An example of lore that blew me away was in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. In the beginning of the game you're entrusted with a historical relic, an amulet. I was curious about it and decided to travel to the city in search of a library to see if I could find a book on the subject. I found a book store. Thumbing through the 50+ books in the store and POW, there was one named for the amulet. Reading it made the amulet feel so much more special, and I love how real world reasoning paid off in the game. One thing I intend to add in my game is to have lore that exposes the weaknesses of monsters, and you have to play research mini-games in a library to unlock the lore. The Research Skill will make the mini-games easier. MERRY CHRISTMAS, INDIE DEVELEPORS.
I love how, in Skyrim, the bards' performances can be one potential source of lore: imagine, by extension, when major quest points are reached, and the characters' exploits are sung about (especially if failure is a hard-baked option in the game). Similarly, the bounty system of the same, whilst useful, is somewhat flawed, and might be better suited as posted broadsheets, alongside help wanted posters, rewards for lost dogs, have you seen this elf? (and what a funny hairdo he has!), petitions, et cetera. Even broadsheets about the latest local bandit chief, written in wrenched rhyme & rotten rhythms, would be a potential. That said, what many such worlds need are a flourishing trade of chamberpot showers, alongside their attendant warnings for the unwary (take that! ye thieves of Riften!) ....
@@andypanz Yeah, I'm not saying the lore itself is all that great but I love how my real world reasoning was rewarded in the way it was. The lore is so omnipresent that I can have a question about the world's lore and intuitively seek the answer. THAT is the cool bit.
@@andypanz TES lore is basically Greek Mythology it’s pretty interesting but it’s either historical or mythical but If we’re comparing it to Fallout I definitely think Fallout Lore is amazing it’s more mystery than it is history. You never learn the true nature of things in Fallout there’s always something more than meets the eye.
Metroid Prime does lore really well. Every interactable object in the game has flavor text that can be accessed theough the scan visor. You just hit a button at any time during gameplay and you can scan creatures, puzzle elements, computers, and a host of other objects. You can learn a lot about the environments and who lived there, read memos written by the enemies, and even gain some insight into how to fight the bosses or how to progress.
I had never considered that's probably why I ended up reading so many more entries in that than many RPGs. It's _incredibly_ immersive not just mechanically by being so swift and occuring in a realtime pause, but allowing you to search for information immediately relevant to your environment, much like any real explorer would be. It just unifies player and character motives and actions so seamlessly and beautifully.
Only problem is the chozo lore itself is very amateur and unsophisticated. It tries to sound grandiose, but isn't t... But I loved the scan visor overall
The only game I can think of that has a literacy skill is Kingdom Come Deliverance. There was also the early 90s game called Freedom about being a runaway slave and one character you could play as couldn't read so it added extra challenges to the game.
Some of my most favorite lore bits are from Fallout, like Harold's story and Richard Grey's diary or the whole story about Deathclaw, where people think it is a myth, but still fear it. Especially little things like NPC rumors and urban legends are something I love in games, because they are usually true to some extent.
There was also patrons in taverns in Arcanum that had a betting minigame where you had to answer a lore question to win/lose money. I loved that part, not because of money but because I did it ! Plus I was congratulated by the NPC.
One of my favourite implementations of lore was in Tyranny. At face value the backstory campaign mechanic was amazing at immersing you into the role you play, by having you actively making world altering decisions with your character before the game even began. What I found even more compelling however, was Kyros' law. In order to make decisions in the game, actually reading the law was useful because you could essentially try to interpret the law any way you wanted to, to gain an advantage. It felt like playing a lawyer-inquisitor hybrid.
A question about quest markers. What do you prefer, pointing at the quest item or quest enemy (even if the enemy is invisible) or a quest marker that turns into a search radius , or no quest marker (figure it out through dialog or environmental storytelling) How much hand holding should the developer do for the player after the tutorial is probably the real question
Great question! Having worked so long in the industry from the 'figure it out yourself' pre-internet days to the more walkthrough/guides modern era of games, Tim should be able to give us a nice nuanced take.
