Foundation is so underrated. I feel like nobody’s read the books, could just be my friend group. But I do like world building a lot, which is why I like Foundation and Tolkien so much.

Swap Dune for The Expanse and add Cyberpunk and that's my list

I don't like sand lol

It's crazy, the history of the world is precisely the best part of The Witcher. If it were just monster hunters, it would be a generic game that would easily fall into oblivion. The political plot makes the story mature and similar to the reality of our world, this is what makes The Witcher so unique.

Yes its very unique and imo one of the best, if not the best, representation of the "monster hunter" occupation in any fantasy setting. Some of the "monster hunters" I like are just hunters of a specific species that somehow expanded in their scope. cough cough Buffy

To add to your comment The Witcher series, but like everything else you've mentioned they are novels or are based on novels or in the case of D and D are settings with many novels worth of established lore.

In terms of games, I'd say Caves of Qud has similar vibes and similar lore and aesthetics. Lore is about as clear too.

I've always felt that so much of Morrowind's worldbuilding was taking huge influince from Wheel of Time; specificlly when it comes to the prophocies, the cycle of rencarnation, the villians, and how much the Ashlanders remind me of the Aiel

If we're going to be unfair and start listing books and things, I'd say Jack Vance's Dying Earth series hits a lot of similarly weird high fantasy notes, and is fantastic.

Florid prose and humorous tales of dickass wizards and lots of horrible people getting what's coming to them, set in an ancient, decadent world that's falling apart around them all, and nothing can be done about it, so they all just live for today. Cugel the Clever is a terrible person, and I love him.

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Speaking of thieves with borderline personality disorder, back over videogames way, Thief: the Dark Project and its sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age are really good at giving you a world that feels both mythic and yet somehow very real.

A sort of gestalt of western history and legends crammed into one big sprawling city. Thief III continues the story, but was a step down in pretty much all respects other than visuals IMO.

Forgot about Arcanum - all the charm of Fallout but in a steampunk fantasy world.

Pathfinder is basically a huge well-written novel. Same people who made WH40k: Rogue Trader, which is a surprisingly similar in that regard

Ha love It - came here to say malazan and bam it was already there

To everyone reading this message, Malazan is a must read

Witcher games overall have to be one of the best at it. They not only have the books and tv shows to support the lore, but the games actively enhanced the material. There is no objectivity in taste of course, but it’s my favourite.

The witcher games (but 3 on the grandest scale of course) have so many interesting sidestories too that actively engage with the world's lore. Even the simple monster hunting contracts are fantastic, because they often revolve around a fantasy creature of that world and part of the contract often involves researching your quarry, how they come into existence, function, how to counter them etc. It makes them an active part of the world and not another mini boss you kill for loot and money.

Tw3 is the most engrossing game when it comes to lore. If the dialogue was a tad more realistic and facial/body animations were more natural, i could just watch the cutscenes all in a row like a movie. And the way they spread things out and obscured things visually so it always felt like you were really in a unique area was masterful.

The one thing i could never get over is the obsession with ciri before it actually tells you the real reason why shes important. You play the first half of the game as a witcher then suddenly youre trying to save the universe and it felt like 'whoops I wasted a LOT of time' but then again, it felts real and unscripted.

Great list. Bioware creates epic and cinematic games, and have made some of the most fun and immersive games I've ever played.

But I think Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny and Fallout are some of the most well thought-out and creative examples of world building. Their worlds feel so 'lived in', that I kinda forget they're games.

CD Project Red and Deus Ex strikes a superb balance betwern those two.

I'm glad they sold the rights to Ubisoft who's going to do a hard reboot of hollow Knight into a gritty crime drama set in the Japanese underworld with Kiryu as the protagonist who has to go around and punch a lot of bugs

you just described lost ruins lmao

What even is a Metroidvania?  Sounds dorky as can be.  

There is a mod for both Crusader Kings 2 and 3 that recreates the Elder Scrolls universe in-game. I don't know how much of the lore is accurate and how much the mod team needed to invent, but there's an entire 1000 year long timeframe that the game allows you to start in and the latest start date is set around 500 years before Skyrim takes place.

There's even an era where Cyrrodiil gets invaded and conquered by Snow Demons from Akaviir and it's all represented in-game.

The first iteration of the mod for CK2 is finished and allows you to start anywhere on Nirn (Akaviir, Atmora, Pyadonea, etc.), but the CK3 version only has Tamriel so far and I don't know if there will ever be plans to include other continents, but the fact that a bunch of people got together and through sheer willpower and love for the series they managed to create something that captures such an extensive history of the Elder Scrolls world is pretty amazing and they all did it for free.

There was at one time a course on Scandinavian and Skyrim history course at Rice University, a private not for profit university in Texas.

Found it, it looks like it's not being taught anymore: https://courses.rice.edu/admweb/!SWKSCAT.cat?p_action=COURSE&p_term=201320&p_crn=27968

wish they would do books like 40K. seems like such a a missed opportunity

Yeah the lore of elder scrolls very much feels organic. It doesn't feel like someone writing lore. It very much feels like the lore was made from people who lived it.

yeah the actual writing is solid, not too complicated, simple language with the odd word from the old toungue, which you can usually extrapolate based on the context, I normally read anything quest-related and take the time, everything else I've been ignoring for now (which I regret) but will try to cover lost ground offline, I managed to download a full book with all the books on an epub earlier today so I can work my way through that

Haven't played Avowed, I take it?

