Videogame fantasy settings are staler than mouldy bread right now
Time to kill off the elves and get weird.
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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.
I think the reason they are struggling is because all the decisions on what should be greenlit are being made by VC investor types, business people who arent in it for the love of film or storytelling etc. No chances are taken, only huge guarantees of big returns are considered (which means replicating what has made money in the past.)
This kind of thinking neglects what actually makes a movie good, and how movies were made in the past.
100%, Id say the problem is multi faceted but for sure a big (maybe even majority) part of it is big money trying to guarantee a hit rather than produce quality content
95% of everything has always been crap. We live in a golden age where we have enough non crap at our disposal that we never have to watch anything awful if we don't want. You will, however, have to look for it -- it's scattered among a dozen services and you'll need to engage with reviews and social media to find what you're looking for, most likely.
There's also a filter of time thing going on, where we forget the shitty media of the past. 1992 gave us Reservoir Dogs, A Few Good Men and My Cousin Vinny. It also gave us Pet Seminary 2, BeBe's Kids and Love Potion Number 9. So was it a good year or a bad year?
This isn't a well formulated idea but something that's been kicking around in my head for a while. There have always been bad movies and TV but I think what is somewhat new is that the blockbuster films are so big budget that it's always "a good movie" in that its well made but the substance is always lacking. It's kind of a bizarre and unsettling feeling watching a well produced 200 million dollar movie that kinda... sucks? Is boring? Because movie magic has become so commodified its hard for a movie to ride on flash and sparkle alone.
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.