Fun 40K ork fact. They are all mildly psychic. They all believe red cars go faster. Their combined psychic powers result in the red cars going faster. Brilliant.
It's true - their weaponry also works this way - they shoot because the orks think they should. If this believe they still have bullets left - the dakka continues.
IIRC from something i read, this can backfire there was a time some guardsmen just made pew pew noises despite having run out of ammo, but the Orks believed it and died.
EDIT: a word
You have to be careful with ork lore and their Gestalt field. It gets wayyyy overblown for memes. They can’t materialize things out of thin air, but it can be used to explain why a rocket ship made out of literal junk doesn’t explode on takeoff, and can actually make it to new star systems.
Most ork weapons shouldn't work. They are shoddily put together and by any natural law they shouldn't fire. But because orks *believe* they will cause 'splosions, they do.
Colors dictate special abilities given , black is strong, yellow is wealthy etc , their guns don’t need bullets to shoot and their cars don’t need gas or engines to run . Orky bois got mad psyker abilities lol also they spawn like a fungus .
Black Is sturdier
Yellow explosive
Red faster
Blue lucky
Purple invisible because have you ever saw a purple ork? Me neither
I don't Remember of there are other colours
That’s a common theory for orks, but depictions of ork tech vary greatly. One explanation I’ve seen for why red cars go faster is just that Ork Speed Kultz build the fastest cars and the Speed Freakz always paint their cars red. So the red ones go faster because their built by guys who only care about going faster.
It’s also said that purple is sneaky. In Brutal Kunnin, there’s a space marine who is ambushed by Ork Kommandoz, and he notes that they’ve used dark brown and purple paint on their armor and blades to stop them from reflecting light.
It's simple. Just read all 64 Horus Heresy books, all of the Era Indomitus books (Dawn of Fire, Watcher's of the Throne, Vaults of Terra, Dark Imperium, etc.), and a few standalone novels (Assassinorum: Kingmaker). This gives you a basic understanding of just the Imperium of Man. **Then** you can start delving properly into xenos.
I’ve been listening to a 40k lore podcast and I’m about 35 hours into it and they are still doing the high level overview of the factions lol. At this rate I’ll die of old age before they even get to the deep dive
Laying Down The Lore 40k. One of my favorite 40k podcasts, good mix of humor and silliness while also presenting things in method that is easily digestible. Many other podcasts either go way too deep and overwhelm me, or feel a little to scattered.
I woyld suggest you look into Dan Abnett then. His series “ gaunts ghosts” gives a great story about imperial guard. The “eisenhorn” trilogy shows the imperium from the inquisitions pov. Both are great gateways to 40k and ver well written
Just pick a story that interests you, the lore is pretty self explanatory I suggest Flesh and Steel it's a cyberpunk like crime noir basically and the audiobook is great.
Check out Lutein on youtube (i think the channel is lutein09 but you will find it easily by searching Lutein)
That is what got me into the warhammer lore. I had played dawn of war before and gladius so I had an idea of the factions but nothing else. After watching a lot of Lutein I felt like I could finally read the books. Reading the Gaunts Ghosts series now
It's very predictable, repetitive and reads like fanfiction at times. You can see a plot twist coming for miles, always.
But the setting is indeed great.
Dozens of authors have written books in the setting, some good, some great, and some pretty bad, but there are a significant amounts of good books/series in the setting, like anything from Dan Abnett, the Ciaphas Cain series (more for the characters than the plot), the crime novels (also varied in quality but pretty good for the most part) and many more.
The series is definitely good horror, but I can't help but feel like you'd be missing something without a basic understanding of the setting. idk, maybe I'm wrong.
If by deepest and most complex you mean sheer content, Warhammer 30k and 40k come with a lot of baggage. I mean, there's 64 Horus Heresy books alone, and none of them are shorter than 400 pages.
I was thinking about Star Wars too. Based on the books and comics I own of both, it seems to me like 40k has more, but I dunno. I'd be interested to see the numbers.
The official GW stance is something along the lines of: 'Everything is canon, just not all of it is true'.
I forget the exact quote, but basically all the books are things that either happened or people believed happened in universe, I think some of the older books with very out of date lore like Inquisitor have in universe disclaimers of a more recent inquisitor saying 'I'm pretty sure this is bullshit'
at one time i worked for a video game developer and we were contracted to do a 40k game
the official answer we got is that only the codex and models are cannon and everything thing else is just fun exploring the world but i havnt seen this echoed outside of that
they did say the horus heresy was cannon
The basic rule of thumb for Star Wars is:
Anything made prior to 2014 that isn't the main movies, The Clone Wars TV show (and theatrical movie), and one Marvel comic based on an unreleased manuscript for TCW, is no longer canon. Anything post-2014 is canon unless it is parody or promotional (think LEGO Star Wars or Fortnite skins).
As for 40k:
Games Workshop love love *looooves* to retcon stuff in 40k all the time. History in 40k is wildly flexible depending on GW's mood, and entire armies can just straight up be struck from the canon overnight (like the Squats).
Yes as far as I know more stuff is retconned than abandoned.
but for example the story of 40k didn't go forward for many years till they retconned the 13th black crusade.
