As I said in yesterday's post, I've decided to start a blog in which I ask the Dtoid community to debate over specific aspects of games. Feel free to check out the post for yourself if you want more info, though it should be pretty self-explanatory.
For the first entry in (what I hope will gain enough momentum to become) the series, I'm wondering what games you've played that have really sucked you into their world and made you stand in awe at the depth (or at least perceived depth) of their fictional universe. I read an essay today about J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings books, and the essay attributed much of Tolkien's success as a writer to the fact that the worlds he wrote about were so well crafted and detailed. It's easy for one to imagine that for every Lord of the Rings book he wrote, there were at least four more books' worth of stories and expanded history floating around in his head. Another example is the Star Wars universe, which has a vast expanded mythology not only in the mind of many fans, but in licensed books, cartoons, games, comic books, etc.
What games do you remember that have extremely well-crafted and vivid settings? Keep in mind that while your example may very well be a whole series (or even a franchise reaching beyond video games), it doesn't necessarily have to be. A little-known orphan game that sold poorly may have a more prominent place in your mind than a monster franchise with enough canon material to study for ages.
Let's debate! (Is that cheesy? Let me know if it's cheesy.)
king kong five's blog
follow this blog
subscribe via RSS
send message
invite to meetup+play
This may sound weird but Super Mario Sunshine sucked me into its environment like a vacuum. The tropical setting really worked well with Nintendo's use of bright, vivid colors. The music, especially at Delfino Plaza, complimented the scenery beautifully. You would have thought maybe an ultra-realistic shooter, or hundred hour long RPG but this game really did it for me.
@Christian Lazo
I actually was thinking of the Mario universe myself. Having never owned a Nintendo console, my experience with Mario games is limited to nights at friends' houses and quality time spent with emulators, but I'm always amazed at how the Mario universe can encompass totally wacky and unrelated elements and still make them all fit the overarching Mario Bros. canon perfectly. You have a plumber jumping on a turtle (animal), then jumping on a goomba (fictional creature), then jumping on a bullet with arms (man-made object brought to life), all of which are presented in different art styles, mind you, and none of it seems to clash.
Not cheesy at all and a good topic!
Actually it might make for a good monthly musing topic... because at least 4 or 5 games are floating around in my head... and none seems quite right. I'll have to think on this one!
(and damn you for making me think!... it hurts!)
This would make an interesting forum thread. I don't even mean that in the usual shitty "This belongs in the forums" context because it might work for you here, I just think the format there works better to promote discussion.
On topic, I really enjoyed playing Oblivion and The Witcher for pretty much the immersiveness of the worlds. There was so much history and back story (especially in Oblivion thanks to all the books scattered everywhere) that you could literally imagine these worlds were real and existed long before you showed up. The Witcher also had back story, but it was usually centered more on the characters rather than just the world. It still gave me enough reasons to want to explore further and talk to every NPC who might give me better insight into what was happening around me.
In RPG's especially the world can make the game for me. When I play I want to be there and if "there" is just a pretty photograph lacking substance then I'll find somewhere else to be.
@Elsa
Take your time! I've been trying to pick a game myself. Looking forward to your input.
@Zodiac Eclipse
I definitely see where you're coming from with Oblivion. To me it did feel like a really elaborately detailed world, though to be honest it wasn't one I had much motivation to explore or learn the history of. I tried reading some of the in-game books, and I tried learning more about the Elder Scrolls lore on the Oblivion wiki site, but in the end I just couldn't get into it. On the other hand, something that I think Oblivion pulled off quite well was how the game made specific locations feel like they all had their own unique history. I still remember to this day the first time I played Oblivion: once I got out of the sewers I explored some of the countryside before entering a ruined temple where corpses littered the floor. On the corpses I found diaries and other clues to how they all came to be in that temple and, in some cases, how they eventually died. Their personal stories and the story of that temple may not have much to do with the larger encompassing mythos of the Elder Scrolls games, but it really made the world come alive to me and it made me feel like a single part of a larger organism.
