Originally Posted by Zarna
Originally Posted by robertthebard
If this were some standalone IP, I'd agree 100%. The problem is, "the world" is Dungeons and Dragons, not just BG 3. There are 10s of thousands of stories that are part of "the world" that may not have any impact at all on BG 3, and every time I see "there's a disconnect", I wholeheartedly agree, there is a disconnect. People are always trying to disconnect BG 3 from the thousands of years of history in the Forgotten Realms. Or, more accurately I guess, they want that history outlined for them, because this is the "assumed knowledge" that the characters have, or that some of them will have. In the case of people that have no knowledge at all about the setting, yes, they should be hitting "outside" resources, because the outline could be a real slog to sit through.
Even though DnD is becoming more popular, we can't expect everyone to be familiar with the setting or to want to do outside research. Too much work to understand things will make for less sales. Basic information should be given to the player, more detailed information should be found in books. If the basic information was offered with a mouseover then it wouldn't clutter up the screen for those who don't care about it or already know it.

I guess that depends on how much they really want (insert whatever they think is missing here) then. We've had a tangent about Waterdeep, since Gale is from there, but is talking about the Weave and Mystra instead. If I were really curious about Waterdeep, I'd go look some stuff up. We absolutely can, and should, expect players that want to be more informed than is required to play the game, we're no where near Waterdeep, for example, then it should be on them to do the footwork. As I said, there's 1000s of years of history in the FRs, and someone that's not been in it long, or at all, isn't going to know a lot of stuff, so how do we put in that exposition, and where do we draw the line? I said earlier that Dark Horse could make a 36 hour comic for "the story so far", and I'd be willing to bet that even that would leave a lot of stuff out. You do, of course, realize that that's why there are tons of books, put out by Hasbro et al, that cover all of this lore for a reason, right? There's a lot of it, and if we're going to ask that they cater to this subset, then we're going to have to do the same for the next subset, and the next. It won't take long before all we'll get is a summary, instead of a new game in the franchise.