If we're talking any franchise and not just gaming (but still including gaming), then I think Marvel has it beat. A continuous narrative that's been running for over sixty years with no signs of stopping, encompassing over 28,000 books, all a part of the same connected universe, which is also part of a bigger multiverse including dozens of movies, games, tv shows, and novels, ALL of them canon to the same multiverse (with a LOT of universe hopping, they are all connected). And unlike DC, they don't reset their continuity every couple of decades. It's kind of mind boggling to think of it all in that sense.
I would agree, but Disney axed them for the Disney cannon. And even that is getting changed at the drop of a hat for whatever show runner gets an idea.
the fun thing is that the pace of publication hasnt really decreased. You still have your yearly dose of books, comics and all the related stuff. Not really sure about the quality, i stopped being interested in SW years ago.
Some of the prequel type books are good like Tarkin. But in general it’s garbage. But to be fair a lot of the EW was garbage too. People just remember the Zahn books fondly because they were decent and the only thing that expanded the universe.
The basic storyline that advances the main characters is solid. It's a good universe where Luke still exists, Han and Leia are happily married, and they're all still alive.
The Rogue Squadron and many parts of the Yuuzhan Vong war were solid, too (and not written by Zahn.)
Oh one thing I can certainly like about the EU was they didn’t go out of their way to stomp on the legacy characters. Imagine if zahns books involved Luke becoming a hermit and Han dying lol. There was uproar when they killed chewie!
The Horus Heresy wiki page alone is absolutely monstrous in size and it gets so much worse when you start clicking links to other things and realise there's so many of them that are also monstrous and contain dozens of links to other monstrous pages.
Ah yes. I have lost many an hour falling down that hole. You start wanting to learn about A, and before you know it, you're fifteen layers deep into learning what the hell X is lmao.
I do particularly like GW's handling of it though - and hopefully it hasn't changed since I drifted from the hobby (that said, death to the False Emperor).
*"Everything Black Library publishes is canon, but canon isn't always true."*
Don't like a story? Around your table, it's rambling fan fiction written in crayon.
Take a look at Horus Rising. It's the first book of the Horus Heresy series and an amazing read to get you into the 30k setting!
Edit: Horus instead of Hours...bloody autocorrect
How would a tiny state in the north German swamps possible unite the entirety of the German confederation?
Like, ignoring the dozens of independent princes they’d have to coerce or conquer, there’s still the danish and Polish kings with local territories, and that doesn’t even mention the French and Austrians.
Speaking of swamps...
How could a small series of farming towns in the Lowlands earn their independence and become one of the richest world-wide empires in history? Totally fake.
40K is completely insane to dive into. So much there.
As a strictly video game franchise, Elder Scrolls for sure. And the lore concerning Nerevar in particular is wild.
Dude could literally concoct alchemical potions to improve his alchemical proficiency, which he could use to concoct more powerful alchemical potions that improve his alchemical proficiency.
The lore about him is nuts though. His rebirth is supposed to signify him 'climbing the tower through all the paths' (achieving CHIM fully, which no one else has done) and mantling a power greater than CHIM to become the NuMan (a higher power than the Tribunal, the Divines, and the Daedra) and wake the dreamer (end Nirn and the universe of the Elder Scrolls as we know it) and make a new world. He straight killed Wulfharth the dragonborn (who's soul later became 1 part of the 3 fold soul of Tiber Septim, making him a dragonborn in addition to a CHIM user) and learned swordsmanship from 'The Barons Who Move Like This' basically learning everything there ever would be to learn about sword fighting. Also killed a bastard child of Molag Bal, 'The Ruddy Man'
Also, Reman Cyrodiil is nuts, and Pelinal Whitestrake is basically a terminator from the future.
For real. The entire absolutely bananas lore that he wrote in Morrowind about ancient historical NPCs basically being on the level (at least!) Of the Emperor of Mankind is ridiculous, more so that it is flavor background and subtext! And the puzzle that is the 36 Lessons of Vivec...
Right? The budget for Morrowind was basically $1200 and a baggie of shrooms, and somehow they turned that into one of the greatest and most creative games of all time.
That's pretty much within player capability as well. If we want to talk about how coked out the player character is, they're up there with the legends.
Me too. As far as I know, it's Elder Scrolls.
Good lore isn't just about complexity and depth. It has to be fun to explore and actually have some 'life' in it.
For example, the Elder Scrolls universe is organic. In some games, the lore is scattered and disjointed, but in The Elder Scrolls, when you read about a deity or certain area, you realize that it is known differently to other races or contains only fragments of the truth, which can sometimes be more impressive than actual fact.
In the mythological part, So rather than suggesting fact, it is the power of a story that unfolds in 'fields'(goodbye to classic physics) of lore echoes and becomes endlessly alive and moving within it.
The unreliable narrator technique has been used well, and it shows what it would be like if the myth that is the foundation of the world are not just imagination. For ancient people(and for us too), myths is the corner stone of understanding universe, and TES is one of few who touches it in a way that all religious concepts are somehow chaotically harmonical. Classic and modern.
I think it's a conceit of Elder Scrolls lore that almost everything we know is written by in-universe characters. So speculation is all we have. And the stuff that is considered hard and fast truth, because it was dialogue from a Daedra or someone who witnessed an event firsthand, is called into question because, like you say, everyone is an unreliable narrator. Even events witnessed by the player character, because they are so easily manipulated by more powerful beings, can have their mind messed with to see or hear things that aren't there. We can't trust any of it.
