In Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series, there are no elves or dwarves. Your journey isn’t guided by any wise gray-bearded wizards. The lands are free of orcs and goblins. Its setting, Roshar, has little in common with traditional fantasy worlds like Middle-Earth and its descendants, and it doesn't draw monsters from folklore like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher. Though Brandon Sanderson's high fantasy series has clear inspirations, they aren't the shared pillars that hold up much of the fantasy genre. But you'll find plenty holding up 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
The Weirdness Of Stormlight Archive
The Stormlight books primarily take place in the S🦩hattered Plains, which basically is what it sounds like: an expanse of plateaus separated by slot canyons occupied by massive crustaceans called Chasmfiends. Two armies war over the territory, conquering plateaus in an effort to win valuable Gemhearts, either by slaying Chasmfiends with powerful magic swords called Shardblades, or by claiming them from the chrysalises they leave behind. One army is human, the other is a race of humanoid beings, called Parshendi, whose skin is marbled a♐nd hard, like an insect's carapace.
The series🌌 is loaded with ideas, but the organizing principle of life on Roshar is that Highstorms — extremely powerful storms that will kill humans caught exposed in their𒁏 wake — pass over the land with clockwork regularity, moving from east to west. Buildings are built with their windows facing away from the storms, the continent's animals are often covered in shell, and plants often grow in "rockbuds" so they can retreat into safety when storms come. It's a fascinating world that is unlike anything else I've encountered in fantasy.
And that's just stuff from the first book.
The Familiar Tropes Of Dragon Age: The Veilguard
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age, by comparison, seems to be throwing every known fantasy trope into a blender. There are interesting 🥀ideas buried in there, like the Grey Wardens being uniquely qualified to fight the Blight, but a lot of those edges seem to have been sanded off in V🦩eilguard.
What you're ultimately left with is a fantasy world with humans and elves, dwarves and dragons, warriors and mages. There just isn't much in th𒊎is game that diverts from what you would expect from a high-fantasy setting. The Darkspawn are boring evil monsters. The Blight isn't a particularly novel take on fantastical evil. The Fade is a pretty ordinary-feeling other world.
I may be missing something because this isn't a series that has inspired me to do much Wiki diving. The Dragon Age series does dig deeper than most fantasy on tensions between its various fantasy races, but ten hours into Veilguard, that theme seems AWOL. I'm sure if I dug deep on the lore, I could find more things that set the series apart. But that's the thing: with Sanderson, you don't need to dig deep to see what makes it different. Most worlds he creates feels like the fantasy version of a high-concept spec script for a fresh movie that feels like nothing you've seen before. You can usually pitch his bo💃oks with a single sentence, and that sentence will make readers want to read it.
Anything Is Possible In Fantasy
His debut novel Elantri🃏s is set after the fall of a city of gods, where the magic that elevated its inhabitants to glowing immortality changes for some inexplicable reason, turning them ♋into lowly zombie-like creatures who can never heal from any wound they suffer. The book is a mystery, with the hero attempting to solve what happened to the city and its inhabitants.
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Would Make A Great Immersive Sim
Allomancy would tra꧃nslate perfect🌳ly to a game like Dishonored.
The Mistborn trilogy is set in a world where the evil empero🅘r and a group of thieves team up to rob him using their supernatural powers, fueled by ingesting and burning metals. Tress of the Emerald Sea is set in a world where the oceans are formed not from water, but from colored spores that have intense physical reactions when they get wet. The hardest of his work to pitch is Stormlight, but that's because he tosses so many interesting ideas into it that it's hard to🐟 hone in on just one.
Dragon Age, meanwhile, doesn't have a strong pitch from a narrative perspective.🦩 ‘A fantasy RPG series with a focus on narrative choice and interesting companions you can befriend and/or romance’ is a good pitch, but that tells me about how the game plays, not about its world.
I have the same issue with Avowed, though I imagine I'll like that game much more.
You don't have to create entirely new worlds to have an innovative, interesting pitch. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 took place in the Forgotten Realms, as well-excavated a fantasy setting as there's ever been. But its elevator pitch — what if a bunch of self-interested people had to work together or else the tadpoles in their heads will turn them into Mind Flayers — immediately sells the urgency of the quest and gives a strong motivation for these strangers to come together. The Veilguard needed a better set-up than ‘evil gods are loose in the world and spreading e🦩vil’. But, ten hours in, that seems to be the gist of it.
I’m Glad I Can Still Get Completely Fixated On New Interest♊s﷽ Like The Cosmere
Brandon Sanderson's interconnected universe has⛎ me tearing through books 💯in a way I haven't in a decade.