When there's a marker for everything it encourages you to not pay attention I think. A radius is good at stopping me from overthinking though, but environmental and lore storytelling is so much more rewarding and immersive. Play games to be immeresed and impressed, not to shut down and mindlessly follow the marker.
Your mention of literacy as a skill calls to mind a game like Kingdom Deliverance where certain quests and items are impossible to complete without either being able to read the items yourself or finding a scribe or someone to read it for you. Not sure if that game is up your alley as it is almost entirely based on real events in medieval Europe and lacks the general fantasy themes that you're more attracted to but it's an interesting and challenging game.
Some really great points here! A couple of tips I would add: 1) The more you fragment lore dumps the more likely players are to read them. TES books, for example, are a bit too long in my opinion and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of players just open and close them to get the skill bonus. Most cRPGs do this well, usually limiting themselves to a page or two. This also applies to voiced dialogue. My golden rule is never have a line that stays on screen for more than five seconds if it's also voiced or a lot of players will skip through as soon as they're done reading, throwing the VA's hard work in the garbage. 2) If you're going for a hardcore RPG make the knowledge useful to the player, not just to the character. Just sprinkle some essential information for quests in lore items every once in a while, just to keep them on their toes. I'd also advise to avoid doing this for the main quest as the player might be roleplaying as an illiterate character. Mages though? Make them read the damn books. 3) For the love of God, pace yourselves. Nothing kills the flow of a game like having to read lore books for fifteen minutes straight. Slap that ten minute history lesson in a dialogue box with some branching dialogue. If it's not pushing the plot forward at least use it to allow the player to define his character. Think Dragon Age: Origins during the Human Noble origin, when the old tutor gives you his history lesson. You can decide how attentive of a student your character was, and how respectful he is, during that dialogue. Can't do that with a book. 3) Chill out with the hyphens and accents and w's and y's in the names of people and places. If you're using them heavily in your game (I am abusing them in mine and you have to trust me on this, my design doc is horrifying to read through) maybe consider having the in-game lore written by a foreign explorer who uses common tongue translations or something like that. If you want to make sure players will scroll trough your carefully crafted history books without reading them there's no better way than writing something like "In the Age of Ud'Ram-Harat the Hél'Gwythshyn army routed the Ygg'Shwyrshrain forces in what became know as the battle of Ulul'A-a-hehe". Well, maybe that last name might get their attention but you know what I mean.
One thing I worry about with "XP for lore" is how many players simply open the document for the XP and then immediately close it without actually reading the text. Maybe it could be solved by implementing some type of check on the design side before the XP is granted (for instance, a soon-after dialogue tree where certain content from the document comes up in conversation), but then that raises another worry about potentially not granting the XP to players who actually did read the document if they happen to not make the check for some other reason (roleplay preference, non-dialogue character, or even just being more focused on other parts of the document from the part that's checked-for).
But why is this such a big deal? The players who don't read lore entries obviously don't care about the larger story so why would it be such a bad thing to reward them for at least taking the time to find and pick up the lore entry? Players are playing your game in the first place. If they want to read the lore, cool. If not, cool. In my opinion if you're constructing a narrative that requires the player to dive deep into lore entries to understand what's going on and enjoy the game, then you need to change that story or you need to really dial down the gameplay because you're essentially writing a book at that point.
There's a GDC talk by Alex Beachum (director of Outer Wilds) on how to design for curiosity. It's not the same thing but it's similar, of course. You can also see that From Software does similar things to what they say on the talk, and you're right, giving extrinsic rewards can be detrimental to curiosity.