This is going to sound really gay and cliche, but motherfucking Zelda, man. I was wrapped up in all those games, even Phantom Hourglass. Also, Portal. I really felt like a lab rat in that game.
The sad truth is I'm pretty easy when it comes to getting lost in fictional worlds.
Well, Bioshock, obviously, was universally praised for its detailed, immersive setting, but that's too easy.
There are a few game worlds that have utterly drawn me in with excellent cohesive design. Off the top of my head I'd say Half-Life 2's world is incredibly clever, especially in the way they use environments and level design to tell the story.
While I wasn't as crazy about the sequels, I remember falling in love with the game world in the original Jak and Daxter, which also blew me away as the first real expansive game world I ever saw that never stopped the game to load.
Hmm...this topic bears more thought. I'll probably post again.
@Bat Country
@Deathofthedead
I find it interesting that one of you brought up Portal and the other Half-Life 2, two fairly different games that exist within the same Half-Life universe. I imagine it must be difficult for a game developer to put the player in the role of the hero while still making him/her feel like a small part of a much larger plot, and Valve did a phenomenal job of doing exactly that in not just Half-Life 2, but all of the Half-Life games. It's part of the reason why the two expansion packs for the first Half-Life (and even the PS2 exclusive Half-Life: Decay), which tell the same story from totally different perspectives, still manage to feel completely on-track with the original game. The same applies to Portal, though in Portal it's somewhat different in the sense that the story has almost nothing to do with what's happening to Gordon Freeman.
I've been thinking about my own answer to this, and though I could give any number of examples, the two that I think stand out the most in my mind is are the Grand Theft Auto trilogy from the last generation, and Final Fantasy VIII. Both of them have really engrossing universes that captivated me in their history, though they both achieved that same feeling of wonder in two different ways.
The three Grand Theft Auto games from the last generation (GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas) all took place in different cities, but all within the same parallel universe that really seemed like a parody of our own world in many ways. There were many overlapping stories and reappearing characters in the series, which really helped to tie the trilogy together as a single cohesive package. The fact that each of the games took place in a different decade also made the overlapping stories both more interesting (to me at least) and easier to keep track of. It also felt like the player was being rewarded in many ways for playing the games in order. There's a certain mission in San Andreas, for example, in which the player has to fly over to Liberty City and take some guy out, and if the player has never played GTA III, that mission really doesn't deliver the fantastic punch that it should.
The one complaint that I would have against the expanded universe in that trilogy is that all of the overlapping stories and recurring characters are retroactive. Meaning, in GTA III you never hear anybody mention Vice City or San Andreas, and in GTA Vice City you never hear anybody mention San Andreas. The overlapping stories are always nodding towards past games, never hinting towards future ones, and it kind of makes it obvious that Rockstar was making up all of these stories and characters as they want along.
Final Fantasy VIII, on the other hand, was a single game with no sequels or prequels. I mean, it had a sequel and a prequel obviously, but not really. You know what I mean. Anyway, one thing that really made the world of FFVIII come alive for me was the idea that the protagonist you control is a student at Balamb Garden. The whole intro to the game, where you take tests and go on field assignments and get scored on how well you perform, was absolutely brilliant to me. There were students, there were faculty, and everyone seemed to have a real life outside of what the player saw on the screen. They weren't all sitting patiently at home waiting for you barge in so they could tell you how terribly lonely they are, which is something I hated in FFVII (and really any JRPG). Most of the students and faculty at the Garden would be walking somewhere, or talking to someone, or doing SOMETHING besides just standing there, and oftentimes if you approached them to talk they would ignore you and keep doing whatever it is they were doing.