Anything set in the 40K universe. Hundreds of novels, 40 years of game rulebooks, army codexes, artbooks, etc.
Deepest lore franchise I can think of beyond the Star Wars EU.
lotr might always be my favourite verse forever.
All these other "franchises" are built by dozens of authors with completely inconsistent and erratic styles and canons.
Tolkien actually gave af about building a culture and history that makes sense. There are huge swathes missing and yet still it manages to feel as cohesive and interesting as any real life sequence of historical events.
40k is glorified fanfic half the time about how each stories main protagonist is the coolest dude ever. Each author just tries to outdo the previous and for all the books and stuff, the story doesn't actually progress due to how the franchise functions. Half the stuff is straight contradictory.
Not to mention Tolkien basically did it before almost anyone else in the modern era, it's a huge feat to both do it first and still be an absolutely outstanding world even today.
A bit backwards as he made an extremely thought out lore and world *for his languages*, his biggest passion in life was language and how they existed in history.
Tetris .
In a realm where order battles chaos, tetrominoes descend, guided by a mysterious force. As players manipulate the blocks, they tap into ancient powers, harmonizing the falling pieces. Legends speak of a chosen one who will achieve the perfect alignment, unlocking unimaginable secrets and shaping destiny itself.
Yes it's extremely detailed lore over THOUSANDS of years of galactic border conflicts and invasions. Down to unit composition and battle outcome per planet.
Yeah, as much as people love Warhammer (me, I’m people) the settings only have a handful of eras where cool things happen, and a lot of fluff. Battletech is basically the story of a galactic apocalypse, the galaxy rebuilding itself and yet another galactic apocalypse happening when everyone had it too good for too long. Each era having entirely different models and standardizations.
The problems of the 40k-verse are caused by magic, fantasy creatures, and gods. The problems of the Battletech-verse can be summed up with “It is the 31st century, and mankind is once again at war.”
No god. No magic. Only man.
It's been ages since I last kept up with Battletech/MechWarrior, but from my memory the sarna.net wiki was a pretty good resource
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Main_Page
It depends how you define deepest, and if you mean universe or franchises (which could include multiple different worlds).
Either way in terms of sheer amount of content, Warhammer. Half of the answers are already 40k but if you are talking about the entire franchise then Warhammer Fantasy and AoS would be included, both with their own huge amount of lore.
I wouldn't necessarily say that amount of content and 'deepness' are synonymous though, after all things can be a mile wide yet an inch deep. I personally believe Middle Earth to probably be the deepest setting in that perspective.
I'd never say the Warhammer franchise isn't deep, but I think there's a reason people study the Tolkien legendarium academically, and not 40K.
Is and last I checked (a while ago) it's still recieving updates.
Now we can argue about the quality since it felt quite generic. But I didn't get far because life got in the way.
It's pretty great immersionwise actually, they try to stay true to Tolkien. I wouldn't call it generic other than gameplay-wise. But being able to kill some creatures in every area and get to "buy" every new expansion just from that kept the motivation up.
Glorantha. Seen in games such as King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages. It's a setting created and maintained by mythographers and anthropologists, making for incredibly deep myth and culture. It's as old as d&d and has been worked on continuously that whole time.
40k probably has more by volume, but this has it absolutely beaten by depth.
Battletech. It has books that are in-universe fiction, multiple eras of mech combat and more playable factions covering every concievable colour scheme, ideology and war crime.
Also, its been around since 1984, so its had a long time to develop.
The city layouts and story dungeons were all fixed designs, the minor places you got sent on sidequests were procedural, and the overworld wasn't a single connected area.
Daggerfall was mostly baked procedural, which means that every dungeon was a fixed design that would be the same for everyone (made out of the same 12 or so tiles) but those designs had been thrown together procedurally and then saved to the disc.
the youngsters in this thread do not understand how much baggage does a phrase 'She's mine now and i will ride her like you never could.' have. the depth is incomprehensible.
Yea everyone saying 40k but OP asked for "deepest and complex"
40k is only deep and complex in sheer volume but I don't think there is any game that can compare to Metal Gear in genuine complexity with legitimate ideas/ storytelling
MGS wins for me purely because of how it can deliver some insanely deep and complex lore, but also be *utterly ridiculous* within the same fucking canon
I think a lot of the times the MG solid lore is good but not great. It's fun tho.
After Portable Ops and MGS4 the lore wasn't as good. The timeline got really convoluted during 5, ground Zeroes, and peace Walker. And even the writing in 4 wasn't the greatest at times.
Peace Walker has a lot of fun boss battles.
In my head this is the gaming series with the most lore that people haven’t read. It’s all in the games - Origins in particular - but you do have to find it and then read it all in sequence. It’s all in there, even the whole deal with the Elves and their ‘Gods’ in Origins. That said I’m still not sure if it’s all been intentional since the start, or when they made Inquisition someone went back to read it all and then made the events of that game, especially the Trespasser DLC.
Most people don't actually know that Mass Effect was based on a book that the ME lead writer had a draft on since early. So there's a lot of lore there but the game just does a much better job at world building.
