Fantasy games need to stop stealing from LOTR

[Saviordd1]

Enough is enough. Why are most (if not all) fantasy games constantly borrowing inspiration from the Lord of the Rings? Hell, even Dungeons and Dragons is tainted by that book's ridiculous fame. Now, this isn't a rant against the Lord of the Rings. I read it. Took a lot of effort but I dragged myself through that book and, after ignoring the copious amounts of needless description, I found a good story with a well-developed world for countless nerds to escape to.

But are we all just doomed to be trapped in this Tolkien-esque world when it comes to fantasy games? I thought the point of making something fantastical was to explore new, undiscovered regions of reality, to plumb the depths of what the world could be. Instead, all fantasy games are just floundering in this miasma of Tolkien Lore.

Maybe this is why FPSs are so popular (or at least so populous) these days. It's sort of easy to innovate new ways of making shooting people fun. But the poor gaming Titan that was fantasy RPGs is drowning in a stagnant pool of Tolkien.

We need something new. Something fresh. Something of pure fantasy.

Because it works?

Honestly very few people complain about the setting of fantasy games, and for the few that do if you look hard you can find un-tolkien esque games.

By the way FPS's arent popular because of their setting, their popular because they dont take to much skill or thought and are easy to access, think about it, if you were trying to get a friend into gaming would you hand him halo or Dragon age?

 

[Zer_]

Enough is enough. Why are most (if not all) fantasy games constantly borrowing inspiration from the Lord of the Rings? Hell, even Dungeons and Dragons is tainted by that book's ridiculous fame. Now, this isn't a rant against the Lord of the Rings. I read it. Took a lot of effort but I dragged myself through that book and, after ignoring the copious amounts of needless description, I found a good story with a well-developed world for countless nerds to escape to.

But are we all just doomed to be trapped in this Tolkien-esque world when it comes to fantasy games? I thought the point of making something fantastical was to explore new, undiscovered regions of reality, to plumb the depths of what the world could be. Instead, all fantasy games are just floundering in this miasma of Tolkien Lore.

Maybe this is why FPSs are so popular (or at least so populous) these days. It's sort of easy to innovate new ways of making shooting people fun. But the poor gaming Titan that was fantasy RPGs is drowning in a stagnant pool of Tolkien.

We need something new. Something fresh. Something of pure fantasy.

It's funny to see someone say this, since LOTR was pretty much written as the quintessential fantasy story. It wasn't anything original to begin with.

 

[PhunkyPhazon]

See, what's really funny is that someone once ranted on these very forums that Lord of the Rings was fantasy ENOUGH! He complained that Gandalf sucked as a wizard. I believe his words were, "For crying out loud, you're surround by enemies. Why don't you use a confusion spell or something?" He complained that all Gandalf ever did was make a rock glow and break a bridge. I pointed out that Gandalf is not actually a wizard, to which he responded that he shouldn't be called one then. Reading this post made me smile.

I took a class on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings (Best. Class. EVER.) and he actually changed some of the myths in order to fit his books. What he did at the time was very original. The sad part is that he seems to have taken all the good ideas. People can no longer see orcs as anything but evil, elves as forest lovers, and dwarves living under ground. My English teacher always said that the fantasy genre was the most annoying one to write for. "It's a genre where you're supposed to be allowed to create and write whatever you want, but no one has any imagination to come up with something new, so instead the genre becomes the most restrictive. You end up trying to follow 'the rules' for a genre that, by its very name, is supposed to be free of rules."

Totally this. Every fantasy world I've ever been exposed to feel really similar, with only small differences separating them. Elves are archers who live in woods, dwarfs are craftsmen that live in caves, orcs are always called something different but they look the same and are evil for almost no reason.

Compare that to something like a bunch of sci-fi space settings. You have the basic concept of a bunch of planets and species unified by a single government, yet there is a ton of variety to be found here. Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Metroid, Mass Effect, all of these use this concept but not many people would try to say any of these blatantly copy each other. They all have a unique feel to them, and offer plenty of fresh species and locales. For the fantasy genre, simply having dwarves live in a forest could be considered revolutionary.

 

[Kotep]

Part of the problem with relying on tropes from Tolkien is that it kind of undermines what the idea of fantasy should be like. I'm not saying that Tolkien is bad, it's just that creating something derivative is, well, kind of missing the point. Fantasy is meant to be the realm of infinite possibilities, where you have magic everywhere and there's a sense of wonder about things. That's what made Tolkien's world interesting, but copying it just defeats the purpose of having something new and interesting.

I think JRPGs actually have a better grasp of how to make a fantasy world that's intriguing, though the background doesn't often get as fleshed out, especially to non-Japanese fans who don't get the source material.

 

[Cheesepower5]

LotR needs to stop stealing from Norse mythology.

 

[Nouw]

I'm going to say the same for Science Fiction and Robert A. Heinlein. Chances are, you've never heard of him but you have played a Space Marine shooter.

 

[Freechoice]

Because it's safe, proven and easy to get concept art for.

 

[Internet Kraken]

You know I hear people say this all the time, but can someone point out the last time they actually saw something that was a straight ripoff of Tolkien fantasy? Because I honestly can't. Oh sure you can say the game is being unoriginal just becuase it uses the elf, dwarf, orc races etc. but I rarely see this races play out the same way they did in Tolkien fantasy. A lot of people panned Dragon Age for doing this yet I didn't think it was that similar. Yes the elves did live in forests but they were also an oppressed race that was often discriminated against.

Fuck even Dwarf Fortress doesn't follow all the fantasy race archetypes by the book. I honestly can't think of something I've seen recently that does.

