I seriously cannot understand how monster hunter games are still the only games with a coherent ecology for their over worlds. From a developer standpoint, they shouldn’t be hard to implement—at least on a highly superficial level. Just separate neutral mobs from hostile mobs based off a zone so players have a choose between venturing off into places with dangerous territory vs venturing to hunting grounds. Ffs, we already have level bands and levelled areas, how hard is something like this to implement? I’m not even going deep on this like with realistic day/night cycles or mob migration. This is purely the superficial stuff.
Worldbuilders often consider this stuff, weather or not they get it right.
There are a few reasons why it's like this, probably more I didn't think of. You're right though it's a cool thing to do and it makes the world feel more alive when this gets proper attention.
>it's just more effort to do world building
>Game development is a very iterative process, and sometimes whole elements get added or subtracted. If you build the setting with a particular structure in mind it can restrict the process of designing, implementing, testing features like creatures.
>Most games are very focused on game mechanics and any extraneous elements tend to confuse or annoy players who expect anything in the game to be relevant or at least interactive with the tools they have.
>Most games empower the player character to essentially be a walking mass extinction event. Tracking how many creatures the player has killed takes up resources in the save data and has to be implemented in a way that feels natural and fits the game. If things just reset every time you return to an area, especially after you just hunted everything down, it feels very video-gamey and kind of defeats the purpose of having a verisimiltudinous ecology being simulated.
>Games (especially large ones) tend to focus their energy as much on the main features as possible, and tertiary things like more in-depth worldbuilding is generally not considered relevant enough to worry about (especially since people are used to having completely nonsensical settings from an ecological or even geological perspective).
>>45111I hate one page dungeons. All the prep work of keying your own dungeon, none of the fun creativity. Vidrel has such a point about some GMs wasting time prepping pointless factoids that only interest them. I know a guy like that with binders upon binders of notes for an RPG setting nobody will ever play in, and on the off chance they do he's going to bore them to death guaranteed.
monster hunter has it relatively easy because the big monsters have overwhelming protagonism and it kind of opaques the rest of the small creatures, they just program a few simple routines for the big guys, some interactions with the aptonoths or whatever and that's enough to sell you on the fantasy of a real breathing world.