Devs are starting to ruin some killer's backstories.
The best example is Legion. In their main lore they were kids who wanted to terrorize Ormond not by killing, but by making chaos. They stole ,,Stop" signs, wrecked some stores and robbed some places. Never intending to hurt anyone. Then they kill a Janitor, but its becouse Frank made them do it. Also he was saving Julie. But in one of Suzie's cosmetic we learn that she STABBED a random seller to steal a Jacket.
What is the point of making a lore for lost kids manipulated by ,,Older cooler kid" into killing one person into making a lore about generic 4 man swf with knifes. Doesn't make sense at all
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The Doctors originally back story was detailed and a good read. They re-wrote it and not as good. Can read both in the Wiki to see what I mean.
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They've been retconing a lot of stuff and it's getting annoying.
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It is becoming a tad odd now. It's better they stick to the basic lore in the character description, and use the archives to expand on it, rather than jump and make complete changes that make no sense.
Also, it would be nice if they just kept the original profiles short and sweet, like they did early on. I enjoyed the small details profiles like Trapper or Hillbilly, not long reads like Trickster or Artist. Rather it be in sections and expanded upon in the archives.
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Can't say i agree, i personally think most of them have been made better as a result.
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I actually like a big bio, but sometimes they try to write a big one and end up with Jonah and Artist 💀
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The lore in this game is so incredibly inconsistent. It started with the Archives. Susie's one of the best examples, because she's simultaneously the reluctant shy girl who got peer pressured into joining a murder and also the Legion's biggest psycho who was stabbing shopkeepers and her fellow cheerleaders and making midnight art with the blood. But the Nurse is also both an angel of mercy who wanted to end the endless suffering she saw and a eugenicist who loathed her patients and wanted to cleanse the impure, and the Hag seems to simultaneously have lived in pre-1900s backwoods country and post-1950s modern suburbia? The Blight showed remorse for his actions in his initial lore and his atrocities were framed as something he'd just turned a blind eye to and never really knew the depths of, but the archives painted him as being extremely amoral and willing to commit murder out of pure convenience well before his life turnaround or his descent into madness in the Realm. And the Plague was beloved by her people for her tireless efforts to save them in her lore blurb, but her cosmetics talk about her being hella merciless and brutal.
It's so dissonant. Who are these characters supposed to be? Whatever we want them to be?
And Yun-Jin's lore didn't outright change as much as some of these guys, but her framing went from understandable denial to 'she totally knew about Ji-Woon and didn't want to ruin her image.'
They like to handwave this off as alternate universes, but I really hate that excuse because it turns anything they tell us about the killers into meaningless words.
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I think with Susie she has a lot of dark thoughts but doesn’t act upon them. When push comes to shove she’s the timid girl who doesn’t want to kill. Granted I’m having trouble finding the cosmetic in question but a lot of Susies cosmetics imply a lot but implication doesn’t mean action.
I mean Julies tome as it stands has several contradictions with Frank’s lore and things such as the mural that Jeff did. I mean different universe magic maybe and simply remembering things differently but yeah.
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Oh my dear lord. I never even realised they changed his lore. At least the core lore itself is intact because it is one of the more intresting ones but holy ######### I never realised they dumbed down the actual writing in it so much. Just what was the purpose of this.
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The cosmetic is her lunar new year knife, though her midnight artist set and the cheerleader set from one of the recent rifts both have some "Susie was very violent in her school days" information or at least implications. The new year knife definitively has her stabbing a random dude.
Also, yeah, Julie's tome clashes with Frank's lore and makes her sound like the main instigator in the Legion. Personally I liked them as a group of troubled kids who started out screwing around with lowkey vandalism and egged themselves on way too far, not a bunch of irredeemably messed up anarchists who united in their mutual desire to watch Ormond burn.
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I really liked the whole Blight largely being unaware of the causes of experiments or trying his best to remain unaware of it then slowly becoming more obsessed and eventually descending into madness it really better paints how he could end up in the entity's realm as a survivor first. But now it just feels like he was a killer through and through and was originally a survivor for shits and giggle cause it might be fun to have a former survivor as a killer.