The smug bastard in question.

The quite obviously baked elf.

I will now imagine all elves looking like this, and it has actually managed to make killing them even more satisfying.

 

[ultratog1028]

That's like saying, "The Action Genre should not always follow fighting and fast-paced chases! Try something new!"

Which doesn't work.

Yeah, well there has to be a better formula. One of the reasons I actually liked certain Magic the Gathering Novels was that even though they took place in different realities and were fantasy, close to none of them followed the Tolkien Tradition.

Ravnica City of Guilds saga was more of a Noir Cop film then a fantasy book. Yet it still has Goblins and elves and dragons and stuff. Just the place was a world wide city. The world felt unique and all ten guilds had viable meanings. A guild of Cops, Inventors, Scientists, Religion/lawyers, Senators, a Religious murder Cult, Necromancers, bums, nature cult, and assassins. Each guild helps the city run or impedes it to help balance out the city (For example: the "Bum Guild" (Gruul) actually is a fallen guild. They impede civilization as they are quite feral). By having so many different groups, behavior is not deter=mined just by species but guild; an elf in the Nature cult behaves much differnetly then a scientist elf, though the scientist elf behaves differently then a human scientist, etc.

What I'm saying is by limiting to Tolkien butt-kissing, Fantasy games and stories shoot themselves in the foot, when by simple concepts they can create great worlds to explore.

 

[Vern5]

snips

Finally! Someone who could explain the problem better than I could. Full agreements and a hearty thumbs up!

 

[Shirokurou]

LOTR needs to stop stealing from folklore and myths!

 

[ultratog1028]

Not to mention Ents, who again are entirely from the mind of Professor T.

I remeber quite a few Fairytales with talking trees. Though I believe Tolkien is the first to have made them WALK.

 

[Axolotl]

Asking fantasy games (and all fantasy medium for that matter) to stop copying LOTR is like asking FPSs' to stop copying Doom. LOTR practically invented the genre, if you aren't copying off them in some way then you aren't writing fantasy then are you? Unless you define fantasy extremely loosely but at that point then Sci-Fi is technically fantasy

People were writing Fantasy decades before LotR. Fantasy as a genre was perfectly healthy before LotR came alonmg and even after it came out, it's only fairly recently that the whole genre became nothing more than LotR ripoffs.

It's ridiculous all the people talking about how LotR "defines" fantasy in this thread. There's a hell of alot of fantasy works done both before and after it that are nothing like it.

 

[JaceArveduin]

It all has to do with stereotypes. R.A. Salvatore wrote many books, most of them involve a good dark elf. Throughout the group of books, he takes many stereotypes and screws them up abit. (Elves raising the dead and a dwarven druid are the first to come to mind) As for trolls, Tolkien's didn't regenerate like the ones you see in Forgotten Realms and some others. They could easily put all the stereotypes on their heads, but what would be the point? It's the stereotypes that tie the genre together, in my opinion. Like others have said, if you make an adventure game where you sit in one spot trying to survive, it's not really an adventure game. Theres also variants of fantasy, as has been mentioned.

Also, Lewis and Tolkien were actually good friends and corresponded on a regular basis.

 

[ultratog1028]

snips

Finally! Someone who could explain the problem better than I could. Full agreements and a hearty thumbs up!

Well, I only wrote that because I completely get your point (I hope). Lord Of The Rings is one of my favourite books, and I hate the fact that Tolkien has essentially been franchise-raped by an entire genre. If I want to read about orcs and elves, I will read LOTR and the Hobbit. This is why I'm a massive LOTR fanboy, but can't stand the vast majority of Fantasy fiction. As a massive fan of Tolkien, I think the most respect any writer can show the man is to emulate him in trying to create their own rich, believable fantasy ideas, rather than plundering what copyright law will let them get away with.

I don't understand why people struggle with the concept of Fantasy without Tolkien-esque influences. Fantasy is letting your imagination loose, and writing down the results. Are people's minds so closed off that they can't imagine fantasy creatures besides elves and dwarves? Is the lack of imagination in society so great that slightly altering the life's work of a man to make it slightly darker is seen as a great creative leap forward?

I have no intention of playing Dragon Age, simply because everything I've seen of the series is either a) scenes from LOTR with different names for everything, or b) scenes from LOTR with swearing and sex added. I got bored of Morrowind because, despite how big the world was, it was obviously based off Tolkien's tropes, and it simply didn't hold up as well in comparison. The Witcher, again, seems to be a stock Middle Earth setting with racism and sex added. I fail to see how that is 'original'. I could draw a penis on the Mona Lisa. Doesn't mean I'm as original as Da Vinci.

This is why I have a great fondness for JRPGs. Because, while they may draw off Eastern myths and symbols, developers also strive hard to create unique worlds and settings for their games. While Final Fantasy may have Chocobos and Moogles as recurring species, the world of FFVII and the world of FFIX are completely different, in terms of history, cultures and aesthetics. The fact that Square managed to create a more rounded, believable world for one of their games (FFIX) than Bethesda have managed over an entire franchise (Elder Scrolls) re-inforces to me how much we need to move away from Tolkien now. When is a Western developer going to introduce an element or motif as striking and original in Fantasy as Square did with airships in the FF franchise? Why is it that Western developers can be as creative as they like when it comes to branching storylines, yet always feel compelled to make the bad-guys look Orc-y and Mordor-ish?

LOTR needs to stop stealing from folklore and myths!

See my post prior to this one.

You sir, won the internet.

 

[ramboondiea]

but tolkin method is tried and tested, people are fickle beasts, when people take chances people whine, when you dont they whine, so given the choice people are going to go with the safer option