It is easy to conjure up any kind of world, that seems interesting and come up with answers how anything is supposed to work, but the real challenge lies in making the audience care about it. No world created is worth a damn if we don't care. I really like how you took Mass Effect as an example, because this game has a shit load of world lore hidden withing codex entries. But it works, because the presentation feels lived in, where we as players are sometimes drawn towards those codex entries and WANT to know more about it. Perhaps maybe even just to confirm a theory we might have from what we've seen. Therefore having lore is great if we actually do care about it. Worst kind of option is to have lore and require the player to skim through it because some kind of quest is punishing them for not knowing in the first place. The lore is not absorbed because they want to, but because they have to - thus the experience is going to be a little bit of a drag to them. Something I also thought would be an excellent example is Nier:Automata, simply because the game throws you right into the action and struggle with the introduction, where you are thrown into a conflict upon the ruined earth against vicious machines, which results in your own suicide - marking the first time you are able to save the game at all. This is a great introduction into what you are about to experience and sets up everything you are supposed to care about: "WHY". If you struggle through it all just to end yourself as a means to victory you are bound to desire the answer to why this conflict is taking place in the first hand and how it came to those extremes. And the "WHY" is essential to everything regarding this world - the game is always rewarding you if you ask the question why something happens. Because the game - and it's world - is about philosophy after all.

Knowledgevania is how they call them. I have never read metroidbrania.

Good video and point overall, but I don't really agree with the Metaphor example. It never really bothered me that almost no one mentions Strohl's town besides him because I thought it was made pretty clear that it was a tiny backwater town almost no one knew or cared about. Strohl is a "noble" but he's a noble of a small town - like being the mayor of a rural village with a population of less than 1000. Also it's not like Strohl is the *only* person who brings it up - his social link features another person who survived the attack, and implies the existence of others off-screen.

I never really liked the original game. But I do like the new Castlevania DLC that came out. Seems to act more like a traditional game and I found it fun.

Physical currency doesn't make sense in a high crime story? Are you sure?

My biggest world building pet peeve is when the world building doesnt inform characters on a cultural level. Generic fanatsy is the biggest offender for this. So often chatacters raised in a fantasy world think and act like someone raised in a modern culturally protestant 1st world nation, or they think and act like that, but are more sexist/homophobic/classist (but for some reason usually not racist against modern human ethnic groups, instead obvious racism analogues are put on different species or fictional groups), but only in ways that match up to modern culturally protestant 1st world forms of bigotry. Like, whyyyyy. Its so lazy.

Hey architect, Rumble (Warcraft mobile game) did this very well. You don't even have to create a name for yourself until like 5 games. The pacing of introducing new features were well done in that game i think. (say what you will about the game but that part i think was well made). If you wanna see a dreadful example, just play the warhammer 40k game where they direct and force every click for way too long, you don't understand what is good or not, you literally cannot lose a fight and gain 10 different resources all the time, all at once, and you are forced to click every building in the first 5 minutes to quickly introduce all features and crap.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here to consider, but you really undercut yourself by shitting on MGS4 for shallow reasons while playing up Mass Effect despite that series' worldbuilding imploding in 2.

It scratches the goofy goblin gamer brain.

I have no idea what the obsession with fromsoft worldbuilding is for, having a world with incomplete lore you can never actually get an objective consensus on is the most annoying shit ever. I want a complete fleshed out world and history, not scraps that basically give any kind of interpretation one can get. I'm not here to ponder about what happened, I just want the objective knowledge.

I sure love generalizations of an entire industry manifested into ragebait & clickbait titles on youtube videos. Haven't seen enough of that lately

Yea. Metroidbrainias.

this video does a really good job explaining how to best present worldbuilding and lore to players, but says next to nothing about actual worldbuilding

I've taken to calling them enigma games or enigmatic games. Both enigma and enigmatic are defined similarly to puzzle, but focus on the problem at hand being difficult to understand or interpret. I think that fits the genre well.

I don't have the numbers turned off but honestly I don't even pay any attention to them.

So what i'm getting is that you want players to EXPERIENCE a world and it's worldbuilding through somebody and their perspective rather than just wiki article-type exposition Makes sense to me!

