L - Lore

Why can't they just say: I'm sick of doing this, let's do something else?

A lot of times lore gets in the way of where a game wants to go.  Whether it is a Star Wars game or a fantasy game.  Sometimes it even interferes with the world.  Games like LotRO even run into issues because people dig so deep into the books and lore.  WoW has had it's fair share or lore issues.  Almost every MMO game ultimately runs into these kinds of problem.  Eventually the Elder Scrolls games are going to face this and other RPG games will surely follow.

The problem is that lore dictates what happened and what is happening.  The developers might have some great ideas, but they are stuck in a bubble where they have to contend with what the lore will allow them to do. WoW made a pretty big splash when they released 4.3 and allowed the encounter to be so easy on so many levels.  Sure, there is difficulty, but not to where it should have been.  People got to experience this and take part in the story and that has helped close out an entire chapter in the WoW lore, now.  The dragon aspects are leaving and are now mortal.  Mortals (us) will now have a more strong bearing on the world.  An ancient evil is defeated.  It's the stuff you see in movies.  However, there will have to be some books written to tie everything together.

When it comes to Star Wars you can see these issues with all of the different stories that are spread out over so many thousands of years.  From KoToR to Jedi Academy there are so many different storylines and timeslines to follow that a typical gamer would simply get lost.  However, there is a huge catalog somewhere that tells you how all of the games fall and exactly when Tie Fighter took place and how it makes sense in the same universe as SWToR.

Lore can be a very dangerous thing.