I think an easy way to have hooked me earlier on in-game lore was if the game made it clear that having the text open for a few seconds would count as your character not just reading, but studying it, which is what gives you the Exp or skill points. For folks with my kind of ADHD, just a brief lack of stimuli can urge us to do something _less_ stimulating and attaching a reward to it would make it feel like a more valuable use of time. Of course you can't design something to win everybody over, and I have no idea how many people would hate that system, but I know that opposite of feeling like it's wasting _my_ time, it would make it feel like I'm spending it more wisely, and give me that bit of extra encouragement that I always wanted to dive deep into the lore while still in the game. Without something like that, I have to actively fight the urge to keep engaging in the more stimulating activities of the games. With the advent of wikis and the like, I always found it easier to steep myself in the deeper lore by just researching it free from the temptations of actual gameplay.
Hitman: Blood Money also used newspapers as a post-mission summary which was awesome to read, and they also sprinkled some articles that touched on the larger story of the game.
One of the coolest things Hitman: Blood Money did was that it had a newspaper at the end of every mission, sans the last one, that depicted what the player did and hinted at the next mission(s).
The points that you bring up in this video use the advantage that video games have over other pieces of media, such as movies, shows or books: interactivity. While I love reading and watching a well-presented movie or show, nothing can engross me more than a video game whose developers have taken the time and effort to properly implement world-building through the world itself in big and small ways. Then, seeing your choices change the world and its people is the icing on the cake.
I love the gameplay rewards mechanisms for engaging with lore (or any other type of content). Also Arcanum's newspapers, excellent touch 👌 So many good ideas in this video. Thank you and have a great day/night 😊
Some of the best advice I heard for this kind of thing was to simply make at least some of the lore relevant to solving some problem that the players want to solve. If the lore in question is cool, they're more likely to look into more of it - especially if paying attention to lore can lead to side quests.
First time i arrived in Tarant and saw the shouting paper salesman i was like whoa that is a cool atmosphere detail. Then a little later i talked with one. And saw you could buy a paper. Nifty detail. Then i saw you could actually read it. The font and design i thought was great. This was a moment where i stopped and knew i was loving parts of Arcanum, mind you i hadnt explored much yet, I was very impressed by this. So many layers to this small world building. Started reading. Lol funny stories, and then bits about wanting war with Caladon, weather and taxes. Then i saw how the stories changed. All the work they did, such a cool feature. Then a while later the papers salesmen were shouting about a headline that was connected to a quest i did. Ok so now the world, untop of ALL the other things i was impressed by, was reacting to what i had done. I loved it and still do.
Timothy, thanks for your videos. Could you please talk about how you design magic systems? How do you choose what to include among the seemingly endless possible magic spells, skills, and abilities that a game could have in it? What are your thoughts on create-your-own custom magic systems?
I'm not Tim, nor a game developer, not even a super fan of magic, but I would really like that such a game would exist in some form of MMORPG or something along those lines. IMO it would take an awful lot of balancing and transposing some things since it would be a game. For example, Magicka has this combination thing which is neat, but the OP spells were quickly figured out so it takes a bit of fun out of the game. To make something PvP viable and not boring, it would have to go beyond just earth, wind, fire and water but into some unexplainable magic stuff that gives and takes life, plays with time, perception, telepathy, transmoprhing etc. And to make it a risk-reward thing, the more powerful the magic created, the more chance it would have to include a downside. If for instance one creates a mage that has an extremely powerful spell that just takes life and is extra strong for that purpose, the making of that spell should take a lot of resources AND would have a chance to fail in that phase, maybe even so that it would make sense that in the creation phase it wouldn't even tell the player the percentage of success, or if that combination is even possible. This way it can be a natural deterrent to even attempt something like this. But again, internet will find a way and if one is able to create such a spell, the internet would know about it