|
Hot take: the game IDing some ringwraiths and tying them to the greater story was also cool and actually worked fine with the narrative.
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 14:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 19:49 |
|
|
I'm pretty okay with the franchise sitting static (especially if sexy shelob is the alternative). Not every popular franchise needs to be a forever franchise with new entries every year! Let this one lie, and put the creativity it inspires into new fantasy worlds
cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Sep 21, 2018 |
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 15:57
|
|
|
Derivative works are good even if they sometimes contain something really, really stupid.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 16:08
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:I'm pretty okay with the franchise sitting static (especially if sexy shelob is the alternative). Not every popular franchise needs to be a forever franchise with new entries every year! Let this one lie, and put the creativity out inspires into new fantasy worlds Yet at the same time Tolkien himself envisioned people creating art and music based off his works, though i cannot remember if he ever commented on other people writing stories set in his world. Regardless, I do not think its crazy to say what draws all of us Tolkien fans into this is the world he built. The stories are good no doubt, but what keeps us coming back to discuss them is the world they are set in. People want to explore it more and develop it, and since Tolkien laid a rock solid foundation down, there is a lot of potential there. Nothing will ever supplant Tolkien's original works, but I love the world enough that I enjoy new stories set there. The Shadow of Mordor/War games are a cool side story written by people who clearly know the original works, cause they pull some deep cuts every now and then.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 16:16
|
|
|
I guess I'll take the word of someone who played it over that eurogamer interview which made it seem like the writer fundamentally did not understand the work. I do know it's supposed to have fun gameplay which is ultimately the most important thing for a game
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 16:20
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:I guess I'll take the word of someone who played it over that eurogamer interview which made it seem like the writer fundamentally did not understand the work. I do know it's supposed to have fun gameplay which is ultimately the most important thing for a game It does weird things and confuses the timeline, but for a video game its a cool story and as a Tolkien fan I really enjoyed seeing people play with the setting and do something interesting, if odd at times. If someone were to write a novel I'd demand a far, far, far, higher standard of consistency and story.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 19:23
|
|
|
The games are fun, but the lore in them is laughable at times in spite of the deep cuts mentioned earlier. e: It just doesn't really jive with the spirit of lotr to be Elf Ghost Batman kicking Orc rear end all day long. Marijuana fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Sep 21, 2018 |
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 19:43
|
|
|
Feanor's sons would have been all about it, and Celebrimbor was a descendant of Feanor.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 20:11
|
|
|
The rote Ubisoft open world style of endless collectibles/map markers accentuates the thematic dissonance of the game's non-stop brutal orc murder compared to LOTR source material. I played the first game for a few hours but realized I just wasn't having fun with it, and looking back that seems to be the core reason why.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 20:50
|
|
|
Diogenes of Sinope posted:The rote Ubisoft open world style of endless collectibles/map markers accentuates the thematic dissonance of the game's non-stop brutal orc murder compared to LOTR source material. I played the first game for a few hours but realized I just wasn't having fun with it, and looking back that seems to be the core reason why. It also gets frustratingly hard if you let those orc captains live too long and they level up a lot.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 21:21
|
|
|
The whole concept of the video game bothers me. The idea that you, as the protagonist, are making another Ring of Power just has "MISSING THE GODDAM POINT" stamped all over the screen in letters of fire. It feels like cargo cult tolkien to me -- they've clearly spent a lot of time learning Tolkien-themed errata but have no conception of why the stories are good or powerful stories. Once you've got your protag trying to make another Ring of Power, Sexy Shelob is . . . . well of course, why not. Let's have Sexy Grishnak too. Sexy Roäc, Daughter of Carc. Sexy Smaug: dragon tits everywhere. Go whole hog with it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 21:33
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:Feanor's sons would have been all about it, and Celebrimbor was a descendant of Feanor. Pretty sure that taking vengeance on your real enemies is the exact opposite of what the sons of Feanor were all about.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 21:47
|
|
|
I wasn’t a fan of the games simply because “find marker collect trophy stab a dude in the neck” is just... not really my style. I don’t have hours and hours to fill. It was a little hard to navigate, but that wasn’t my main beef— it was just not rewarding to find spots on the map to pick up trash and search the trash for a marker that would make me hallucinate. All stab, no substance. And this is coming from someone who has a 100% Skyrim game and drat near emptied out Witcher 3.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 21:53
|
|
|
This stuff just isn't a tonal fit. If I had to guess, a lot of more recent fantasy writing is in some sense a reaction to or engagement with Tolkien and most of these video games come out of that tradition, so by looping back to the OG IP you get dissonance, because fundamentally speaking the approach is different. Honestly the most Tolkien game I can think of is Dwarf Fortress. WoodrowSkillson posted:Feanor's sons would have been all about it, and Celebrimbor was a descendant of Feanor.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 22:06
|
|
|
