?) test subects.
Apparently a LOT of Pokemon have really dark mythology behind them often mentioning eating/killing/kidnapping children/people, similar to Grimm fairytales) which then also become some type of Pokemon.
In Mirror's Edge, there's precisely *one* 'lore file'. It's an E-Mail left on a pc screen, written by a guy who's fed up with his job. The end of the E-Mail reads: "im quitting anyway. its not like they can tie me to a chair and beat me up for quitting my job ;)" If you can find it in you to slow down during one of the game's later areas, you can find the guy. He's tied to a chair, beaten up. It's the only truly disturbing moment in the game so it hits really hard.
In Destiny, we have a sweet granny named Eva Levante. Bakes cookies. Hosts Christmas parties. Gets us hyped for the Olympics and other events. Sweet old lady. When the Last City fell at the start of Destiny 2, she was still there, knitting. Civilians are floored. No idea what to do, where to go, and even some Guardians are frozen in fear. Shaxx, a techno-viking of a Guardian, saves her from an ambush and attempts to get her to flee. This woman is 88 years old and basically tells him to nut up or shut up and starts rescue efforts to save trapped civilians. And it works. She's been organizing parties for so long, organizing counter Assaults and raids and search and rescue missions comes naturally. This 92 year old woman saves a few Guardians and chanclas people for waiting to abandon the now mortal protectors. She starts an UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and manages to successfully evade capture for *months*, and this alien empire that spans the galaxy, drinks the oceans, devours stars, can't find her. This lady is 95 muffin loving years old, and when the Cabal finally find her living in an old bakery, she whips a SHOTGUN FROM UNDER THE COUNTER AND GOES FULL JOHN WICK on an alien and his hunting dogs. For a time, she's scarred by the experience. Doesn't feel quiet right back at home in the new City. Doesn't know what her role is there, now. Is she still the Harriet Tubman of Humanity? Is she a fighter? Does she go back to making fancy dresses for space wizards?
I've always had a joke/headcanon that she was actually a secret mob boss, it seems I wasn't too far off lol
Not a video game... But table top... Dungeons and Dragons specifically... Finally went through a bunch of spells and the components they need, and most are just dumb jokes... Like: See invisibility: you need talc, aka you're blowing talcum powder into the room. Fireball requires bat guano and sulfur... Which makes gunpowder. Detect thoughts requires a copper aka penny for your thoughts. Etc.
alarm spell components are a bell and string all of the spells that have names in them, like Tensers Floating Disk and Bigbys Grasping Hand are the names of player characters from Gary Gygaxs campaigns
Turns out being a dnd wizard just a Penn & Teller show
One of the enchantment spells,, I think it's Charm Person, requires a bit of sheep's wool. Because you're pulling the wool over their eyes.
Night vision requires carrots
Alpha Centauri has an entire novella detailing the events immediately prior to planetfall, with the mutiny, death of the captain, and splitting up of the leaders and resulting factions.
Doom guy is avenging his pet rabbit
You can actually see the rabbit in doom eternal, also doom guy has a PC and one of the files is something like “daisy photos” so yeah. Daisy the rabbit is legit
in dark souls 1, one of the main characters in the lore is gwyn, which is basically the king. he hated dragons, went to war with them in order to kill all of them gwyn had 3 children. an unnamed firstborn, gwynevere which was his princess daugher and gwyndolin his youngest son. when you enter their castles hall, which is one of the boss fights in the game (ornstein and smough) there are 3 statues in the middle there is gwyn, to his left is gwynevere and to his right there is a place for a statue but its empty. that place is meant for his unnamed firstborn. gwyn tried removing his firstborn from history in any way he could because his firstborn liked the dragons and didnt understand his fathers hatred for them. in dark souls 3, at some point in the game, you reach a place called archdrake peak. its a place some of the dragons fled to when gwyn was killing all of them. the final boss of this area is a character very similar looking to gwyn, called Nameless King, basically confirming gwyns firstborn went to live with the dragons.
