[General Discussion] Gamings best ever backgrounds

For me, when I'm trying to describe to another a point in gaming when I was enraptured in the moment and really felt a part of a certain ambience the game was sending out, I find the background is perhaps the central article that I need to describe in order to convey how a location affected me. They're hugely important in giving a 'feel' to a location; they give a sense of greater scope and a world much farther reaching than just the very immediate vicinity that has been coded for you as a playground.

This is all if you're like me of course, and find truly immersing yourself in a game as best as you can - headphones, darkness, reduced outside distractions, etc - to be one of the important pre-conditions needed to get the best out of certain games that were meant to swallow you in their universe.

First let's define 'background'. It's the far distant scenery and surroundings of a location, that the player cannot usually reach or interact with in any way. Backgrounds aren't usually rendered in code like the tangible physical reality of the protagonists immediate surroundings, and are instead essentially flat pieces of artwork.

Tellingly, any time I think of a background in the affecting way I mentioned in the first paragraph, it's mostly from a first person shooter. This is to do with that genre perhaps being the most immersive of all, so the weight of background importance in that genre could either stem from the you-as-the-protagonist viewpoint, forcing you to consider the surroundings more as you would were you actually there than any other genre; or it could simply mean that the games artists put more thought into the background precisely because it would have more attention. It's probably both.

Alright, enough of all that shite. Here's a background I like.

Deus Ex - Liberty Island

Liberty Island at night time. It's your introduction to the ever shadowy and downbeat - alright, I'll say it - 'cyberpunk' future of Deus Ex. Sneaking around Liberty Island, you feel very much cold and isolated on that dark little place, and this sense is heightened hugely by your location being offset against the warm distant glow of the New York City skyline. It looks positively inviting. An awesome feeling. I can sum up my immersion in Deus Ex by this atmosphere of Liberty Island, and a lot's owed to its backdrop.

Most amazing jew boots

Unreal Tournament - Facing Worlds

Facing Worlds is a CTF map set on a rock floating through space, with two towers either end and a stretch of open air ground between them. It was the background that I thought truly special about this map - unusual as it may be to like an online fragfest game map for a non gameplay element. The rock was spinning whilst orbiting close to the Earth, so over the course of a game a huge looming Earth would be moving around the screen giving off this bright white-blue glow, which constrasted with the vast expanse of black space and dull rocky browns filling up most of the rest of the screen.

There's nowhere I can't reach.