Heh.. this sounds like an AD for that game.. guess i just wanted to say that deep complex lore CAN be exposited in dialog easily if you make it a "what do you know" question, not everyone knows a lot of history but that farmer that for generations was harassed by magic creatures has interesting "lore" on them. The way Square Enix does lore is TERRIBLE, not to mention that Square Enix does not even understand how to do a game-world without literally making half the world static-1-reply-npc's
I totally agree that 'less is more' should always be the rule for lore. When a game does it right, it gives you hints of a big fascinating world. When a game does it wrong, it tries to tell you everything about that world until you're skipping pages of text to just get to the flipping gameplay. You want the players to be wanting more story, but the game should never quite be giving it to them. That keeps them moving along to find out what the next crumb of information is going to be.
An example of failing this would be Dragon Age Origins (don't know about the sequel, I've always heard it's so bad that I never bothered). They really REALLY want to tell you about their world. Constant journal entries popping up with all sorts of details about everything you come across in the world. Books you can find everywhere you go that go on for pages and pages of backstory and world history. It's way too much. The writing is good, mind you, and the world is interesting. And I'm the type of person that will usually read most of those things. But when you dump it on the player over and over like that, the player is likely to lose all interest.
An example of this done well is a few years old game that I just became familiar with recently, Immortal Defense. Some people probably know it. It's a tower defense game, but the back story is that you are a person whose 'ghost' was taken out of his body and put into a different dimension of space where you can attack ships that are moving through hyperspace before they get to their destination, thus defending your world from the incoming attack before it gets there. (and allowing for creeps to move along a line that you can build your towers next to, thus perfectly fitting the standard tower defense formula) The game presents story in the form of characters talking to you briefly before each mission, either others that inhabit the same dimension as you, or messages from people left back home. These are usually brief, a few sentences or a paragraph at most. And every level's story leaves you wanting more, so you keep playing to find out what new facet of the story is going to be revealed next. I know they must have done something right because I am not overly fond of tower defense games, and yet on the first day I got this game I played it for 6 hours straight. I just had to see what bit of the story was going to be revealed next.
But then, I'm not entirely sure how to implement that sort of story progression in an open procedural sandboxy game. I leave that up to the experts.
