I suspect your problem is that you aren't making a distinction between a plotline and story elements. In this context, plotline is the course of a given game and story elements are the pieces you encounter along that course. The big mess-o-lore is simply a source for text decoration, just as a texture library is for visual decoration.

Really.  What I think is important is to avoid looking for flaws in phrasing or taking obscure alternate meanings and interpretations from statements.  No doubt you will find such flaws, especially if you look hard enough, but in so doing you'd be disputing the writer's intent.   And that would seem to be at cross-purposes with what you're looking for.

If you've a question or misunderstanding about anything I wrote, ask me a question.  But please don't pick & choose bits & pieces to shore up your original concern, if in so doing you're changing the meaning and intent of what I wrote.

Example:

I never said - or tried to say - "mods will fix it".  What I said was that I'd assumed Ele will have an official campaign (with it's own 'lore').  And, of course, if you don't want to run the OC, you will need to make your own.  Can you think of any other possibility?  I can't - because at this point I am not aware of any tech that can auto-generate a milieu for you.  Maps, yes.  Lore, no.

Another example:

Why did you latch on to my use of the word "units"?  You wrote, "Brad has expressly said - even in recent dev journals - that the game doesn't ship with units because you create them from equipment during the game."  If you're trashing my whole response because of a pedantic way of describing the unit assets that ship with the game, then replace the word "units" with "stuff".  My meaning remains unchanged, and you can now move on to the gist of the response.  Win-Win.

But I'm pretty sure that your core statement about the game ("doesn't ship with units") makes no sense at all.  But please link me with anything that supports your statement, or your interpretation of Brad's statements, because I definitely want to sort out whatever misunderstanding there may be (even if it's me that is misinterpreting things).

I'll try to rephrase though - the game will ship with bits and bytes that, working together, will form units.  And if you don't like those units you can make new ones.  Is that better?   Again, I'm not aware of any tech that auto-generates lore, so if you don't want or like what ships with the game out-of-box for your sand-box play, you're alternative is to create them with the tools provided.  Perhaps create them without any pre-made official lore at all.

the idea of "official lore" is what bothers us, Aesir. The concept that the game will be built with a "well, they can mod it in if they need to" sort of attitude, then jam pack it with lore not everyone wants. Having lore to work with is ok, but the fear is that there will be a sort of "railroad" even in the regular campaign as to how the story evolves. Some of us want empires with orcs and elves, we can't have that though, so now we are just hoping to keep the game from becoming an interactive story book.

A lot of this paranoia comes from the two (very simmiliar) races and the fact that elemental was played up as "a unique experience every game". Lore is fine, even advantageous, but only when its actually lore, ie from the past. As soon as the game is set up to ram you down a specific path because the story calls for it, alot of us will lose interest.

It seems like there's a lot of noise in this thread derived from confused and conflicting vocabulary, and probably also by some assumptions that might be more common to those of us who've played GalCiv2 vs. those who haven't.

When I typed above about plotlines vs. story elements, I had a (possibly erroneous) assumption in mind that the 'normal' game of Elemental will be a sandbox mode at least roughly similar to GalCiv2's 'normal' game. I'm pretty much stumped by the phrase "regular campaign" in your larger discussion because my impression of "campaign" in the TBS context is nothing other than a 'forced' plotline version of a sandbox game.

Hilarious.  Strawmen AND hypocrisy; it's wrong for me to dislike something (ie, strong stories in sandbox games, GalCiv2's backstory etc) but it's okay to describe people with differing opinions as 'hostile and insulting' and they deserve 'hostility and denigration'.

The point is that I'm eager to have sandbox remain sandbox-y, and yet recent statements could be interpreted to mean they're using their strong story and background to inform sandbox mode (somehow, maybe, etc).  Your strawman about 'dry game with nothing but numbers and units with all the appeal of chess pieces' is a complete invention to justify your trolling here.  Attacking me personally because of my taste is not only a giant red herring, but fatuous and embarrassing to yourself.  Everyone else can discuss this like adults.

