Uh, we’re talking about games, not books. And those things you say don’t appear in fantasy novels anymore are par for the course for fantasy CRPG’s.
So rather than ripping off Tolkien’s pseudo-medieval European fantasy setting, they’re ripping off Martin’s pseudo-medieval European fantasy setting instead? That doesn’t exactly address the “fantasy is too derivative!” complaint. If you’re gonna mine history for ideas for fantasy settings anyway, why not expand one’s horizons a little? I’ve seen a few fantasy books based on ancient Rome, the Middle East, Asia, etc. but they’re usually badly outnumbered, AFAICT.
And yet we have upteen “space marines vs hideous monstrosities from space!” scifi games just as we have upteen “elves & orcs out the wazoo!” fantasy games. The problem isn’t the genres, it’s that most games don’t really push the boundaries, IMHO. I’m really looking forward to Dragon Age, but I’m a little disappointed they weren’t a wee bit more daring with the setting.
That argument makes no sense, seeing as how it’s fantasy games that are stuck in a rut despite the fact they can use the “it’s magic” justification for everything, and sci-fi games that come up with original settings even though they need to put some logic behind it.
Hmm, maybe I’ve missed them but I remember only a few sci-fi RPG’s. There aren’t that many sci-fi RPG’s out there:
Fallout 1/2/3
Stalker 1/2
Mass Effect 1/2
KOTOR 1/2
Deus Ex 1/2
System Shock 1/2
I may have missed a few but certainly not upteen :)
Other than System Shock 2 (and that only for one character type), none of these are “space marines vs. hideous monsters”. Mass Effect may be the closest, though you only have 3 “space marine” types, the rest are an alien hit squad you recruit. Fallout, Stalker, KOTOR and Deus Ex definitely aren’t.
All of these games are pretty different, IMO:
Post apocalyptic nightmare
Nuclear disaster horror/survival
Space opera
Space opera
Conspiracy/spy
Space ship survival/horror
You can remember Mass Effect 2? That’s some quantum shit right there.
No spoilers pls.
What about Gods of War, then? That took a much different setting and style for fantasy. The same could be said of the Age of Conan, or if you want to drill back in time of course, the Ultimas had a fantasy world that didn’t involve the typical tolkein archetypes.
There’s Titan Quest, and of course the Diablo franchise. Let us also not forget Fable and Overlord, of course in Overlord’s case there some of the stereotypes, but they’re treated in such a ludicrous fashion (hippy elves, etc) that it’s a fresh view of them.
Maybe you guys played too many gold box games, or too much Warcraft? :P
Fantasy: what could have been
Sci-Fi: what still could be
As I’ve gotten older, I find the sci-fi stories/games more appealing. Example: not so wild about the Force anymore, but I do daydream about moving stuff around my apartment with Alyx’s grav-gun. Dunno. Maybe sci-fi connect more with the here and now.
Also, game production is still largely an hours-indoors, math-based, eblows-deep-in-the-clockwork enterprise. So it would seem to me that from top-down the staff (not just the writers) might do better integrating the gameworld’s details with a sci-fi story than a fantasy one.
Thief.
There. Just felt like someone should mention Thief.
Several people in this thread have specifically referred to fantasy fiction (including the post I quoted) and that was what I was responding to.
Ha ha ha ha, these are like my exact memories of those series… Whenever I think of that Terry Goodkind series, I always feel this vague guilt that I even stayed with the series as long as I did.
I think everyone interested in fantasy should at least read A Game of Thrones, even if they thought the rest of the series would never be finished. It gave me an appreciation for historical fantasy and low fantasy, which is nice for avoiding the overly long spewage of epic genericness.
This lazy formulaic fantasy contributes to games stagnating… Sci-Fi is forced to restrict and adapt its universes and rules… Nukes don’t create mysterious portals, and moon men don’t invade. Maybe a particle accellerator creates mysterious tears in the universe, and deep ones pop out of alien worm holes. But, those extra rules and details spice it up, and force it to stay fresh, rather than holding it back.
Doesn’t the Ghormghast Trilogy do something different? I’d love to fantasy game in a setting rich with byzantine politics and entirely bereft of evil overlords.
And I am loving Mass Effect. I read the Codex for fun! The tech setting is really well thought out.
Shepherd dies.
I guess it depends what you think my argument is. I intended for it to suggest that maybe the difficulty of producing a sci-fi game could be why there are way more fantasy games.