in seconds and the only way to prevent everyone just doing the meta, the punishment for failing must be great and a dice roll. Let's say that character power/magic level is an actual levelling system as it normally is in RPGs. Creation of a spell takes a certain amount of XP away from you. Simple spells like fire would just take for instance 15 XP away from you when creating it with a You have 30 points available from doing your mundane quests, now it is time to create some spells. You can attempt at learning/creating the spell for 15 XP and since it's very likely that you will succeed as it is standard elemental magic, you lose 15 XP, go back to "level" 15, but you have a neat fire spell. Now when it would come to complex spells, the numbers would add up and the chance of creation would drop, maybe even non-linear. So you leveled the character to 500 XP and want to create the most OP spell that you can think off, or have seen a streamer pull off. You invest all 500 points in a combination of arcane stuff and *poof* dice roll said no-go and you are now without power, back at level 0 and every other mage is better than you, time to grind again. But let's say you were able to create that extra good spell that will spank noobs - there is a catch! Even when using a spell, there would be drawbacks; maybe it would sap all your mana or even your life, dependant on a dice roll that gets percentages from the combination AND your current XP. If you waste all your XP into learning/creating a spell, but are now a weak wizard (with great knowledge, though), then it would be unsafe to use that spell as it would be a death sentence, so all in all you acheived nothing. Maybe investing 250 points in a spell that was a bit weaker and less prone to fail in the creation stage and leaving the other 250 XP as the ability to actually safely use that spell afterwards would be a better idea. Sorry for the long post, I will go to bed now. :D
Loving these videos, super appreciated. One thing I'm curious about, I've been working on a levelless, classless RPG system, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about the philosophy of what makes for good character progression systems in game design. Like, if you had to trim down character progression to its absolute bare minimum (and went back to the mid '90s so you don't have to worry about battle passes or seasonal DLC or any other tacked-on MTX content) and had the creative freedom to slaughter sacred cows with reckless abandon, what'd be first to the chopping block?
Good video, Tim. I was wondering if you'd talk about the process of offical strategy guide creation. Like, do developers/publishers update the writers when things are changed? Do the writers speak and work with the devs?
A simple but effective method is th have lore terms be highlighted in the text window with a drop down option to learn more about it. (I think Tyranny did something to that effect)
Tim, can you make a video on using purchased pre-made assets vs. doing everything yourself? I'm curious to know your thoughts on this, I'm a good programmer but I suck at arts and modeling, I'm wondering if people would not buy my game if I used pre-made assets.
He mentioned the use of asset store items in a previous video as a temporary solution to get started. I wouldn't think (but could be wrong) people would buy it as a finished game at full price with unaltered, prepurchased assets, but might be willing to invest in an early access version. The makers of 7DTD are replacing placeholders to this day. The team has grown (and shrunk and grown, I'm sure) from three to somewhere around 60; contracted out the making of some of the game's art assets to another company; and employed some in-house artists and 3D modelers to produce things like posters, artwork and signage and models for an upcoming in-house replacement of Unity's character system. (TFPs' is probably a rare success story, but it's also been an extremely rough and rocky road for them. So, I'd say they've earned it.)
Damn, I'd love to try a Literacy skill in one of my designs; my mind is alight with possibilities. 🖤 @Tim Question: I'm in professional gamedev and I see a lot of new designers struggle with design documentation and especially pitches; what do you think are the most salient or key parts of a game pitch?
The first question game designer should themselves is why do they want player to learn the lore. Then how much the character knows the lore and why does the character needs to repeat to learn the lore. Some good points for the lore also description of items, armor and weapon. It is easy to put mention of some events in the description even without explaining the events.
By the way, when talking about player needing to learn things manually, what do you think about how Kingdom Come Deliverance handles it? In that game you need to go to a literate person of the town and he will give player a book to read and then he asks you to tell him what the book was about, etc.
