It’s definitely better in Morrowind, in large part because Michael Kirkbride was a lead writer on that game and was the source of some of the weirder aspects of the lore for that region. Check out the Sermons of Vivec if you want a taste for some really out-there fantasy writing in that game.
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I can’t explain it without heavy spoilers for The Talos Principle, but there’s some fun stuff in that game’s expansion pack, Road to Gehenna.
Road to Gehenna is set in a part of the IAN simulation inhabited by generations of the AI who failed to pass the test in the main game. They’ve built a tiny society with discussions on a message board you can read on the in-game terminals. They argue with each other about what they should be doing. They speculate about how humans used to live, extrapolating wildly from literature and communications in the IAN database. They even write stories and draw art.
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It runs the gamut: when I said some of it is dry I really mean dry. But there’s tons of great reading to dig into if you put the time in. And, of course the thrill of collecting books of which only one or two copies in the world exist. If that’s your thing.
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Fatal Frame 2 mostly, and correctly, gets attention and credit for being genuinely terrifying, but my favorite thing about it is the way the game builds the feeling that you are in a real, once-living village by intertwining the main narrative and plot progression - the village’s story - with little vignettes for the village’s residents you encounter as ghosts that give some insight and perspective into who they were and how they lived and died.
A lot of survival horror games from the PS2 era - the peak of Japan’s output in this genre, imo - did something similar, using lore and world building to flesh out their surreal settings, but I think FF2 does it best because of the way that personal touch grounds everything.
Destiny, Dark Souls, and Borderlands all have tons of these in there. None are essential, but all give you more of an idea of how the world actually is.
I have a love/hate relationship with these kinds of things. I love that the devs take the time to add these & build out the worlds like this, and that you have to seek it out. I hate that it takes time to do that; I mostly want to plow right through a story and “beat” the game.
It’s one of those unique things that games can do to really cater to all players. For those who want to blast right on through, it’s optional content you can read about later if you really want to. For those who care about it, it’s all there for you to explore & gather.
The vibe of the series is so wonderful and unique, they do such a good job of bringing that whole micro-scale ecosystem to life! Pikmin 2 is an absolutely amazing game and I fully recommend it, it’s one of my top 5 games for sure. I’m personally really hoping that Nintendo ports Pikmin 3 to Switch since I missed out on it from not being a WiiU owner, but I’ve heard it’s also very very good. Pikmin 1 is also great but it shows its age more and is far less forgiving due to a 30 day time limit. So if you were to try the series I’d recommend skipping that and going straight to 2 or 3.
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It feels a little cheap to bring it up because its been talked about a lot recently, but I think Hollow Knight does this extraordinarily well, to the point where it somehow recreates for me the feel of the first Dark Souls better than…well, Dark Souls.
I think that’s why I’m enjoying how Octopath Traveler is doing it – as a natural part of the gameplay, not hidden away in a codex or grimoire. It’s still optional-ish, but it’s more integrated, something you’re expected to do, and not sequestered three levels deep in a menu.
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I was going to say Shenzhen I/O, for its wonderful emails, but my heart has to go with Hitman (2016)
(but the emails in Shenzhen I/O are pretty great)
might i sugest agin, a skul-gun for my head
For real though Deus Ex (original, never got into the newer ones) does a superb job of this with its emails especially
The Dishonored series has a lot of little snippets that I enjoy picking up, and I think it’s really nice that, aside from notes, you can usually find duplicates of books in case you’ve missed them. It’s especially great because they don’t try and throw a whole book at you, just a excerpt that sort of gives you an idea for what the rest of it’s probably about. It’s kind of great in terms of placement, because of course there isn’t just One Book in One Place all the time. Special shout out to The Heart of the Abyss in Death of the Outsider, for very obvious reasons.
I really like the a lot of the Terminals and Short Stories in Bethesda RPG’s like Fallout 4. In fact what kind of persuaded me over to the idea of Fallout 76 is that a lot of stories will be like relayed through audio tapes and such for while it may mean unfortunately no more dialogue focused quests like Brain Dead and the Ultra Lux it will mean Bethesda will really lean into their storytelling strengths as a developer and give me some messed up comedic stories like Vault 75.
Like a lot of the examples here, I tend to like the “scattered media” approach to world building (Deus Ex, Dishonoured etc etc etc), even if it tends to end up with me getting obsessed with hacking all the terminals / lockpicking all the boxes to get more paragraphs of text…
That said, I think I most enjoy the worldbuilding where you mostly get the world via the characters (say, Invisible Inc.'s fairly broad-strokes cyberpunk-noir character bios; even if my favourite thing in the setting is that the black-market is apparently run by an enhanced domestic cat.)
I’ve found myself really enjoying the world building in the Dishonored series. The journals, audio logs, and other items are all great, but I especially like that you as the player kind of get a hand in building the world through the morality system. Taking the consequences of someone like Corvo or Emily’s actions into account and having them play out in the world is really rad to me, epsecially because it’s kind of taking a look at privilege and imperialism
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Hollow
Knight