I guess I’m not seeing the difference between fantasy and scifi?
It’s ALL fantasy imho.
I totally get the “no more orcs & elfs” complaint.
But isn’t that driven by an underlying boredom with WoW?
The BIG problem with scifi games is mobility.
If you can fly around in a space ship / time machine you can go “everywhere”.
The creates a serious problem in game mechanics.
Do you add content far away (at the end of the space ship flight)?
Or do you add more content right here (prior to boarding ship)?
SciFi worlds therefore tend to be farflung but must proportionally have less going on each one.
I thought that the StarGate MMO had a clever way to get around that:
You go through the gate to get to an instance.
Other SciFi games limit mobility by being “post apocalyptic” (translation: you’re walkin’ buddy).
BREAKING NEWS: Dr. Rochmoninoff discovers that all fiction is fantasy!
It is all fantasy, of course, but Fantasy seems to fall into the exact same tropes more frequently and it is frustrating. IMHO.
I understand what your saying, fiction = fantasy (as Zylon teased). But there are some definitions around these terms just to help discuss the genres. Fantasy, Scifi, Horror, Alternate History, Murder Mystery, and any story with a sane female can all be see as fiction, but they dont meet the strict definition of Fantasy literature.
A story is fantasy if magic (called by any name) is a primary part of the plot or setting. A story set in the future where with mystical jedi who have a vast array of supernatural powers is fantasy. Scifi is defined as a story about a possible future, something that could occur. A story about a spaceship that goes places no man has gone before is scifi. An attempt to bridge the two by giving the mystic jedi a scientific source for their power like midichlorins is just bad writing.
Not meaning to say you are wrong or anything. I understand where you are coming from. Im just laying out some common definitions that may help the discussion. I do really like your points about scifi conventions that make game implementations difficult, I had never though about how useful that impassable mountain range is in fantasy games and how difficult that is to logically contain in scifi games.
Hey Grifman, you forgot Anachronox!
This definition is only tangentially correct. Science fiction is about, as the name implies, science-- generally using scientific developments to provide an interesting context for a story to be told. Hence the more hoity-toity “speculative fiction” label which is sometimes used. These stories can just as well be set in the past or present as in the future.
When science fiction is applied in the same way as fantasy normally is, to provide a generic spaceships-n-lasers setting, what you end up with is space opera.
Hahaha.
But my point is that “fantasy” and “scifi” are such non-specific terms that they’ll lead to inevitable talking around in circles unless people are clear as to what they mean by each one.
I’m pretty sure the OP meant “LotR” when he used Fantasy.
I’m not sure at all what the OP meant by SciFi.
In my own experience the best SciFi stories are really really hard to make good games out of.
OTH, the simple tropes of LotR make for good gaming (e.g. paper and pencil D&D and all that came after).
The point I was trying to make earlier is that its just simpler mechanics-wise to produce a good fantasy game than a good scifi game.
But in retrospect I missed a more important point.
Fastasy benefits from the fact that Tolkien created the definitive fantasy work. Not everyone has read LotR, most have seen the movies, but EVERYONE knows the basic tropes. No explanation required. A Fantasy game based on the tropes benefits from this and will appeal to a large audience (e.g. Everquest, WoW).
There’s no such thing as a definitive SciFi trope. Instead there are dozens of popular sub-genres and a handful of stand-out works.
- Space Opera - my favorite being Brin’s Startide Rising but arguably just a repackaging of Tolkien’s fantasy trope
- Exploration/Invention - Verne/Wells and all their immitators
- “Hard” SciFi - intentionally predictive fiction often to serve as a social warning e.g. “On the Beach”
- Cyberpunk
- Time travel (the paradox stories, not the adventure ones)
- Robots - Asimov and his imitators
- Aliens - some very good work in the field of true non-human point of view (not just “humans reskinned”)
- Future War (e.g. Saberhagen’s Berserkers books, Drake’s Mercenary & Hammer’s Slammers books)
- Classics like “Nonstop”, “Frankenstein”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
- I’m not capable of listing all the subgenre’s but you get my point
And not only is there no definitive SciFi trope but within the SciFi fan base the followers of one subgenre frequently hate other subgenres.
That fractures the base you’re trying to cultivate to buy a game.
So while there have been several excellent SciFi games:
Total Anhilation, Starcraft, XCOM, System Shock, Deus Ex, Fallout, Masters of Orion etc.
I don’t see how they’ll ever have the same mass appeal that a fantasy game will have.