I'm reminded of a small quick lore test in the game FTL in which after you play it long enough and encounter enough empty space with prompts saying there's nothing to do, players can become quick to tap 1 to move on (ok maybe, me being impatient). The entire game is randomly generated every time, and there's a common enough event where you come to a planet at and it will generate how many moons are around it. If you skip or don't read that prompt, you're immediately quizzed by a powerful inhabitant who will ask you, "How many moons are around my planet?" If you select the correct answer, and again it's always generated as a random number from the description one screen before this question prompt, you get a powerful character added. If you guess wrong, you're immediately punished with losing resources. That taught me to at least TRY to be wary and read a little more in that game. But I'm also thinking of how it's great when lore actually gives hints to defeat difficult enemies. I've definitely come across some on console games, but there's usually a translation error. Probably most famously Zelda 2's NPC that states "If all else fails, use fire" in an island where enemies are immune to default attacks but can take damage from magic fire. I do also have a soft spot for the potential for unreliable lore/narration, but I realize on a practicality level that many players may not have the time for that.
One thing i really love about Bethesda is how fantastic they are at using environmental storytelling. You walk into a room and just from the placement of objects youre toks an entire story without a single line of dialogue. Oh, these people were laying together in bed when the bombs dropped, this person committed suicide, this familys breakfast table is still set.
I love the idea of a literacy skill. But I think it would only work well if there was a system where you get multiple skill points per level or whatever skill system there is. These points should be limited tho so you can’t rush something. Maybe separate trees for combat and interactive skills and you get one point for each per level
Buffs that are one time, limited time, given as a reward for reading\finding lore have the opposite effect, the player wanting to hold onto their chanche of making use of it. Skill books that always fill exactly to the next level, when later levels are harder to acquire are eventually read( unless the player forgets them), but suffer from a similiar effect, and if unmarked, may lead to the player not reading any books until all skills are near maximium.
One thing I aspire to do with my games is make one where people have the urge to explore the world and find out the lore without being handheld through it all. One of my favorite things as a child was going through all the different fallout games and exploring as much as I could, learning all I could. Same with the Elder Scrolls games. I remember in Skyrim I actually made a point to get a bookshelf and fill it with as many books as I could find, organized and all.
I'm still here waiting for a game like Skyrim, but one that doesn't have a map. Roadsigns and asking people for directions (with a chance of not knowing or even straight up lying to get you into a trap) would be a dream. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is very close to that though, but it's not some fantasy world.
Sometimes I feel like video game design can be summed up with the phrase 'I see what you did there' and the more you say that with your game the better it is.
I just realized in games where books are also skill books or perk books or whatever, but some books are just lore, that turns books into Skinner Boxes given the nature of the random reward.
The skill book lore books are the most important of all. Because we naturally want to explore the world so putting books in areas that are hard to get to (like some area with a lot of dangerous monsters that can one shot you) you remind the player that they are special for coming this far to get the knowledge. If you are an explorer you want to be rewarded for taking the time to see every area on a map. Without that incentive you will just ignore the areas off the beaten track and just focus on main quest. Completionists want to get it all. I think the best books should be far away from civilised world in places where exotic creatures, strange ruins and forgotten lands exist that feel like nobody but you has been to before. Finding stuff that cannot be found anywhere else will cause players to push themselves to the limits to go see those places they didn't think had any interesting content before but are now reminded that the rarest things are often away from most NPCs sphere of knowledge. (ie you and only you got this book and that gives you a sense that you are a legend for getting to find it) Above all mystery is what drives us to explore so having the books in places nobody would normally go can affect the player psychologically so that now they want to check everything and find all the lore books in a set. In a way it is like pokemon but with text. The more lore you have the wiser you are, and the wisdom should be rewarded with rare ability that can only be attainted because you search it out. Because that knowledge is scattered it necessitates you exploring everything to have complete wisdom of the world not just fragments. After you know everything you basically feel complete. It's the same feeling of solving a long crossword puzzle and getting all the answers.
