Retconning in-game lore

[UnSub]

With Going Rogue, the latest CoH/V expansion, comes a retcon to the CoH/V lore. Praetorians went from the mirror universe version of the main good guys (give or take) to a more formal organisation who established order on the brink of chaos but did so in a heavy-handed fashion. It's a retcon to content that is 6 years old.

I'm interested - has there been other MMOs where devs have re-written in-game lore to suit the updates? CoV did it to an extent - "there has been an island full of bad guys just off the coast the entire time, but you've only just noticed it" - but the change to the Praetorians is an official change to existing content rather than new content that was just slotted in.

[Hawkbit]

WoW did with the space goat lore.  Someone here will elaborate.

[Soulflame]

The retcons to Sargeras alone from Warcraft 2 (or whenever he was first mentioned) through the lifetime of WoW have been amusing.

In the original lore, Sargeras was sent to confront the insidious eredar prior to his confrontation with the Nathrezim. This has now been retconned by new lore that establishes that the eredar, and other races were transformed into demons by Sargeras.

Sargeras was originally a footnote in Warcraft lore, a fallen Daemonlord whose dark legacy was used by Medivh to manipulate Gul'dan. Gradually, novels and game material built up his role to the primary lore villain.

Bonus:  It mentions the eredar retcon as well!

[Rendakor]

Illidan was also retconned from being dead at the end of WC3:TFT to alive again in WoW.

[Sheepherder]

The space goat thing wasn't actually a retcon, retcon implies an intentional change.

[Soln]

SWG NGE cf. Jedai

[Stabs]

The Blood Elf Paladins caused a rethink of lore during The Burning Crusade.

Originally they weren't Paladins, they were Blood Knights, a class which just happened to have the same powers but instead of getting them as a reward for virtue from The Light they got them by siphoning off the magic from a captive angel. In the Sunwell Patch, and as a concession to the player base who insisted on calling them Paladins, they gave the Naaru their angel back and holy power was channeled to them to allow them to act as Paladins rather than Blood Knights.

Perhaps not precisely a retcon but a change of direction after the Blood Knight class name failed to gain traction.

[Simond]

I'm waiting for the Worgen lore retcon to hit the official forums, and the inevitable reaction.
(tl;dr Worgen - all Worgen - are the result of (surprise!) night elves screwing up. Specifically, a bunch of NE druids tried to create a new form based on wolves. The extradimensional home, being summoned into Azeroth, and the Lords of the Emerald Flame? The Emerald Dream).

[Dtrain]

Something about the idea of a Blizzard game needing a retcon seems very funny to me. Maybe it's because it brings up visions of someone obsessively reading World of Warcraft novels.

[Pezzle]

I guess Jamyl Sarum would qualify as a retcon in EVE?  Being dead then being alive is a good trick.  I am pretty sure they have mucked about with the race histories as well.

[Ingmar]

I'm waiting for the Worgen lore retcon to hit the official forums, and the inevitable reaction.
(tl;dr Worgen - all Worgen - are the result of (surprise!) night elves screwing up. Specifically, a bunch of NE druids tried to create a new form based on wolves. The extradimensional home, being summoned into Azeroth, and the Lords of the Emerald Flame? The Emerald Dream).

This isn't really a retcon, none of it is really inconsistent with the little crumbs we had before, and there was already a lot of speculation that the Emerald Dream was the other dimension.

[Sjofn]

The Blood Elf Paladins caused a rethink of lore during The Burning Crusade.

Originally they weren't Paladins, they were Blood Knights, a class which just happened to have the same powers but instead of getting them as a reward for virtue from The Light they got them by siphoning off the magic from a captive angel. In the Sunwell Patch, and as a concession to the player base who insisted on calling them Paladins, they gave the Naaru their angel back and holy power was channeled to them to allow them to act as Paladins rather than Blood Knights.

Perhaps not precisely a retcon but a change of direction after the Blood Knight class name failed to gain traction.

The player base insisted? BLIZZARD insisted. The character creation screen, the trainers, everything except the occassional class quest text called them paladins. OF COURSE players also called them paladins, everywhere in the game did!

[Lakov_Sanite]

Can we at least agree that warcraft 1-3 weren't exactly the pinnacle of game storytelling? I mean it's like saying that candyland3 ret-conned all the lore of candyland.  I like wow but I've never been under the delusion that it's a bad comic book.

There's a lot more games out there I'd be more upset about *kotor, cough*

[Koyasha]

The Blood Elf Paladins caused a rethink of lore during The Burning Crusade.

Originally they weren't Paladins, they were Blood Knights, a class which just happened to have the same powers but instead of getting them as a reward for virtue from The Light they got them by siphoning off the magic from a captive angel. In the Sunwell Patch, and as a concession to the player base who insisted on calling them Paladins, they gave the Naaru their angel back and holy power was channeled to them to allow them to act as Paladins rather than Blood Knights.

