Even Jersey!
One of the biggest elements that can make or break a game is its world building. World building can make relatively passable or even bad games into something memorable that gets by on word of mouth and buzz. A game can have that janky feeling in its controls, or the story can be nonsensical and boring, but a well-crafted world to immerse yourself in does wonders for many games.
Sure, you can reference Skyrim with its fully-realized land of citizens who go about on actually designed schedules. Cities move like clockwork among differing factions of religion, guilds, and alliances. There’s been more than one story about how quest-important NPCs just died because a thief sparked a gruesome street-corner massacre. But world building isn’t just humongous, living and breathing civilizations. One of my favorite worlds is Bowser or more precisely Bowser’s guts. As a Honey I Shrunk the Kids framing device for Mario and Luigi, the brothers explore Bowser’s body at a microscopic level and believably travel around his bones, interacting with the “world” in fun ways. If Bowser starts chugging up water, the bros can reach new areas. If Bowser gets his lights knocked out, you hit an exposed nerve which wakes him up.
And of course I need to reference Monster Hunter, which I’ve been playing non-stop since release. You might think it’s just all hunting big monsters, but there’s some interesting lore in the background such as the legends of old heroes who established the guilds through their heroism and the bureaucratic processes behind the scenes that keep villages safe from powerful elder dragons.
This month’s prompt is about your favorite worlds. From planets permeated with craziness like Borderlands‘ Pandora to the entire galaxy of rich culture that’s responsible for Mass Effect, we want you to share with us why you love these picturesque worlds with, what else? A community blog!
To participate, just start a new blog and title it “World building: [your blog title here]” and go town on it! A regular blog? Sure! Enough pictures to fill a slideshow? Awesome! A couple of heartfelt sentences? Eh, I wouldn’t do that. So let’s see those blogs and maybe we’ll push them to the front page!
Um, well, I’m going to go back to Monster Hunter now, okay?