The idea that my posts should be phrased as 'asking, politely' that Stardock do what you -think- I want is ludicrous.  I'm looking for information (which has been provided, such as it exists at the moment, by those more mature) and have no illusions about my ability to influence the game's development.  I want to know how things ARE, not bend Stardock to my will.  If sandbox isn't a proper sandbox I'll just cancel my pre-order and buy the game once mods address the issue, that's all.

EDIT - wagh!  The (bizarre) forum software led me to believe the post I was replying to was the most recent.  Apologies all round for the confusion I just created.  :S  I notice from the support forum that Chrome has known issues with the quote function, which is why I was doing it 'manually' here.  GW, this is not a reply to you!

Aesir Rising - I don't know how to link directly to dev journals (I imagine they're in the forum somewhere but the software really hates Chrome), but the journal dated July 23 (the Elemental FAQ) involves a reiteration of the statements I had in mind regarding units.

Q: Will there be priests?

A:  We do not include pre-built units.  What players choose to call their units is up to them. However, a channeler can choose to imbue a unit with essence that makes him or her able to cast spells.  However, players won’t simply be building armies of priests and clerics.  Those who cast spells are rare and special and lethal.

As they've demonstrateed previously and discussed (especially with regard to combat) it seems that units of troops are defined by equipment selected (hats, swords etc) and level of training (veterancy etc) and not chosen from a list.  Thus the game doesn't ship with units, because it's a toolbox to create more.

I didn't intend to appear to 'focus' on this part of your reply (and indeed also mention buildings) but I had recently skimmed the dev journals and so this quote was fresh in my mind.  Again, I'm not really clear on how the lore is supposed to inform or work with sandbox mode - simpy that that is what it appeared to me that Brad was suggesting.  Others don't see the post the way I do, however, so things will doubtless become more clear as time goes on.

I'm going to start over.

I don't want what you're describing. I don't want a sand-box mode that runs on rails because it must remain true to whatever the official campaign will have for 'lore'.  I want your interpretation to be wrong.

What I'm not getting is where the concerns comes from.  I'll check out the journal you're referring to.  Maybe I need to add my voice of concern, but I'm not concerned yet.  It just doesn't compute with me that they'd have a sand-box mode that isn't a sand-box mode.

My concern was brought about by an more recent journal, the 'Elemental Story Update' on 6th August which you quoted above.  Brad talks about the story (for campaign mode presumably) and then says that the 'scriptable engine allows each so-called sandbox game to have a truly unique life of its own because there’s just such a massive amount of lore to tap into'.  The scriptable content system is good (it drives the quests, world events, and other things I imagine) because it makes sandbox more interesting and different each time - but this suggested to me that it was somehow based on the story (from campaign and the book, the background lore, etc).  

It's not a huge problem if it's like GalCiv2, where the 'story' was limited to flavour text for technologies and particular popups given per race - however this sounded to me like the sandbox mode was going to be generating lore-based stuff with the scripting engine.

Ignoring the flames...

I interpreted Brad's statement a little differently from how everyone else seems to have interpreted it. I don't think he means that your sandbox game will have a storyline, I think he means the things in your sandbox game will have a story. If you discover a dungeon, you can learn who built it and why. If you find a powerful artifact, it will come with a history of how it was made and what heroic deeds were done with it in the past. If you locate that Dreadwood forest, you'll know what happened there to make people dread it.

If any of you have played Dwarf Fortress, it could be similar to the way that game randomly generates a thousand years of history and then uses it to determine the starting conditions for the map and the various extant civilizations. In that game, dwarves can create artifacts and carve engravings, and will often include images taken from the lore or previous game events. Dragons and other monsters will occasionally show up, and may have scars or injuries from past battles (which you can look up). It's a lot of fun to see what weird things pop up due to oddities in world generation, and something like this would be a great feature for Elemental.