Perhaps not precisely a retcon but a change of direction after the Blood Knight class name failed to gain traction.

The player base insisted? BLIZZARD insisted. The character creation screen, the trainers, everything except the occassional class quest text called them paladins. OF COURSE players also called them paladins, everywhere in the game did!

Yeah, they didn't bother to make them show up as Blood Knights anywhere in game, except some class text that for the most part, only Blood Knight players would ever actually see.  If they had changed the class name on /who searches and such it would have caught on I'll wager.

Regardless, that wasn't the reason they had that plot twist happen, it was more part of separating blood elves from Kael'thas and such, and an explanation for why they didn't all lose their powers when Kael yoinked M'uru.

Personally I typically find retcons annoying, because there are usually better ways to get to the same place storywise.  I'm not sure the CoX changes are properly termed a retcon anyway though - a lot of this new information doesn't contradict anything we'd learned before with certainty, and there's also the fact that a lot of the new is put forth as in-character propaganda by Emperor Cole/Tyrant and his people.  This is more like learning their side of the story, which isn't necessarily true, and doesn't necessarily conflict with previous knowledge.  Of course, I haven't really gone and researched what is known of the changes in-depth.

However I do know that a lot of the time when a retcon is done, they don't have to do it in order to accomplish the goal of shifting the story in the direction they wanted.  Take the Draenei/Eredar thing in WoW, and the complete retcon to Sargeras and the Eredar there.  They could have arrived at exactly the same place storywise had they stated that the Draenei are a group of Eredar that were somehow redeemed, and became good.  On the other hand, the Draenei being vastly different from the Broken Ones that we thought were Draenei is a good example of giving us more information that doesn't directly contradict old information.  We thought they were Draenei, but we just hadn't met an uncorrupted one.

In KOTOR / TOR, the retcon is kind of significant in one way, and not so much in another - Revan and Malak having been working for this Sith Emperor could be something that was unknown information only recently being revealed.  But the fact that they were searching for the Star Forge even before they disappeared after the Mandalorian Wars, which they're now retconning to 'they looked for it in secret after they came back from being corrupted by the Sith' is an annoying change that seems entirely unnecessary, since the original story can still get them to where they want to be.  Why not, they looked for the Star Forge before leaving, and out there, found the Sith Empire also looking for it, and that's how they came to be in the employ of the Sith Emperor?  I don't personally like it (I don't like the whole 'they were working for the Sith Emperor') but it still gets you there without changing anything that was already established as fact, and only expands knowledge you did not previously have access to.

So I think that in MMO's, in any franchise, really, they should be very careful to explore every possibility for 'how can I get the story to where I want it, without altering anything that has been previously established' before they even think about changing anything.  Sometimes, you have to retcon, there's no other choice.  But most of the time, you could get there without changing established certainty.

[Sjofn]

Retcons in CoX make sense anyway! There should be more! Every patch!

[UnSub]

I'm not sure the CoX changes are properly termed a retcon anyway though - a lot of this new information doesn't contradict anything we'd learned before with certainty, and there's also the fact that a lot of the new is put forth as in-character propaganda by Emperor Cole/Tyrant and his people.  This is more like learning their side of the story, which isn't necessarily true, and doesn't necessarily conflict with previous knowledge.  Of course, I haven't really gone and researched what is known of the changes in-depth.

It's a retcon in that Cole is going from a power hungry conqueror to an over-zealous defender of the people, and characters like Sister Psyche have moved away from a psychic Marquis de Sade to a psychic Big Brother. Praetoria is moving from battle-scarred plaything of superpowered beings to a false utopia surrounded by a hostile force. The two different versions don't really match up.

[Kail]

The Blood Elf Paladins caused a rethink of lore during The Burning Crusade.

The entire Burning Crusade expansion was a huge pile of retcon.  The Blood Elves, the Space Goats, Outland itself (I guess it wasn't getting torn apart at the end of the WCII expansion?), all of it is weird.  There's a list of a few of the pieces here, if anyone's curious.  But their timeline has always been fucked.

[Simond]

And really - is it a retcon if the story arc was planned that way from the beginning of the expansion?

[UnSub]

No. To take CoH/V as an example, it wasn't a retcon when it revealed that Nemesis actually started the Rikti War because it fits in with the existing story and develops it.

It is a retcon to say, "You know that stuff we said for 5 years? Didn't really happen, here's the new version".

[Pantastic]

People make a big deal out of the Draenei changes, but IIRC the original background was just a brief one sentence mention in a manual, not something repeatedly mentioned or brought into the game. Retconning a throwaway line in an old version of the game isn't a big deal to me, and I think it would constrain the game makers too much to regard every single sentence in old manuals as unalterable truth. I think something like changing the Onyxia story from something the unnamed adventurers (PCs) drove to something Wrynn did without help is a much better example.