"You Are There": Verisimilitude in Gaming

[MechDeus]

It was like right from the start of DS2 they were all:

"Man, we need to go to this place that's far away and will be tough to walk. Let's do it!"
"Oh no, an obstacle, I guess we'll walk to this other place that's far away but still closer to the other far away place."
"Well, looks like another obstacle, so I guess we'll see if there's another far away place that's closer to the first place that's still far away."

I have now lost all sense of where the hell I am in relation to where I started or where I'm going. Maybe if I actually knew these locations I would get it, but I'm like two hours in and they might as be flying to the moon and back for all I can tell.

Anyway, Borderlands 2 also did a great job of putting together a world. The first game felt like they were trying to get as much mileage as they could out of a handful of wasteland and tire pile models, but the second game has more varied locations and locations that are similar but have a unique style that helps tie it together.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Megaman Legends and Kane & Lynch 2. Both took to developing their own senses of place and identity with sell-out commitment. They felt like places where stuff was happening outside of the player's perception. People went to work and visited friends and watched television in there while you weren't playing.

These would be best games if they were as committed to mechanics.

[Thief Silver]

Kane and Lynch gets to suck all the dicks though.

[arjue]

Morriwind nails it for sure. the moment i saw video for the upcoming Skyrim expansion, i immediately got giddy and knew it was either in or near Morrowind by the crab-like architecture of the yurts and the dust storms.

[A Robot Bit Me]

I'll yurt you. Morrowind is like an amusement park made up of only public restrooms, parking lots, the kiosk where you get a map, and one Quiznos.

Kane and Lynch gets to suck all the dicks though.

The second one is a really interesting game. The for-money murderers act like for-money murderers and have the back stories that for-money murderers would. They are broken. They do not play Marco Polo after exterminating profusions of brown people.

Heaps of trash accumulate where trash would heap. Stairs go where stairs go. Apartments are designed like apartments. It is a pretty okay way to spend eight dollars!

[icarusfall]

Halo 1.

Seeing the ring in the distance made all the difference and left a lasting impression on me in regard to World Building.

[arjue]

I'll yurt you. Morrowind is like an amusement park made up of only public restrooms, parking lots, the kiosk where you get a map, and one Quiznos.

It's aged pretty terribly and is fairly simple by todays western RPG standards, but at the time it was incredible.

[James]

Chulip. Someday I'm just going to give in, crack the manual, and power through the game to see the story and its world.

Landstalker. I remember looking at the map fairly late in the game, my first time playing, and realizing that every little pixel blob represented a place I'd been. Things I hadn't paid attention to because they looked like background filler all of a sudden had a story attached to them.

James

[Dolemite]

Shadow of the Colossus. More than most games, it has the feel of a massive, fully-realized, living, breathing landscape filled with wonder and mystery. The amount of planning and work that went I to creating that free-roaming world is truly mind-blowing...cliffs here, a complex ruined tower there, a giant lake with who knows what at the bottom, little random lizards scurrying about, and so on and so on. You really could just forget looking for the giants to slay and just explore for hours.

You named most of the more recent ones that come to mind, so I'm going to go a little further back.

It might be a laughable example by today's standards, but Duke Nukem 3D blew me away with this.

Not a laughable example at all...it's actually an excellent one. In fact, I just beat the Atomic Edition off of GOG a few weeks ago after never really having played it before (except dicking around with it here and there on a friend's PC years and years ago) and I was not only suprised how well it has held up, but also of the complexity and "real" feel of the levels (at least the ones that take place on Earth), which indeed felt like actual locations and not just a strung together series of corridors.

[Dolemite]

Megaman Legends

Another good one. I used to like just going around and talking to the residents of the town while there were going about their business.

Another example is Shadow of Destiny on PS2. Not the greatest game ever, but the developers designed a living, breathing city with specific locales and people wandering about that was presented through the viewpoint of different time periods as you played. It felt like a real place and not just a videogame level.