Peach's Castle and the Original Model
Super Mario 64's Peach's Castle is the model from which every subsequent hub world descends. It was a three-dimensional space with paintings on its walls that served as portals to self-contained worlds — a structure that solved a specific navigation problem. Without a hub, a 3D game's level selection required a menu; with a hub, the choice of destination became an act of exploration in itself. Peach's Castle rewarded exploration: hidden stars existed within it, areas unlocked as players collected enough stars from the worlds within it, and its architecture hinted at the worlds it contained through thematic consistency between a painting's subject and the level it accessed.
The model was quickly imitated — Banjo-Kazooie (1998), Crash Bandicoot (1996), and Spyro the Dragon (1998) all used connected overworld spaces linking self-contained levels — but rarely improved upon in its fundamental design. The hub world's strength was the clear spatial metaphor it provided: you are here, the levels are there, the path between them is traversal through a comprehensible space.
Dark Souls and the Dissolved Hub
Dark Souls (2011) eliminated the hub as a separate space and dissolved its function into the game world itself. The bonfires that served as save points and character progression stations were embedded in the connected world rather than located in a separate menu space; the game world was its own hub, with areas connected to each other through a geography that rewarded memorisation. A player who walked the Undead Burgh for the first time did not know that a shortcut existed to the Firelink Shrine below; discovering that shortcut — a locked door that opened from the inside — reorganised the mental map of the world's connectivity.
The dissolved hub design required an entirely handcrafted world: every connection needed to be intentional, every shortcut deliberate, every area transition architecturally coherent. The production cost of this approach was high; the experiential reward was a world that felt genuinely three-dimensional rather than a set of levels connected by a menu dressed as a space. Elden Ring (2022) extended this approach to a fully open landscape — the most ambitious expansion of the dissolved hub since Dark Souls established the template.