Half-Life 2
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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Yeah, that is a great classic example. There's a lot of environmental storytelling so you can get an idea of what's going on, and what it is is very interesting, but it doesn't get in the way of the game or its story.
Hollow Knight.
Absolutely can’t get enough of the world and all the interesting characters and hidden lore.
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Pillars of Eternity. I really appreciate that they must have had some Anthropology majors on the team, especially for II, because the worlds feel much more exotic than other RPGs. It shows up just how generic Medieval Fantasy most RPGs are.
The tropical Roparu (?) society with its caste system is particularly interesting. The interaction of the various factions is believable. And of course the pantheon is well though out.
The downside is that they can be clumsy about exposition of the world - especially in the first one, you get these enormous lore-dumps.
I can't wait till they add true turn based combat to Pillars of Eternity.
I played about 3-4 hours and the loved setting and the world, but the real time combat did not work for me.
I don't mind real-time combat, but it has to be in third person.
I couldn’t agree more! It’s a fantasy game but it explores some really cool concepts; like colonialism and freedom vs order.
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Subnautica and Raft
Wait Raft has lore and world building?? I love that game but I never even paid that close attention. Guess I need to go look now.
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Deus Ex, anyone?
This one is it for me. The game really does so much with so little. The reality of the game is that it is a roughly linear sequence of closed levels (with some hub levels thrown in) that feels like a cohesive, connected world. It’s absolutely incredible!
Yes, I go back and replay the game every few years. Its grittiness is definitely a bit silly to me now, but when I was a kid, I was enchanted by it. While the Jensen games did not have the charm of the OG, the first was still decent, and it's a shame Square Enix drove it into the ground with the second Jensen title.
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STALKER. The Zone is amazing. Currently replaying Call of Pripyat for my third or fourth time through, a year after playing the shit out of Heart of Chernobyl, and I’m absolutely loving it.
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Rimworld
Outer Wilds, especially with the DLC.
Mass Effect.
Shadowrun - it had a tremendous effect on my actual worldview (as did other cyberpunk works). The near-future cyberpunk setting offers plenty of opportunity for satire, being rooted in this world makes some geography and history relatable and mixing it with fantasy elements does not only make it more colorful and varied, but also prevents unrealistic stuff from breaking my immersion, because it does not pretend to be realistic.
As a young nerd obsessed with RPGs and William Gibson's work I was outraged at the idea of putting fantasy into cyberpunk. But then I picked up a damaged copy of the Shadowrun rules from a bargain bin and was blown away by the worldbuilding, they really found a way to make it all fit thematically and logically and I ended up running the game for years.
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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - probably the most cliche answer possible, but Troika really did build a game that took you to the world of vampires in LA in the early 2000s.
Arcanum - a fantasy world undergoing industrialization with technology being in direct conflict with magic.
UnderRail - A society stuck underground connected by tunnels between towns/cities and nodes. The writing (quests/characters) is not that great, but the world-building is top notch.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
I'd add Redemption as well. It's super rough now, but I played it 20 years ago, and I was amazed by all the lore. I didn't know until after I finished it, that the game was based on a TTRPG.
Dave the Diver
Fromsoft and Larian are great at this.
BioWare 20 years ago was guaranteed. We might never get another BioWare game I would purchase.
"Zanzibart, forgive me".
Nah, Fromsoft has great vibes. But the worldbuilding and story is all deliberately obscured because of Miyazaki's love of sci-fi he couldn't properly read. That makes it a trove for obsessives but it can't really be called good.
It’s definitely good and it is done in a way that can only be done in video games. Too many video games depend on passive exposition instead of finding actual lore in the world.
So your reasoning for saying it isnt good is because you actually have to work to see it instead of it being spoonfed to you? Is that right?
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I hope you don’t mean Baldur‘s Gate when you say Larian and BioWare. edit: downvotes seem to forget that the Forgotten Realms worldbuilding wasn't done by the licensed games.
World of Warcraft; Azeroth (the planet) lore is quite detailed and fleshed out - building upon the foundations of the original RTS trilogy.
It’s a bit of a shame a lot of it gets swept under the rug every major expansion and patch cycle, so it’s hard for new(er) players to catch up.
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NetHack
@
Eh? It has almost none, and what there is is rendered completely inconsistent.
Underrated because the game itself was often kind of lacking in terms of solid foundational RPG systems...
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
Pretty good attempt at putting a Middle Earth type world ahead a few hundred years in the midst of an Industrial Revolution.
Really thoughtful stuff like the labor exploitation of certain races like orcs, with quests like a half-orc you can help start a labor union or help the shop boss shut down the nascent union.
Rainworld
spoiler
All living things are trapped in "The Cycle", and no one likes it, they all want to die and be free of the burden of living. They called this "The Big Problem".
To try and find a solution to "The Big Problem", people* built 3 AI that would constantly be running to try and compute a solution to The Big Problem. This requires a ton of energy, and an ocean's worth of water to keep them cool. The AIs are generating so much heat that it evaporates oceans worth of water, resulting in periodic violent rainstorms (thus the name of the game). People moved to structures built above the clouds to be safe from the rain.
One day, one of the AI finally solved The Big Problem, notified the other AIs that it was solved....and promptly died before sharing it. The remaining two AI (named "Looks to the Moon" and "Five Pebbles") continue to iterate on solving the problem, but both have all but given up hope.
You play as a Slugcat, a species specially evolved by the AI to squeeze through pipes and keep their systems clean.
*I said "people", but I don't think it's ever established what planet you're on or what race of creatures built the AI.
There is a ton of detail I'm skipping...
...but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn't care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn't care if you "finish" the game, it's just there to be experienced.
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Alan Wake. And on a grander scope almost all of Remedy's stuff. They put everything together where it feels like there's more out there. There's no seam in the metaphorical stitching. It feels like even when you reach the end of something there is more.
From less of a deep standpoint? The 3DS fire emblem games. They do some really cool stuff that connects them together.
I always wanted to read a book on the first Bioshock game. I couldn’t really get into the gameplay so I never got far into it or the sequels, but I love the premise idea a lot.
Hyper Light Drifter.
Not a word in the entire game. Still a masterpiece of storytelling.
Anachronox always stood out to me, really underrated game. I'm not sure about particulars since it's been so many years, but the combination of the graphics style, the script and the humor in it, the characters and the design of the world all fell together really well, along with the great sound design and music. It felt authentic.
Signalis
Elden Ring.
Or any of Mitazaki's games for that matter.
They write so much shit down in making the games, but the player barely gets to scratch the surface with what they actually present in-game. This is actually really awesome because it lets you piece it all together without straight up telling you every detail.
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Elden Ring has the deepest, most complex worldbuilding of any game ever made, and it's not even close. For anyone interested in worldbuilding I strongly urge you to watch some Elden Ring lore videos from The Tarnished Archaeologist to learn about the techniques that the Elden Ring devs use to put incredibly deep and subtle worldbuilding into their games. It's changed the way I think about worldbuilding in any context.
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