Hey! You Got Your Lore in My Mulitplayer

Alright, let’s do this. This is one thing I have a very strong opinion on; Lore in multiplayer only games. I don’t mind story and lore if it applies but most of the time it’s just shoehorned or forced. Just let the game be a game. PLEASE!

            Let’s just start with what I’ve been playing the most, Apex Legends. Apex is the only battle royale I’ve played because I don’t very much care for the style of BR or hero shooters. I like the formula of Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halo 3 (picked the Halo I played the most) where everyone starts with the same gear and has the same chances to get weapons and power ups on the map and it’s about your skill as a player. It’s fair. Battle royales are based a lot on chance and hero shooters are based a lot on character abilities. Sure it’s great when you outlive an opponent that has gold shields when you had blue but most of the time the person with the bigger stick is going to win. The reason I chose to play Apex is because it is set in the Titanfall universe, (which I really like), in some way, shape or form. Now for a lot of my points I feel contradictory/hypocritical because I’m complaining about lore in a game that I choose to play specifically because it’s tied to a universe’s story that I am already fond of. Such is the way of things. But my problem with Apex is you’ll be going about your business then Gibraltar will start talking about “Thunderdome” or Bloodhound will go off about the “leviathans.” I DON’T CARE SHUT UP! I’m just trying to not die right now okay? I don’t care about your fictional lives. It just screws with my pace. Each team has the potential to have the same character on it so there’s a possibility that there could be like, twenty Octanes on the map, what’s your lore reason for that game?

            Speaking of “pace,” @NEETproxy and I were playing a couple games of Rainbow 6 Siege’s M.U.T.E. event; it was rough. Just the fact alone that I haven’t played any of Year 5 and going from Apex where you can just be running around a whole match to Siege where creeping around any given corner can mean certain death, it was tough. But even going from Splitgate to Apex is kind of hard because Splitgate is fast and in your face so going back to Apex I have to remember to slow down and not charge in, guns blazing because that seldom works for me. So lore for Siege seems to be that the characters are basically training with each other. For what, I’m not sure. Apparently there’s nothing too awful going on in the Tom Clancy universe that team Rainbow doesn’t need to go address other than a random zombie outbreak for Quarantine. I’m sure that will make me feel real tactical. (EvenSam Fisher has nothing to do.) So they’re training. Okay. So, why is my body spewing liters of blood when I’m down? They had a cinematic for an event in February called The Tournament of Champions and in video they showed characters using non-lethal bullets filled with flour or something. Basically looked like they were playing airsoft or paintball where you got hit enough and you were considered out. So if that’s the angle you’re going for, why not just have that translate into the game? Have white powder erupt wherever a bullet hits a persons body or any surface area.

            I was watching the trailer for Ubisoft’s new battle royale, Hyper Scape, and within the thirty seconds the trailer started introducing a plot and I just closed out of it. Overwatch is relatively guilty of this too because the first trailer for the game makes it clearly evident that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” but as for the actual game is concerned it doesn’t matter. Like why even present it that way if there’s no in game reason. And Blizzard’s other multiplayer only game, Heroes of the Strom, ouuu. Like, the game was fun and quirky and the way the game was originally presented was that there were two gods who plucked these characters from their universes and had them fight for ladder points. Perfect. Don’t need anything else. Things were good. The Tracer trailer was a perfect representation of HotS and The Nexus then after that it just took a nose dive. First they had a whole thing of good versus evil with Medivh and Gul’dan, then was the introduction of more Overwatch characters, the “Dark Nexus” (come on), a web comic that actually changed one of the maps and my final nail, adding original Nexus characters that could’ve easily been made into one of Blizzard’s existing universes. I didn’t mind Tracer being added to the game. She’s pretty much OW’s mascot, she’s different, she might generate some new players for OW but when they started pouring everyone else in that’s when I started getting irked. See, for those of you that don’t know, one of the games that Heroes of the Storm pulls from is StarCraft. Now SC is a game in the OW world where one of their characters, D.va, is a “pro StarCraft II player.” So D.va being in the same environment as characters from a game that she plays is off-putting for me. And I’m pretty sure most pros don’t even know the characters from the campaign since they are only interested in the multiplayer. Next was a web comic that showed one realm lord (voice for one of the maps) “kill,” I guess, another realm lord from a different map forcing that characters wife to become the realm lord. You follow me? So new voice lines were added and the look of the objective changed so if you didn’t know about this web comic all these changes made no sense. The reason the changes happened make no sense either but, y’know. The denizens of these realms litter the battle field okay? They’re on the outskirts, some of them are still doing farm work, some are in the middle of the map but they don’t look frightened. They’re not worried that they will be killed because it’s just a show the realm lords put on for them. I see HotS as like a jousting tournament of sorts. This is just something the realm lords do to ease some of their own boredom so to have Gul’dan or Deathwing be like, “I’m going to take over the Nexus!” It’s like “no, you’re not. You are a gods’ plaything right now. At any given moment they could strip you of your power or turn you inside out.” I could go on a little bit more about HotS but I won’t for now.

            I think that pretty much covers it. I mean, it has to be a labor of love to put so much effort into lore for games that don’t even need it or making fictional books to be read in a fictional game universe but, I just wish games were games you know? If you wanted to add lore to the game than you should’ve put it in a separate mode, a separate way to view it within the game itself. I’m sure they do it to try to get people to think “I wonder what they are talking about” and go look at the comic or YouTube video or whatever. And try as I might to resist I HAVE to go look because that’s how I am and then I hate that I did cause I have to know everything about things I like then get upset about crap that doesn’t even matter. So? Thoughts? Am I the only one these types of things bother? Am I paying too much attention? Let me know what you think and I’ll be back shortly.

                        @AztecSauce                                                    @H4mmerBros