Why did we switch from hero skills to lore in contests?

General Hero Hunters Discussion
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At least with skills you could make educated guesses based on skill icons, the hero’s look/name, and their intro animation.

It was also satisfying because once released you could see how close your guess was to the real skills.

With Lore you have people posting paragraphs of detailed backstory and then the hero launches with something like:

New Hero, Anvil: “A Faceless Menace” Anvil is a merciless commando drone that can smash through enemy tanks.

What’s the point of everyone writing a small novel of lore about heroes that barely get any?

1 Like
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Because HHG devs prefer reading fascinating fictions created by fans than witty skills guesses by fans.

Look up Poobgloob’s fan story of Wesson he wrote for september contest. He wrote an interesting fan lore about Colonel Wesson’s past story despite that contest demanded “what does he do” guesses from fb page. The story was so good so he won.

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It’s because in HH, the ‘lore’ is usually just awkwardly shoehorned into the game retroactively. Plus if you have your playerbase guess at the lore before you’ve announced it, you can just pick the backstory you like after the fact :joy:

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Avoid callouts and starting drama, please. Please review the rules before posting again.

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This is a common misconception. When designing game narrative, you use the broccoli method. You write everything, from the character’s upbringing, to their personality, history, etc. That’s the whole broccoli head. But often, you only show the florets of the broccoli, because that’s what’s most interesting. And that stuff works because somebody wrote the stalk, even though you don’t see it.

If you just wrote the florets, they would be withered and dry and lame, because they wouldn’t have the stalk to nurture them.

I can assure you that the designers work very hard to create the narrative universe for Hero Hunters, and all of our games. Just because it’s doled out slowly over time doesn’t mean it’s not there, or that no thought was put into the design. We’re sorry to hear you dislike the lore, and think it’s shoehorned in. The backstory contest is a fun way to give people something to talk about, while providing a fun way to choose winners for prizes.

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@Muninn Thanks for the detailed and insightful response regarding the process you guys use. Rereading my reply, I think it was little more on-the-nose than intended. I do appreciate what the design team does regardless of how much I personally tend to invest myself in game lore.