9:50 I give my pawns that are pregnant or taking care of their children extra time to have recreation and do whatever they want, I think of it as pregnancy or child leave

It’s a shame how you didn’t mention SS13 in this. Seeing as the events just the average round are like: the head of security arrests someone who broke into cargo, which leaves an opening for a traitor who worked at cargo to assassinate the head of security, of which the traitor is promptly killed and thrown out the airlock after being stripped of everything valuable, which leads to the captain and the company representative making a democratic vote where people vote over making the station’s detective or warden the new head of security, and in the same election over 5 people including the clown, a rat, and the gang of mimes try to steal the ballot box. Yknow stuff like that Edit: and you, the player, during that entire round with that amazing shenanigans was just sustaining the station and warding off death as a shaft miner.

What is even the point of this video if you don't show good games with bad worldbuilding? The whole thing is just "good games have good worldbuilding, and bad games have bad worldbuilding" and like yeah, of course??? The part of the video supposed to showcase that shows only 3 games, and is supposed to make us believe that 1-Starfield is a good game and 2-Death Stranding and Destiny have bad worldbuilding? Total insanity. Also you could just say that you hate reading man 🙏

Number go up is very good for brain juice and gameplay. I’m surprised it took you so long to figure it out.

I see you too are a Fl4k of culture

Some thoughts that I had while watching the video in that particular order without any connection to one another: "All this stuff that’s not direvctly relevant to what’s happening in the plot..." - "Any given setting is only engaging when we have a reason to care about a particular time and place". So what you’re saying is basically "Worldbuilding improves and completes plot and to have a good worldbuilding we need to have a good plot"? This cyclical dependency really confuses me. I mean we need to have a good story and we need to have a good worldbuilding but I can’t see how either is strictly dependant on the other and can’t exist without it. Although of course either improves the other. "Humans being racist space rednecks" - this is the fun line to say but I don’t approve association towards MAGA movement. Not because I support or care for them (or US politics in general) in particular but because calling names and using condescending tone doesn’t really turn people towards you or towards critical thinking (in general and for video games in this particular case) especially when coming from non-political channel. Still in your right to do so of course, that’s just a disclaimer you might want to be aware of. Love the inclusion of Fallen London. One additional lesson I can get from there is that there’s a fine balance to find between showing some information and keeping secret some other. Even if there’s a good reason to care about the worldbuilding/lore, there still has to be enough and good enough lore to explore to actually say that the game has a great worldbuilding. And this exploration process plus some detective work done by the player while they only have few pieces of the picture enriches the new-found lore so much more. That’s also probably applicable for Miyazaki games as much as I know about their lore from barely playing one of them for a few hours. This overall point has been glanced over in the video but I just wanted to phrase it explicitly as I consider it really important to the topic. Spoiler for Sunless Sea: Also damn the Dawn machine: when I first discovered it I was so fascinated and stared at it for a few minutes before realising that I’ve just lost half my sanity. When I first watched the trailer for Shadowlands I was like: what?! I haven’t played any of the story since Legion and the more I listen to people the more I feel like I shouldn’t (I will one day anyway tho).

The thing I like about Vampire Survivors is that it gives all the dopamine of exploitative mobile games but doesn't try and drain my bank account. I can just enjoy the game without having to resist all the calls to spend money, and without the game wasting my time.

Ashley's so space racist she got the most Turian and Salarian votes since Reagen did 45 years ago. God you leftists are so obnoxious. unsub

10:25 ah yes "Bioshock"

This not why i play the game at all......

no matter how many times i play this game i still get scared even tho i know where to expect the threats... this game really dives into the psychological aspect of fear which is far more effective than a few jumpscares

Chess should have black or white start first based on a blind pawn pick like who plays what colour. also I've never thought of baseball as an assymetrical game before this video but huh.

How did Lord High-Exarch Thalamidius, The Shadow' Bane's crusade against the riverlands go!? Damnit. Now you've gotten me invested. Don't leave me hanging like this!

