ITT vidya worldbuilding green or red flags>giant swords sticking out of the ground>giant skeleton remains (especially in the desert)>ancient ruined civilization that used to be high tech Ironically these are all red flags that used to be green before they were run into the ground, now if someone thinks it's a good idea to use them they're probably uninspired and derivative as fuck
>>739067814It depends on how they are executed. WoW was just shit with it.
>Giant sword>No giant bodies, or some giant elder who is old and weakShit game>Game excuses the lack of giants and no day and night cycleTERA did this
red flag: originium/unobtainium/femto/Xinium/aether material or energy that the entire story's conflict revolves around, but then the story is about human factions bickering with each other while ignoring and getting destroyed by this material/energy
>>739067895I think real world saturation is an important factor that demonstrates how out of touch a dev/writer is, for example a subverted gritty fantasy world used to be a sign of a forward thinking worldbuilder, but after GOT popularized it as a setting to the point it's the default these days, it's good to be vary of any creator who thinks they're making something worthwhile just by following the biggest trendsNowadays creators who are creating straightforward honest fantasy worlds are a bigger green flag than those trying to make something "original" and subversive at any cost
>>739067814What exactly would be a good story to write in regards to the giant blade sticking out of the ground?
>>739068724Most don't even bother, they just make it a random background element for cheap intrigue
>non-Earth setting uses the Gregorian calendar and monday-sunday weeksJust make some new fucking month and day names up, it's not that hard, plenty of people have done it before you
>an ancient evil awakens
>>739067814Yeah, there’s last time ancient high tech was acceptable was BOTW. Anyone doing it in 2018+ needs to fuck off.
>>739071346It was cringe in BOTW too, zoomer.
>>739071346Already long played out by the time of BOTW
red flags>ancient civilization just uses greco-roman or mesoamerican architecture>hell = a cavern with lava
>>739067814any time travel crap other than dilation within relativity.
>>739067814>giant skeleton robot in the desert>that is also god to people who hate his kindYou're a red flag, faggot
>>739072227Showing hell at all is a red flag to me, ruins any mystique the world might have
>>739073216>dilation
Honestly anyone who treats worldbuilding as a discipline and not something that emerges on its own is a red flag
>>739067814I love giant skeletons, I love imagining them when they were alive. I wish more games had giant ambient creatures that you can walk under and around.
>>739067814All of them are fucking kino
>entire premise of the story is centered on searching for a missing person
>>739079594giants are retarded. oh yeah, im so big that the biggest trees are like blades of grass to me and mountains are like speed bumps. how does such a creature exist without destroying the world by merely existing? how does it survive; what does it eat or drink? or, what insane god created such an impossible creature and for what purpose?
>>739080097Like you know better than god
>>739080097Idk how does a human sized entity powered by ordinary human food output icbm levels of power with their spells? It's magic nigga the square cube law and all that jazz can be bent if not ignored.
>>739067814>fantasy world turns out to actually be a post apocalyptic earth set in the far future
>>739068724Some of the coolest settings don't bother to justify their crazy shitAllagans secretly being behind nearly every cool geographical feature in the world is a big reason Final Fantasy 14's world building has gone to complete shit
>>739067814Brutal Legend actually did all of that and explained it really good
>>739082225It was also made at a time before the tropes were fully worn out
>>739071346it was already run into the ground within the Zelda series itself by BOTW after SS just did the same trope. shit was lame. and then TOTK did it AGAIN but with a totally different ancient civilization than BOTW. god I hate nu-Zelda.
>>739067814Total grimdark doom & gloom without any relief. It was sort of novel when Dark Souls did it but after a million Souls games and derivatives, it's played out. That kind of total, oppressive darkness stops being effective and just becomes one-note and boring when you have nothing to contrast it against. You need at least occasional moments of lightness and warmth for the dark stuff to really hit.