Hey Tim, I'm hearing from Indie developers that I need to build an audience online, like making a youtube channel. Many of them are making channels about being a developer, which I'm certainly not a subject matter expert of that. I know I am a subject matter expert about my game world. How can I turn that into content that can draw in an audience for the game I'm developing? I especially find this a more interesting direction because the only audience I'd be drawing with "how to develop" videos are just other developers, which more of a niche crowd.
I’m not really sure. This channel is also a “how to develop” channel, along with a lot of stories and anecdotes about the process. I’d recommend finding a channel that deep dives into a game world and ask them.
This is something I ran into with my time running tabletop games. Also as someone pursuing prose writing, I feel like some of the main techniques to make the audience interested aren't actually too different between mediums. I personally really dislike reading lore books and compendiums in videogames since it's a completely different mode of interacting with the game, and if I wanted to read fiction, I'd just go, you know, read a book. So the main way I've settled on making the audience interested is by just making it part of the actual story. I personally don't care about if there's a dragon on yonder hill in the lore. Force me(or a character if we're talking other mediums) to go over there and actually deal with the dragon though? Yeah, I care about it being there now. Same thing goes for a lot of little world building details like a specific line of kings or an ancient city that fell to ruin.
The named demons idea is actually very cool. It's something that would blow players' minds back in the times before the Internet, or even now, if they don't spoil themselves by reading wikis.
------ ------- Hey Tim. You often try not to touch a design or narrative point of view. Ever thought about another guest from a design background? Chris Avellone has recommending your show/lectures on Twitter/X, and he has been outspoken about processes in the past on his blog. Ever thought of inviting Chris as guest on your show to cover the design/narrative perspective on some of those focused questions? --------- -------
Maybe this goes without saying but I’ll mention it in case it doesn’t. If you’re trying to get a player to do something they don’t want to do, you might want to think about why that is. Maybe you want to serve players who like lore, but your game is attracting players who prefer action. Skyrim has action combat almost resembling a first person shooter, which might have made it more appealing to a broader audience than just traditional RPG fans. I personally never stop and read books in that game, just pop it open for a skill boost and close it. That’s an example of incentivizing a player to do something they don’t like because of the extrinsic rewards, and you don’t want that because it’s not fun.
hey mr pink I really love golden light and didn't know you were working on something new. Cool to see you in Tim's comment section. I'll be watching for Chambers it looks really interesting so far.
Honestly, getting experience or skills from books does not make me want to read them. The only thing that does is a quality read, which is a reward in itself:)
Emphasis on quality. Same here. A lot of Tim's advice in this particular video is in regard to how to get players interested in the lore of a game world who might not otherwise be and I agree with one thing @ConnerofallTrades said in another comment on the subject: "If they want to read the lore, cool. If not, cool." If the lore is interesting, even those not interested in it initially may pay more atttention to it in a second or third playthrough, but it's the tiniest of leaps from good game design to Skinner Box game design to attach a "reward" of XP or anything else to things that have nothing whatever to do with progressing through the game and everything to do with things players might do for their own edification or simply to satisfy their own curiosity. To be clear, I don't think for a moment that Tim is advocating Skinner box game design, but one other point I wholeheartedly disagreed with is "appeal to the player's ego." That is the absolute worst "appeal" a game developer could ever make, afic, if they wish a player to be engrossed in the world they've created as opposed to being engrossed in themselves or so obsessed with "leveling," etc. they forget to actually enjoy the time they're spending with the game. We even have a saying about the process of ego dissolution when reading a good novel or watching a good movie. We say we "lost ourselves" in it. Needless to say, that's a two-edged sword these days. The fact that we're having to defend ourselves from predatory industry practices means we can't afford to lose ourselves in a video game the way we once did. In fact, that very well could be why our "analytical" brains are kicking in so often and much as we play. So, if a developer or studio wants to be well thought of, they might ease up on the practice of attaching "rewards" to activities that have nothing to do with progressing through the game.
