[crossfire] How to integrate old stories in the game?

[Kevin Bulgrien]

> Hello.
> 
> How would one integrate old (as some hundred years old) in-game stories in the 
> gameplay flow?
> 
> Right now, we have kind of the "Know-It-All" sage who will conveniently know 
> everything of things that happened hundred years ago, without any mistake or 
> such.
> 
> Things I could envision:
> - old manuscripts, in languages a player would need to learn to decipher
> - wrong (plain or slightly mistaken) things around, to have the player try to 
> figure what to trust
> - partial stories only, leaving the rest to deduction.
 
It seems these kinds of ideas are good, though I'm not to sure about "wrong"
information without some not insanely hard to find way to validate wrong data.
Of the listed ideas, the first seems most likely to enhance play.  The last
seems reasonable, though perhaps better done by having the missing pieces
completed as a related quest progresses as though the player is rediscovering
the history through the act of digging through and using this partial story
data.

> Opinions? :)

Without really claiming to have a vision of how to pull it off, perhaps the
wrong/partial ideas could be supplemented by a mechanism by which a player
can actually accumulate the stories client side for perusal in more of a
book fashion instead of the encumbering NPC communication model.  I think
that the lore and quests in this game are hard to handle because there is
no practical way for a player to manage the information in more than a
piecemeal fashion.  Adding wrong and partial stories seems like it could
go the wrong way if something was not done to balance it out.

Pieces of stories could have identifier tags of some kind that would allow
them to be fit together into a document on the client.  Wrong information
could have the same tag as good information - causing the player to have
to decide which one was right when both were found.

Agree that wrong information is more realistic in some sense, but am reluctant
to get too realistic in this regard as it can frustrate rather than improve
the player experience.  This game is based on a fantastic world rather than
a realistic one.

Kevin