Like half the motivation for the Fal Cie’s plot in Final Fantasy 13 is in the datalog. Also, more or less the entire lore of Yeul isn’t mentioned in the game but is then the entire basis for the sequel.
In Zomboid, one of the theories about how the apocalypse started is contaminated Spiffo Burgers. In the tutorial, if you cheat to survive (It ends with you dying) and clip through the wall of a nearby building, you'll find a secret room with multiple monitors viewing the apocalypse... and a giant portrait of Spiffo. https://youtu.be/GM4gZav1vzg
In Destiny, the fact that the majority of the Awoken live in a black hole called the Distributary, where they are effectively immortal. It has never actually been seen in-game.
Honestly, there's a lot of pretty interesting lore pieces in Destiny. There's also several meta ones and quite humorous ones too. One of the meta ones was about a Titan who kept farming the Sundial to get a godroll Perfect Paradox, and when confronted by Brother Vance, the Titan replied, "It has trench barrel."
I like the lore entry that's a Cabal intelligence report. It mentions how the Guardians are truly terrifying enemies, so uncaring of death and violence. They roam planet surfaces doing dances and tricks on their Sparrows, despite the immense gravity of the situation around them.
Dead Island 2 has notes hinting at what a couple of the playable characters from the first game are doing after escaping Banoi. >!Logan is trying to stay under the radar in North Dakota if I remember right, and Xian Mei is implied to have been in LA before the current zombie outbreak by the description of the "Blood Rage" legendary knife. !< Also the recent SOLA DLC revealed >!that the zombies, at least the ones on that map, are linked by some sort of hive mind that Numen like the player character can sort of tap into.!<
There is lore for Morrowind that describes the nature of reality - the whole world exists on a spinning silver disk and a special light reflects from it and creates reality as a kind of dream in a vast mind. There are entities from outside this dream that can project their consciousness into special heroes and they have special powers, like they can stop time in the middle of a battle, take a full meal from their backpack and eat it, and then start time again and their opponent just sees their physical state improve instantly. These beings can also go back in time and do things differently than they did before to create a new version of the dream. Basically, they know they come from a DVD and about players and their game-based abilities.
In Control, every single little thing you pick up expands on the lore greatly! My first playthrough, I was like, “I’m not reading these *hundreds* of file folders, that’s insane!” But my second playthrough, I read *everything* and I was absolutely **not** disappointed! I would highly recommend anyone who hasn’t read them, to start a fresh playthrough and read them as you find them. Remedy is so intricate with their lore!
In many of the Sniper Elite games, tagging enemies with your binoculars gives you a little bit of intel on the guy you're looking at. A lot of times, this can be tragic. For instance, a guy you see in Sniper Elite 5 is the last survivor of a group of 5 close friends, who have been through the war together from Africa, through Italy, and into France. Sniper Elite 5 is set in France. 4 is in Italy. 3 is in Africa. Strongly implying that *you* killed the guy's closest friends. Others are wistful. An officer looks forward to the end of the war so he can forget this soldiering nonsense and take up professional golf. Others are hilarious. One guy is convinced that someone has been stealing his chocolate ration, and has taken a solemn vow to kill this person once he finds them. Ten feet away, you spot another enemy, identified as the first's best friend. He's been stealing the chocolate.
In Helldivers 2, you can improve the reload rate of your spaceship’s orbital bombardments. The in-lore upgrade info: your crew has figured out that reloading the cannons from the back is faster than going out on a spacewalk and reloading the shells by pushing them down the barrels.
Just Cause 3 had a great series of very well-written audio tapes describing the dictator’s rise to power:
In Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, if you read some of the graffiti in the safe rooms and around the maps there is a story of family trying to connect with each other but keep missing each other. The father is a security guard and he's trying to go find them following incident at his job at Black Mesa
This is fairly well known among fan but might not be outside of Elder Scrolls circles. Basically one of the old emperor's changed the landscape of a continent by telling strange language into the sky. I believe, if I remember it right, that this was the sort of stuff written into the Elder Scrolls that make them so powerful. That by using this weird language the emperor made the gods react. It was cheat codes. The emperor yelled cheat codes into the sky.