Personally I prefer a movie where it's full of mystery and at the end I have so many questions and I dive online to find the answers than a movie that tells tells me everything
This whole conversation makes mecwonder why I know more about the history of areas in the Yakuza and Soulsborne series than most western ARPGs. I wonder if it has anything to do with how they don't try to copy DnD wholecloth
I like how diablo just reads the book for you, they are always short and direct, no blabbering about personal feelings and stupid characters i don't care about
I don't like when tedious activities are rewarded badly like some books giving XP or skills. I'm gonna open every book if that's the case, but I'm not going to read it or care about it. But Witcher games and baldur gate3 to some extent actually fix this, By allowing players to learn about the world and enemies from books. Finding out what kind of damage type an enemy type or a boss is resistant or vulnerable to. In bg3, some character or world information will be handy in dialog. But in most games, it's not what I care about, I just want that XP or level boost or possible quest. Also I don't like reading, it's boring, but I so understand why it's good to allow digesting information slower, compared to a video or a voice log, As well as obviously less effort to add lore text
i think the only game i've seen with a literacy skill is kingdom come deliverance. it was a cool idea but the implementation wasn't great, having 0 reading skill just jumbled the letters in text (the higher your skill the less jumbled it was) so it was actually still very easy to read even with 0 reading skill
Another method is to have only short words appear. Its best to not show any of the words not know. Not even scribble of indecipherable text. This can be made even better when certain words are always a word with a close spelling. That appears in place of the actual word intended by the author. This replacement system for written text would be a time consuming project. This is because its not an encryption. Its a way of betraying human understanding on figuring out misleading information. That makes it very difficult to come logical means to decipher it.
lot of good ideas on how to go about it worst is when game forces you to engage in its boring lore just because someone bothered making it. Most important one imho is "Everything needs a reason why its is the way it is" and not to pull rabbits out of your hat just because it sounds cool and ignoring your own narative
I somewhat dislike the trope of the ancient lore. At least when it's just thrown into the gameworld. If there was some catastrophic event and now lots of knowledge got lost and has to regained, then yes, ancient lore makes sense. But by default: why should the lore of the ancients be better than modern knowledge? we had time to work on stuff and improve it! I had a laugh with my players when we played DnD 4th edition back than. DnD4 had magic missle as a cantrip, while in former editions all spells where a "per day" kind of thing. So I let them find a ancient tome with magic knowledge in there and they learned the "once a day" version of the magic missle 😂😂😂
The oldest surviving text from the bible wasn't on a clay tablet, parchment, nor papyrus. It was engraved on a silver. Which is highly resistant to corrosion, malleable enough to reshape without breaking, and can be polished to be seen with little light. Those other materials were far more common, and many more written pieces found inscribed on them.
The way lore is handled in the souls games is one of my favorite things about it. You go to some absolutely insane areas that are awesome in their own right, but players who wish to dive deeper simply just have to read the item descriptions to get a much better grasp on the world. A good example of how lore reveals information is in Dark Souls 3, there’s an optional tree boss in an early game area that when killed allows you to turn boss souls into unique items. Players may find it weird that there’s a giant tree that comes to life and gives you the ability to get unique loot. However, if you read this boss soul’s description you learn that the tree became foul because superstitious villagers just stuffed anything “heretical” into the tree, sort of like a dump. Well, a character you meet in the hub area tells you that transposing souls is a heretical art, so that explains why this random tree has a transposing kiln that you get to use after. I think this is a great example of why I adore the way you discover lore in the souls series, and that’s just one easier to figure out answer. The games are full of that kind of stuff (although I will say I get a lot of lore from reading and watching other people’s opinions on it).
No offense, but these seem really dated to back when players just wanted to play doom-likes and needed a reward for eating their vegetables. There are so many games nowadays where people love lore, want to get more lore, seek it out actively DESPITE challenges. Dark souls hides its lore with all its might, and yet players love reading it - because its good and interesting. If they gatekept quests, items and progressions with lore, it would be a lot less engaging, a lot more forced.
