What games have what you’d call really good worldbuilding, and what in particular do you like about them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of geography, a backstory, flora, fauna, inhabitants, technology, and often if writing speculative fiction, different peoples. This may include social customs as well as invented languages (often called conlangs) for the world.
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Fromsoft and Larian are great at this.
BioWare 20 years ago was guaranteed. We might never get another BioWare game I would purchase.
I hope you don’t mean Baldur‘s Gate when you say Larian and BioWare.
“Zanzibart, forgive me”.
Nah, Fromsoft has great vibes. But the worldbuilding and story is all deliberately obscured because of Miyazaki’s love of sci-fi he couldn’t properly read. That makes it a trove for obsessives but it can’t really be called good.
It’s definitely good and it is done in a way that can only be done in video games. Too many video games depend on passive exposition instead of finding actual lore in the world.
So your reasoning for saying it isnt good is because you actually have to work to see it instead of it being spoonfed to you? Is that right?
Do you consider it being “spoonfed” to you when you read a book and the plot and everything is just written down?
Do you consider it positive that you have to “work for it” if every fifth word is written in Chinese and you have to translate them?
Making it hard to understand does not make it good. Making it easy does not make it bad. Is there an aspect of it you like that isn’t just that it’s hard to understand? Because that’s all you mentioned.
Do you consider it being “spoonfed” to you when you read a book and the plot and everything is just written down?
uh…no? the whole point of books is to read them
the whole point of games is to play them, if you want all the plot in your games to be reading…maybe grab a book instead?
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - probably the most cliche answer possible, but Troika really did build a game that took you to the world of vampires in LA in the early 2000s.
Arcanum - a fantasy world undergoing industrialization with technology being in direct conflict with magic.
UnderRail - A society stuck underground connected by tunnels between towns/cities and nodes. The writing (quests/characters) is not that great, but the world-building is top notch.
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Half-Life 2
Yeah, that is a great classic example. There’s a lot of environmental storytelling so you can get an idea of what’s going on, and what it is is very interesting, but it doesn’t get in the way of the game or its story.
Hollow Knight.
Absolutely can’t get enough of the world and all the interesting characters and hidden lore.
STALKER. The Zone is amazing. Currently replaying Call of Pripyat for my third or fourth time through, a year after playing the shit out of Heart of Chernobyl, and I’m absolutely loving it.
Outer Wilds, especially with the DLC.
Gothic one and two are really good. In the first game you are dropped into a prison colony and very soon a guard will try to extract protection money from you. In any other game the guard would just kill you, instead you will meet another guy asking you for help. He then lures you to a secluded space reveals that he was sent by the corrupt guard and beats you unconscious to steal your money.
Another game I will never stop recommending because of its worldbuilding is the excellent Enderal: Forgotten Stories. I really like how it depicts the theocratic society of the continent the story plays out in. The story about what initially seems like a standard fantasy thieves guild but is actually a cult that shuns emotion and try to transcend the physical body, is also really good and ties in with the overarching plot of the game.
NetHack
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Eh? It has almost none, and what there is is rendered completely inconsistent.
Pillars of Eternity. I really appreciate that they must have had some Anthropology majors on the team, especially for II, because the worlds feel much more exotic than other RPGs. It shows up just how generic Medieval Fantasy most RPGs are.
The tropical Roparu (?) society with its caste system is particularly interesting. The interaction of the various factions is believable. And of course the pantheon is well though out.
The downside is that they can be clumsy about exposition of the world - especially in the first one, you get these enormous lore-dumps.I can’t wait till they add true turn based combat to Pillars of Eternity.
I played avout 3-4 hours and the setting and world, but the real time combat did not work for me.
I don’t mind real-time combat, but it has been in third person.
I also love how reincarnation is a fact of life in that world, and souls are a real, almost physical, thing that can be manipulated and used.
I couldn’t agree more! It’s a fantasy game but it explores some really cool concepts; like colonialism and freedom vs order.
Anachronox always stood out to me, really underrated game. I’m not sure about particulars since it’s been so many years, but the combination of the graphics style, the script and the humor in it, the characters and the design of the world all fell together really well, along with the great sound design and music. It felt authentic.
Shadowrun - it had a tremendous effect on my actual worldview (as did other cyberpunk works). The near-future cyberpunk setting offers plenty of opportunity for satire, being rooted in this world makes some geography and history relatable and mixing it with fantasy elements does not only make it more colorful and varied, but also prevents unrealistic stuff from breaking my immersion, because it does not pretend to be realistic.
As a young nerd obsessed with RPGs and William Gibson’s work I was outraged at the idea of putting Fantasy into cyberpunk. But then I picked up a damaged copy of the Shadowrun rules from a bargain bin and was blown away by the worldbuilding, they really found a way to make it all fit thematically and logically and I ended up running the game for years.
it had a tremendous effect on my actual worldview
How so?
Hard to describe. I started to feel the same way about the real world as I did about the world described in the books. Like the high tech, low life concept - just because we have shiny things does not mean we have a good life. And developing a tendency for rather diverse and/or weird friend groups who band together to fight for our place in this world. I mean, the books obviously crank everything up to 11, but the prower structures seem very similar.
I was reading Shadowrun books about evil megacorporations who are mightier than nation states and indigenous liberation movements against them, so I paid a lot of attention to real world politics when I read the news about stuff like NAFTA and the EZLN or the MAI agreement.
Deus Ex, anyone?
Yes, I go back and replay the game every few years. Its grittiness is definitely a bit silly to me now, but when I was a kid, I was enchanted by it. While the Jensen games did not have the charm of the OG, the first was still decent, and it’s a shame Square Enix drove it into the ground with the second Jensen title.
DX:MD is one of the most fun stealth games, it’s just unfortunate they put vent shafts everywhere
This one is it for me. The game really does so much with so little. The reality of the game is that it is a roughly linear sequence of closed levels (with some hub levels thrown in) that feels like a cohesive, connected world. It’s absolutely incredible!
Mass Effect.
Mass Effect completely blew me away when it came out. Loved the overall lore about the Reaper threat and how the different species were connected to each other.
Horizon: Zero Dawn was also great in that regard, and the world felt really well put together, even though the lore wasn’t quite as deep.
Hyper Light Drifter.
Not a word in the entire game. Still a masterpiece of storytelling.