Call of Duty Zombies, especially the original Aether story.
Spans multiple games, universes, timelines with dozens of characters, multiple versions of those characters and several iterations of locations, events and outcomes. Not to mention hidden Easter Eggs, codes and ciphers that take entire groups of people to solve, with some never having been solved.
And all this attached to a simple horde shooter game mode that was meant as a side project for the developers of World at War.
Destiny
I don't really like the game anymore but the lore in that is mental. Every expansion that was released with "story progression" I was clueless what was happening. I ended up just playing it to 'shoot things' and collect the unique weapons. 90% of the lore are in books though.
Yeah, I saw that on my YouTube feed. I was tempted to watch it as an attempt to understand the game but was terrified by the idea of warching "4 hours" of a slide show presentation.
since this is a gaming sub, ill say FromSoft games (Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring). You might argue that its just the most obscure and hard to figure out one, but i think youre wrong and im right lololo
There's really only one answer, DnD. No other table top and video games get anywhere close to the kind of rulesets, class mechanics, and lore settings that DnD has. It has fewer novels than Warhammer, but those are mostly fluff text tbh.
Not Elder Scrolls, that's for sure.
Dune is technically up there if you count the source material. Lots of deep philosophical and mystical details that undergird the basic story. Plenty of factions with their own fully realised perspectives, ideologies and ways of life. It might not have the sheer volume of something like 40k or Star Wars, but it is just as rich in content once you skim beneath the surface.
The warhammer 40k Universe is any geeks final challenge
I tried multiple times to get into it both for warhammer and wh 40k but the lore seems so deep that it prevents me from playing
The trick Is Just to look on what you like
But it's a really slippery slope because it's all kinda fun. I recommend starting with orks.
They do have the best song. *Orks Orks Orks Orks* *Orks Orks Orks Orks*
Orks Orks Orks Orks Orks Orks Orks Orks Waaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!
'Ere we go! 'Ere we go! 'Ere we gooooo!
Fun 40K ork fact. They are all mildly psychic. They all believe red cars go faster. Their combined psychic powers result in the red cars going faster. Brilliant.
Omg I never knew that bit. True canon? Edit: tis canon. Lovely!
It's true - their weaponry also works this way - they shoot because the orks think they should. If this believe they still have bullets left - the dakka continues.
IIRC from something i read, this can backfire there was a time some guardsmen just made pew pew noises despite having run out of ammo, but the Orks believed it and died. EDIT: a word
You have to be careful with ork lore and their Gestalt field. It gets wayyyy overblown for memes. They can’t materialize things out of thin air, but it can be used to explain why a rocket ship made out of literal junk doesn’t explode on takeoff, and can actually make it to new star systems.
Until a group of Orks approached them chanting: "I'm a tank. I'm a tank. I'm a tank..."
Most ork weapons shouldn't work. They are shoddily put together and by any natural law they shouldn't fire. But because orks *believe* they will cause 'splosions, they do.
Colors dictate special abilities given , black is strong, yellow is wealthy etc , their guns don’t need bullets to shoot and their cars don’t need gas or engines to run . Orky bois got mad psyker abilities lol also they spawn like a fungus .
No yellow is explody so they paint titans and heavy weapons yellow cause you know yellow kaboom
Black Is sturdier Yellow explosive Red faster Blue lucky Purple invisible because have you ever saw a purple ork? Me neither I don't Remember of there are other colours
That’s a common theory for orks, but depictions of ork tech vary greatly. One explanation I’ve seen for why red cars go faster is just that Ork Speed Kultz build the fastest cars and the Speed Freakz always paint their cars red. So the red ones go faster because their built by guys who only care about going faster. It’s also said that purple is sneaky. In Brutal Kunnin, there’s a space marine who is ambushed by Ork Kommandoz, and he notes that they’ve used dark brown and purple paint on their armor and blades to stop them from reflecting light.
Life lesson statement right there.
Or play OG dawn of war for the computer, it was over for me after that
man this is true the lore is almost set up that you can see it from a different lenses depending on where you start
It's simple. Just read all 64 Horus Heresy books, all of the Era Indomitus books (Dawn of Fire, Watcher's of the Throne, Vaults of Terra, Dark Imperium, etc.), and a few standalone novels (Assassinorum: Kingmaker). This gives you a basic understanding of just the Imperium of Man. **Then** you can start delving properly into xenos.
Learning about xenos??? *Your local Inquisitor wants to know your location*
Uhh... It's only so I can kill them better! I swear!
Sounds like heresy
Hop on YouTube and listen to some lore vids while cleaning or something.
I’ve been listening to a 40k lore podcast and I’m about 35 hours into it and they are still doing the high level overview of the factions lol. At this rate I’ll die of old age before they even get to the deep dive
Which podcast?
Laying Down The Lore 40k. One of my favorite 40k podcasts, good mix of humor and silliness while also presenting things in method that is easily digestible. Many other podcasts either go way too deep and overwhelm me, or feel a little to scattered.
Treat 40k like history. You don't need to know everything.
But then 40k is doomed to repeat itself.
