Hub/Home Areas

[Moonface]

Not including games where a home is a focus of the game such as in Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Stardew Valley, what games have you played or seen that have really good or bad hub/home areas? You know, somewhere that lets you take a moment to collect yourself and maybe gather your accomplishments before you set out for the next part of your adventure. For games like platformers that have multiple hub areas, what one stood out to you most?

SmackDown! vs. RAW 2007 had a sort of hub area where you got your own locker room that you could walk around in and customise. It only stands out in my memory because it's one of the few (if only) hub areas that I was allowed to customise and add stuff to as I progressed through the game.

Spyro has the best hub worlds of any platformer I've played, and it's tough to pick my favourites from each game. Midnight Mountain is my favourite from Spyro 3 without a lot of competition, but the other two games are hard. I love Winter Tundra in Spyro 2, but I find Summer Forest to be the best hub world in terms of actual level design; meanwhile, Autumn Plains is the grandest feeling of the three. For the first game, it's between Magic Crafters, Beast Makers, and Dream Weavers. I tend to think about Beast Makers the most so I suppose I like that one the best?

[King Atem]

Super Mario Odyssey has that whole hub traveling home inside a huge hat contraption where Mario is shown sipping his coffee, reading a paper & you can add things you buy from stores into it from across the different places traveled to. Mario gets changed there & is where his closet is. I think its interesting that it's a hub that travels with you, as it were.

[Dragon Lord]

I think my favorite hub in any game I've played is Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls. I like the area aesthetic and the music is great. It's just a comfy place to chill out in a world where everything is out to brutally murder you. I also love it because of how many newbies get trolled by going to the Graveyard in the back thinking it's safe since it's the hub area.

Although the hubs in the Toukiden games are really great too, so maybe I can't just hand it over to Firelink Shrine. Now that I think about it, I think I'd actually have to give it to the villages in Toukiden and Toukiden 2 overall, with Firelink Shrine being close behind them. I especially gotta go with the village in the first Toukiden game, just because you get to have a Tenko at your house that you can interact with and they are just too adorable.

Honorable mentions: Demon's Souls (great music), Dark Souls II (visually nice), Bloodborne (nice both visually and musically), Outcast Village in Ys 8 (getting to see the progress of the village as you play through the game is fun), among others that I'm probably forgetting at the moment.

[Moonface]

Super Mario Odyssey has that whole hub traveling home inside a huge hat contraption where Mario is shown sipping his coffee, reading a paper & you can add things you buy from stores into it from across the different places traveled to. Mario gets changed there & is where his closet is. I think its interesting that it's a hub that travels with you, as it were.

I had a feeling I'd played a game with a hub where stuff is added to it through your adventure, but ended up thinking I was just imagining it. But nope, this was it! XD

[WR91]

One game hub that I saw and enjoyed but never got to experience myself was "Home" on the PS3. At least I think that's what it was called.

I didn't have a PlayStation 3 (unless you consider the ONE day I picked one up before returning it). But my friend did and he played a free game on the PS3 where you created a person and walked around a town and interacted with other real life people and even got to have your own apartment. I believe it was just called Home but I'm not 100% sure. But yeah, that game looked cool for the time.

[Moonface]

@"WrestleRacer91": Yeah, it was called Home. I always remember Sony pushing hard with it but never managing to get the response they were seeking with it.

[ShiraNoMai]

One of the hub areas I've spent the most time in has to be Diddy Kong Racing's. I would spend stupid amounts of time, aside from finding secrets, pretending to play DMV. There's a one section that overlooks the water/beach area that I used to pretend to park in all the time

[Moonface]

Your mention of DKR made me remember CTR @ShiraNoMai and how fun it is to try and turn the entire map into a track. CTTR was really good in that regard too but in that game you traversed the hubs on foot and they were filled with enough stuff to do that they were really more like levels with races tacked on like side areas.

[ShiraNoMai]

It's insane to me that they'd create a hub world for a kart racer on foot. It makes me think that if I were to design something like that, I'd intentionally make the fields wide enough that it would punish you essentially for wanting to traverse the hub that way instead of by vehicle.

