There is a trend in MMOs and roleplaying games to create "be-all" game worlds. These worlds contain a little bit of everything, such as a European area, Egyptian area, Gothic horror area, and so on - just like a buffet with a little bit of every food you can imagine. The world is everything to everybody, and has something for everyone. It is a challenging goal to make it all work together, and it represents a strategy to appeal to every gamer, no matter what the interest. The world taken as a whole is like a giant theme park, with adventure zones covering every possible era of fantasy history, adventuring concept, and sociological structure.
Good examples of be-all world design are Blizzard's World of Warcraft, the original D&D Mystara campaign, and even Paizo's Golarion world setting. In each of these worlds, there are areas covering any type of culture and adventure area imaginable. Of course, the MMO games are a bit more limited in what they can do, but you can see the influences of the buffet-style world clearly in the variety of zones and cities in the game.
Put aside the realism argument against worlds of these types, of course they are not realistic and not based on anything - this is fantasy. The best analogy in a way is the 'real world' with its variety of cultures and lands, but an important difference is that these game worlds typically borrow from every era of history, and create their little version of it in a geographically limited area. Everything works together, and sort of all gets along. A good explanation for why this is so often goes, "Contact is limited between the cultures."
SBRPG never envisioned designing a be-all world for the setting the gaming group creates. Each game world is unique, has a single flavor, and is a one-shot affair. Of course, you can go ahead and create any world you want, and are not limited to fitting in the new creation into an already crowded map. You lose the ability for one group of adventurers to journey to new lands, but then again, every world you create is a new land itself, and any new lands in them are truly unexplored and fresh.
A dedicated game world towards one type of adventure, such as Gothic horror, only lets you play in that theme. The upside is that there are no distractions or escapes either, there is no hopping over to the super-magic kingdom for help curing vampirism, or grabbing a bunch of steampunk weapons to take care of Count Dracula. You are stuck dealing with where you are at, and players need to focus on the world within the theme it was created in. It is a trade off, you lose the buffet of themes and lands, but you gain a focus and detailed world within one unified game world.
All-in-one world design also has the risk of turning the play experience into a Disney-world experience, like a theme park where you go on different rides, experience different zones, and never really feel there is a unified whole to the world. Be-all are fun worlds to create and play in, but sometimes I appreciate a world designed carefully around one theme, focused and coherent, and purposefully not trying to appeal to everybody.
The danger of trying to please everybody, yet pleasing none applies here - some worlds do it, and many others do not. Then again, if everyone else is trying to create that perfect be-all game world, wouldn't yours be different if you didn't? Do what you love, focus on one thing, and do it well.
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