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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Stalker trilogy, stalker 2
Final Fantasy XII is pretty high up there for me.
Bestiary entries are vast, almost a book in game format, and most add to lot of worldbuilding even if not needed for the main plot itself.
Also bosses, sidequests, enviromental cues seldom aren’t at least hinted by a few NPCs often dozens of hours before they’re relevant.
Overall details are often explained when you look in the right corners of the game. Even some weird weather cycles seem to have some logic applied. And in a single case, it felt inspired by a real-world element, one even Mad Max 4 used a cut in the beginning.
And I wonder if the sky-gazing kid in one of the airships that says she saw something in the sky was referring to Deathgaze or the continent from Revenant Wings…
hypnospace outlaw !! it’s more subtle things, of course, since it’s just a sort of parallel reality to our own 1999, but i think that’s what makes it feel SO real. i’m a really big fan of the news page and advice pages you can find in the game because they show you the mundanities of the everyday lives of these people
Horizon Zero Dawn is to this day the only game I have ever taken the time to listen to/read all the optional little lore drops in the world as I encountered it. Really well done IMO, even if the game is not overall that good, best world building I’ve experienced
Definitely Kenshi. Rather old title where the world feels somewhat desolated, but so well thought out at the same time. Every place has a story behind it
Kenshi is maybe the only game I’ve played where the more I played, the more I was like “What the fuck shit hole have I been dropped into. What happened here.” And that feeling only increased the more of the world I explored.
“AAHGH WHAT IS THIS LASER BEAM”
“AAHGH WHAT ARE THESE THINGS”
“AAHGH WHY ARE THERE CANNIBALS EVERYWHERE”
“AAHGH THE RAIN HURTS WHY IS THERE PAIN RAIN”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has one of the most interesting world in stories inside and outside of gaming. I hope we will see many more stories set in that world.
The hook alone is great.
Spoiler for the prolog and trailers.
Around the end of the 19th century the whole world broke apart and a part of Paris (called Lumiere in the game) was thrown into the sea.
And this giant “Paintress” started painting the number 100 on an enormous monolith and each year she counts down. And everyone who is that old or older evaporates into ash and flower petals.
So the people started sending out expeditions to find out wtf is going on.
Spoiler for the rest of the game.
The world is actually a magical painting the Paintress’ son made when he was a child. For him, his sister and their parents to play in. But when he was an adult their other sister was tricked by “the Writers” into setting a fire which killed him.
In her grief the mother fled into the painting because it was the last bit she had of him. Fearing she would stay in there until she died of starvation the father went in as well to get her out. As she wouldn’t relent he started erasing the painting and she tried to prevent that. Every year painting the age of the people she wouldn’t be able to save from him onto the monolith.
So we actually have this world of magical Painters and Writers who are at war with each other and it is hinted that there are Musicians as well. And who knows what other artists with magical powers exist in this world. I’m imagining Programmers joining the fray in the future. The possibilities both inside any art pieces and outside in the “real” world are endless.
The TES series in general for its massive, expansive lore.
But Morrowind in particular has absolutely incredible world-building with incredible creativity and originality. There is a reason why so many people keep going back to the n’wah simulator and it’s because the world is so rich and fleshed out. So much of the following games was built off Morrowind’s stunning work.
As someone whose first TES was Morrowind, it set the bar so high in terms of worldbuilding, I was honestly a bit disappointed with the later entries into the series. Oblivion (more generic fantasy setting) and Skyrim (nordic with dragons) definitely played better, but the worlds were much less unique and memorable.
Twice now I have tried to make a top level comment and accidentally responded to a thread instead… Anyway…
Instead of leaving this deleted I will agree wholeheartedly that while I personally am not the biggest fan of the TES series they have some of the most deep, complex and (somewhat) organized lore there is.
I just wish they would hire better script writers and weren’t so afraid of locking content behind player choices. Always having every option available just feels a little silly.
Yeah. And Skyrim really needed better VAs. That one guy who voiced Farengar just did not properly understand some of his lines and consequently butchered them.
Ace Combat. Seems rather dull on the face of it but goddamn are the geopolitics compelling.
Disco Elysium, such interesting and complex world building beneath the drunken detective murder mystery. Shame ZA/UM ruined everything with the devs and we probably won’t get anything else out of it.
I could have listened to the rich lady‘s reality rundown for hours.
I want to answer Xenogears because of all of its story and storytelling, but the worldbuilding itself is kinda standard, if not for the scope of it. You do end up learning about pretty much everything there is to learn - the world and its history, the characters and what moves them, the politics, the conflicts, the geography, the physics, the religions, the supernatural, the origins of mankind - not to mention a full class on philosophy. And then whatever question you still have left, there’s a book about it in addition to the game.
And you start with a classic amnesiac character in a small village.
Trails in the Sky
I got sick about dystopian chaotic worlds that don’t work - where the hero’s journey is about saving the world from some impending ruin, or about preventing a starving dystopian city from being blown up.
In Trails, the conversations you have with NPCs remind you that while you’re on the trail of some bandits or suspicious people, other people are not evacuating, sheltering in fear, etc; they’re living their lives, keeping up to date on modern trends, making travel plans to other countries.
So, so many worlds just don’t have space for characters to have those thoughts. It’s always fear around impending disasters, or how to respond to a fight, or grim poetry about how much the world has fallen into darkness.
It especially hurts that some people live so much of their lives in these fictional worlds that they start to believe people would be like that when they go outside. Worlds like the one in Trails, even if they spend a lot of time being boringly polite, are a nice call back to reality.
The Portal games, but mostly Portal 2.
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.
Apart from Mass Effect, Pillars of Eternity, and Deus Ex as others have already mentioned, I’d like to also add:
Grim Dawn.
The conflicts in its Universe feels reasonable, all the factions have their history and reasons of existence, there are beneficial and selfish, but no clear black and white, and everything interacts. The Lore is very good for an ARPG that focuses on combat, loots and built.
Little Nightmares 1 & 2. Cosmic horror very well executed. No real lore is ever given to you besides what you are shown through your travels and what little environmental storytelling exists.
Everything is vaguely familiar but off. Distorted, but in a way that you’re never quite sure whether everything in the world is supposed to be like that, or if something happened to make it that way. In fact, it’s not even officially cosmic horror. There is no Cthulhu-esque big bad revealed to be behind it all. The visuals of the games could even just be interpreted as on -the-nose allegory and metaphor, with a fairytale like quality, if not for the subtle hints at a prior normality in the background.
