This applies to other people's games (not to mention books, movies, TV, and other media), but I'm discussing this from a game designer's perspective, so I'm letting this topic live in Development Discussion. Do you like it when games have intricate backstories and lore for their characters and settings, or do you care nothing for this kind of detail? Similarly, do you like it when developers strive to maintain a sense of continuity across all the sequels, spinoffs, and related licensed media, or are you totally OK when games contradict themselves? I'm not obsessed with game lore, but it can be interesting if it's a game series I'm invested in. Some of the recent Final Fantasy games have taken this to an extreme - I haven't actually played the more recent games in the series, but my understanding is you might have to play several games and watch an anime or movie just to understand the game's full plot. In contrast, Mario games tend to care very little about this - Mario games tend to introduce game worlds, use them in one game, and never mention them again (here's looking at you, Beanbean Kingdom and most of the places in Super Mario World not named Yoshi's Island or Chocolate Island). As for continuity, I like it when developers try to maintain a sense of continuity and consistency - it's confusing and annoying when developers change basic facts about a character or change the shape of the world map without a plausible explanation. However, I also understand how a rigid insistence on maintaining continuity can become restrictive, so small discrepancies don't bother me (and if it's a series I don't care about, I probably won't even notice). I've included something of an extended backstory across many of my older fangames. People may or may not have noticed, and if they noticed, they may or may not have cared. A future use for the Stop 'n Swop series may give me a chance to explain it in greater detail. For the RPG I'm making, many of the main characters have backstory that might not be explicitly stated in game, but it may be explained in greater detail in the online manual or in the bestiary (if I include those).

I personally do like some more and backstory. It's ok for some things to not make sense as long as they are small and unimportant. However, I am rather mad about Mario Oddessey because it's world map is so large in scope and it's going to change my perspective of Mario's planet forever.(I'll still play the game; though). Anyway, Metroid is really the only game series I care for very deeply and I hope it doesn't change. I hope it simply evolves

It depends on the game and how good the lore is really. Games like World of Warcraft (used to) have a lot of rich lore that stemmed back to the old RTS games and I used to get really into the lore of characters and the world in general, which made it a lot of fun to play when you saw characters or places you'd seen or heard about in the RTS games. In the case of Mario, I would love if they actually acknowledged previously visited places like the Beanbean Kingdom in other games, outside of a nod here and there, but I won't lose any sleep if they don't. In RPG's, I like when character backstories are looked into through sidequests and other activities like that, or explained later on. It was amazing in Chrono Trigger to learn how Lucca's mother became crippled and to be given a chance to save her, or to learn other character backstories and things through playing and sidequests. I'd rather learn about characters this way than simply reading a bio that has no effect on how they're portrayed in the game.

For me it really depends on the game. Some games wouldn't be as good without detailed lore and characters, and some games really wouldnt benefit from it. I do like continuity in most games though. It bugs me when things contradict each other too much (though sometimes that can be interesting).

i think having continuity in your game (note: not games) is vital if the locations the player is going through are by any means coherent. sonic 3 & knuckles has stage transitions between each zone, and it does the game a lot of good by having them. you can really feel it when they're absent in mania, where some zones have them and some don't. it makes the zones that don't have any prefacing transition feel far more out of place, especially when you're jumping from locale to locale outside of the zones themselves

I'm a sucker for lore so I usually develop all of my games in the same 'universe' and you'll often find bits of continuity between them. That being said a boatload of lore certainly isn't a requirement for a good game, but it can add to the experience.

Neither really matters to me, to be honest. Lore and continuity can prop up an already-good game, but they won't save one that isn't fun to play. I think what makes games unique as a medium is the element of interactivity that comes with them. You're not forced to sit back and watch things play out, you can influence what goes on. For this reason, I think having a good story and good gameplay can kind of work at odds with each other. Some games are working to blend things out better, but most stick to the gameplay -> cutscene -> gameplay -> cutscene flow we've seen for years. If I want to experience a good story I'll stick to books, shows or movies.

In my perpetual brainstorm of an idea, I have this RPG where regular animal characters are the main characters. I've put the occassional curiousity of trying to figure out places about the world it would be in, but in the classic sense of counting chickens before they hatched, and I've so far gotten the idea of other planets, other characters, and plot ideas that would expand to theoretical sequels. Maybe like one planet has mana, the other doesn't. And there could be a big reason or something. But if I'm just making the one game to start with, I want it to feel like its own, just maybe there would be things set in it on purpose that would be expanded on, something that doesn't feel like a changed out of place feeling. A thing the Pokemon series does it keep adding new regions of the Pokemon World. There's no map of the entire world, they just keep adding new areas. And like, Pokemon from other games that couldn't evolve before but could in Diamond and Pearl, they evolve because of certain reasons that weren't available in the other games.

I think it can be interesting to have some lore and continuity in your game(s). To me, it's not really a requirement for a good game, but it can make it feel more involved and possibly fun. I sometimes find it weird when contradictions happen in the continuity (such as how in the Mario games the environment around Peach's Castle keeps on changing, sometimes drastically, without any explanation), but I usually don't mind it, as I do understand that having to be 100% consistent all of the time can be quite limiting. I think it's neat when games acknowledge previous events, characters, and locations, although I think there should be a good reason when doing so. For my games, I usually make them be in the same universe. For quite a while, I've been imagining how would the Mushroom Kingdom look and some characters be portrayed (such as Mario and Roy Koopa) in my fangames. I've tried to tie my Mario fangames together in one universe with Battle in the Future, so you'll probably notice some references to them (besides the fact that it takes place right after The Flooded Tower).

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that good lore is more important than a good story. And it's not that a good story isn't important, either, it's just that it's a lot more easy, and...well...[i]possible[/i] to fit deeper and more universal themes into a world's lore than it is to shove them all into a linear narrative line. I couldn't give a rat's hindquarters about the individual stories present in Zelda games; most of them are basically the same story repeated over and over, but with a few different themes and motifs each time. And yet, the Zelda series is my all-time favorite (even if not most-played) video game franchise, and it's not because of the gameplay, it's because of the lore. All of the ways in which the aforementioned "minor" themes repeat, and connect with other themes in other Zelda games, and connect to real life in strange, symbolic ways...that's what makes the world of Hyrule not only my favorite video game world, but my favorite fantasy world ever. Not the gameplay. Not the simplistic stories. Not even the cool creature designs (although that admittedly is still a big part of it.) It's how everything fits together to create a world that's not only believable, but has, in a sense, effected some of the things that I believe about the real world. That's true literary power.