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I never knew this either. What the hell was the purpose of this? The style of lore has been becoming longer, not shorter, and the information in there is so much less interesting now. This is an M-rated horror game; there is zero reason to throw a conniption over gore.
I wonder if something in there fell afoul of some country's laws. But seriously, big L. Doc had a fantastic backstory that very thoroughly painted the kind of detached monster he was, and the new version is just... lazy.
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The new version is worse than lazy because laziness would be if the original lore was as bad as his current lore. I genuinely don't know how to express the rewriting of something in a way so significantly worse and with so much less effect. Its not lazy because they went through the trouble of rewriting it, its not simply bad writing or inexperience since they already had such a good framework to go off of even if they did wish to rewrite it. I am genuinely at a literal loss of words on how to describe this abomination.
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I don't know but I was so disappointed when I saw the change. If you compare some of the wiki entries to what's currently in game they've made some slight random adjustments to other lore that isn't noticeable - nothing like the doctors though where they basically tossed it in a bucket to water it down.
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Ah the knife. Didn’t look at that, looked at the other two. I dunno even that description is so ridiculous and exaggerated compared to the rest of the lore that it makes me think it’s wishful thinking. It is definitely really odd to put it in such blunt terms though.
As for the tome honestly I think it’s based on perspective. Everyone is the hero or protagonist of their own story so the fact Julie sounds like the main instigator isn’t surprising seeing as the story is told from her point of view.
Admittedly the video of the stabbing puts me off more because even if you didn’t have Frank’s version it’s simply weird because the killing was not premeditated. I do tend to be an innocent until proven guilty kind of guy though so I just believe that this is Julies way of remembering it. To hide her shame and further her romantic belief with Frank.
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Same. The idea of how a survivor could be driven into becoming a killer was fascinating, but the Rift treated him like any other killer. I'm putting him up there with Nurse, Legion, and Hag with killers whose original vision got totally distorted (mainly because Hag's story doesn't even make any sense with the Rift stuff she got.)
The result of all this conflicting character vision feels super messy and unintentional. Can't they keep some good summaries at BHVR HQ? Keep the same writers on the same characters? I'm sick of the 'well, it could be a different version of ___' handwaving the way nothing has any internal consistency anymore.
Re:Doc, with lazy, I meant that the new version is just so uninspired. It feels low-effort, like someone scrawled it down in five minutes to get the job over with. It doesn't make you envision anything, or recoil from anything, or do anything more than the bare minimum of telling you that Herman Carter is a mean doctor who did electroshock research for the FBI. The old one was evocative. It painted his growing reputation and disconnect from ethics, the way prisoners shipped off to be disappeared begged to be sent to anyone but him, the way the halls would ring with screams... it described the graphic remains of his final actions on this plane before the Fog swallowed him up. It was good writing. This is not.
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In periodic satisfaction surveys, they are asked if they are interested in the lore.
Not long ago I answered yes, but now I answer no.
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Everyone and their mother loves finding things out so i'll probably be the only one thinking this, but i loved WAY back in the beginning of DbD when the Killer stories were very short, just a paragraph or 3.
They felt like old folklores, a scary story you'd overhear from crazy-looking people in a pub.
"Man i swear it! I walked by that ol' cornfield where that family disappeared and the animals died and right as i passed it i heard a chainsaw and the corn rustlin'."
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Me too I really thought that survivor to killer was an extremely intresting point of Blights lore and pretty much since 1st reading it I have always wanted Talbot Grimes as a survivor, which due to the timey wimey shennanigans of the entiy's realm would be possible. I think that having inverses of his perks would also be extremely intresting. An undying that after a boon is snuffed it is transferred to another random dull totem on the map, a blood favour that if you are hit within the boon any pallets within the boon that have been dropped are returned to their upright position and honestly dragons grip equivalent would kinda just be blastmine 2 so Im not as sure on that perk.