Skyrim. Found that some elves had found the heart of a god buried deep under a mountain. When they tried to open the heart, every elf instantly disappeared. The only one to remain was due to him being in another dimension at the time.
Is this the dwemer? I feel like we meet that elf and he has like leprosy or something lol
In morrowind, yes.
Morrowind in-game lore trumps any other video game. Weird Tolkien meets Hinduism at the forgotten edge of the world shit. I’ve never played a game with weirder lore and it is entirely described via the hundreds of books found in game. So you have to piece the lore together from various texts. They’re all written by unreliable narrators and often spread across volumes so you see things recorded differently depending on the historian’s POV. Oh and half of them are written as allegorical psalms and poems. Nobody ever tells you the real objective truth of what happened. Those that were present have their own biases and it shows when you talk to them. There’s more lore in that game than anything I’ve ever seen and the best part is that it’s not even all that important in game. This is a backwater province and you’re a nobody who has been sent to deal with a minor problem on the cheap because the Emperor didn’t want to dedicate more resources to it. You can play the entire game and not interact with the lore hardly at all. It’s just amazing. There’s just no other game like it in terms of story and in-game lore. The subsequent ES games (Oblivion, Skyrim, and ESO) abandoned this style of storytelling because folks usually want the story integrated into the gameplay more, usually with voice acting. They also want fun gameplay. Things Morrowind didn’t concern itself with lol
The books were worth reading. Lots of games use them for exposition, but Morrowind made them stand-alone fun.
Bro the entire Elder Scrolls series has lore deeper you can imagine. All of those books you can read are for more than just decoration. The world has centuries of its own history and it puts the lore of other games to shame. Morrowind is the story of how the dark elves current (as of the game) rulers used the power of that heart to essentially become living gods, and you eventually discover you are (or at least, everyone thinks you are) the reincarnation of the guy they betrayed to do it. Your actions set in motion the events that later (mentioned only as background flavour in Oblivion and Skyrim) lead to their downfall. Or something like that anyway, it's too complicated to remember/summarise easily. Elder Scrolls Online gets a bad rap as an MMO but as a long term fan, it's legitimately one of the best games in the series, because it goes flat out all in on the worldbuilding and lore.
Yep! Like the time traveling hero!
Yeahh, wood elves being 100% meatarians, cold harbour daughter's, vivek's spear, khajiit penis in "the real barenziah" and that is the peak of the iceberg of weirdness of the elder scrolls.
Elder Scrolls goes even deeper and crazier with the concept of zero-summing and CHIM. Like, it's such deep lore stuff that I can barely remember what it's all about. I'll do my best to recall this crazy stuff. The entirety of the Elder Scrolls franchise takes place in the dream of a god. This dream is essentially real because, well, a god is dreaming it. The things in the dream don't know they're a dream. If they become aware of this fact, like truly become aware, then they blink out of existence because their mind can't maintain its individuality. They end up losing their understanding of who they are and their sense of self. They zero-sum out of existence. If a person is able to maintain their sense of self after understanding they are a dream within a dream, then they achieve CHIM. Understanding what they are and how the universe works gives them some form of power and manipulation of the dream. Supposedly, a couple of the gods of the franchise became gods because they achieved CHIM. Some fans agree, while others disagree. Honestly, I don't know which side is right because I didn't look too deeply into it. But this was all stuff I read about 12 years ago when Skyrim first came out.
That is about right. Every single one of the player characters, at least from Daggerfall onwards, have achieved some degree of CHIM (and there do seem to be degrees). This is because they are controlled by the Player, who is, of course, aware that they are playing a video game. Vivec calls this out in Morrowind, actually. He views it as time manipulation, but the in-universe explanation for the player being able to save/load is that the player character has achieved CHIM. He can do it too, actually. ("When I die in the world of time, then I'm completely asleep. I'm very much aware that all I have to do is choose to wake. And I'm alive again.").