2 réponses à ce sujet

[exorzist]

One of the major criticisms of Dragon Age: Origins has been that the game draws on ‘derivative fantasy’ in its plot and storyline. Now, staying away from the debate over whether or not DA:O is ‘dark fantasy’ as marketed, or ‘Tolkien-esque epic fantasy’ , the whole discussion leads me to ask why is it that anything in the fantasy genre is immediately under fire for being self-referential.

What I want to know is when does something stop being cliché and become, instead, archetype?

American satirist Ambrose Bierce is often quoted as saying, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know.” Which is full of all sorts of delightful irony if you consider that “There is nothing new under the sun,” was a Biblical quote some 1,800 years before. Film, literature and music have a grand ol’ history of drawing on those who came before. But, despite 2,000 years of literature leaning on Biblical reference and allegory, when a book like The Da Vinci Code comes out, no-one calls it derivative of the previous work – or of the Bible itself.

In fact, one modern-day columnist trying to trump up support for teaching religion in public schools wrote, “Trying to understand American literature and history without some knowledge of the Bible is like trying to make sense of the ocean despite a complete ignorance of fish.”

Continue reading the article by clicking here.

Thank you for all comments and feedback. Very appreciated.

Modifié par exorzist, 03 décembre 2009 - 05:03 .

[David Gaider]

foolish_sagacity wrote...
I think there was a problem here of trying to pretend they were getting away from the source material of LoTR that let them fool themselves into believing they had.

I think you're under a mistaken impression. We never said we were "getting away" from anything. Our intention was to take the familiar archetypes and put our own spin on them. There are certainly worse things than being compared to LotR or any one of a number of other fantasy franchises... heck, Tycho at Penny Arcade even implied in his editorial today that we must have been inspired in part by Lois McMaster Bujold -- who I've never even read (though perhaps I should). Fantasy as a genre tends to draw from the same pool, so such comparisons are not really surprising... and at the end of the day we were not striving to be different just for the sake of being different. Some people prize that more than others, I suppose, but at the end of the day we are satisfied with taking a genre we love and doing it well.

[David Gaider]

Niten Ryu wrote...
Bioware was smart when they designed Dragon Age to be generic fantasy. It sells well and players, no matter if they know it or not, get that familar feeling that they've experienced this before. Torment, one of my all time fav CRPG were set in the one of my all time fav imaginary worlds. Too bad for me and the designers, that most of the players found to be it way too alien and bizarre.

There's a segment of fans who have played everything, read everything, done everything... so when something comes down the pipe that even vaguely resembles something they've seen before, they're immediately bored with it. A jaded outlook, perhaps, but perhaps an understandable one if you're an avid fan of any genre. Thing is, making something that is different enough to peak the interest of those fans immediately risks being off-putting to anyone else -- and while those fans tend to be vocal, they're sadly don't number as many as some of them believe.

I also suspect sometimes that many of them don't know what they want, and that if you tried to give them what they're asking for they wouldn't, in fact, like it. That's a generalization, however -- certainly there is room for variation even in the traditional fantasy mold, and your estimation of how uniquely we applied the archtypes will no doubt vary to how exposed you've been to them.