The contrast of the two styles of expository writing between Halo Combat Evolved and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are nothing short of staggering. While Halo requires the player to pay close attention to the dialogue, and search for the smallest of details that could change the perspective of the entire game, Breath of the Wild encourages the player to enjoy the world around them, and puts the main story and the lore surrounding it as a secondary priority. Without interviews to attempt an interpretation of the lore provided by these two contrasting games, we are left with rather little to work with for the interpretation of the lore. Instead of answering questions, this process has led to more of them. Why did the game writers choose a phrasing that would make the choice from Halo in a moral gray area? Why did the game writers for Breath of the Wild choose to allow the character to never interact with the characters who drive the plot? These are but a few of the many questions that have gone unanswered throughout the research and writing process.

While we encountered downfalls during our researching process, our motivation to complete our respective games, take in depth notes, and gather lore did not falter. While we did not uncover everything, we found sufficient qualitative data to come to our conclusions about lore writing. Below we have included more detailed analysis of our findings.

Analysis of Halo Combat Evolved

Halo CE’s lore and story were both very vague. The player is dropped into an unknown universe with no context whatsoever. They don’t know who the characters are, who the enemies are, what the setting is and the time period. Most characters and places are mentioned like the player would already have knowledge about those topics, but there is no expansion on the discussion of these people and places. The player is told to go do this and do that, and they have to pick up on the clues and understanding along the way through the dialogue or from the player’s own observations. For instance, who are the Covenant, and why are they attacking the humans? Sure it would have been used as a way to make a generic enemy, but for anyone who likes to get into the story, it would have made them wonder more about them. Why are they attacking humanity? How did they come to be? Questions like this could be applied to many aspects of the game due to the fact that there was no context or backstory given to the player at the start. Unless the players had read the novel Halo the Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund prior to playing the game, there would be no immediate understanding to the universe of Halo. Even then, a lot of topics in Halo CE would not be expanded on until the later games came out. In short, Halo CE is a game that heavily relies on the player to do their own research and pick up on the small clues in order to understand the lore of the game.

Analysis of Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild’s lore is crisp and clear. The player is given a cut-scene that lays out the lore of the world for them, and is then released into the world. Information on characters can be gathered through dialogue in the form of text boxes. Old quests can be viewed from a quests tab with descriptions of what was done to complete it, and what happened during the completion. Diaries can be located from around the world written by various characters. These small pieces of lore all serve to paint the picture for one of the greatest Legend of Zelda games.