Worldbuilding is important because it provides context for the gameplay or the story to be meaningful, let alone good in.
You can sometimes hit the right notes by aiming directly at the atmosphere or whatever, but it's very hit or miss, worldbuilding is the vehicle to get there reliably.
It also *is* the kind of story that doesn't explode, violently, when you unleash a player at it, so it's unique in not growing at the expense of gameplay.
But more than that, worldbuilding is the kind of story that can *aid* the gameplay, instead of just not harming it.
Typically, when player looks at a game, they learn to parse it into tokens.
Tokens are whatever makes sense in terms of mechanics.
However, effective worldbuilding allows games to resist tokenization by blurring the line between what information is relevant and what is just meaningless window dressing, allowing you to actually take the game in instead of playing with tokens. Why? Because it can be used to generate meaningful, structured information beyond systematized, mechanical context - it isn't limited by whatever resolution your mechanics runs at and it isn't limited by your abstract systems. It can be used to convey important information using subtle and unexpected cues, that the player can and will miss if they focus on parsing fucking tokens. This means that if you actually use it instead of just having it as pretty backdrop, player will no longer be able to afford not to take every word and every sound and every pixel in because they will no longer have a reliable and easy criterion of what is and isn't important - the thing is, you need a model according to which this information makes sense, you need this model to be bigger than your mechanics and bigger than you can convey explicitly (else it'll just be tokens all over again), yet you need it replicated in player's head faithfully enough to be usable - without such model any extra information will effectively be white noise. This of course overlaps with simulationism (which is also based on applying this logic to mechanics itself by relying on player's preexisting mental model to approximate mechanics so that it doesn't need to be explicitly conveyable and memorizable even if it needs to be implemented) but if you take simulationism far enough, you end in a worldbuilding land - both exploit the fact that the devs and their audience have something in common - they are humans inhabiting same physical world and preequipped with complex mental models and heuristics of how stuff works - to avoid implementing a lot of very complex relationships in terms of mechanics - for example a game doesn't need to understand how details of NPC's face model or geographical location relate to some strings of text but you can still use it to let an observant player avoid a nasty trap or reap a splendid reward.
Worldbuilding allows gameplay to effectively become informal in a way not unlike it does in a PnP. It's a powerful magic trick with no tradeoffs, not using it is plain fucking stupid.
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And it's not like we 've never discussed sperged furiously about this kind of stuff here before.)
And that's, by the way, is one of the reasons original BG wasn't particularly notable in terms of worldbuilding. Morrowind, and even Skyrim to some extent managed to make for example blahblah lore books more than just window dressing by allowing player to extract information you could put to practical use, like getting a roomful of daedric gear.
We all love to harp on how we love our games cerebral and out of reach of a common plebe, but without worldbuilding and simulationism they won't.
If you can allow yourself to think in tokens then it matters little whether you get your quest compass displayed on HUD or need to follow some easily formalized algorithm to visualize one. The games will only get smart if you can no longer be sure if the quest compass is actually pointing somewhere, let alone where.
Worldbuilding and simulationism get you "Eureka!" moments too, and, BTW, I *have* seen an otherwise clever attempt at this fail depressingly by not being accompanied by (in this particular case) simulationism.
Mass effect 1 did a fine job at world building men. Mass effect 2 and 3 did a fine job ruining it forever.
Then suddenly Ass-ari. It's like all that worldbuilding decided to commit suicide.
The appropriate place for World building is in the first chapter of a richly documented manual that comes with the RPG.
It's not *the* place for worldbuilding, but it's certainly *a* good one. I sure loved my phat manuals.
If world building is king then Oblivion (...) is to be fapped by most...
Why would you fap to a game that's most notable for shitting all over series' worldbuilding, breaking it nearly beyond repair?
Immershun is pure marketing bullshit spew by game reviewers and PR guys who dont know shit about games but aspire much to film reviewers. If you are immersed so much in such settings use by game, you got SERIOUS problem with your mental health and games' importance should be bottom of your priority scale.
We are talking about games with length of tens of hours, not a film with 3 hours, top.
Suspension of disbelief is crucial for any fiction.
Anyway, if you're not caring about it and still play SP games, then you're effectively obsessing over a bunch of abstract tokens doing meaningless token stuff.
It's unhealthy. Go outside, meet someone, maybe fuck someone, do something useful or at least go fap to something. Seriously, stop.