My only complaint is that the overall chronology of the timeline is WILD. My favorite example being that humanity's introduction to the galactic civilization is recent enough that Anderson not only was the first human spectre candidate, BUT ALSO A VETERAN OF THE FIRST CONTACT WARS.

Just, how, how in the hell do the turians even let humans nominate a candidate that literally fought against them.

It's kind of a minor gribble, but these things are all over the place and weirden the context of certain scenes. Like Ashley being treated as an ignorant racist for being weary of aliens, when her dad literally fought in the first contact wars. WHERE TURIANS ATTACKED FIRST AND UNPROVOKED.

Like her being bigoted or untrusting of an individual is still ignorant. But the game treats it like she's being silly for being "raised that way". When again, her dad experienced first hand violence from the first encounters with an alien species.

And then a lot of the ancient history stuff has similar issues but some of that is due to retcons or backfill.

What a grand and intoxicating lore.

You can fill a giant book with the amount of lore that series has

Skyrim was the game that made me go "wait, I could just do that for worlddbuilding, just write a shit ton of books from differing views"

after the 3rd one I realized how fucking hard that was but I still do it to this day. Feels way more organic for me too.

I would collect every new book I found, and have a house with lots of bookcases

they are so cool, what are your favorites?

The corpse of GameRant rises shrieking from the earth…

While waiting for the 6th Elder Scrolls game, Reddit user FartLordMD after 56 years of play time, discovered that the games of the aformentioned franchise takes place on a planet other than our own Earth.

the lusty argonian maid?

> Mario, Alice and LocoRoco are all fantasy, just not Tolkien-inspired. Oddworld is Sci Fi.

Yeah, any work of fiction can be technically put into some genre or another, but I think it's clear what I meant and there's no need to get super analytical about it. Anyway, some great recs here. Thank you.

I actually own Rain World and am fascinated by it. I got pretty frustrated trying to get anywhere, but absolutely plan to go back to it.

wuppo was such a fun game, it felt like it ended at the right time but also should've gone on for another 10 hours

i think this list is pretty solid, can include similar games such as

braid, celeste, do not feed the monkeys, little inferno, return of the obra dinn, hotline miami, thirty flights of loving (extremely short), undertale, and maybe to the moon

all have slightly less than straightforward world building although many are focused more on the game aspect than the world building itself

The Planescape universe, specifically the City of Sigil, is by far one of the tripiest places you'll ever experience. The entire city runs on philosophy because it's located at the very center of the multiverse and technically represents all the possible morality alignments at once. As well, those philosophies often depict 'blue and orange' moralities as opposed to our standardized 'black and white' morality. The whole city follows weird logic where rules and laws exist but you have to figure them out yourself, including a local dialect thats pretty hard to parse if you're not observant.

And if you dive in I have one piece of advice. Do NOT interact with the Lady of Pain. She is the guardian/queen/god of Sigil. She's not really a god, but many worship her like one, and she's probably powerful enough to kill a god if she wanted. But her will is Law in the city. What will is that? Nobody freaking knows, her whims are as inscrutable as her face behind her metal mask. The only thing anyone knows with any certainty is that she is wholly committed to the survival of Sigil.

It's D&D but in a totally different and unique setting. 2nd edition had some really cool settings with this one, Dark Sun, Ravenloft..

The thing is, Planescape doesn't play like a typical d&d game at all. It's much more story driven, with a lot more reading, dialog choices, ect..with combat taking the backseat.

If you ever heard of a game called Disco Elysium, well that clearly took inspiration from a game like Torment. Blending the RPG elements, skill checks with a strong narrative experience, kind of like a gamebook if you ever played one of those.

The Unfinished Swan I haven't heard of and looks like a great example. Super surreal and hard to define(from what I can see anyway). Nice, thanks.

Greedfall... I've tried to edit to explain better what I'm looking for, but it's still very clear Renaissance era with some fantasy, ya know? Like the details may be unique and fascinating, but the general setting isn't anything super unique.

I was going to say ASOIAF. For me it’s the best. Westeros and Essos feel like real places to me.

Agreed! GRRM puts an impressive amount of care into worldbuilding with a lot of influence from real history, which requires a lot of research.

While I appreciate both GRRM's and JRRT's worldbuilding, I like that Martin puts a lot of emphasis on the uncertainty of his world's history with conflicting accounts and questionable sources like the maesters. This parallels reality in which a lot of world history is misinterpreted, embellished, debated, completely made up, or lost to time.

Silmarillion is the same world so I don’t think there’s a point in differentiating. I think we can all just agree Tolkien was a worldbuilding god.

Yeah, Lord of the Rings has absolutely amazing world building, everything is phenomenal.

My man literally wrote multiple history books to support his several fake languages and explain how they changed through time, including epic legends and poems. And that description isn’t even close to doing justice to what he built.

Among other things, he’s made everybody else’s con-langs look feeble forever.