>>739067814>>ancient ruined civilization that used to be high techused to love this as a kid, but then it gets dull real fast when you see it the thousandth time. I at least respect any store that never elaborates on it and keeps it forever a mystery.
>>739067814red flag: real life politics/agendas/ideologies mirrored into the gamebigger red flag: US real life politics/agendas/ideologies mirrored into the game
>>739068060I miss TERAThose thighs are to die for
>>739085016>You need at least occasional moments of lightness and warmth for the dark stuff to really hit.DS2 did this well with Majula
>>739084094Marathon bros win again.
>>739067814You don't have to explain everything in your world or story. Just throw in some shit you think looks cool and fans will latch onto it and create lore for you, like in FromSoft games.
>>739067814>ancient ruined civilization that used to be high techI hate this one holy shit
I think the last time the "ancient advanced civilization" thing was done well was in Mass Effect with the Protheans because it plays with the trope in so many ways >they actually aren't that ancient, they're the latest in the part of a cycle>they actually didn't build any of the advanced stuff everyone thinks they did, they also inherited it from earlier>they weren't a noble enlightened empire that seemingly existed solely so they could leave cool stuff for the current civilization but actually expansionists conquerors who only happened to be the most dominant race at the point of the cycle reset
>>739082092Solatorobo.
>>739067814Giant skeletal remains will always be kino>>739080097We're giants compared to insects and mice, retard, yet they exist just fine
>>739085636t. brainlet
>>739067814
>>739068724Setting where black holes suck in material and are white holes on the inside that spit that matter out into a smaller universe. Blade came from a warrior who fell through a black hole (hero chasing villain to the other side, villain who got black hole'd and stuck in smaller universe, maybe just some poor sap, could be anything) and either traveled the new cosmos or was marooned on the planet after getting shat out the white hole careening at faster than light speeds and ending up on that planet which formed after billions of years but it felt like way less time for the guy since he got spat out so fast. Everything in the new universe is smaller than his but is made of more complex elements or something like how star metals work. Anyway it doesn't have to be all that, it could be anything as that's the point of fiction. Like others said, explaining too much can ruin a story so you have to pick and choose where an explanation ends to leave at least a little for the viewer to think about.
For me the biggest red flag is making every supernatural thing like gods and other species and whatever just humans with different shapes. Like that is the peak of uncreative but the people who make those stories are like "[fantasy race or god] is deep because...they're just, like, a person, you know? that's what makes them so much more meaningful than if we had [given them a different level of intelligence or different aims than a human would have had in that being's position]." Fucking hell, and they do it ALL THE TIME. I don't even hate it as a concept, like everything in Discworld has a personality but that's for comedy and isn't playing itself off as deep, I'm talking about shit like taking Lucifer and just making him a mildly morally grey human man in a suit or the DMC cartoon where most demons are just good boy muslim refugees with regular human personalities. Awful worldbuilding. Humans are not interesting enough to be every single thing.
>>739080638God doesn't exist and neither did dinosaurs.
>ancient ruined civilization that used to be high tech >applied retroactively to ruin something that never required an explanation
Fixing the Halo lore by adding in an ancient technologically advanced race known as the forerunners
>>739071462>>739071734>>739084523Cope
>>739068724Sword of a giant woman
>>739088630White guys who grandstand about playing kids games are the jeets of white people
>So far the setting I'm building has no redflags from this thread
>>739089270Sorry but Hitler X Trump: Grand Adventurejourney is only really going to appeal to this board specifically
>>739089665Oh fuck
>>739089270Oh it has red flags. There are always red flags.
>>739067814>thousands of years pass>still European medieval age
>>739088630Play a Switch for the workin man
>>739090715This one is kino when done well
is a big shipwreck in the desert an ick or good
>>739069852I personally think that's absolutely retarded. I know a little about astronomy, making a calendar system that makes sense is real hard work.If you're just going to call thursday orsteinsday you might as well just call it thursday because all you're doing is calendar cosplay, you might wear a suit but you're still thursday underneath
>>739067895this, wow always pulled another "this was the villain ALL ALOOOOOONG" bullshit every expansion.