[Moonface]

It's insane to me that they'd create a hub world for a kart racer on foot. It makes me think that if I were to design something like that, I'd intentionally make the fields wide enough that it would punish you essentially for wanting to traverse the hub that way instead of by vehicle.

I guess the idea was that the tracks were theme park rides and so you'd naturally traverse a theme park on foot between rides. It also allowed the game to be populated with NPC's that were meant to be park goers which would be horrible to replicate with everyone in karts.

[Moonface]

Hefty bump but I was reading a discussion about Meridian in Horizon Zero Dawn and how it had a lot of potential to be a great hub because it's by far the largest and most grand looking in the game, but falls apart by being devoid of any substance, and I agree. I thought it being bigger would mean it would offer a lot more, but it just takes a small settlement and makes it larger with the same amount of content. Worse still, all the content you will repeatedly use, the vendors, are all kept together in one spot in the middle of the city, and reaching them sucks because I would say Meridian is the worst hub area I've had to navigate through. It's just a giant maze where nothing stands out so you can't use visual cues to figure out what way to go; if not for the markers of the vendors on the HUD I don't want to think how much harder it would be to not get lost every visit.

Thinking about that also got me thinking if I've encountered other hubs that aren't very good. Another that comes to mind is the last one in the first Spyro game, which is just a circular platform with the level portals on the edges. Insomniac tried to give an in-game reason for it being this way despite the real reason being development time, and while the reason kinda works it's still a bad hub. At least the future Spyro games didn't repeat that mistake.

Anyone else here played a game with a hub they didn't really like?

[ShiraNoMai]

I can't say I've played too many games with hub areas. Reflecting on it, I find hub/home areas betat when they're consolidated and within close proximity to other levels. I think the novelty of larger open hubs loses itself when you're constantly having to traverse through it to get from one level to the next. I do find some games do it better than others, such as expanding the visual interest and giving the player a reason to explore the areas rather than just use it as a long Trek between them to make them feel "realistic" in a way.

I think Glover did a kind of poor job at that task. After each boss level, IIRC you have to bring a crystal back to the central area of the hub to fuse it back with the original. After the first time, it gets tedious. The land or area colorizations aren't worth the effort of traversing the map with the damn ball each time.

[Moonface]

I can't say I've played too many games with hub areas. Reflecting on it, I find hub/home areas betat when they're consolidated and within close proximity to other levels. I think the novelty of larger open hubs loses itself when you're constantly having to traverse through it to get from one level to the next. I do find some games do it better than others, such as expanding the visual interest and giving the player a reason to explore the areas rather than just use it as a long Trek between them to make them feel "realistic" in a way.

Thinking of long traversals, I don't know if it would classify as a hub or not but I guess since it's used to travel to "levels" it can be one; the open world of Burnout Paradise. It's a neat open world and when there's things to keep discovering in it then it's fun, but once all the open world events are done and you're just left with the "levels" it quickly falls apart because of the lack of a fast travel. Having to drive across the map to an event you want to do for fun after completing them all is awful, especially because the game always spawns you in the same starting location so if there's an event you really like that isn't close by, you're forced to always drive for a few minutes to reach it.

[ShiraNoMai]

Yeah I wouldn't call those levels myself, just more sections in the larger area--you wouldn't call the plaza down the road a completely different section to the rest of the city we live in; it's just a small part inside the grand picture.

Now, there CAN be levels inside the big open world areas. Take for example, the shrines and dungeons in Breath of the Wild. Those are what I would call separate from the open world "hub" environment.

[Moonface]

I'm surprised reading through this again that SM64 has not once come up. Does no one here really consider it a good home world and just an okay one?

Lake Flaccid from Gex 3 is a pretty good hub that'll probably be one of the more obscure ones to be in this thread. I like how big and varied it is with each part being themed around its respective level entrance. The only other game off the top of my head that does that is A Hat in Time but I'm sure there's more, but I really like when a hub incorporates elements of the levels it holds into itself. It makes everything feel more connected.