While all of this made the game come alive in many ways for me, it's not necessarily what made the game's mythos stand out. That didn't happen until a few hours into the game, when the party heads over to Galbadia Garden, a second military academy and a sister school of Balamb Garden. Suddenly I felt like this world had a rich history, I'm not even entirely sure what caused that. It might have been the fact that Glabadia is such a larger school than Balamb, and that up until that point I had thought Balamb was huge and detailed and I never thought I would find something larger. It's a very similar feeling to what I felt back in high school, when I would go to speech and debate tournaments at school larger and richer than mine. Balamb Garden was like my own high school, meaning it was a fairly large microcosm that I had taken the time to become familiar with. Galbadia Garden, on the other hand, was like the larger schools that I visited for speech tournaments; it was larger than my own school, and it had its own cliques and its own history and none of it was familiar to me. Those first moments in Galbadia Garden made me realize that I, as the player, could never be in more than one place at once, and that during all that time I had spend familiarizing myself with Balamb Garden, there was a whole other world in Galbadia that I was unknowingly ignoring. That feeling is what made the universe of FFVIII really come alive to me.
That last section was pretty incoherent, but I thank anyone who took the time to read it. Hopefully I'll get better at this.
I'm going to go ahead and hop in here and say "please take this to the forums."
Not to be a dick, no, but because I'd like to participate in the conversation and not see it drop off the front page of something in a matter of hours. Besides, the cblogs don't foster debate as well as a forum does. You may be one of those "I hate forums and just don't use them" types, but think of it this way; you could get the debate in the forum, take the best/strongest arguments, and use them to post your blog. That way it fits into the blog mentality, has a week or so to foster debate, and then let's the kids out here figure out what you're talking about to where they too want to answer your questions.
Mirror's Edge. 'Nuff said. I absolutely LOVED the City in the game, and the environment was one I honestly would live in if I could. Can't wait for a sequel.
I'm split between five games and I'm not sure if I can just pick one of them:
#1. Chrono Trigger- This was the first game that showed me the effects of time travel and was my first taste of multiple endings. Having a cool world to play in is great, but when you can go forward and backward in the timeline of said world is phenomenal.
#2. Legacy of Kain series- To explain why this world is so cool would take too long, so I'll break it down. Time travel, vampire god-kings, dimensional rifts, holocausts, ancients, cursed pillar guardians, etc.
#3. Final Fantasy VI- To me, this is the best Final Fantasy there ever was or will be. The world is dark, gritty, steampunk world and even gets destroyed later in the game, which creates a darker and grittier aesthetic. It's also a world where magic isn't the norm and the "bad guys" kidnap Espers to try to synthetically create magic, which is a unique aspect to FF games.
#4. Fallout series- Fallout 1&2 are a couple of the best RPGs ever created. The dark humor and brutal world of these games gives me a fuzzy feeling inside.
#5. Planescape:Torment- I think this one has to be the winner of the five since, essentially, this world has all worlds in it. All you need is the proper door and the proper key and you can go anywhere. When I say anywhere, I mean just that, be it Sigil, a multi-dimensional hub, or some desert prison dimension that is home to a chained up, evil angel. From the 9th layer of hell to a maze created by the Lady of Pain herself, this game has it all.
Ohhhh some good choices already like the Elder Scroll series. I'd like to throw my hat in the ring with Guild Wars and Star Control.
Guild Wars had a huge amount of lore and back story that you were never required to know but knowing it really gave to lots of insight to the gameworld like knowing about relation of the undead to the Kingdom of Orr, the war against the Margonites and their ascension from flesh and bone to those of the to the god of water and why that created the Crystal Desert and forced the Elonians away from Tyria dividing the nations of man. Heck I could keep going.
As for Star Control well not only is it a personal favorite but its whole game universe is so rich including cultural and historical backgrounds to all the races. Like how the Thraddash are so warlike that their culture resets back to the stone age. They got so tired of naming all their former cultures that they just refer to them by number to keep track of them. And of course my personal favorite, the Yehat, who live by Scottish honor while parenting over a race of Samurai Racoons.
There are so many others too like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Fallout trilogy and Marathon.
@Deathofthedead
Agreed on the Jak & Daxter series, the no loading feature really helped make it feel like a series of a seamless explorable worlds.
See dude, a little over a day and a half after you posted, the post is gone and no one is discussing it anymore. Forums, meng. :D