Moment of transparency first... I have yet to play the Bioware game that I didn't enjoy, and there are only a couple (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Neverwinter Nights 2) that I only enjoyed, as opposed to loved. So it's entirely possible that I am a fanboy and my opinion is simply skewed. I don't THINK that I am, but a lot of fanboys are in denial, so my opinion on the whole issue is a bit untrustworthy.
That said, in my opinion, people seriously need to drop the whole ?Dragon Age: Origins is just a LotR remake? stuff.
Before the ragging begins, this is not a demand that people who don't like Dragon Age have to... that would be stupid. I can totally see why Dragon Age would be a niche game, apparently so did Bioware, hence all the surprise that Dragon Age turned out to be their best seller. But all the success has apparently turned on the hate as well, as if people who didn't like it suddenly have to justify themselves. You don't. Hate away. But if you are going to bring reasons to the table, you could do a lot better than ?They just ripped off Lord of the Rings.?
I have spoken to a lot of people whose reaction to the game was a resounding ?meh,? and I have found that almost (stress the almost) everyone who had the reaction had one thing in common; they didn't know LotR very well, neither had they liked it very much. They knew it had dragons, dwarves, elves, and some kind of spreading evil army, but beyond that they tended to trust either to Peter Jackson's movies or the hundreds of fantasy worlds that have been grown from the soil Tolkien tilled. Not being a fan of that sort of thing, it gets easy to simply walk away from anything that seems derivative. After all, if you didn't like the source material, who can blame you for disliking the remake?
The problem is that almost anyone familiar with Tolkien who is presented Dragon Age as a sort of cliffs notes version will quickly call you insane. Sure, there are elements there, most notably in the primary races, but beyond that? Beyond that lies a bit of George R.R. Martin. Oh, and some Robert Jordan. A smattering of Raymond Feist. Even some spins on Ancient Rome. And a great deal of Bioware. And as you see all these influences on top of some original material, you realize that calling Dragon Age a LotR's clone is about as accurate as calling Mass Effect a clone of Battlestar: Galactica. The similarities are there, but there is a whole lot more to it.
When the late Robert Jordan wrote The Eye of the World, the first book in his Wheel of Time series, he intentionally made the first half of the book feel a great deal like the escape from the Shire in the Fellowship of the Ring. He said so openly in interviews. Why? In his words, ?To make fantasy readers feel at home.?
Bioware, in all three of its flagship IPs (I stand resolute in my hope for a sequel to Jade Empire) practices what I like to refer to as Pick-up-and-play storytelling. Their worlds are huge, with a great deal of lore behind them. (I maintain that the position of Bioware Loremaster, which apparently exists, must be the coolest job of all time.) However, unlike The Last Airbender movie, where the exposition started during the second trailer and didn't end until five minutes after the credits had stopped rolling, Bioware doesn't shove its plot down your throat. Instead, they give you as much information as they think you need (Mass Effect: It's the future, there are aliens, GO! And Dragon Age: There are Darkspawn, they are fought by the Grey Wardens, GO!) and then hurl you into the story. You know that there is a great deal more going on, but they persist in giving you only the information you need, the rest is placed in the codex for you to read at your leisure, though you never really need to.
Other companies that try this often fail. Final Fantasy, for example, is terrible at starting you off in medias res without telling you things that would be highly beneficial to know. This works (more or less) because you never really need to know your role in a Final Fantasy game, the cutscenes will let you know eventually, your job is to manage the combat. (The last Final Fantasy game where this wasn't frustrating to me was X, because as Tidus was an outsider, people kept explaining this stuff, which was nice.)
Bioware succeeds by using the shorthand provided by each genre, and likewise through their character design. They could, for example, have created three totally unique races to populate Dragon Age. That, however, would have required them to give enough plot exposition to give us an understanding of the three that our character could reasonably be expected to have. That would have been a lot of exposition, just to get to the game part.
Instead, they use Tolkien's tropes. Tell me that there are Dwarves, and I know instantly what you are talking about. The same with elves and dragons. There are differences, of course, between the elves of Dragon Age and the Elves of Middle Earth, but it takes a lot less time to show those differences than to give an entire race explanation. More time for game, less spent on exposition, all by making one race short and stocky with the other being slender with pointy ears.
I was excited to hear the announcement of Dragon Age 2. If Bioware holds to its previous pattern, I expect them to take this world that they have shown us and expand on it, taking advantage of all we learned about their world in the first installment, thereby allowing them to lead us away from what we previously knew and were comfortable with. And I am sure, when it is released, that many people will complain about it being derivative of Tolkien.
