#video game worldbuilding

[redd956]

3 games with a strange & underrated amount of detail to worldbuilding

Castle Crashers

Castle Crashers is one of those games that I play as sort of a cult following. It has a played a part in my childhood, and I always end up going back to it to play it again, especially with friends and family. But still shocks me to this day is the strange detailed amount of worldbuilding going on behind the scenes to this game.

Whether it’s the enemy kingdoms, the fun designed background of battles, or the fact there is very obviously several kingdoms with working cultures and systems going on. This silly game where you play as a group of knights (mostly) with magic, has you travel across its world, fighting baddies, saving princesses, and stopping whatever is in your way.

So much detail went into the game in the first place, but I’ve never seen its worldbuilding pointed out or talked about. Makes me really wish people would make more fan content of the game.

Call of Duty

Despite the fact that Call of Duty is one the major franchise video games I play, one that I’ve played since a tiny child, I never really payed much attention to the world it was in. I always just assumed it was the same as ours with dramatization in several aspects. However that didn’t stop young me to becoming obsessed with the obvious worldbuilding elephant in the room; Black Ops Zombies.

But as the years went on Call of Duty actually put thought into it’s wild yarn ball of a timeline, and decided to throw it a few times for the fans. The several branches of the Call of Duty decided to intertwine their storylines somewhat, and begin to utilize more consistent worldbuilding notions across the games. Eventually they cooked up a world with enough different, incredibly intricate details, and a timeline series that makes FNAF look linear that I believe to fully explore it you’d have to have A Phd in Call of Duty Lore.

To this day they still mess around with their wild worldbuilding (and it’s many controversial aspects) with the new installments, and remakes. Most recently Modern Warfare 2 Remastered did a revamp and expansion of the original modern warfare timelines, Vanguard confirmed the combining of all three major branch’s timelines, and Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War continued to add to the Black Ops storylines.

Sims

Oh the sims! A beloved video gaming franchise running a brutal money hungry monopoly of life simulators. As a kid I was obsessed with an Xbox 360 pets copy of the Sims 3. As an adult I own Sims 4 and should’ve long pirated it, and leave it overly modded to rot in my steam files. Surprisingly this popular game has plenty of hidden lore and worldbuilding.

There is even a timeline (fucked up by the devs of Sims 4 not thinking one bit while making their game), and a conjoined storyline full of mysteries. Many of the original households have long backgrounds and stories told in many different ways using the game’s mechanics.

The playable worlds themselves have plenty of hidden adventure to be hold, and stories awaiting in plain sight. Whether that be towns infected by a mysterious strange sickness, a worn village full of pale greenish looking sims, or exploring the cases of the various ghosts and graves scattered throughout the games.

[prokopetz]

The principal difficulty of having a Pokémon pick up your groceries for you isn’t getting it to understand the concept of a grocery list, but getting it to understand the concept of capitalism.

One might assume that Meowth is the exception, given that Meowth is literally the capitalism Pokémon; the trouble here is that, while Meowth does understand capitalism, Meowth also understands shoplifting.

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[xccentriktigress]

Drawings From the Edges of Pentiment Pages: Dogs and Cats

[bedrockfactory]

Imagine the world if there was a game where you build and lead a tovoxran mining colony on an alien planet, where every game month you must pay an ore/raw material tax (send some amount of refined ore) to the empire or else you get consequences

[groundrunner100]

For those wondering why Star Trek is not on this list, check my previous poll for the unofficial Science-Fiction Franchise With The Best Lore.

You’ll understand my reasoning.

[troythecatfish]

[spitblaze]

You ever see something that is meant to be like...an overgeneralized statement for the sake of entertainment or comedy and not at all serious but it's about YOUR special interest and you are just sitting there trying not to explode with an entire explanation of why it's such an overgeneralized statement and the depth of the topic

[amorphousbl0b]

Thinking about Environmental Storytelling (for absolutely no overly sarcastic reason) lately.

I know the big cliche of video game environmental storytelling is carefully arranged bodies, but one of my favorite examples of this is in the first Halo game.

Firefights reshape the landscape in the first Halo more than any subsequent game — and frankly, more than most games in its genre. Corpses don't despawn and the arena is covered in significant amounts of blood.

This makes the game’s environmental storytelling uniquely natural. Even though every aftermath you discover throughout is pre-designed, it looks like something your own actions could’ve left behind, and it creates the feeling that you’re not the only force affecting the world. Like the Marines and Covenant fighting across Installation 04 are truly acting just out of your sight.

And the content of those bloody aftermaths reveals something disturbing.

As you travel you’re constantly encountering human bodies scattered around, which in gameplay terms just diegetically justify ammo refills for your assault rifle but in terms of the story communicate something very important: that the crew of the Pillar of Autumn is fighting for its life on every corner of the Halo, and that humanity is FUCKED without the Master Chief. There are no Covenant bodies, no blue bloodstains. The levels are filled with more and more enemies and fewer and fewer living allies. These Marines are being butchered without much chance and you are the only thing that can save them.

And when you start finding Covenant corpses and blue blood all over the place during a spooky abandoned level midway through the game, if you've been paying attention you immediately know that the Marines could never have done this. Something else is out there.

[icewindandboringhorror]

................ he 

[shitpostingkats]

Twewy is such a hard game to pitch people on.

"So there's this world of poetic symbolism and death gods and magic."

"Ooh, do I get to play as one of the death gods, and unravel the mystery of the afterlife?"

"No. You play as group of depressed teenagers who have to deal with all this crap."

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Sword of Kaigen

standalone fantasy set in a rural mountain village at the edge of an empire that still holds traditional values, with families of powerful water/ice magic warriors

follows a powerful young heir who begins to question his beliefs about the empire when a new boy comes to his village from the city

and his mother, a housewife who has tried to forget her youth as a warrior and vigilante in the city since she moved back home to a loveless marriage

when there’s a violent attack on their village that they’re unprepared for, everything changes, and she has to embrace her old skills to protect her family and people

[prokopetz]

It's been seven years and I still can't get over the fact that Nintendo's writers were like "the next Zelda game is going to re-imagine Hyrule as a post-apocalyptic high fantasy setting in the mode of Middle-earth, but that means we need a clear 'high elf' analogue, which is something that Zelda games haven't historically had", and they decided to resolve this problem by putting the fish on top of a mountain.

[delta-orionis]

Spent my commute this morning speculating wildly about the astronomy of rain world and how it ties into the things we know from the canon, if at all

[aphel1on]

its almost impossible to peer pressure me into watching a thing until at least 2+ calendar years have gone by from its peak of popularity but we are about to pass that threshold with dunmeshi i fear

[rustybottlecap]

That Polygon Unraveled video about Fallout may have ruined that aspect of the games for me. When I play one of the games I want so bad to hear stuff like that. The video is an amazing worldbuilding experiment too.

also can I even tag this as just polygon without it being confused with cr*pt*shit and getting spambots