Designing a game whose mechanics reinforce any good writing is pretty hard and faces stronger marketing obstacles the more money is involved. A game that felt authentically Tolkien in the game structure and was consistent on the plot details would be far too weird for a conservative game publisher to feel confident funding at that level of production value. So they did what they could get away with.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 22:24
|
|
|
There is a whole LOTR mmo that was apparently pretty faithful.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 22:28
|
|
|
I suspect it's faithful in worldbuilding details and not in tone, because Tolkien's tone doesn't lend itself to video games, like at all The games where you get tonal harmony between gameplay and story come from either asking "I have this mood I want to inspire, what kind of gameplay would result in that?" or "I have this cool gameplay concept, what kind of story would reinforce it?" and neither is too terribly common in AAA games where the story team is segregated from the gameplay team and there's dozens or hundreds of people working on it
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 22:37
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:The whole concept of the video game bothers me. The idea that you, as the protagonist, are making another Ring of Power just has "MISSING THE GODDAM POINT" stamped all over the screen in letters of fire. Uh, yeah, it ends badly for basically everyone involved.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 23:11
|
|
|
euphronius posted:There is a whole LOTR mmo that was apparently pretty faithful. It was pretty faithful to the map and descriptions of things, but at the end of the day it's hard to extract MMO classes from what we see in the books, especially when there's an expectation of for-real magic users but the closest we get in the books is Gandalf, a literal angel, lighting pinecones on fire to throw at wolves and generally making bright lights. When you take Gandalf's ability to inspire hope in his allies and reduce it to hitting '2' to give your allies a 15% boost to hit rate, some of the feeling is going to get lost. I played the game quite a bit and I did enjoy the atmosphere, but I was still going out into the swamp to kill 20 Neeker-breekers or collecting 7 barrow-wight femurs.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 23:23
|
|
|
Games should really stick to Appendix N stuff. Sword and Sorcery is a much better tonal fit for roam map, kill monsters.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 23:31
|
|
|
I'd play the hell out of a Dying Earth game, MMO or otherwise
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 23:35
|
|
|
The Silmarillion is very firmly in the hands of the Tolkien estate which has been unwilling to licence it at all but the first age would fit the video game tone much much better than the third age
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2018 23:44
|
|
|
Pham Nuwen posted:It was pretty faithful to the map and descriptions of things, but at the end of the day it's hard to extract MMO classes from what we see in the books, especially when there's an expectation of for-real magic users but the closest we get in the books is Gandalf, a literal angel, lighting pinecones on fire to throw at wolves and generally making bright lights. Yeah, I played LOTRO for a couple of years. It had the atmosphere down pat, I still have fond memories of just traveling around in the Shire. However, I agree with you about the classes and combat, it just felt like typical D&D-esque fantasy classes bolted on, even though they tried to mix things up from the normal formula. I played the Multi-User in Middle Earth MUD years ago (MUME) and had a similar feeling. The only faithful way to build a game around Tolkien is to exploit the sense of wandering around in the setting, I think. Like a 3d encyclopedia.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 00:00
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:It feels like cargo cult tolkien to me -- they've clearly spent a lot of time learning Tolkien-themed errata but have no conception of why the stories are good or powerful stories. The best interpretation I've seen of Shadow of Mordor/War is that it's actually one of the best video game adaptations around, but it's an adaptation of movies and their characteristic style. Alec Meer posted:[...] the books are long, quasi-historical journeys whereas the movies are primarily about action and spectacle. Shadow of Mordor is absolutely the latter. It is profoundly stupid, because it is, essentially, pro wrestling. But it is pro wrestling based on those innumerable sequences in the various Jackson films when a hero character has a short-lived rivalry with a recurring but unnamed Orc.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 00:16
|
|
|
Shadow of Mordor is okay as long as you realize you're playing a bad guy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 01:00
|
|
|
Is there a good write up any where on line or in print of the history of Tolkien's revisions to the mythology over the course of his life or do I just need to read the whole History of Middle Earth?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 02:21
|
|
|
That’s what the History of Middle-earth is. Includes virtually everything but The Hobbit, which has its own published textual history by John Rateliffe. There’s also Arda Reconstructed by Douglas Kane which is an attempt to determine how Chris constructed the published Silmarillion, but it won’t make any sense if you aren’t familiar with the sources (from HoME) that he’s talking about and is pretty dry anyway.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 02:59
|
|
|
All this talk of Tolkien games and no mention of Sil? It gets almost everything right, to my mind, though your character can become far more powerful than any random noldo could be expected to become. I don’t like a lot of the Angband mechanics it’s attached to, but it’s really a brilliant game all around. Regarding changes to or reinterpretations of the legendarium, I think people trying new things and taking the works in different directions is fine, even if those directions aren’t something J.R.R or Christopher Tolkien would approve of. But they have to somehow be an evolution of the spirit of the works. I wouldn’t mind somebody recasting the setting to be early 20th century technology with fantasy elements, for example, and playing up the grim, almost post-apocalyptic feel of third age Middle-Earth. But I would mind a great deal if someone retold The Lord of the Rings as something other than basically a fairy tale. I think somebody could take a look at technology through Tolkien’s lens and arrive at a completely different conclusion from