>>739088329I agree but damn you need to chill
>>739090715that's pretty much what happened in the actual europe, they remained very medieval until the 18th century
>>739068060>Tera mentionedMiss that game
>>739068724The sword is actually a spaceship but it's been so long nobody has any concept of what that is anymore (it does still look exactly like a sword though) and your people are not native to this planet.
>>739093474To be fair with AI you can probably get a decent calendar that’s seemingly plausible for a fictional word in one prompt. But the problem is that if the game uses the calendar in any meaningful way it can get annoying for no good reason. Just treat Monday as a cultural translation of whatever their real calendar is very much like you don’t complain that they’re speaking English and not some conlang
>>739093474>a setting can have dragons and giants and people conjuring fireballs and talking tree people but it must still have 7 day weeks and 12 months of roughly 30 days each because otherwise the astronomy wouldn't make sense
>>739082092Chrono Ark, combined with the in-universe lore being literally made up by the local pedophile groomer schizo to justify hanging out with a 10-year old for thousands of years.
@739093790Don’t ever reply to me again
>>739093738>Just treat Monday as a cultural translation of whatever their real calendar isThat's even what Tolkien did, as autistic as he was. He had entire separate calendar systems he created for elves, men, and hobbits, but realized how annoying that would be for the reader so just stuck to Gregorian terms in the stories, justified by the books being a translation.
>>739068724The sword is a giant sword used by God whose corpse formed the world. It is said one day, God will rise from the dead and wield the blade in a final battle against the Evil One.AKA Bionicles but Mata Nui has a fuckhuge sword stuck in him.
>>739093612I won't chill, now look at this prime hebe.
>>739067814the giant sword sticking out of the ground was actually an ancient ruined high tech ship piloted by giant skeleton remains (in the desert)
>>739069852If it's a Japanese game, it's difficult because months are simply number + moon. Shichigatsu is "7th moon", so as long as there's a lunar cycle, there will be months (which is derived from "moon"). Similarly, if there's a sun, days will derive from that. This doesn't necessarily state the length of a day or a month or say how many are in a week or year, but they're inevitable. Japanese simply allows month names to work in any world because they aren't actually names.Now in English, this gets a bit more painful. September, October, November, and December used to be the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months, hence their names (Sept Oct No Dec) until Julius Caesar (July) and Augustus (August) got their names shoved in. January is the Roman god Janus, and really most of the months from January to June have all sorts of origins, but they imply histories through their etymologies. But that's the whole thing when creating a fantasy world, because it's not reasonable to have to create entirely new languages and accents that take into account an entirely different history. We have so many words with etymologies that only exist because they have specific cultural associations. English itself derives from many other languages.
>>739094195That's just Xenoblade
The Titan stuff in WoW always felt a bit gay and kingdom hearts in an otherwise refreshingly grounded fantasy world. It was ok when it was shrouded in mystery but they blew their load way too early with that stuff
>>739095423>If it's a Japanese game, it's difficult because months are simply number + moonThat wasn't always the case, though. They could make unique fictional month names if they really wanted to, but just like us they usually don't bother because of either fear of alienating the audience or uncreativity.
>>739095957The traditional month names aren't as well known in Japanese, at least from the people I've asked, but I still like them.
>>739096135Yeah generally they're known to exist but not many people could actually name all of them. 皐月 gets a bit of use in other, albeit rare words, it's the one I see the most of.
>>739073448Every single time I play this game I fall into a 200hr nation-building epic and end up wishing there was just one more layer of every game system. Kenshi 2 fucking when goddamnit
>>739097045I've seen 師走, 如月, 弥生, 皐月, and 霜月 off the top of my head, but I probably wouldn't have been able to name them all if I had to.
>>739079594Subnautica is easily my favorite exploration game, just because it does it has so many setpieces that dwarf the player and even the Leviathans of the game.
