You'll have to forgive me but I attached a poll to your thread. It seemed like a perfect candidate for doing so.

As to the question, I consider lore integral. I really enjoy getting immersed in the who, what, why, when, where and how of things in a gaming world. What I wish game developers would do is figure out a more streamlined way of introducing quests to players that doesnt bludgeon you with a page and a half of text like WoW does. Everyone sees an exclamation point and goes up and clicks the NPC and just clicks accept. I know so few people who actually bother to read the quest text unless they absolutely must. While it was alot less intuitive and elegant the Everquest method of questing certainly forced people to slow down and read into things to really understand their world instead of just flying through it at warp speed.