his, as long as they paid close attention to the questions he asked and were sufficiently sensitive to the problems he brought up. I haven’t played the Shadow of Mordor games, only watched bits of the first one on Youtube. But my sense of them is that they may be fun games, with a lot of attention paid to details on the source material, but they don’t do anything with it. There’s no evolution on the concepts or issues that were important in the legendarium. Rather, sexy Shelob and the like is naked devolution. Characters are included to just be exciting or titillating in the moment you interact with them, rather than representing a larger narrative or theme. So there’s nothing wrong with criticizing them, and doing so isn’t the same as wanting Tolkien’s works to be eternally static. Of course, as people already mentioned, unless it’s a very niche, focused work like Sil, it’s extremely unlikely a video game, especially set during the third age, could ever be adequately reconciled with the legendarium at all.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 08:52
|
|
|
Pham Nuwen posted:It was pretty faithful to the map and descriptions of things, but at the end of the day it's hard to extract MMO classes from what we see in the books, especially when there's an expectation of for-real magic users but the closest we get in the books is Gandalf, a literal angel, lighting pinecones on fire to throw at wolves and generally making bright lights. Gandalf throws actual fireballs in LotR.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 10:43
|
|
|
Heithinn Grasida posted:I haven’t played the Shadow of Mordor games, only watched bits of the first one on Youtube. But my sense of them is that they may be fun games, with a lot of attention paid to details on the source material, but they don’t do anything with it. Heithinn Grasida posted:There’s no evolution on the concepts or issues that were important in the legendarium. Thanks for the tip about Sil! I'd never heard of it before.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 10:50
|
|
|
Sil is really good.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2018 15:58
|
|
|
Video game Shelobs not bad for a bastardized primoridal spirit of consumption and darkness, shes basically a quest giver and the main character has a bunch of misgivings about her and stuff, shes not at all what she is in the books but its also not entirely reprehensible. She's not really sexualised, but shes kind of an evil spin on galadriel? It would have been better artistically if she stayed a big gently caress off spider and communicated using intermediaries or something like that, but as stated earlier in the thread the AAA games industry is appalingly conservative save for a few studios with cultlike followings. (Rockstar or CD Projekt Red spring to mind.) The Orc murder simulator games aren't bad, infact the newer one is a lot of fun and the emphasis is really on having fun with dozens of orcs. It's basically assassin creed crossed with pokemon with orcs and that works pretty well. The lore stuff is just shallow window dressing and imo, easily ignored or taken very lightly.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 16:01
|
|
|
Throwback to Foehammer chat: Any chance that those blades are, in fact, ancient artifacts of Gondolin, and have been heirlooms of Elrond’s house for millennia, but were lost somehow during the tragedy of Celebrian’s abduction and are now, for Elrond, unwelcome reminders of what happened? “Yeah, uh, thanks for bringing these back, my wife was raped by orcs while carrying these on a road trip and now my family is a shambles and my sons are bloody-fingered maniacs and I had to send my daughter to live with her grandmother to keep her from loving the neighbor kid. You know what, just keep em.”
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 19:43
|
|
|
I mean obviously that’s not Tolkien’s intent, he clearly was operating from an incomplete mythos, but if you squint you could pretend that Elrond immediately recognized them (and the orcs did too) because they’ve been in relatively recent circulation and he just doesn’t want them now.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 19:45
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Sexy Smaug: dragon tits everywhere. New thread title, surely?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 19:56
|
|
|
elise the great posted:I mean obviously that’s not Tolkien’s intent, he clearly was operating from an incomplete mythos, but if you squint you could pretend that Elrond immediately recognized them (and the orcs did too) because they’ve been in relatively recent circulation and he just doesn’t want them now. drat, that's dark But yeah absolutely perfect explanation and explains why Elrond's reaction is so understated: they're just eliding over that whole issue because nobody wants to talk about it in front of hobbit babies or dwarven foreigners
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 20:02
|
|
|
If the swords belonged to Elrond wouldn't Gandalf have recognized them immediately when he found them? He'd been in Middle Earth for around 1,500 years (and presumably knew Elrond for most of that time) by the time the swords would have been lost.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 20:19
|
|
|
sunday at work posted:If the swords belonged to Elrond wouldn't Gandalf have recognized them immediately when he found them? He'd been in Middle Earth for around 1,500 years (and presumably knew Elrond for most of that time) by the time the swords would have been lost. Gandalf: *sees Elrond's dead wife's sword in a pile of monster loot while travelling with Dwarven royalty* "Um guys . . . yeah, let's ask Elrond about these"
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 20:24
|
|
|
As you might expect of a guy his age, Gandalf’s memory is kind of suspect on occasion. He basically completely forgot about Thrain’s map and key for what, like 100 years? And those were in his pockets! Granted he had other business to take care of and not much to go on. e: also, the swords would have had to be Elrond’s and in Celebrian’s keeping (for whatever reason). Celebrian doesn’t have any claim to them, her heritage has nothing to do with Gondolin.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 20:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 19:49 |
|
|
It could have been a present. Or maybe a brideprice? I dunno if Elves had customary/mandatory gifts when marrying like most historical human cultures do (though which direction they went in varied with place and time).
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2018 20:34
|
|