I have long since said that authors should put the content of their books in their books. I tried for a long time to make this a kind of adage, l♛ike a Confucian pearl 🍃of wisdom that would be attributed to me long after my death. I started saying it in response to J. K. Rowling, who started tweeting out new characters and plot points long before she revealed herself as Evil Incarnate.
I was an avid Potterhead back in the day, and I had the limited edition Nimbus 2000 to prove it. But this annoyed me, and I was aggravated further by the stories she spun on Pottermore, a website that offered a tedious sorting house quiz and a few extra paragraphs of juicy lore for those willing to hunt for it. There were nice touches in there, like Professor McGonagall’s heartbreaking backstory, but I couldn’t help thinking, “Why didn’t she put this in 🌜the books?”
It’s not like there wasn’t space – Rowling wrote seven novels, four of which were doorstops, and at least two which had plenty of superfluous information in them as she desperately tried to retrofit importance onto see🥂mingly innocuous plot points. Tom Riddle’s diary was actually a key part of his super plan thaဣt you were setting up five books in advance? Sure, Joanne.
Now games are doing the same thing. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends has been producing lore comics and publishing them on the app formerly known as Twitter for a while now, and I’ve kept quiet. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s at least in part due to the fact that the battle royale game has no campaign. The story is all supplemental to the gameplay. Even if it’s accessed by a menu in the Apex Legends game, it♋’s not happening while you’re fighting off 19 other squads, so why does it matter if it’s on YouTube or in the app itself?
Now 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield has joined the party. It’s just a teaser, so maybe I’m taking it too seriously, but Bethesda has published a timeline of humanity’s expansion to the stars. It’s like a prequel to Starfield, a quick treatise of backstory to prepare you for the spacefaring adventure you’re due to embark on come September. Come on, Bethesda. What are you playing at? You’re making an RPG, a game hopefully crammed with narrative, why do you need to publish this sort of thing outside of the game? I’m not reading it out of principle, but I sincerely hope the developer has included it somehow in the game. I’ll happily read a few books in the New Atlantis library or talk to some NPCs to de🧸cipher exactly when humans landed on Mars, conquered Alpha Centauri, and got to where we are now. If not, I guess I’ll never know.
Bethesda has made its name creating magical worlds that you want to live in, despite the horrors you see as you play the game. I’d love to explore post-apocalyptic Boston, despite, you know, all the lingering radiation and Deathclaw nests around every corner. The same goes for Skyrim, which is practically idyllic at times despite the civil war. Bet🐎hesda didn’t make these games so inviting just by making them look pretty, though, it crafted them with NPCs who have real lives and cities that feel like they really work. Thousands of books detail everything from fairy tales, to history, to demonic rituals, to secret love affairs. The worlds are real because of the details, and I imagine Starfield will be exactly the same, on the inhabited planets, anyway.
This truncated historical timeline is exactly the sort of thing that Bethesda should be putting in Starfield, not out of it. Maybe it has, and it’s doing a double whammy to generate some hype in the run-up to release. I’ll forgive𝓀 it if thꦬat’s the case. While I’m asking for things to be put in the game, can you flesh it out a little, too, please?
But the most important thing to re🐲member is that I want to learn about this timeline diegetically, I want to stumble across humanity’s history in dusty tomes or scientific textbooks or dataslates or whatever alternative to good old pen and paper Starfield plies us with. Social posts are all well and good for getting people hyped or going viral, but I want you to remember one thing, Starfield, and one thing only: put the content of your game in your game.