While us #Gaming folks make ourselves at home here in #Offtopic (thanks again for that), I figured this would be a good time to talk about other homes in games.
The Hub area of a game is often to closest thing us player call home between our adventures, right? Sure, they don’t always have clear lodgings for us, but they’re that safe place to come back to.
What’s your favorite, or a good runner up? What’s a hun you wish other companies would look at? What would you call home in a game universe?
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I don’t think it’s a “hub” in the traditional sense, but I really like how The World Ends With You handled Shibuya. See, in TWEWY, Neku & Shiki are tasked with completing seven trials set by the mysterious Reapers to win the Game, with the punishment being the ominous sentence “fail and face erasure”. Well, these trials all take place within the city of Shibuya, but each one only lets you into a particular place of the city. For example; During Day 1, you start in the Central Crossing. Trying to go right bumps you into an invisible wall. Trying to go up, and there’s some creepy red hoodie dude in the way, so you have to go left, to the Statue of Hachinko, where you meet Shiki, which unlocks the upwards route from before. Day 2 lets you go from the Underpass, left to a small area I can’t remember the name of, and finally up, to the Statue of Hachinko. In the later parts of the game, when the city opens up, you end up having a mental map of the place, that the game slowly introduced you to in small chunks. Just from Day 2, you learned the route from the Central Crossing to the Station Underpass. It’s a great system.