Videogame fantasy settings are staler than mouldy bread right now
Time to kill off the elves and get weird.
This is true of just about every story telling trope in every genre of every form of media right now. The gems that stand out genuinely change the formula, because otherwise, we've seen it all before.
You should have seen that long post someone did on "why I hate your favourite story-telling game", on Beehaw last month.
I'll edit it in once I find it.
Found it! Beehaw link Original link
That is an interesting read. Everyone in the comments are ripping the author as pretentious oof lol. As I said in my OP, I think this problem goes much deeper than shallow video games. Movies and TVs are struggling to find novelty in the endless deluge of content we're currently experiencing. (Books and webserials seem to be doing more ok but I'm also a lot pickier about what I'll consume there so its selection bias) We're in an infinite monkey typewriter situation and at this point it seems mostly random when something is just different enough to be good television. A tale as old as time, the situation remains: the best stories are character driven.
Ah, I’ve seen this problem in storytelling broken down to this:
You don’t want your story to be a bunch of “and then and then and then.” You want your story to be “because this happened, this other thing happened, then because of that, this other thing happened.” Etc etc.
Still a good read.
I mean... sure if you only play games that have that same feeling?
Like oh no BG3 is just elves & Brittania... Duh?
So play WotR and at least go to the Abyss?
Or play any game based not on Tolkien lore? There's a ton of games based on different mythologies: Raji, Prince of Persia, Tribes of Midgard, Hades, Wo Long, etc.
Or just play games set in just completely different worlds? Pyre/Transistor/Bastion are all interesting worlds. Remnant I/II is a neat concept. etc. More playful stuff like Cuphead/Death's Door, etc.
Or look at some MMO's if you want larger worlds with different influence? Guild Wars 2 is pretty decent as far as a good variety with its world/races for example, even if its still similar to a generic fantasy setting.
So, the author mentioned a couple of delightfully strange recent games. The thesis of the article is way too broad and unsupportable. If you're sick of mainstream settings, then stop playing AAA games.
I can understand why fantasy settings are pretty stale, not just in games but in a variety of other media as well. Fantasy can be complex, and using old, familiar tropes (elves are haughty and love nature, dwarves are stubborn and love gold, humans are the world's jack-of-all-trades) lowers the barrier to entry, which is really important when you want something to be easily marketable to as large an audience as possible. People know what to expect from familiar fantasy tropes, which means they can focus on plot and gameplay rather than going "so what's that character supposed to be?"
But it's boring. I love it when a fantasy setting isn't afraid to trust the intelligence and curiosity of its audience and do something weird.
Anime if anything seems to be doing worse at this. Nearly every fantasy or fantasy adjacent anime goes for a knock-off D&D MMO style and it feels so tired. They don't want their audience to need to make the smallest effort to understand the world and the role of the characters in it.
Tolkienesque fantasy has become the carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy ages ago...
And it becomes even more apparent when people consider that Tolkienesque fantasy tropes aren't even about "medieval Europe", they are about a particular English pseudo-medieval world. Fantasy doesn't do much exploring even beyond the English-speaking world.
Southern Europe (Italy, France, Spain,...) aren't even featured much. The landscape may allude to it, but then the same Northern European castles sit on the top of hills, occupied by the same kind of lords that you'd find in other parts of the game map.
And other parts of the medieval world do not fare much better: Everything around the Mediterranean is reduced to stereotypes or entirely replaced by some fantasy race. Every place outside of Europe/the Mediterranean fares even worse.
It has no depth, no knowledge of particular local traditions, it is not rooted in any stories, only recalls the same tired tropes that Tolkien established.
Even inside Europe and around the Mediterranean, the medieval world was very diverse. Every region had its own traditions, stories, clothing, customs and its own mythologies with their own particular kinds of monsters and creatures.
But you'd not know through most fantasy stories which - no matter the landscape they take place in - it always boils down to a band of adventurers walking into an inn, drinking a beer and paying it with gold coins, before they go off to kill some orcs in the name of some duke. Very little thought is spend on considering if it even makes sense that a place that is akin to - let's say - Southern France had any of these things.
When Tolkien wrote LOTR, he based most of it on ancient Germanic stories like "Beowulf", that there are uncountable other folktales and stories from all over the ancient world which could be chosen as the basis of a fantasy setting instead.
It's so weird that elves are now the good guys. They were actually dream spirits that give you nightmares (engl. nightmare ≫ german Alptraum = elf dream). And no, they weren't described having otherworldly beauty.
It's also believed that nordic elves and dwarfs are the same beings in the Edda. The nordic word for elf is álfr which often is part of dwarf names.
Partly why Shadow of the Colossus was eerily beautiful, it didn't depend on any kind of pre-existing mythology
Exactly my thinking for Horizon. These studios are pumping so much money into mechanics and graphics, I wish they would put similar resources into story and lore.
I wanted to bring up Horizon but I thought people would quibble over post apocalyptic vs fantasy. But really, if you're going to quibble about that then you're already blind to how beholden you are to fantasy tropes and are rejecting things that are genuinely new and different because they are different "wrong."
I was very pleased with the world-building and lore in Horizon: ZD! The cultures and different factions felt genuinely unique and novel.
You've not played Caves of Qud, I see.
Only stuck to a specific subset of AAA games I'm fairly sure
I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a ton over the past two years and honestly I'm really glad I've spent so much time in the setting, it's so not traditional fantasy and it's richer for it. I wish that more fantasy played with the expectations of the genre. Tolkien-esque fantasy is a great jumping off point but I wish authors/creators did more with it than just start and stop there
Really wish this game had controller support. I want to try it on the steam deck but only community bindings are available!
With action cam it’s definitely playable with a controller but I doubt they’ll put in controller support because like… there’s a billion different bindings and everyone rebinds everything in their own so there’s not much point? Browse community bindings and find one that works for you/your character(s).
Yesss I've been playing since Guild Wars 1, I was there when the last day dawned on the kingdom of Ascalon, and I looove how they've evolved the setting over the decades! I've run D&D games set in it, and it's a great great time
Stormlight Archive could be turned into such a good Dynasty Warriors style game.
Story-mode is literally just playing differing characters in each of the fights of the story, you could do at least 10-12 fights.
Campaign mode could be picking one of the 10 warcamps, each with different starting strengths, and racing, done via a base building / management interspersed with combat levels, to claim the most wealth.
@Pheonixdown @alyaza I had alot of fun doing a bares bones prototype of gravity lashing in 2d. Storm light is just ripe for all sorts of video game adaptations.
Definitely a project I wanna revisit someday.
This is nothing new, been the story across media since Tolkien, really.
The mid nineties to the turn of the century was a special time. We got Morrowind, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, even Ultima 8 had a pretty interesting setting (even if the gameplay was atrocious). I'm sure there were other games and fiction with interesting settings as well.
Then the LotR films came out, and that was it. Everybody started bandwagoning hard.