In Disco Elysium the game straight up called me out for apologising so much. It hit me so hard I stopped apologising as much irl. 10/10 game would be ashamed again.
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.
yeah, PC here, i didn’t really much games before digital distribution came along, but i was enjoying every demo i got on a cd that came with magazines, now - over 20 years later i have nothing to play
You probably owned 5 games that you personally were actually interested in.
Until 2024 I was still subbed to Amazon Prime. Their Prime Gaming (Shipping and the Twitch Prime sub were the draw I would never pay for Prime Gaming) campaign throws a fuck ton of games at you constantly. A lot of good games too. Keys for GOG/EGS,/their own launcher/some shitty pixel hunting adventure games website.
I also redeem the EGS weekly free game(s) most weeks. I miss a few.
There’s 500 games in my Heroic Games Launcher list combined. I’ve played 2 of them.
Tough thing about being a kid. Lot of free time, no responsibilities, and no idea what you wanna do with it. In a sense anyway. When I was a kid yeah we had fewer choices. But I also had limited experience. Didn’t know what I might like or not.
I see my niece grow up with a similar attitude about movies. “I would not like that.” You can’t know that. So many games, you just don’t know which ones to play. You don’t have the criteria in mind to make an educated guess about what might be a good match for you.
The best part was: this was even in the installer! When setting up your sound card, there was a test button. If it worked, you heard “your sound card works perfectly”. But if you kept pressing it, eventually it would say “enjoying yourself?” And if you kept going after that, in an angry voice, “it doesn’t get any better than this!”
Ah old Blizzard, when even the installers had character.
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.
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.
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.
Right, so if making the plot and lore obvious in a book is fine, it’s also fine in a game. Using pejoratives like “spoonfeeding” criticises this without giving any reason.
From games are particularly bad because most of the lore is on item descriptions that are often themselves locked behind random drops and easily missed questlines. This is not good world building, this is purposefully obscure world building. People mistake “hard to put together” for quality, but it’s the opposite - making this stuff harder to get makes it worse, because players are less likely to get it! If you feel too communicate the lore to most players, that’s not good!
I hope you don’t mean Baldur‘s Gate when you say Larian and BioWare. edit: downvotes seem to forget that the Forgotten Realms worldbuilding wasn’t done by the licensed games.
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Aktywne