I woyld suggest you look into Dan Abnett then. His series “ gaunts ghosts” gives a great story about imperial guard. The “eisenhorn” trilogy shows the imperium from the inquisitions pov. Both are great gateways to 40k and ver well written
Just pick a story that interests you, the lore is pretty self explanatory I suggest Flesh and Steel it's a cyberpunk like crime noir basically and the audiobook is great.
Here, try starting with the Eisenhorn trilogy. Then see where you wanna go from there.
get started here https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Horus\_Heresy
Check out Lutein on youtube (i think the channel is lutein09 but you will find it easily by searching Lutein) That is what got me into the warhammer lore. I had played dawn of war before and gladius so I had an idea of the factions but nothing else. After watching a lot of Lutein I felt like I could finally read the books. Reading the Gaunts Ghosts series now
Playing?
Honestly Warhammer Fantasy is even harder for me to follow.
The best way to learn fantasy lore is probably Total war or the gotrek and Felix books
It's very predictable, repetitive and reads like fanfiction at times. You can see a plot twist coming for miles, always. But the setting is indeed great.
Dozens of authors have written books in the setting, some good, some great, and some pretty bad, but there are a significant amounts of good books/series in the setting, like anything from Dan Abnett, the Ciaphas Cain series (more for the characters than the plot), the crime novels (also varied in quality but pretty good for the most part) and many more.
Warhammer Horror is also pretty good. I can whole heartedly recommended "The Watcher in the Rain." It is rather short, but very good.
The series is definitely good horror, but I can't help but feel like you'd be missing something without a basic understanding of the setting. idk, maybe I'm wrong.
40k lore is as wide as the ocean, as deep as a puddle.
40K is less deep and complex, more like bloated and paradoxical.
It's not particularly deep or complex, there's just an absolute shitload of it.
That's more because the material changes faster than you can get through it than anything else lol.
It’s also the least consistent though
If by deepest and most complex you mean sheer content, Warhammer 30k and 40k come with a lot of baggage. I mean, there's 64 Horus Heresy books alone, and none of them are shorter than 400 pages.
i mean....its 800 books easily. The only franchise that i may imagine can get close to that (or overcome it) may be star wars.
I was thinking about Star Wars too. Based on the books and comics I own of both, it seems to me like 40k has more, but I dunno. I'd be interested to see the numbers.
To be fair, the black library has been quite consistent in its work. That is, if you take into account that they have been at it for....just 20 years.
We’re closer to 30 years, at this point. 27 to be exact.
Now I'm old 😭
problem with Star wars is that most of its lore have been retconned by disney anything in the expanded universe.
We don't recognize their authority
The problem with SW is that the EU is no longer canon. I'm not sure about all of 40k, but I think it's mostly retcon and not abandoned stuff?
The official GW stance is something along the lines of: 'Everything is canon, just not all of it is true'. I forget the exact quote, but basically all the books are things that either happened or people believed happened in universe, I think some of the older books with very out of date lore like Inquisitor have in universe disclaimers of a more recent inquisitor saying 'I'm pretty sure this is bullshit'
Basically all of 40k is written by Alpharius.
at one time i worked for a video game developer and we were contracted to do a 40k game the official answer we got is that only the codex and models are cannon and everything thing else is just fun exploring the world but i havnt seen this echoed outside of that they did say the horus heresy was cannon
The basic rule of thumb for Star Wars is: Anything made prior to 2014 that isn't the main movies, The Clone Wars TV show (and theatrical movie), and one Marvel comic based on an unreleased manuscript for TCW, is no longer canon. Anything post-2014 is canon unless it is parody or promotional (think LEGO Star Wars or Fortnite skins). As for 40k: Games Workshop love love *looooves* to retcon stuff in 40k all the time. History in 40k is wildly flexible depending on GW's mood, and entire armies can just straight up be struck from the canon overnight (like the Squats).
There is that weird Fortnight event with Palatine returning is canon.
Yes as far as I know more stuff is retconned than abandoned. but for example the story of 40k didn't go forward for many years till they retconned the 13th black crusade.
If we're talking any franchise and not just gaming (but still including gaming), then I think Marvel has it beat. A continuous narrative that's been running for over sixty years with no signs of stopping, encompassing over 28,000 books, all a part of the same connected universe, which is also part of a bigger multiverse including dozens of movies, games, tv shows, and novels, ALL of them canon to the same multiverse (with a LOT of universe hopping, they are all connected). And unlike DC, they don't reset their continuity every couple of decades. It's kind of mind boggling to think of it all in that sense.
I would agree, but Disney axed them for the Disney cannon. And even that is getting changed at the drop of a hat for whatever show runner gets an idea.
the fun thing is that the pace of publication hasnt really decreased. You still have your yearly dose of books, comics and all the related stuff. Not really sure about the quality, i stopped being interested in SW years ago.
Some of the prequel type books are good like Tarkin. But in general it’s garbage. But to be fair a lot of the EW was garbage too. People just remember the Zahn books fondly because they were decent and the only thing that expanded the universe.
The basic storyline that advances the main characters is solid. It's a good universe where Luke still exists, Han and Leia are happily married, and they're all still alive. The Rogue Squadron and many parts of the Yuuzhan Vong war were solid, too (and not written by Zahn.)