I think I have finally settled on an apt description of Doc's new lore, it feels like you told a 12 year old to write a summary of Doc's original lore. It just feels like a ######### short summary of his old lore that is entirely redundant,
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Upvoted for "4 man SWF with knives".
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Often when it comes to horror, less is more.
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It doesn't help that tomes are AU's so even if they're lore it's not even for the canon characters.
Maybe next survey will ask if ppl want a continuity or not.
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Frank and Julie had already touched the topic of killing together. Even though the Janitor wasn't planned, they were on the same page. Susie wasn't, so she was shocked. That's the origin story lol. Just because she was shocked and hesitant at first doesn't mean she stayed that way.
In the years after that (from the point of the origin story until she was between 18-21 and taken by the entity) we know that she went after the cheerleader that bullied her, the neighbors that she envied the happy life of, literally paints with blood, and even stabs an unsuspecting stranger in back in an alley... "She left him in the cold street, bleeding." just to impress Frank.
Frank may have forced her to take that first step, but being a killer was something she embraced afterward. She kills to impress / fit in with her friends, but also for her own pleasure and revenge.
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Except according to Frank’s or the base lore the entity takes the group that night while burying the body of the janitor. Susie doesn’t have time to develop this way. I agree though her time in the entities realm would likely grow her this way or if she had the chance to develop she would embrace her darker nature.
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I always assumed The killed the one dude the same night they went missing/taken into the entity
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It is impossible that they were taken that night. The lore doesn't actually say they were, it is just easy to assume that because of how it's written.
Susie's student ID is 1993-1994. It's most likely her Sophomore year ID.
There is a photo of their whole friend group that is dated 1996. (28 August 1996)
Also, this is an assumption: the Lunar Year was most likely the year of the pig.. which was 1995.
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The "lore" is a joke. Numerous examples cited in the post. It reminds me of Freddy vs Jason where all of a sudden Jason is afraid of water and rain. Obviously, the writer and director didn't watch any of the previous ten movies.
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This is from the lore page on the wiki and it's the same in game as of current.
All four were digging in the muddy snow to dispose of the body when Frank spotted something moving through the woods. He grabbed his knife and broke from the group to check it out. The Fog thickened around Frank, becoming so dense that he soon could no longer see ahead. He retraced his steps and stumbled onto an ominous trail. He followed the eerie path, as if called by the darkness. Julie, Susie, and Joey finished digging, but Frank was nowhere to be seen. Julie spotted his muddy footsteps in the snow and the three of them followed the trail, which took them deeper into the woods. When Julie, Susie, and Joey did not return home that night, their parents thought they'd run away with Frank. Each family came up with a different theory. The mood in the town changed, however, when a body was found by an abandoned lodge up Mount Ormond.
There is no other way to interpret that as that they were taken the same night they killed the janitor.
Honestly it's a mess. Part of me likes a lot of what they've got but they need to straighten it out. Especially what is reality and what is 'wishful' thinking. I mean I think I've heard cosmetics aren't canon and I think that's to justify someone wanting to turn Susie into a school age serial killer rather then the base timid girl that she is among other things.
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Legion's lore is just a complete mess, they don't care as long as they can still sell more cutie susie cosmetics
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I got the impression that the lore is a convoluted mess because they used the "different timelines" excuse.
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Hopefully they will introduce more lore with Joey, and fill in the gaps in a way that makes the story clear.
Now every way I come up with to make sense of it feels like a stretch and like I'm trying too hard lol.
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Hag retcon is the best worst retcon of all, its so incredible bad it made me read it twice just to check if what I was reading was real.
I think the lore departament is the one who has plummeted the most in quality over the years, it was never great but at least it didnt give this pretentious vibe it gives now, the feeling is when someone is doing something incredible low quality but trying to sell it as an incredible work of art, worst part is not even funny-bad, its just bad-bad. I honestly believe they should reconsider the whole departament because the direction the took is wrong and the results are abysmal.
It started to go wrong around Plague/Jane but it was still normal, now we have Indiana Jones wanabes, a CIA hacker and a wica larper...