>>739067814>ancient ruined civilization that used to be high techThis has a lot of potential but shitty writers always fail to capture how unique this kind of thing can be.>medieval fantasy, while rummaging through ruins you find a metal door affixed to the ground>you have heard of this before. it's called a Buncor, but there's few stories of them>yank the Buncor door open. search around after seeing this extremely luxurious underground living quarters>find high quality Medu-Sins, tablets and syrups far more effective than any healing potion you've ever been served>there's remnants of some kind of advanced bow made of metal. it uses miniature arrows made of what looks like copper>there's another advanced bow. this one doesn't use the miniature arrows, but it summons lightning strikes where its pointed>the remaining modernistic gas lanterns which light the room seem to carry no heat, nor are lit by flame>you think you saw an arcane construct, but it looked more sentient than arcaneinstead it's always>WOW THESE PEOPLE WERE HERE BEFORE US! We can read their extremely vague historical records and that's all!
>>739067814>>giant skeleton remains (especially in the desert)YupSucks
>Akira Yamada is a normal high school stu...
>>739082092>Fantasy world is just one plot of land dotting the skies>there are millions of them allwith their own unique cultures and histories>the real world is far below and is enraptured by a weapon used to obliterate civilizations that become too powerful for their own good>Time travel
>>739079505Trails?
>fantasy world has slang derived from baseball>reference to other games
>>739093873Azar had fine taste, is all I'll say.
>fantasy currency is Gold>sci fi currency is Credits
>>739068724>Sword belonged to a god who defeated the demon king 20 kajillion years ago>There's a town by where it pierces the ground, and halfway through the story you have to climb up it and go through a dungeon on the hilt>However, if you do a bunch of postgame stuff, the god returns, pulls the sword out of the ground, and has a boss battle with you>If you win you get the sword, albeit shrunk down to a normal size, and it's removed from the map
>>739067814>in the future, the rich LITERALLY live above the poor
>>739067814>In the future, citizens are taxed and if you don't pay them, you get instantly killed by a hyper competent extremely deadly teleporting strike force of silent and violent government drones heavily doped up on whatever experimental drugs they can get
>>739067814I love forests with giant mushrooms.
>>739067814the biggest red flag is that the author didn't read any history, anyone that tries to craft a world drawing only from other fictional settings creates nonsense. look no further than all the japanese media set in a pre-modern west. The fashion is napoleonic, the armour is renaissance, the weapons are medieval and the food is out of season
>>739067814>>giant skeleton remains (especially in the desert)>>ancient ruined civilization that used to be high techThese two can be fine as long as it's done well.Starsector is a good example of an ancient ruined high tech civilization done well. The entire sector basically functions based on ancient tech, who has it, who can make it work, ect. Most of the ships are domain blueprints thrown into domain forges with the entire power balance of the sector being based on who has domain tech. The strongest faction having one pristine nanoforge and a synchrotron core, with the other major powers in the sector being a league of nations centered around a single planet with a single pristine nanoforge making them nigh untouchable and a rebel miltary dictatorship considered irreplacable for the sectors fuel supply because it has a single synchrotron core. Hell there are irreplacable ships that were produced 200+ years ago still being better than anything that can be produced now and being extremely selectively fielded because of that.
>red flagmetric system with no option to change it, and where it makes no sense in-universe. means the devs used an off-the-shelf engine and made no effort to adapt it to their needs, which means they cut corners in other parts of the game as well
>>739067814>red flagWomen soldiers
>>739088329read up on divine madness. the greeks came up to that conclusion thousands of years ago already
>>739098597...What?Game name?
>>739100995Ast;LibraI whole heartedly recommend it.I accidentally spoiled you on a very important part of the end game lore but you won't understand it for about 100 hours. I will also provide you one piece of advice; In the dark castle where a girl asks to accompany you, deny her that request.
