What games have what you’d call really good worldbuilding, and what in particular do you like about them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of geography, a backstory, flora, fauna, inhabitants, technology, and often if writing speculative fiction, different peoples. This may include social customs as well as invented languages (often called conlangs) for the world.
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.
How so?
Hard to describe. I started to feel the same way about the real world as I did about the world described in the books. Like the high tech, low life concept - just because we have shiny things does not mean we have a good life. And developing a tendency for rather diverse and/or weird friend groups who band together to fight for our place in this world. I mean, the books obviously crank everything up to 11, but the prower structures seem very similar.
I was reading Shadowrun books about evil megacorporations who are mightier than nation states and indigenous liberation movements against them, so I paid a lot of attention to real world politics when I read the news about stuff like NAFTA and the EZLN or the MAI agreement.
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.