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The TES series in general for its massive, expansive lore.
But Morrowind in particular has absolutely incredible world-building with incredible creativity and originality. There is a reason why so many people keep going back to the n'wah simulator and it's because the world is so rich and fleshed out. So much of the following games was built off Morrowind's stunning work.
As someone whose first TES was Morrowind, it set the bar so high in terms of worldbuilding, I was honestly a bit disappointed with the later entries into the series. Oblivion (more generic fantasy setting) and Skyrim (nordic with dragons) definitely played better, but the worlds were much less unique and memorable.
Twice now I have tried to make a top level comment and accidentally responded to a thread instead... Anyway...
Instead of leaving this deleted I will agree wholeheartedly that while I personally am not the biggest fan of the TES series they have some of the most deep, complex and (somewhat) organized lore there is.
I just wish they would hire better script writers and weren't so afraid of locking content behind player choices. Always having every option available just feels a little silly.
Disco Elysium, such interesting and complex world building beneath the drunken detective murder mystery. Shame ZA/UM ruined everything with the devs and we probably won't get anything else out of it.
I could have listened to the rich lady‘s reality rundown for hours.
Fallout
Mass Effect completely blew me away when it came out. Loved the overall lore about the Reaper threat and how the different species were connected to each other.
Horizon: Zero Dawn was also great in that regard, and the world felt really well put together, even though the lore wasn't quite as deep.
Half-Life 2
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.
Gothic one and two are really good. In the first game you are dropped into a prison colony and very soon a guard will try to extract protection money from you. In any other game the guard would just kill you, instead you will meet another guy asking you for help. He then lures you to a secluded space, reveals that he was sent by the corrupt guard, and beats you unconscious to steal your money.
Another game I will never stop recommending, because of its worldbuilding, is the excellent Enderal: Forgotten Stories. I really like how it depicts the theocratic society of the continent the story plays out in. The story about what initially seems like a standard fantasy thieves guild but is actually a cult that shuns emotion and try to transcend the physical body, is also really good and ties in with the overarching plot of the game.
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.
Hollow Knight.
Absolutely can’t get enough of the world and all the interesting characters and hidden lore.
Cyberpunk has a city that actually feels like a real city to me.
After playing the story through a few times, it's hard to actually stay invested in it anymore, I also did all side quests one run too, and I'm not keen on repeating that. However, 2077 is the only game where I will start it up just to drive around and listen to some music, whether in game or something I pick myself, and then just turn it off. Usuallt for 30-45 minutes. And I played many of the GTAs and all but the first Saints Rows. But only 2077 will I drive around just for the hell of it.
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!
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.
Rimworld
Outer Wilds, especially with the DLC.
Mass Effect.
The Portal games, but mostly Portal 2.
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.
Apart from Mass Effect, Pillars of Eternity, and Deus Ex as others have already mentioned, I'd like to also add:
Grim Dawn.
The conflicts in its Universe feels reasonable, all the factions have their history and reasons of existence, there are beneficial and selfish, but no clear black and white, and everything interacts. The Lore is very good for an ARPG that focuses on combat, loots and built.
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.
Fromsoft and Larian are great at this.
BioWare 20 years ago was guaranteed. We might never get another BioWare game I would purchase.
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.
Dave the Diver
Not sure if it's my absolute favorite, but Pathologic has fascinated me for years.
There are so many strange and unique aspects to the world (especially the Polyhedron, an impossible tower floating above the town) that already make for excellent world building, but when they come together it creates a feeling I haven't felt from any other world.
You know how Lovecraftian horror has a very distinct feeling? The world of Pathologic makes me feel something vaguely similar, but completely unique - no horror or aliens, but the feeling of powers existing far beyond our understanding combined with people who somehow do understand small parts, and the consequences of their choices affecting everyone... it's really hard to put into words, but it feels like it created its own genre.
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.
Suzerain.
I mean, its kind of a given since the game is effectively a politics simulator choose your own adventure romp. But seriously, I don't think I've seen many other games be this detailed. There's wikipedia page level text for countries, individuals in your and other governments, cities, factions, and others that, while overwhelming, also shows just how many factors and information you have to understand as a president of a nation — it adds to the pressure and sense of responsibility that you have to make heads or tails on all of this.
No matter how good intentioned you are as a president, you're still just a person. You're bound to not know everything. You're bound to be overwhelmed. And your lack of knowledge, intentional or not, leads to bad stuff... Recession, losing your popularity, waning influence in your party, broken family life, assassination, all out war with a neighboring country... Worst of all, you are to blame since they're all consequences of your actions.
Better get to reading those entries.
Definitely Kenshi. Rather old title where the world feels somewhat desolated, but so well thought out at the same time. Every place has a story behind it
Kenshi is maybe the only game I've played where the more I played, the more I was like "What the fuck shit hole have I been dropped into. What happened here." And that feeling only increased the more of the world I explored.
"AAHGH WHAT IS THIS LASER BEAM"
"AAHGH WHAT ARE THESE THINGS"
"AAHGH WHY ARE THERE CANNIBALS EVERYWHERE"
"AAHGH THE RAIN HURTS WHY IS THERE PAIN RAIN"
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.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has one of the most interesting world in stories inside and outside of gaming. I hope we will see many more stories set in that world.
The hook alone is great.
Spoiler for the prolog and trailers.
Around the end of the 19th century the whole world broke apart and a part of Paris (called Lumiere in the game) was thrown into the sea.
And this giant "Paintress" started painting the number 100 on an enormous monolith and each year she counts down. And everyone who is that old or older evaporates into ash and flower petals.
So the people started sending out expeditions to find out wtf is going on.
Spoiler for the rest of the game.
The world is actually a magical painting the Paintress' son made when he was a child. For him, his sister and their parents to play in. But when he was an adult their other sister was tricked by "the Writers" into setting a fire which killed him.
In her grief the mother fled into the painting because it was the last bit she had of him. Fearing she would stay in there until she died of starvation the father went in as well to get her out. As she wouldn't relent he started erasing the painting and she tried to prevent that. Every year painting the age of the people she wouldn't be able to save from him onto the monolith.
So we actually have this world of magical Painters and Writers who are at war with each other and it is hinted that there are Musicians as well. And who knows what other artists with magical powers exist in this world. I'm imagining Programmers joining the fray in the future. The possibilities both inside any art pieces and outside in the "real" world are endless.
Trails in the Sky
I got sick about dystopian chaotic worlds that don’t work - where the hero’s journey is about saving the world from some impending ruin, or about preventing a starving dystopian city from being blown up.
In Trails, the conversations you have with NPCs remind you that while you’re on the trail of some bandits or suspicious people, other people are not evacuating, sheltering in fear, etc; they’re living their lives, keeping up to date on modern trends, making travel plans to other countries.
So, so many worlds just don’t have space for characters to have those thoughts. It’s always fear around impending disasters, or how to respond to a fight, or grim poetry about how much the world has fallen into darkness.
It especially hurts that some people live so much of their lives in these fictional worlds that they start to believe people would be like that when they go outside. Worlds like the one in Trails, even if they spend a lot of time being boringly polite, are a nice call back to reality.
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.
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.
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.
Stalker trilogy, stalker 2
Ace Combat. Seems rather dull on the face of it but goddamn are the geopolitics compelling.