I know people often scoff at gacha's, but Nikke has insanely good storywriting, and many characters have very interesting backgrounds and personalities. And anyone who has played it knows how impactfull just the ending of the tutorial is.

it's always a souls player talking about world building, reads one blog post starts a youtube career over it

Me when bloodborne

I know everyone's sick of hearing about this by this point but this is another thing that Chrono Trigger does perfectly. It's a game that's so good at not only getting the player introduced to and invested in the world in one time and place, but in several different times and their relations to each other. The setting itself is relatively standard fantasy fare (with a couple of cool twists), but the way it's presented to the player and expanded out into the past and the future really goes a long way to make a great story even greater. (I should note that I am currently only 9 minutes into the video, so Chrono Trigger might actually show up in it? Not holding out hope, but if it does I'm gonna flip) Post-video edit: Oh well, like I said, wasn't holding out hope. Praying for some kind of remaster or re-release announcement (that's not the awful steam port) on the game's 30th anniversary this year, to finally make the game relevant again. I played it for the first time in 2020, and it definitely holds up.

World building is generally a waste of time. Unless it's for a setting book for a TTRPG. Then it's precisely what you're selling. But otherwise, it's just a lot of information that will not be seen or which is largely irrelevant. Just tell a good story. Fill out the details as needed. As I've gotten older I've lost a lot of interest in classic fantasy, which is where "world building" is a particular curse. Every upstart author thinks they need to be another Tolkien and _create a world._ But Tolkien stole the majority of his world building from existing folklore and frankly I don't care for a lot of the customizations he made to it. I think far more important than "world building" is for games in particularly to learn to stop faffing about with time wasting details. I _don't want_ extra long cut scenes or volumes of character dialog, since it's almost always just a waste of time. Cut to the chase, get to the f-cking point. Because honestly, most game stories just aren't that good. Some of the problem is that they just fundamentally aren't good stories (they're just stories meant to sell, not to be good). But also it's a lack of editing and restraint. Brevity has value. Focus on the bits that matter, cut the stuff that's fill. Which includes useless world building crap no one but the person who wrote it cares about.

If you like good worldbuilding, check out Nihon Falcom's 'The Legend of Heroes: Trails' series. Some of the best longform storytelling I've seen in gaming. We're 13 games in and each of these games takes place on the same continent with a shared world history. And these are JRPGs we're talking about, they've got long runtimes, even the older ones. Worldbuilding does come through the story, but a lot of it also comes through interactions with NPCs (who actually all feel like real people going about their daily lives since they all (and I mean all) get updated dialogue every time the main story progresses), environmental details, and through actual in universe newspapers and full length novels. It is a sloooooow burn though.

Wait wait wait I wanna know more about High Exarch Thalamidious and his Great Crusade Against the Riverlands

Using Xenoblade 2 as footage for the "boring exposition" thing baffled me a bit, as quite frankly, the worldbuilding was the only thing that game did right.

18:50, "persona 5 is great because it forces you to run around visit shops, catch and pay for public transport" - as a longtime morrowind stan, GOOD I KNEW I WASN'T CRAZY

Describes the beginning of FFXVI without mentioning the, how many were there, 2, 3 porn cutscenes? What on Earth are you doing looking for worldbuilding in a porn game?

“Appeal to a players need to optimize making entry level strategies weaker and less fun compared to other higher skill options” But what I’d the “entry level strategy” IS fun? You just want the game to say “no, screw you, you have to use these other newer strategies or get dunked on”?

This video is fundamentally flawed by assuming that somehow the shield is “less fun” or “boring”. Some of the coolest moments and most fun I’ve had is tanking through killer bosses like consort radahn to save my host, and it requires careful stamina management, and knowledge of which attacks are unblock-able. Just because something is safe or reliable does NOT make it “less fun”, this is especially clear in multiplayer where a dedicated tank makes an excellent teammate for a glass cannon and this is very “fun”.

10:05 song?

Just a fun note, you used the wrong Prey cover art when discussing the game. You used the cover art of the earlier Prey (2006) which has very little in common with the Prey (2017) you were discussing.

"10 things about Skyrim you didn't know"

Casino Logic

5 minutes into the video and i had to pause it so i could go play the game again.

One game/visual novel that does worldbuilding fantastic imo is VA-11 Hall-A, its def worth looking into if you like VNs!

I hate the autistic fascination with worldbuilding and what is "cannon" its all fiction, its not real. Use your brain for something better, you don't know much about the real world. You probably can't name more than 5 local plants or animals, you're a blockhead.

I hate codex in games so much

It's not world building but the way it's integrated into the environment... Thoughtfully. Not just one thing, but many things.