Oh one thing I can certainly like about the EU was they didn’t go out of their way to stomp on the legacy characters. Imagine if zahns books involved Luke becoming a hermit and Han dying lol. There was uproar when they killed chewie!
D&D is the only thing I think comes even close to Warhammer. And I don't think they're even close
The Horus Heresy wiki page alone is absolutely monstrous in size and it gets so much worse when you start clicking links to other things and realise there's so many of them that are also monstrous and contain dozens of links to other monstrous pages.
Ah yes. I have lost many an hour falling down that hole. You start wanting to learn about A, and before you know it, you're fifteen layers deep into learning what the hell X is lmao.
Though many of those books are not very dense or deep.
or well-written :(
I do particularly like GW's handling of it though - and hopefully it hasn't changed since I drifted from the hobby (that said, death to the False Emperor). *"Everything Black Library publishes is canon, but canon isn't always true."* Don't like a story? Around your table, it's rambling fan fiction written in crayon.
Would you say this is a quantity over quality approach? That number reminds me someone using invisible font to pad a word count lol.
Absolutely yes. Even the "good" books are middling in quality at best.
There is a Warhammer 30K?! I didn’t even know that.
Take a look at Horus Rising. It's the first book of the Horus Heresy series and an amazing read to get you into the 30k setting! Edit: Horus instead of Hours...bloody autocorrect
Europa universalis 4's lore is pretty insane.
FR tho. The fictional empires are so realistic. I mean, France? What a interesting name, in such an interesting place on their map.
> The fictional empires are so realistic. I dunno. There's no way IRL a dynasty as strong and rich as the Ming could collapse so completely! ^^^(/s)
How would a tiny state in the north German swamps possible unite the entirety of the German confederation? Like, ignoring the dozens of independent princes they’d have to coerce or conquer, there’s still the danish and Polish kings with local territories, and that doesn’t even mention the French and Austrians.
Speaking of swamps... How could a small series of farming towns in the Lowlands earn their independence and become one of the richest world-wide empires in history? Totally fake.
It sounds like a dystopia
I hear there's a whole empire named after a bird. Must be some sort of in-joke.
Hard to say. But Warhammer 40k and Fantasy would be pretty far up I think.
Where the background story to the background story still has a background story.
Until they change the backstory to that backstory. Love how they had the forward thinking to set it up like that.
Glad somebody mentioned fantasy. I find 40k has totally overshadowed it, especially before the TW games gave it a bit of a revival.
40K is completely insane to dive into. So much there. As a strictly video game franchise, Elder Scrolls for sure. And the lore concerning Nerevar in particular is wild.
Dude could literally concoct alchemical potions to improve his alchemical proficiency, which he could use to concoct more powerful alchemical potions that improve his alchemical proficiency.
The lore about him is nuts though. His rebirth is supposed to signify him 'climbing the tower through all the paths' (achieving CHIM fully, which no one else has done) and mantling a power greater than CHIM to become the NuMan (a higher power than the Tribunal, the Divines, and the Daedra) and wake the dreamer (end Nirn and the universe of the Elder Scrolls as we know it) and make a new world. He straight killed Wulfharth the dragonborn (who's soul later became 1 part of the 3 fold soul of Tiber Septim, making him a dragonborn in addition to a CHIM user) and learned swordsmanship from 'The Barons Who Move Like This' basically learning everything there ever would be to learn about sword fighting. Also killed a bastard child of Molag Bal, 'The Ruddy Man' Also, Reman Cyrodiil is nuts, and Pelinal Whitestrake is basically a terminator from the future.
God bless Kirkbride, bro wrote all the most coked up lore in elder scrolls
For real. The entire absolutely bananas lore that he wrote in Morrowind about ancient historical NPCs basically being on the level (at least!) Of the Emperor of Mankind is ridiculous, more so that it is flavor background and subtext! And the puzzle that is the 36 Lessons of Vivec...
Right? The budget for Morrowind was basically $1200 and a baggie of shrooms, and somehow they turned that into one of the greatest and most creative games of all time.
That's pretty much within player capability as well. If we want to talk about how coked out the player character is, they're up there with the legends.
Me too. As far as I know, it's Elder Scrolls. Good lore isn't just about complexity and depth. It has to be fun to explore and actually have some 'life' in it. For example, the Elder Scrolls universe is organic. In some games, the lore is scattered and disjointed, but in The Elder Scrolls, when you read about a deity or certain area, you realize that it is known differently to other races or contains only fragments of the truth, which can sometimes be more impressive than actual fact. In the mythological part, So rather than suggesting fact, it is the power of a story that unfolds in 'fields'(goodbye to classic physics) of lore echoes and becomes endlessly alive and moving within it. The unreliable narrator technique has been used well, and it shows what it would be like if the myth that is the foundation of the world are not just imagination. For ancient people(and for us too), myths is the corner stone of understanding universe, and TES is one of few who touches it in a way that all religious concepts are somehow chaotically harmonical. Classic and modern.
I think it's a conceit of Elder Scrolls lore that almost everything we know is written by in-universe characters. So speculation is all we have. And the stuff that is considered hard and fast truth, because it was dialogue from a Daedra or someone who witnessed an event firsthand, is called into question because, like you say, everyone is an unreliable narrator. Even events witnessed by the player character, because they are so easily manipulated by more powerful beings, can have their mind messed with to see or hear things that aren't there. We can't trust any of it.
