What is the best way to make a great video game?
What is the single most important thing you need to consider?
One word – Worldbuilding.
One of the greatest things I learned at Lucasfilm and I have to emphasize One thing about learning – you never learn from people at the bottom from mediocre people from mediocre companies and bottom feeders.
You only learn from the best in the world and frankly, no one else has anything to say really.
I’ve worked for and with (not literally) sewer companies when it comes to their vision their accomplishments and so forth and I have spoken to many mediocre bosses & people I’ve worked with, and not a single lesson was worth it other than don’t ever work with people that are other than the best in the world.
Anyway, the greatest biggest single consideration you need to have when you make the greatest video game ever made is Worldbuilding.
The greatest thing that George Lucas created and his company Lucasfilm, was an astonishing Worldbuilding that even the dismal performance of Disney can’t yet destroy.
When the entire thing makes thorough sense, from the tallest buildings to the tiniest plants to the nuts and bolts and the rivets of the spaceships. Every character is well grounded in the world, every character’s action comes from someplace grounded in the world and goes to a place also grounded in the world.
What does a great filmmaker do? Take for example Ridley Scott or the other great director Luc Besson. Or Stanley Kubrick? Astonishing Worldbuilding. I was recently rewatching The Blade Runner movies and also the Dune movies.
Everything makes sense even if it doesn’t make sense. What other world has incredible worldbuilding, unforgettable worldbuilding?
That will be the Matrix series, there was my life before and after the Matrix series. The Matrix even invented words that we now use everyday. Images that we will never forget.
Authors rely on the same scheme – grand worldbuilding. Just think of Tolkien, Dumas, and Tolstoy. It comes out of it a feeling of a place that is not this place. When we finish reading a great book a great story series we step out of the imagination of several titans circling a fire together.
And this is why I always say don’t go on YouTube to find out how to make Video Games – rather read great books, watch astonishing movies and think of epic stories taking place in worlds that are going to become the thing that you want to do.