Why is there so little variety of them? Are demographics the problem or the profit motive?
who doesn’t like fire world
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Probably lack of imagination, ease of reusing past assets, and conservative business execs afraid of alienating customers with something weird.
I’ve noticed this happening with big budget movies too. Inception took place mostly inside people’s dreams, but what did the movie do with that? Almost nothing. It was all boring stock FPS settings — hotel room, big city, Siberian mountains. What a waste! Christopher Nolan has no imagination.
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There are plenty of games leaning into messy lunacy now, see the Random names thread
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I thought this thread was going to be about not being able to change window border/color options a la SNES- and early PS1-era RPGs.
Still not sure it’s not about that.
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I mean in one sense this isn’t true. AAA games have I think plumbed basically every biome and environmental category for their pulp adventure-cum-prestige drama settings. Jungles, deserts, snow-capped mountains, small towns, big cities, you even get the Moon sometimes, I mean that’s like all the places. I’m positive some whiteboard guy in every AAA developer is like “we need more environmental variety! People love environmental variety!” during the development of every billion dollar game.
The real problem is the marriage to realism. How can you have Netflix Original Series-quality Profound Character Moments if people don’t buy that the environment is real? Videogames should be pushing for weirdness and abstraction, but that’s no way to win a Videogame Oscar.
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I will say that I keep finding myself thinking I’d love to see more environments that feel like they’re roughly the same scale as reality, and you navigate them at something like the same pace it takes for a human being to walk around (I guess Gone Home is kind of like this).
But then I think about it a bit more and I’m like, maybe I don’t want that.
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Also, considering how acclaimed Katamari Damacy is, it mostly takes place in a typical™ japanese setting, it is the collection of assets, or rather the usage, placement in space and combination of things that give it that wacky feeling, like a few pandas waiting on a platform for a commuter train.
So it is also the good usage of a relatively boring setting that can make things fun, see the giant maps in Katamari when you see after a while of rolling that in the background, robots and faux-totally-not-godzilla-or-kaiju-in-general-inspired monster wrestle, or alien ufos loitering around egypt.
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Let’s take roleplaying games.
How many of them are NOT sci-fi, fantasy or anime, compared to the much greater variety of their board sibblings? I can only come up with one, Alpha Protocol.
What is this setting now?
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Earthbound
E A R T H B O U N D !
E A R T H B O U N D !!
EARTHBOUND play EARTHBOUND !!!
- Earth
- Bound
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voters
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i’ve lamented this for a long time!
it wouldn’t even take any real creativity, as there’s tons of potentially gametic real world settings that no-one uses:
india, modern or ancient
any version of africa that isn’t egypt or a battle-scarred impoverished hell or a single tree in front of the sunset on a savannah
pre-christian britain
britain at any point in the second half of the twentieth century
the soviet union, but not as a generic “evil place where everyone is either sad or a soldier”
imperial russia
mongolia (or any central asian country) at any point in history
even the kowloon walled city has only appeared in a handful of games!
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Really not enough games set in Portugal imho
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with regard to rpgs, i think it’s probably being used as shorthand for “chuuni stuff”: teenagers with powers doing secret stuff at night. persona, tokyo xanadu, dangan ronpa, and so on.
I think the flowering of indie games gives the test to how much this is driven by budget conservatism and I think the answer is: sort of. There’s tons of weird and interesting place-setting in indie space but the ones financially rewarded are very market-driven and in well-explored niches and fantasies, though there is a drive towards new (Firewatch is a good example of a breakout success defined by presenting a novel and entrancing fantasy).
When viewed with the scope of indie games, I feel like games are mining a similar spatial variety as movies, which is to say, limited next to the scope of human endeavor but fairly broad.
If we’re talking about thematic themes, well, we need to start talking about the scope provided by understood mechanics, how well we’ve explored violent conflict and movement but how poorly we’ve explored other human interactions, and look at the slow grinding progress and periodic breakthroughs we see – particularly as the borders are pushed in the indie space.
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On the one hand, I dig this. On the other hand, setting your game in a real-world place about real-world people in real-world history carries a whole heap of new problems, pitfalls, and sensitive issues. Especially if your studio or creative leads aren’t connected to those cultures and places.
Also, if we’re talking RPGs in particular, these settings pose a lot of problems in adapting them to existing RPG conventions, which as an oversimplifying rule tend to craft narratives in worlds where you’re granted an incredible amount of achievable power and agency and eventually gain access to the entire world of the game.
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Someone should make an RPG where you start out as a disempowered political activist and over the course of the game level up until you’re at the vanguard of a movement to dismantle capitalism.
Actually I guess Mother 3 is almost that in some ways.
Bracing myself for some serious Felix snark in response to this post 
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REAL FAKE ANSWER: Because most video games are schlocky genre trash and the major media influences outside video games on both people who make video games and most dedicatedly play video games are also schlocky genre trash.
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I think it is.
Check this out: The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches
Thanks. How is it WRT the whole choices&consequences shebang? Is it like the typical japanese rpg in this aspect or more like Fallout?