>>739068569THISOne more humans-only grim and gritty "realistic" world where peasants are dirt people and everyone important is a backstabbing noble and imma crash out. That shit is so cringe man.
>>739067814>left the sword sticking around with no explanation for 8 years>HAHA, WhAT sWoRD? >tease explanation in a teaser trailer>left the sword sticking around with no explanation for another fee yearsWhAT sWOrD?
>>739101084Looks... uncanny, I'll check it out thx.
>>739085636Its retarded that none of the artbooks printed this map at full res.
>>739084094yes, but cube
>an ancient evil or threat was imprisoned by a character or civilization or group that was more powerful than the main characters in the current point of the setting>the main characters are able to completely kill the ancient evil something that the past ones could have done before but didn’t for some reason
>>739068724
>>739068724Does xenoblade count?Humans live on the giant.One giant is big enough to house sapient multiple races with their own culture and bunch of different biomes
>the first guy you play as who seems to be the typical everyman MC-kun is NOT the chosen one>he doesn't get instagibbed at the end of the prologue or anything, he still sticks around and is of great aid to the actual chosen one, but it's not his story and he knows it.
>>739101876Why is Smithy a giant sword anyway
>>739067814>the world has regions that are just clones of existing IRL regionsthere's so many fake Arabias, fake Africas and fake Indias it's unreal
>You can/do/will be rapedGreen>Cant get pregnantRED, even/especially in male
>>739068724The planet is actually an egg for a divine being and the sword was stabbed in by a fallen divine that was trying to stop it from hatching
>>739067814I don't know about giant swords, but giant skeletons is ALWAYS kino.
>>739101492Trust him on this. Don't be fooled by the graphics, and don't play the schizophrenic demo. It isn't an accurate slice of the actual game.Astlibra is amazing.
>>739102219Smithy is the creator of the sword, the sword itself is its own entity.And its big cause Smithy wanted to fuck shit up(it was probably to destroy the Star Road too)
>>739067814Not a worldbuilding flag but a green flag I really liked otherwise, being a play on a trope>silent protagonist actually speaks at the end of it
>>739067814>giant swords sticking out of the groundIt was cool when they did it in Darkshore in vanilla wow.
As you approach the giant skeleton in the dessert, it gets up, dusts itself off, and power walks away.
>Go up to giant sword sticking out of the earth.>Click on it.>It disappears. What happened to it? None of the NPCs around react.>Keep playing the game.>Check inventory.>0_0
>>739075202Imagine hating dante's inferno
>>739068724an ancient god had a sword shaped cock and tried to fuck the planet, but his giant sword shaped cock got stuck
>>739102219Smithy is a blacksmith from outer space who creates living weapons, the giant talking sword is his "spaceship" or something like that not sure. I forget it's actual name.
>>739068724if it hit azeroth right in its nuggets and the whole planet was like yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeowch owowowowowo MY BALLS hnnngggggggggggggggggggggg SWORD TO THE BALLS, YOU GOT ME YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD, SWORD STRAIGHT TO THE OL NARDS GOD I WOULD BE LAUGHING IF I WAS NOT IN SEARING PAIN FROM THE GIGANTIC SWORD THAT I CAN CONFIRM PIERCED BOTH OF MY BALLS, HAHAH GOOD ONE, SARGERAS NICE NO BALLS GUESS NOTHING TO TELL THE GRANDKIDS ILL NEVER HAVE OOPSIE GUESS ILL GO ADOPT A CAT OR TWO AND NOW I GUESS MENOPAUSAL BITCHES ARE FIRMLY ON THE TABLE, WOW, LOOK AT US, OLD MEN NOW, OLD BALLESS MEN and scene
>>739067814One Piece's lost civilization is kino. It's not ancient, it's just removed from the history books entirely because the world gubbermint is fucking evil and malevolent.
>>739068569true, crimson deserts setting is a breath of fresh air after all the other safe-edgy grimdork fantasy universes.
