Hubworlds have become increasingly more popular in the hacking community. I have only played Frozen Throes and Cerulean Coast thus far but know there are more out there. Obviously due to the hardware difference, these games handle it different than the Mainline FE Games. But also different from one another, which makes it an interesting topic to discuss. Both about the main games as well as how you as creators and players of the fangames or other SRPGs you played tackled the Hubworld.
How the maingames do it:
Ever since Fates we have a gurantee that we always have to visit a hubworld in between chapters. This comes with pros and cons. The only modern game without such a mechanic is Shadows of Valentia, which is a remake though and instead took us inside of Dungeons and villages, the latter in a Visual Novel Style. MyCastle was small and easy to walk through, SoVs approach made every new area something you wanted to explore and some of them were pretty small and quickly done.
At first I saw Three Houses approach as a logical step in development, since it takes the 3D View from Fates and makes the whole place actually explorable from that PoV. Nowadays I dislike hubworlds because:
A- It takes (me) too long to do everything that seems important to help on your journey.
B- It lacks the multiplayer features MyCastle offered.
C- While with clever routing both an optimal playing as well as a casual player who does multiple playthroughs can make a routine on what to skip in order to solve things as fast as possible, I deem it bad gamedesign if the best solution to solve problems caused by it is to ignore them - Why is it there in the first place?
Three Houses was built around the Hubworld so much that the story has suffered from it. There were logical flaws (which isn’t bad if the game makes up for it) and over the course of a 80+ h playthrough things became repetetive. But, you can solve it very easy by spamming the option to eat food with your students - its even the most rewarding action! So compared to the latest hubworld it seems a lot faster for me at least. A while ago I’d blame the hubworld for the lack of proper mapdesign, though now I think - They were more focused on how to make the hubworld work, rather than implementing it in a game that has entirely different gameplay. Its the execution that was bad, not the hubworld itself. They clearly wanted to do something with it, every NPC and character has new dialouge for each chapter and it feels lively enough.
Engage has the opposite problem. Here they focused on the core gameplay and failed to implement a good hubworld. Everything that made Three Houses Hubworld special is missing in Engage, and on to of that its very impracticle. For the most important parts of the hubworld (arena and the ring chamber) you have to go into a loading zone. And in between certain actions are both real load times and waiting time. The latter being → waiting for character animations and lines you heard often enough, waiting for the moment you can skip the battle, waiting for the “Win/Lose” + Exp gain animations, waiting for the moment you can skip the bond dialouge (or listening to it), skipping through the unlockables for every single level, repeating this a sceond time if you want to bond past Level 5, onwards. This is a process I think many players have to do multiple times at least a few times during their run because this is the best way to inherit skills to your unit. It is a normal thing that shouldn’t take that long, as it helps you to strengthen your units. Then there is also the Sommie with its buggy animation which at least in the start is important to get bond fragments (later on I ignore it due to time). All of it feels strangely unpolished and with a lack of thought compared to Fates especially. Like, why have custom clothes, if you can’t even use them 90% of the time? And why do you spend the most valueable recource on it? I also say that cooking and the support actions are important, though the latter can be skipped and both aren’t as time consuming. The place is also very huge and everything except the shops is scattered around. You spend easily 20+ minutes if you’re not speedrunning or just wanna game without planning out every step. We are humans, humans sometimes change their mind and remember there are other things they could do… And thats before you even get to buy equipment. There are so many tools but too many in total so it starts to become work, even without the loading zones.
To be fair, in Three Houses you also got to warp you all over the place since its very huge as well. However I’d argue that it feels not as slow as in engage, though this could be because I am more familiar to Garreg Mach than Somniel atm so I won’t make a judgement here.
My personal wishes for a good FE hubworld are:
-Not just one Hubworld.
Engage let us explore every map once we’ve beaten the chapter which means they can fit more than one explorable map. Fill these maps with shops and rumors that unlock quests, maybe even place recruitable characters for later or connect multiple places via sidestories. If there isn’t a nearby city or village, let the army camp in whatever location they are in. That way they could even return some form of customization as in MyCastle. I want the hubworlds to enhance the feeling of a journey and a camp would be mobile and important places like big capitals or even ruins of a battlefield would invite the player to explore. If its always new, it doesn’t become repetetive, you might even want to return at some point. And while I don’t mind the hubworld to be in a different pocket universe, why not be creative and let our crew travel in an airship if it needs to fly? Not to mention that some places might not be revisitable due to certain events which adds strategical descisions as in the limited shop offers of Radiant Dawn…
-Less is more.
Its enough if there are shops and a training area or something. Presents kinda misses the point if they spawn very often and you have to give like 20 or so per character. Instead let them do jobs that are done offscreen to let them bond with each other (hunting for meat, fishing for fish, training sessions for exp). Minigames could be extras in the main menu but since they never unlock mandatory stuff I would prolly ignore them. Just don’t tie them to important loot. However, if they have lots of ideas, tie that with my first wish → give different options depending on where you are. Help farming on a village, go into a fancy restaurant in a town, go hunting if you are in a forest, search water when in the desert. The options are limitless, just don’t overrun the player.
-The world shouldn’t be bigger than nessecary.
Every single place should be reachable within seconds and not require long loading times. I’d prefer one longer wait time to load the whole thing after every chapter over many small loading times inside the hubworld. Including the mentioned skippable stuff. Try to make it so that the player doesn’t think that the 20 or so minutes they spent there felt like a waste of time. At best they should be just as fun and strategic as the main game. But not in terms of “How can I continue to play the game as fast as possible without losing out on things that feel mandatory?” And while the time you spent there should be as short as possible, it is more important that the time feels like fun rather than work. Its a difference if I have to skip through the same repeating things multiple times or if I move around items in the prep screen.
-If it doesn’t make sense to include a hubworld for the way the game is built: Don’t include one.
If its just there to be there, it does more harm than anything, especially if its executed poorly. A better solution (for me at least) would be to bring back the menu from the Tellius games. Everything here is like a big prep. menu but still different. It is enough - And if we still need to have a hubworld, give those who don’t want to interact much with it the option to use a menu. Again though, if you need a shortcut to make it bareable… Why is it even here?
-If FE4 Remake should ever happen, please leave it alone with hubworlds, let the castles stay menus, it seems like it fits at first but please, please don’t, it only sounds like fun until you realize that you’d have to stop in the middle of a giant chapter multiple times to do exploring and stuff.
What are your thoughts on hubworlds? What FE-like games with hubworlds have you played? What aspects about those do you like and dislike? I would include more fanmade examples but even the two I mentioned I couldn’t complete yet because my Backlog is terrible. And the only other SRPG with a hubworld that I completed is Stella Glow, which uses a menu.