Video games excel at creating fresh new worlds for players to explore, but they can also be valuable windows into more realistic locals. While plenty of games simply use historical locations and conflicts as backdrops, others put the necessary effort into faithful recreations of their subject matter.
The interactive nature of games means that accuracy can be difficult to maintain past the initial set-up, but some developers have found creative ways to keep their sandboxes closed just enough to maintain historical relevance. Whether it be studying photographs to recreate roads and buildings from World War II or using historical texts to study the behaviors of ancient civilizations like the Romans or Egyptians, these games succeed in blending educational accuracy with entertaining gameplay.
Mount & Blade: Warband - Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars may not be as commonly represented in video games as conflicts like World War II or various theaters in the Middle East, but Mount & Blade: Warband - Napoleonic Wars brings the era to life with incredible accuracy. The game's long reloading time for firearms and inaccurate weaponry show that machine guns aren't needed for tense battles. Furthermore, this game is one of the few that lets players step into non-combat roles like drummer or ensign. In a similar fashion to real life, people in these roles offer essential morale boosts to their allies that can turn the tide of war.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 builds on the foundation of its predecessor to build the most historically accurate interpretation of the 19th-century American West ever seen in a video game. While Rockstar Games fictionalized the specific towns and names in-game, everything else in Red Dead Redemption 2 is based on reality. Several characters are based on real people, the social climate is accurate to the era, the most common firearms are represented accurately, and even some of the specific missions have players carrying out crimes based on real, historical outlaw activity.
Civil War II
Contrary to what its name seems to imply, Civil War II is indeed about the bloody 19th-century conflict between the American Union and the Confederacy. While several Civil War games accurately set up the most famous battles and people from the war, Civil War II succeeds in realistically implementing some of the bigger-picture issues of the Civil War.
Army movement and combat management are certainly necessary for victory, but players will also have to consider less common obstacles like how much money can be printed before inflation becomes detrimental or what the best way to implement an embargo is. The result is a game that is as close to the harsh realities of one of America's deadliest wars as possible.
Medal Of Honor
The later games in the Medal of Honor franchise left most of their historical roots behind, but the series began as a relatively grounded representation of World War II. Medal of Honor: Frontline is the most realistic of the bunch, and it has players fight through various battles of World War II's western front. Steven Spielberg, who directed Saving Private Ryan, helped the development team by providing access to the authentic weapon sounds and firing patterns as well as his military tactics consultant, Dale Dye. These details helped bring the entire game to life, but everything comes together particularly well in the game's harrowing depiction of the assault on Normandy Beach.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
The European Medieval era inspires many fantasy role-playing games, but few of them try very hard to represent the realistic struggles of the time. Kingdom Come: Deliverance trades more popular western European settings for the Kingdom of Bohemia in the 1400s. While the game has plenty of action, injuries come quickly and can easily turn deadly.
Combat isn't the only time the player character is at risk, though. Players need to worry about eating food, drinking water, and keeping track of their provisions as they wear down or spoil. All of this takes place in an open world filled with buildings and landmarks inspired by reality.
Europa Universalis IV
It's difficult for grand strategy games to be historically accurate because the way events unfold is up to the player. That being said, Paradox Games' Europa Universalis IV does as much as it can to reflect reality. While certain groups may flounder or flourish in ways that don't match the history books, the issues and events that players have to deal with take inspiration from real advancements and crises.
Of course, that doesn't mean that players won't end up with a wildly unrealistic story, but the problems like rebellions, technological advancement, religious tension, and war that need to be navigated for victory attempt to honor historical alliances and happenings.
L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire's crime narrative may be a work of fiction, but Rockstar Games used its experience with open worlds to faithfully recreate Los Angeles circa 1947. Instead of only trying to recreate the general feel of post-war America, the developers used hundred of era-specific photographs and map data to bring the City of Angels to life with as much accuracy as possible. Historical accuracy isn't limited to the game's buildings, either. Cars handle as poorly as they did in the '40s, several social conflicts affect the story, and there are references to multiple real-world crimes that actually happened.
Brothers In Arms
Many World War II games trade historical accuracy for more engaging gameplay and narrative flow, but the Brothers in Arms franchise sticks as close to the facts as it can. The developers attempted to recreate the present battlefields as faithfully as possible with era-relevant photographs, and they consulted several historians to make sure the game didn't contain any significant oversights or anachronisms.
The game's developers also traveled to the present-day locations of the game's missions to ensure that the environments were laid out correctly and represented what real soldiers saw during World War II. Locales like the Carentan church, the house at Dead Man's Corner, and the intersection at Saint Comet are examples of the development team's attention to detail. Each building is accurate down to its stonework patterns and landscaping.
The Assassin's Creed Series
The Assassin's Creed franchise has had its ups and downs, but none of the base games have put much effort into historical accuracy. However, this changed when Ubisoft added the Discovery Tour mode to Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey. This mode was designed for use by teachers as an educational tool to teach students about ancient Egypt and Greece. Discovery Tour lets players either walk around traditionally or automatically move between points of interest paired with narrated informational accounts of how the object or area ties into real history.
Rome: Total War
The Total War franchise has successfully branched away from history with its Total Warhammer series, but entires like Rome: Total War continue to serve as viable educational tools. The story mode presents players with context for famous battles from Roman history, and the various combat units behave like their real-life counterparts.
The game's developer, Creative Assembly, studied various historical documents accounts to understand Roman tactics, and the game represents its subject matter so well that it was used to showcase battles in the television show Time Commanders.