Maybe that Dreadwood forest has a dragon in it that kills all who enter its territory. That could trigger a quest to slay the dragon or persuade it to join your cause. If you slay it, you could find an artifact that once belonged to a great hero who was captured and imprisoned in a nearby dungeon, triggering another quest to explore the dungeon and free the hero's soul. That may in turn lead to a quest to take care of some unfinished business between the hero and a legendary channeler known for his collection of rare spells....

All of this stuff would be made up of bits and pieces taken from the lore. It wouldn't be like, "this game we're doing the chapter about the guy with the dragon", but more like the Lego model mentioned above. The map has a dragon, so it gave it a name that appears in the story and generated a history for it that makes references to other events or things that were generated with the map.

That's what I'd like to see.

Thankfully it will have an interface, unlike DF, so this possible detail will be usable by mortals.

That is the kind of dynamic scripted stuff I certainly thought of earlier in development; I'm concerned that it'll be -too- specific to whatever story the campaign has, while I'd prefer sandbox to be totally divorced.

I actually really hope the scripted stuff works as you describe, since Brad has been eager to get that kind of dynamic story event thing going for a while.  Dynamic, changing and connected?  Good, excellent even.  Restricted by story? Bad.  Infodumps about story?  Bad.

As an extreme example, it'll suck if you see a forest called 'Dreadwood' and thus, by experience, know what is likely to be in there, because of 'the lore'.

I think about it that way as well.

It's a lot easier to strip out lore that someone doesn't want then it is to add lore that other people do want. Especially if the modding system allows for custom events.

I don't think there's a lot of fear of the game turning into an interactive story book, the whole point of a game like this is that it's a big sandbox. Adding in events, landmarks, and elements based on a coherent story rather then random stuff the developer thought up (like Civ 4's "build 8 colisieums in your 6 city empire" type quests) is an improvement.

I'm not "everyone else" either. I was trying to get at 'the same point' when I typed about plotlines vs. story elements and lore as something like text decoration for toys in the sandbox.

The issue with your statement is twofold however.

1: "We will mod it out" is such a bad fallback. I'm paying for a game that I like from the get-go, not the "privelege" of fixing it.

2: The problem with a coherent story focus is that each game now has far fewer ways to be unique. I'd just rather they worked on an awesome content generation system then wrote a book. I must be a bad person.

So am I, and we don't want the same thing. So somebody is going to have to mod something to get exactly what they want, and making a mod to turn off the events that are tied to lore is simpler then making a mod that creates all those events based on lore.

There's not going to be a plot in a sandbox game. Other people have mentioned how its more likely to work already, so I won't repeat it, but the idea that you're somehow going to get into a custom game and have it behave like a campaign game is pretty far-fetched.

Ok, thats fine. My issue is with anyone who thinks it will be fun to play using the exast same lore everytime. Ill give you an example:

Game A: Bill the paladin raids a cave. The treasure in said cave is Giovanni's Sword, a +2 sword of healing or something. The player sighs privately to himself... out of the last 5 games hes seen this sword 3 times. Nothing changes about it, and he's starting to feel deja-vu... afterall, hes just a player in a story thats always the same, maybe the locations and map has changed, but theres that sword... again.

Game B: Bill the paladin raids a cave. The treasure in said cave is Giovanni's healing Sword, a +2 sword of healing. The player is intrigued, even though he has seen healing swords before this one looks new and has a new name. The reality is that in the last 5 games, hes gotten 3 +2 healing swords, but he doesn't realize this because hes so involved in his own lore. The "giovanni" tag was pulled at random from a list of 1000+ names, attached to the healing adjective due to its properties, and presto! instant original lore.

You could argue that since there isn't any backing lore that it takes away, but hardly a handfull of people care about the reasoning behind thier gameing. Most people just want to game.

