okay so where's the quarry. quarries don't fuckin go anywhere man, I don't care how dead your ancient twats are, that's a big fuckin hole in the ground within transport distance of everything. where is it, bitch. show me the fuckin quarry
kodp/six ages gets a lot of points here for rarely/never actually showing you the villages but through context and culture making it so easy to believe that they are real, working places that you never really question it
also for being about cultures that are kinda-to-very xenophobic (in a generally insular cultural way rather than oppressive/racialised) and thus when they see some weird shit they don't go "cool ancient ruins! Let's live here!", but instead "this place is strange and therefore scary and dangerous, let's get out of here" more often than not
...while also having gods who encourage exploration and learning, so you can still overcome those fears if you're careful about what stones you overturn
it's probably cheating at this point to include six ages in any discussion of fantasy games because those games have been operating on a whole other level for nearly 30 years.
(which is helped also by the established tabletop world they're based on itself being another 30-odd years old)
also also yeah obv a village management game explicitly about culture and interpretation is a very different project to an open world game of any kind, never mind an action-y one. It's not a fair comparison for several reasons
@sinvega
i like how Stonetop (tabletop indie rpg, pbta style, still slightly unfinished) takes basic adventure fantasy but situates it in the context of "you'll need a bunch of lumber if you want your village to build a mill" (but you have a standing compact that you will only harvest game and dead wood from the spooky forest) (also you will need an engineer)