>>739100519>americansjesus christ mutt, just learn to use the metric system, its not hard, it makes perfect sense, it scales perfectly.
>>739090715For most of human history, life was basically the same as it was 200 years before.
>>739103292I'm not a Yank, but what's the point of your gif when the chungus shown is clearly appearing on a German TV show?Also, I reckon an imperial measurement system can fit better in some settings.
>>739067814Absolutely terrible question & I suspect you did it on purpose or you're a bot. You make a massive amount of assumptions and then make a vague ass conclusion based on them. You're either a retard or you're just fishing for replies.
>>739103157
>>739103292obligatory reply that the webm in this post is a german woman in a german show.
>>739102572So the thread knows, that's literally what's happening in the OP's image.
>>739105018>Also, I reckon an imperial measurement system can fit better in some settings.There are some use cases in aviation. Like using feet for altitude to better distinguish it from other measurements. And having only positive temperature values is useful for some equations.But other than that there's no point to it. And the month/day/year will never not be turbo retarded.
>>739100341King Arthur fails all of that, then.
tired>irregular seasonswired>irregular day/night cycles
>>739103158wait retard until we reach the one big piece of shit of ending and its again lost alien shit that can make nuclear reactors n shiet
>>739100341also insert nordic shit and unga bunga runes
>>739093682Yeah I read that one Warhammer 40k novel as well.
>>739105317They already have confirmed nukes and island sized boats. It's only a matter of time before they have unbreakable metals and Poneglyphs capable of time travel.
>>739088387NTA but if god isn’t real and neither are dinosaurs what was the world like in prehistory?
>>739099669One of the things I like about PM setting>Guns? Sure use a gun but the tax on bullets is at least three mansions worth a magazine.>Yeah, you better expend it on augs and combat training so you don't die the moment close the gap on you
>>739067814Good thread anon. Green flag for me is historical accuracies of daily life.
>>739068123Fuck you nigger, Command and Conquer is gigabased.
>setting is just the author's barely disguised fetish buffet.
>>739067814>giant skeletonsare awesome
>>739106320Skeleton hands wrote this post
>>739068724The issue is that most of these stories with "giant sword sticking out of the ground" just do it because it looks cool and doesn't really have any interesting context.Xenoblade 3 did it pretty great. For context, Xenoblade 1 takes place on the corpses of two planet-sized giants (whom are still standing) and the giant sword there is a horizontal bridge embedded in the side of one giant, connecting the two. It's been a battlefield/bridge between worlds for endless millennia.Pretty much since then that world's been destroyed/rehashed/overwritten/corrupted with Xenoblade 2's world, and so all of the landmarks around both wolds have been scattered into new world.The sword ended up completely embedded vertically in the ground and became the tallest object in the world, and a faction escaping the main conflict climbed to the hilt of it and built a city out of the remains of an ancient fortress from the first game.
>>739068724Nothing, its a shit context
>>739068724Some people thought it would look cool so they just built it like that
>>739106240This reductionism is exactly why shit is so fucked
>>739105395OP is too far gone
>>739094195>It is said one day, God will rise from the dead and wield the blade in a final battle against the Evil One.
>>739067814Wtf this is common? I had a whole story idea where giant skeletons are the backbones to a makeshift village.
>>739067814>big fuckoff crater in a mapis my favorite
>>739115246Yes, you're less original than you thought
>>739115763Starfield appreciator
>>739067814>13 years old>exploring systems in Space Empires IV>FUCKING BLACK HOLEfucking jumpscares
>>739068724You put a giant sword there because it's cool and worry about The Lore™ later.
>>739079779not just games but all media this is one of the worst tropes ever
>>739093682I quite enjoyed that story.
>>739106185KANELIVES
>>739122663Name five examples, SH2 is considered one of the best stories in vidya
>miserable dying worldDS was a blight upon game worldbuilding
>>739067814i will agree that they are red flags UNLESS they are explored and explained. then they are green flags. if they are just some backdrop set piece, dull.