They'll be right, then as now. Dragon Age clearly owes a great deal to Tolkien. But rather than being a weakness, it'll be a strength, if done right, and Bioware hasn't yet given me reason to think they won't do it right.
That said, in my opinion, people seriously need to drop the whole ?Dragon Age: Origins is just a LotR remake? stuff.
Before the ragging begins, this is not a demand that people who don't like Dragon Age have to... that would be stupid. I can totally see why Dragon Age would be a niche game, apparently so did Bioware, hence all the surprise that Dragon Age turned out to be their best seller. But all the success has apparently turned on the hate as well, as if people who didn't like it suddenly have to justify themselves. You don't. Hate away. But if you are going to bring reasons to the table, you could do a lot better than ?They just ripped off Lord of the Rings.?
I have spoken to a lot of people whose reaction to the game was a resounding ?meh,? and I have found that almost (stress the almost) everyone who had the reaction had one thing in common; they didn't know LotR very well, neither had they liked it very much. They knew it had dragons, dwarves, elves, and some kind of spreading evil army, but beyond that they tended to trust either to Peter Jackson's movies or the hundreds of fantasy worlds that have been grown from the soil Tolkien tilled. Not being a fan of that sort of thing, it gets easy to simply walk away from anything that seems derivative. After all, if you didn't like the source material, who can blame you for disliking the remake?
The problem is that almost anyone familiar with Tolkien who is presented Dragon Age as a sort of cliffs notes version will quickly call you insane. Sure, there are elements there, most notably in the primary races, but beyond that? Beyond that lies a bit of George R.R. Martin. Oh, and some Robert Jordan. A smattering of Raymond Feist. Even some spins on Ancient Rome. And a great deal of Bioware. And as you see all these influences on top of some original material, you realize that calling Dragon Age a LotR's clone is about as accurate as calling Mass Effect a clone of Battlestar: Galactica. The similarities are there, but there is a whole lot more to it.
When the late Robert Jordan wrote The Eye of the World, the first book in his Wheel of Time series, he intentionally made the first half of the book feel a great deal like the escape from the Shire in the Fellowship of the Ring. He said so openly in interviews. Why? In his words, ?To make fantasy readers feel at home.?
Bioware, in all three of its flagship IPs (I stand resolute in my hope for a sequel to Jade Empire) practices what I like to refer to as Pick-up-and-play storytelling. Their worlds are huge, with a great deal of lore behind them. (I maintain that the position of Bioware Loremaster, which apparently exists, must be the coolest job of all time.) However, unlike The Last Airbender movie, where the exposition started during the second trailer and didn't end until five minutes after the credits had stopped rolling, Bioware doesn't shove its plot down your throat. Instead, they give you as much information as they think you need (Mass Effect: It's the future, there are aliens, GO! And Dragon Age: There are Darkspawn, they are fought by the Grey Wardens, GO!) and then hurl you into the story. You know that there is a great deal more going on, but they persist in giving you only the information you need, the rest is placed in the codex for you to read at your leisure, though you never really need to.
Other companies that try this often fail. Final Fantasy, for example, is terrible at starting you off in medias res without telling you things that would be highly beneficial to know. This works (more or less) because you never really need to know your role in a Final Fantasy game, the cutscenes will let you know eventually, your job is to manage the combat. (The last Final Fantasy game where this wasn't frustrating to me was X, because as Tidus was an outsider, people kept explaining this stuff, which was nice.)
Bioware succeeds by using the shorthand provided by each genre, and likewise through their character design. They could, for example, have created three totally unique races to populate Dragon Age. That, however, would have required them to give enough plot exposition to give us an understanding of the three that our character could reasonably be expected to have. That would have been a lot of exposition, just to get to the game part.
Instead, they use Tolkien's tropes. Tell me that there are Dwarves, and I know instantly what you are talking about. The same with elves and dragons. There are differences, of course, between the elves of Dragon Age and the Elves of Middle Earth, but it takes a lot less time to show those differences than to give an entire race explanation. More time for game, less spent on exposition, all by making one race short and stocky with the other being slender with pointy ears.
I was excited to hear the announcement of Dragon Age 2. If Bioware holds to its previous pattern, I expect them to take this world that they have shown us and expand on it, taking advantage of all we learned about their world in the first installment, thereby allowing them to lead us away from what we previously knew and were comfortable with. And I am sure, when it is released, that many people will complain about it being derivative of Tolkien.
They'll be right, then as now. Dragon Age clearly owes a great deal to Tolkien. But rather than being a weakness, it'll be a strength, if done right, and Bioware hasn't yet given me reason to think they won't do it right.