AgentNein said:
Totally with this whole "sick of the standard fantasy model" thing. There's so much potential to create new and fantastic worlds and (almost) everybody in the fantasy world from books to games to movies just wants to riff on Tolkien.
1. Read the following authors: China Miéville (
Perdido Street Station,
The Scar, or
Iron Council), M. John Harrison (
Viriconium), K.J. Bishop (
The Etched City), Jeff VanderMeer (
City of Saints and Madmen), Gene Wolfe (
Book of the New Sun or the
Wizard Knight books), and Michael Swanwick (
The Iron Dragon's Daughter).
2. Prepare to have your mind
completely freaking blown.
This goes for all of you (Yahtzee included, because he TOTALLY READS THESE COMMENTS RIGHT LOL) who protest the abundance of depressingly generic kings-n'-elves-n'-dwarves fantasy. Miéville in particular has emphasized over the years that his work is in many ways a reaction to the tired traditions of Tolkienesque fantasy, which he dislikes not so much for its milieu and world-building (which remains excellent) as its overwhelming sameness, and the drabness of copypasta works that have followed it.
Granted, literature is a very different narrative vehicle from videogames, and as Therumancer cogently pointed out earlier, there's a way in which the storytelling of generic fantasy meshes well with traditional videogame progression structures, making a change unlikely (there's also the fact that sword-and-sorcery fantasy remains a profitable enterprise; some people, it seems, never tire of elves-'n'-dwarves). Still, my hope is that one day there'll be some spillover. A videogame based on Miéville's world of Bas-Lag would be absolutely
nuts, an surrealist RPG-horror mashup that would, were it done well, easily stand as one of the most cerebral and terrifying videogame experiences ever. It would also be unbelievably difficult, given that the monsters of Miéville's world are all horrible abominations, some of whom are essentially Lovecraftian gods who can warp reality at will. It's also not likely to happen, given Miéville's decidedly anti-capitalist views. Still, one can dream.