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.

  • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
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    9 hours ago

    If we’re including fan games for preexisting games, I so far absolutely love Pokemon Empire, the Reborn style difficult fan game set in a region that basically just finished a full-on civil war and you and a friend are finally able to return to the region. Not really spoilers since you are basically told that in the first part of the game.

    I am not gonna give away spoilers if possible, but the region feels like it’s divided after the war, which gives it a more real feeling than any official game or basically any fan game. Various NPCs question whether things were better before the war, some want the old monarchy back in power, some are more in favor of the new government, etcetera. It feels less like a typical run through the gyms, defeat evil team, beat elite 4 and champion style game so far with what I have played and how far they are in development.

    I like how the writers didn’t just decide to make everyone into a hivemind of “villain team bad!” ( or more than likely just ignore them, like in majority of the official games ) and have people who support them and people who start to question whether or not the villains are in the wrong or not.

    I also like how in the tilesets they used, some parts of the region look like they are wartorn to a degree and are a region that is starting the rebuilding process.

    I wanna say more things, but then I’d be spoiling stuff and I really don’t wanna spoil things for this game.

    • ICCrawler@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      The fuck. I’ve never heard of this. Haven’t heard anything that interesting in pokemon since years ago back when I was using smogon university to dig into the meta and play on some online simulator where everyone just locked their pokemon at lv50 and could choose all their IV/EV distribution, natures, and move loadouts for the ultimate meta experiance.

      • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        The fun part about this is I didn’t know it existed until maybe a few years back when someone I watch on yt who plays pokemon fan games and ROM hacks ( HeroVoltsy ) played it. And even then, I think I only found out by scrolling through his playlists.

        Will say, just like a lot of fan projects like this, the game requires you to join their discord server if you don’t already have the download link. Sadly probably one of the best and worst ways to try and keep the project going while also keeping the corpo lawyers off their back and also being accessible to the majority of people.

        Can’t say I know what simulator you are talking about, though. I think the only one I know of is Showdown.