 | Constructive feedback on ingame lore entries(1) | Category: Lore and StoryJuly-22-2014 12:18 PM PDT (8 years ago)  |
| This is for the D3 writers, a collection of thoughts I’ve had since D3 first launched and which I have only now organized into a forum post. I don’t expect to start a dialogue with the writers but I would appreciate it a lot if one of the community managers could pass on some of what I’ve said. (Not every word of it, just the salient points.) This is pretty long, but not really reducible to a TL;DR except for “Diablo 3 player and English major giantsequoia offers opinions and constructive criticism on the in-game lore entries.†At least I hope it’s constructive. If I seem overly harsh in some areas, please do call me on it. A lot of what I have to say also has to do with the character Abd al-Hazir and how he delivers his information. I’m not going to analyze every lore entry – I’ve selected a few in particular to comment on, for various reasons. Many are examples of what I consider bad lore entries. Some are what I consider excellent lore entries (the ones that are good are typically very good). And there are a few mediocre ones, and ones that I’ll point out because they’re contradicted by other lore entries or even the very monsters they refer to. KHAZRA – Ironically, the first one I mention is not for the content of lore, but rather a canon/retcon issue. In the in-game lore entry for the khazra, al-Hazir refers to the Writings of Abd al-Hazir (http://www.diablowiki.net/Writings_of_Abd_al-Hazir), specifically his entry on the khazra. Note that Battlenet never preserved those entries – I got them from DiabloWiki. Still, most of them are probably canon, but only most of them because of the way the cultist story ended. (See below.) Now that I think of it, I only really wanted to mention the khazra entry because it refers to the Writings entry, which Blizzard didn’t bother to keep as it was part of the pre-D3 launch preview site, which makes me sad. However thinking about it now, there is something interesting about the khazra which I feel could be explored further. In one of the cultist Urik’s journals, he mentions that when he reinvigorated the khazra, the majority of them flocked to this new source of demonic energy, but a few “understood what had become of their people†and fled. How is this possible? Al-Hazir’s entry on the khazra shaman says that the few transformed umbaru who remembered magic taught it to their cleverest children, implying that any khazra living today are generations distant from their human ancestors. Have some few khazra remembered what they once were, enough to recognize what Urik was doing, and kept that information alive parent to child? Speaking of cultists... CULTISTS – Al-Hazir met some, learned too much, and “...has unfortunately been missing since late last year.†Unfortunate indeed, unfortunate that it had to be retconned. Minor retcons aren’t such a big deal, but this was character death. Unless we’re supposed to believe that al-Hazir was brainwashed by the coven into thinking they were harmless, and then released (that didn’t happen) or that he secretly joined the coven and was using his missives to deflect attention from it (that didn’t happen either), I kind of thought that apparently abducted and sacrificed was a decently sinister end to his story. Those cultists were seriously bad news. (Could nobody in Sanctuary read into that just a little bit? "I've been marked by depraved cultists, and now I'm missing!") But after all since he lived, he can go on to write more. There were/are lore benefits to the retcon, in that we get an established lore figure as a peripheral character in the game. He’s a window into the attitudes and beliefs of a denizen of Sanctuary, a privileged Caldeum citizen, a scholar. As it turns out, however, the benefits of al-Hazir as a character are (at least somewhat, in my opinion) debatable. He’s a fine enough character, but there’s a serious problem with his tendency to talk, annoyingly self-importantly and at length, about things which are totally irrelevant or demonstrably false. I’ll talk about that trend in entries below, but for now back to the cultist story. Al-Hazir’s reaction to the cultists in game is completely different from what he describes in the Writing mentioned above. It would have been fine even if they’d just changed him from abducted and probably sacrificed/dead to alive and safe, but it goes way beyond that. In the Writing entry, he’s feverishly researching the cultists out of fear, gripped by chill and dread, wishing he hadn't tempted fate by complaining that New Tristram wasn’t foreboding enough and then walking in the woods at night. Then in game, he nonchalantly describes their peculiar rituals before smugly declaring “Oh well!†and going home to put his worries behind him. Playing Diablo 3 the very first time and having already read al-Hazir’s Writings as part of the preview, hearing that lore entry felt... pretty bad. And it’s echoed every time since. | ||
 | Constructive feedback on ingame lore entries(14) | September-4-2014 4:59 PM PDT (8 years ago) |
| Thanks for the amazing amount of feedback, giantsequoia! Our writers have pored over it and asked that I provide you their thoughts (and thanks) in return: Hey GiantSequioia, Thank you for this extensive, carefully crafted critique. There’s a lot of thought and passion in it, and everybody on the writing team has read your post. You seemed concerned in a few places that you might be coming across as too negative, so I wanted to let you know that we understood your points in the spirit you intended. You’re passionate about the subject, and critical because you want the lore to be as good as possible. Your criticisms provide food for thought about the lore in both Diablo III and Reaper of Souls. They help us to see where we didn’t meet an expectation or failed to completely communicate a thought. I can tell you’re frustrated at times by lack of closure on some of the lore – only getting half the story. In those cases, you create all kinds of interesting hypotheses about possible answers. We always want to engage the players in as many ways as possible, and by not spelling things out completely, we invite the kind of creative theories and ideas that show through in your posts. That’s part of the fun. In regard to al-Hazir, remember that the order you picked up the lore books is not necessarily the order in which they were written. Even though it seems al-Hazir was captured by the cultists before the events of Diablo III, his lore books could still have been written before being abducted. And he may be alive or dead. He may still be a prisoner, or freed. We haven’t said. What do you think happened to him? Thanks again for this post. -Brian Kindregan Lead Writer, Diablo III: Reaper of Souls [Post edited one time, last edit by Nevalistis at September-5-2014 8:56 AM PDT (8 years ago)] | ||