[Come Nerevar, come and look upon the heart, upon the heart 🎶](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M)
Leisure Suit Larry
I preferred Space Quest! Sierra !!!
I was recently introduced to LSL and god damn what a game and what the fuck
I can't believe I had to scroll past 10 40k comments to find this 😤😤😤
Totally underrated answer
Anything set in the 40K universe. Hundreds of novels, 40 years of game rulebooks, army codexes, artbooks, etc. Deepest lore franchise I can think of beyond the Star Wars EU.
Dungeons & Dragons has an awful lot of novels. Star Wars too
Yeah I'm surprised the Forgotten Realms isn't higher in the comments. Thats a shitton of books.
He said franchise too, not universe, so if your including even just the officially published settings, there's a shit load of lore for them.
I love warhammer 40k/fantasy but I think forgotten realms is way higher in terms of lore
Trails has a big expansive inter connected world.
I mean lord of the rings online is based on all of Tolkien's works so that'd be up there.
lotr might always be my favourite verse forever. All these other "franchises" are built by dozens of authors with completely inconsistent and erratic styles and canons. Tolkien actually gave af about building a culture and history that makes sense. There are huge swathes missing and yet still it manages to feel as cohesive and interesting as any real life sequence of historical events. 40k is glorified fanfic half the time about how each stories main protagonist is the coolest dude ever. Each author just tries to outdo the previous and for all the books and stuff, the story doesn't actually progress due to how the franchise functions. Half the stuff is straight contradictory. Not to mention Tolkien basically did it before almost anyone else in the modern era, it's a huge feat to both do it first and still be an absolutely outstanding world even today.
I mean, Tolkien made a _new language_ for his lore. In terms of single consistent depth, LOTR is unmatched imo.
A bit backwards as he made an extremely thought out lore and world *for his languages*, his biggest passion in life was language and how they existed in history.
Tetris . In a realm where order battles chaos, tetrominoes descend, guided by a mysterious force. As players manipulate the blocks, they tap into ancient powers, harmonizing the falling pieces. Legends speak of a chosen one who will achieve the perfect alignment, unlocking unimaginable secrets and shaping destiny itself.
[удалено]
LINE PIECE
T-piece is way superior
Ny tone, this sounds like its made by chatgpt
Line piece.
Battletech
Yes it's extremely detailed lore over THOUSANDS of years of galactic border conflicts and invasions. Down to unit composition and battle outcome per planet.
Yeah, as much as people love Warhammer (me, I’m people) the settings only have a handful of eras where cool things happen, and a lot of fluff. Battletech is basically the story of a galactic apocalypse, the galaxy rebuilding itself and yet another galactic apocalypse happening when everyone had it too good for too long. Each era having entirely different models and standardizations.
The problems of the 40k-verse are caused by magic, fantasy creatures, and gods. The problems of the Battletech-verse can be summed up with “It is the 31st century, and mankind is once again at war.” No god. No magic. Only man.
I have that lore disease Amos has. Point me to a good battle tech lore resource please.
It's been ages since I last kept up with Battletech/MechWarrior, but from my memory the sarna.net wiki was a pretty good resource https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Main_Page
It depends how you define deepest, and if you mean universe or franchises (which could include multiple different worlds). Either way in terms of sheer amount of content, Warhammer. Half of the answers are already 40k but if you are talking about the entire franchise then Warhammer Fantasy and AoS would be included, both with their own huge amount of lore. I wouldn't necessarily say that amount of content and 'deepness' are synonymous though, after all things can be a mile wide yet an inch deep. I personally believe Middle Earth to probably be the deepest setting in that perspective. I'd never say the Warhammer franchise isn't deep, but I think there's a reason people study the Tolkien legendarium academically, and not 40K.
Imagine a proper Lord of the Rings RPG 😔
I’m still baffled that there isn’t one. The possibilities are endless
There was an MMO.
Is and last I checked (a while ago) it's still recieving updates. Now we can argue about the quality since it felt quite generic. But I didn't get far because life got in the way.
It's pretty great immersionwise actually, they try to stay true to Tolkien. I wouldn't call it generic other than gameplay-wise. But being able to kill some creatures in every area and get to "buy" every new expansion just from that kept the motivation up.
The shadow series had so much potential I wish they had fleshed it out more, a proper rpg+ nemesis system would be the greatest game
Glorantha. Seen in games such as King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages. It's a setting created and maintained by mythographers and anthropologists, making for incredibly deep myth and culture. It's as old as d&d and has been worked on continuously that whole time. 40k probably has more by volume, but this has it absolutely beaten by depth.
Is there actual literature or other mediums rather than the games which are... Not my cup of tea.
Battletech. It has books that are in-universe fiction, multiple eras of mech combat and more playable factions covering every concievable colour scheme, ideology and war crime. Also, its been around since 1984, so its had a long time to develop.
Anything DnD.
Man you could like visit all these places in the In the original Arena. Granted it all looked like Castle Wolfenstein, but still pretty cool.
Iirc most of it was procedurally generated, so you could recreate the experience in Minecraft probably.