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I actually wrote a tome for Joey or at least in the style I thought it could be using Julies as a base going over some events and some of the occupations Joey held and why he got fired. I’ll show eventually when I put out my Joey to survivor idea out there in earnest with lots of art, the premise being in an alternate universe Joey does not stab the janitor and thus he and Susie get taken as survivors instead. Making good use of the multiple universes thing rather then an excuse to justify 4 Kates being in a game, make a mess of lore and sell cosmetics.
See some things I can justify or like explain like why Frank’s base lore of the stabbing is drastically different from Julies memory of it. Trauma or moments like that can cause people to remember it differently.
Unfortunately other things I cannot explain. As I mentioned earlier according to Julies tome they only come up with the name of the Legion when plotting revenge on the hardware store that fired Joey, but then how do they hire Jeff to do the mural? They are taken by the entity that night. On top of that Julie is an artist in her lore so why hire Jeff at all? I mean maybe she’s not confident in that style but that sounds very unlike everything else we know about Julie.
I mean if it were up to me and I had to clean up that mess I’d simply say different universe, the Legion came up with their name earlier and Julie is a musician and not an artist in the one where Jeff did the mural. However I’d establish that on the most part the base lore and tome comes first (at least for Legion) It’s a hand wave sure but what else can you do. There is still some good in it.
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That wasn't their finest hour.
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Wouldn't it be simpler to say that they weren't taken that night, instead of suggesting different universes? If they use Joey to further the story and explain what happens next in the woods, they could clean up the mess easily and the rest of the lore falls into place.
It actually makes perfect sense to me that they hired Jeff to do the mural. Being an artist doesn't mean you enjoy, are willing, or even can do any type of art. Sketching people is entirely different from letters. If Julie didn't want to do it, I'd relate to that as an artist who has always hated lettering. However, that's not to dismiss the possibility Frank could have simply got caught up in the moment, liking Jeff's style.
(The Lunar Year was Feb 1996, year of the rat. my bad)
Post edited by Nyxsie on0 -
To be fair, her original backstory did mention thoughts of purification crossing her mind.
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CROWS
IN
CHILE
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Fair enough. Obviously not an artist, wish I was. I suspected that as an explanation but yeah.
Anyway that would mean retconning written words but I guess if you don’t use multiple universes you are forced to either retconning Jeff’s lore, the base lore or Julies tome. I’d pick Julies tome and make them come up with the name of the Legion sooner. Even though the name is part of the whole point of that story it’s not a big deal.
Also considering the seriousness of what they just did as well as hiding the body in the car of the person who had got fired from the store that day it’s likely they’d get caught very quickly unless they went on the run and even then. Frankly I wouldn’t like that direction. It simply changes too much that is well established.
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Possibly, Ormond is a small remote town out in the mountains and it was the 90's. Joey also didn't get fired that same day, he had just got fired from there recently.
But if the entity took them that night,
Feb, 1996: Susie "skipped school" for the chinese new year and stabbed a man in the back.
Aug, 1996: Photo of the Legion in Ormond.
Julie and Frank wanted to kill. So maybe that night Frank saw an opportunity to test Susie, and convinced her to stab him. Her actions were specifically to impress him, afterall. While Susie didn't want to kill the cleaner, we don't actually know why she didn't. She might have been having a panic attack from chaos in her mind when all the sudden her bestfriends were murdering someone.
If Susie stabbed the man with Frank before they all killed together, then it could make sense that the entity took them that night.
Btw.. I just read the description Susie's notebook: she repeatedly tried to come up with a logo for The Legion but couldn't do it.
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I really liked the implication of Yun-Jin knowing or at least having a suspicion of what Ji-Woon was doing, but didn't really care as long as he was making her money. Because it kind of fits with the cold business-like world of the idol/K-Pop industry, as long as the idol is producing a good following with "good" products then who cares what they (the idol) do in their free time?
Making it more of a cat-and-mouse type of game between the two was fine I suppose, but it kind of makes Yun-Jin more sympathetic when really she's not really supposed to be.
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To be fair, it didn't have any implication it was eugenic kind of purification.