I think what brad was suggesting was a lot more like game B in your descriptions than it is like game a

Thats cool then! I don't hate official lore so much as I just want to make a story of my own. A simple toggle button might help this issue, but that may be asking alot... Then again... year long beta.

That's an interesting sentiment - adding a toggle would be hard.  You'd think making certain game elements optional would be pretty easy (aside from critical mechanics, anyway).  I've often thought that in many cases - particularly 'realism' - many features should always be optional, to prevent driving away certain players. 

For instance, I wanted a really complex econ model, because I've hated simplistic crap for twenty years of Civilization.  Obviously this isn't for everyone.

If the lore will be added to the game inthe way Jalicos describes then I will be thrilled. Even if that is the case I still would not want to see a system where you can tell what the Tower of Time will contain just because you saw it before. I do not even want a system where you know this tower will contain one out of three options.

What I would very much like to see is a system where lore may be added to landmarks, but there may be none. The lore attached to some place may of course be lost in the mists of time and beyond any one's recollection. There may be an artifact inside, but who can tell if the tower was not plundered some time ago?

If the game is unpredictable like this, you will never be able to tell what place you need to visit first if you want the best reward. For example, let us suppose that the game alows one of three events to occur in any given place. These events are in fact attached to that place. So now if you want to maximise the rewards for your efforts, you can actually alt-tab out of the game, look up what place can possibly what rewads and choose the one that is the most likely to reward you with what you need.

This is a system that I find very disappointing and I would very much like the game to be unpredictable every step of the way. If you want to see what is inside the forrest or tower, you will have to send an army there and see for yourself. Even if the lore tells you that there is a dragon in a forrest I still do not want to see a dragon all the time. I want to be surprised, I want to forever remain curious and I want to be really blown away by this game. I do not want there to be spread-sheets where I can look up what I can expect.

The biggest flaw of Sins of the Solar Empire is that there is no story.

It's not so hard, just look at Dawn of War 2 and SW: Empire at War, all it takes is some very reusable character animation windows and voice acting, and story of course.

But I get the feeling that Starcraft 2 will greatly upgrade the standards of how the story is done in strategy games, in terms of scope, replayability and non-linearity.

thats a pretty narrow statement.  I think there are many other 'flaws' with Sins.  Perhaps the biggest budget wise, but then again, there WAS a story.  Just no narration of that story beyond the opening scene (and what you, yourself, put into it)

I personally think lack of interesting AI personality, diplomacy, and related interface.  Its very underdeveloped, but the next expansion should help with that.

man, I hope you're right.  What are you going to do when you find out it doesn't break any grounds in story at all?  scope and replayability I can totally see.  I don't see "non-linearity" being an area Starcraft that excels, but we'll see.

It's a tricky balance. On the one hand, if the Tower of Time is always the same, then it gains a certain legitimacy. It's The Tower of Time, officially and canonically. That would be really awesome, but it does lead to the problem of knowing what to expect because you've seen it before. Randomizing everything would solve that, but then the "Tower of Time" is just another tower. It doesn't mean anything.

Is there a way to have the best of both worlds?

One thing that just occurred to me is that we don't know when the names pop up on the map. What if you didn't learn the name of a map object until you explored it? You could find a tower, but you wouldn't know which tower until you get to the top. That prevents you from knowing what to expect by memory, but still allows for fun moments like, "That was the Tower of Time? Oh. Oh my."

On the other hand, knowing the name up front can also give some nice 'Oh shit' moments...

Imagine you get a quest to 'Explore that tower located a bit north of here, and get me the crystal that's in the highest tower.' So you go exploring a bit to the north, find a tower... 'Oh crap, I have to enter the Tower of Time?!?!?! Noooooooo....'

Maybe a combination of both would be best, some towers (like Tower of Time) can reappear in another game with a comparable function / story / difficulty so as to build a feeling of dread / expectation when you find the tower. Other towers could be completly random and one time only so you don't know what to expect from them.