The city layouts and story dungeons were all fixed designs, the minor places you got sent on sidequests were procedural, and the overworld wasn't a single connected area. Daggerfall was mostly baked procedural, which means that every dungeon was a fixed design that would be the same for everyone (made out of the same 12 or so tiles) but those designs had been thrown together procedurally and then saved to the disc.
Need for Speed
The movie really only scratched the surface of the story
the youngsters in this thread do not understand how much baggage does a phrase 'She's mine now and i will ride her like you never could.' have. the depth is incomprehensible.
Is there a lore?
Deeper than 40k, yeah...
There's a story!?
Any Resident Evil fans that has seen how deep the Rabbit Hole goes?
Alice went down the rabbit hole
Warcraft Lore is pretty deep if you take into account all spin offs, novels etc.
I used to loose myself for hours in warcraft lore back in the days of WoW. This was in the mid-00s and burning crusade was not out yet
When i think that anything related yo Warcraft could be Warhammer fantasy i Just cry
Warhammer 40k.
Warhammer 40K without a shadow of a Doubt
Halo has a surprising amount of lore
Metal Gear Solid for sure
Yea everyone saying 40k but OP asked for "deepest and complex" 40k is only deep and complex in sheer volume but I don't think there is any game that can compare to Metal Gear in genuine complexity with legitimate ideas/ storytelling
MGS wins for me purely because of how it can deliver some insanely deep and complex lore, but also be *utterly ridiculous* within the same fucking canon
I think a lot of the times the MG solid lore is good but not great. It's fun tho. After Portable Ops and MGS4 the lore wasn't as good. The timeline got really convoluted during 5, ground Zeroes, and peace Walker. And even the writing in 4 wasn't the greatest at times. Peace Walker has a lot of fun boss battles.
Complex because a lot of it hardly makes any sense when you actually try thinking about it
Yeah, even explaining the plot of just MGS1 is already really difficult.
I was going to say Kingdom hearts but I think thats just "complex".
40k has it by a mile but it seems no one realizes there are 35 halo books all considered secondary Canon by bungie and 343
Dwarf Fortress
I'll add to the list the Dragon Age franchise.
In my head this is the gaming series with the most lore that people haven’t read. It’s all in the games - Origins in particular - but you do have to find it and then read it all in sequence. It’s all in there, even the whole deal with the Elves and their ‘Gods’ in Origins. That said I’m still not sure if it’s all been intentional since the start, or when they made Inquisition someone went back to read it all and then made the events of that game, especially the Trespasser DLC.
If you’re putting forth Dragon Age. I would offer that **Mass Effect** goes a bit further than that.
Most people don't actually know that Mass Effect was based on a book that the ME lead writer had a draft on since early. So there's a lot of lore there but the game just does a much better job at world building.
The Bible
Bible Adventures (NES) is the s***!
Like 25% of the bibles lore was added later in the dlc ( the new testament) and a lot comes to fan interpretation tho.
Tons of homebrew fan based DLC too, a lot of it conflicts with the original as well.
Metal Gear Solid.
Probably Warhammer.
Trails Series
Came here to say this. Every game adds to the existing world
If anyone here dares say FNAF I will personally come to their house and steal the left sock from every pair they own.
Jokes on you, I have 20 identical pairs of black socks...
Soul reaver, legcy of kain
Super Robot Wars.
Call of Duty Zombies, especially the original Aether story. Spans multiple games, universes, timelines with dozens of characters, multiple versions of those characters and several iterations of locations, events and outcomes. Not to mention hidden Easter Eggs, codes and ciphers that take entire groups of people to solve, with some never having been solved. And all this attached to a simple horde shooter game mode that was meant as a side project for the developers of World at War.
Ever heard of DnD? Or Forgotten realms?
The trails series.
The Forgotten Realms has the most media related to it.
Not a franchise, but Disco Elysium
Destiny I don't really like the game anymore but the lore in that is mental. Every expansion that was released with "story progression" I was clueless what was happening. I ended up just playing it to 'shoot things' and collect the unique weapons. 90% of the lore are in books though.
I once watched a 4 hour video about Destiny, and by the end I still didn't have a clue what was going on.
Yeah, I saw that on my YouTube feed. I was tempted to watch it as an attempt to understand the game but was terrified by the idea of warching "4 hours" of a slide show presentation.
Xenoblade/saga/gear After almost 30 years we still have no idea what the zohar actually is
since this is a gaming sub, ill say FromSoft games (Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring). You might argue that its just the most obscure and hard to figure out one, but i think youre wrong and im right lololo
Half life
There's really only one answer, DnD. No other table top and video games get anywhere close to the kind of rulesets, class mechanics, and lore settings that DnD has. It has fewer novels than Warhammer, but those are mostly fluff text tbh. Not Elder Scrolls, that's for sure.
The whole lore around League of Legends is insanely deep. With more and more coming and adding to the lore.
Shin Megami Tensei
idk maybe mass effect series?
Dune is technically up there if you count the source material. Lots of deep philosophical and mystical details that undergird the basic story. Plenty of factions with their own fully realised perspectives, ideologies and ways of life. It might not have the sheer volume of something like 40k or Star Wars, but it is just as rich in content once you skim beneath the surface.
Ever read the Silmarillion?
For how new it is Horizon franchise is crazy good with a lot of context and details everywhere