If anything, everything implied Nurse was inspired by real nurses who killed their patients to put them out of their misery. Pulling off backwards retcon and making her into eugenics insane fanatic is one of the worst possible decisions made.
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They could have made a different character with a eugenics "fanaticism" instead of retroactively retconning Nurse's backstory. Like they have Doctor and Blight who are/were doctors, so why not a "professor" type killer who was pro-eugenics?
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Funny; I interpreted the Yun-Jin characterization change backwards.
In her initial lore, judging from her reaction to her suspicions with Ji-Woon's tape, the idea of him being a serial killer did horrify her, but she really didn't want that to be true because it would destroy the career she fought tooth and nail for, so she ignored the possibility and didn't investigate it. She's not a good person and she's driven by self-interest, but it's somewhat understandable that she convinced herself that she must have been wrong.
In her tome, she would have to be a complete idiot not to suspect the Trickster. The tome describes evidence tying him to several different murders and constant sneaky behavior, as opposed to one tenuous connection that could easily have been imagined - and the stint he pulled with that small-time musician in Brazil made it so that it could have only been him or that other guy, so once the other guy is dead and the murders continue... yeah. Assuming any doubt was even left by that point, there's none then. So it gives the impression she knew or at least heavily suspected him for a significant portion of their working relationship and kept her mouth shut for the same reasons you just described.
I thought she became less sympathetic... and less explicable, because she should have known that Ji-Woon was going to blow up in her face sooner rather than later. If she wanted to keep making money off him, her best bet would have been to help him cover his tracks and become an accomplice - though it's also worth noting the Trickster's music was starting to fail. If she wanted to save her career, she would have parted ways and gone back into the talent hunting business so that when the Trickster inevitably got caught, he had some other manager to soften the PR fall. And if she was worried for her life, then she would have turned him in (and hopefully salvaged some of her image in the process.)
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Jeez, chill. I agree, I was just saying that the retcon was not born out of thin air.
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The crows were obviously sent by the entity, also entry 2 in the latest house of arkham tome entries expands upon Carmina's lore quite a bit and explains things more in depth.
The Killer and Survivor specific tomes aren't AUs, it has never been confirmed or even implied to be so, what is an actual AU however is the Terra Arachna observer entries.
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Hag's one was the most jarring. I remember reading her lore and finding it really creepy.
She lived in this old village in the woods where they practiced drawing old tribal symbols and stuff. One day she is caught in a rainstorm in the woods and abducted by cannibals. She's chained up and they slowly eat at her flesh for weeks. When the villagers finally find the cannibals lair she is gone, the cannibals are dead, and there's the old village symbols drawn on the floor.
So I was very excited to see her story play out in her tome. Instead we got some story about a modern day high school girl who dabbles in magic from grandma's spell book and accidentally kills her over weight Science teacher or something.
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The way I understand it from the Tomes and outfits lore changes is that there is multiple parallel universes and the Entity takes inspiration from all of them. So while the main lore is that, there are other parallel universes where the Entity did not take them... and that's where that story of Susie comes from. Just like there is a parallel universe where a bunch of the characters were at the Fire Moon Festival and Trickster was a performer there.... but that was a world where the Entity didn't take him from. So when the Entity puts Susie in her Year of the Rat outfit even though they were probably taken in 1994 or 1995, the 2020 outfit is inspired from a Susie that was probably from 1996 (which was also Year of the Rat.)
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because apparently they had to ruin nurse's ambiguous character
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In the lore most everything is just different universes. It doesn't really matter, because even BHVR doesn't care about the lore that much.
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Did the devs ever explicitly say that different universes were a factor for cosmetics and the like? I remember everyone confusing a certain characters dream as confirmation and the devs stating that outfits were non canon. Now I keep hearing people bring up alt universes to explain everything.
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To be honest the lore at first when it was short and sweet I didn't mind, but I don't really care about the newer lore or the archives/tome lore, I don't want to know every little detail about the killers, it makes them less scary. It reminds me of Rob Zombie's Halloween
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