New Dragon Age discussion thread

[Dark_Raven]

The animation is realistic.

[Tigranes]

You're right, the radiation has changed their exoskeletons.

[Dark_Raven]

That it did.

[Llyranor]

ROFLASLFALMAOTUNASANDWICH

 

You can read the first chapter of David Gaider's new Dragon Age novel here!!!!11!1

http://dragonage.bioware.com/noveltst.html

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

... I honestly don't expect anything good out of that book.

[Llyranor]

David Gaider sure writes a lot. He puts words and words and words together. So much freaking exposition, none particularly interesting. I can't believe I've already put up with 5 pages of this.

[Maria Caliban]

... I honestly don't expect anything good out of that book.

 

I'm hoping for yaoi.

[Llyranor]

Light-headedness came over Maric, and

he saw stars. He fought against swooning

Wow, this really is badly-written fanfic.

 

Wow, just wow.

 

Whatever interest I had in DA just went down a few notches.

[Tigranes]

It *would* get an A in high school writing class.

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

So is Llyr serious now or...? I can't tell anymore.

[Llyranor]

Not that Loghain much cared what the Orlesians called

him, since it was their fault his family had been forced off the

farm. The Orlesians didn

[Rhomal]

It's like a car wreck.. its horrible, sad and painful to endure but when passing by you just can't look away...

[Llyranor]

A cold wind blew across the field, making him shiver.

HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA

 

Thanks for letting us know that the cold wind made him shiver, Mr David Gaider!

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

This is a joke, right? That quote is from some nowhere fanfiction.net story, right?

 

 

Someone is going to make money out of this.

Edited January 16, 2009 by WILL THE ALMIGHTY

[Leferd]

You know...it's really not that bad.

 

Gaider isn't much of a novelist, but atleast he didn't write the Mass Effect novels. They were terrible.

Gaider though, is a really good video game writer. I'm thinking maybe that as a side project, instead of writing a Dragon Age novel, he should have scripted a

comic book miniseries and had each chapter's art done by a different aspiring comic book artists within the ranks of Bio's art dept. That would probably mask some of his

awkward, virgin novelist prose.

[skuld1]

Well, maybe it gets better... but it shouldn't take away from the fact that he does good writing for games. I've heard that writing for video games and writing novels are two completely different beasts.

[Llyranor]

Freaking Hades, I finished that bloody chapter. You couldn't pay me to read that novel.

 

Gaider seems in love with himself and his words. Words words words. He loses himself in his descriptions while disregarding pacing and flow.

[Dark_Raven]

Gaider is awesome.

[Llyranor]

A cold wind blew across the field, making him shiver.

[Pidesco]

I don't really see how this is any worse than the writing in any Bioware game or, indeed, the writing in almost every other game by any developer ever.

 

In fact, despite the overall writing incompetence showcased by Gaider here, it's still better than the writing in many games developed around narrative. All Final Fantasies come to mind.

[Monte Carlo]

Dave Gaider wrote:

 

Men didn

[Tigranes]

All Final Fantasies come to mind.

 

You know, Final Fantasy's writing isn't bad either, if you look at it from the perspective of constructing plots and delivering those set pieces in the right order and in the right way. In fact, some FFs are quite excellent in that presentation, delivery and construction of the narrative. The actual prose is nothing to write home about (and mostly, nothing to bash your head about). And if you're searching for any deeper meanings, ironies or good commentary, you'll find a terrifying void.

 

I judge Gaider's book chapter and many games in the same way. I'm not interested in nitpicking because in writing, inane nitpicking can always make anything look bad. He's got a few clangers in there (like "run he did") and in general, the chapter gives the impression of run-on sentences and buckets of similes and adjectives. But really, who's looking to find delicious prose in Gaider? That was never his strength, and judging by the style he has chosen here, he's not intending it to be the strength. What would be the selling point would be the overall narrative and the characters. Usually it's not bad enough to bother me, and I wouldn't read this kind of book very carefully anyway. They're meant to be subway filler.

 

Unfortunately, thus far, Maric is completely boring. His effort to inject energy into his character and flesh out his motivations ends flat for me because it is so utterly boring a concept to begin with. Wah, heir of dynasty, mom is rebel queen, mom died, i'm on the run, but i'm only young and i'm so scared, wah. Geez. I can't care about the betrayal of the Orlesians or the whoever it was if I don't know anything about them. Expecting people to retroactively understand Maric's anger for these Orlesians just doesn't work. We're expected to immediately empathise with Maric by the sheer virtue of the fact that he's running away from something and his mom is dead; we're expected to identify a hatred of the Orlesians based on one sentence about how they're, again, another set of bland, uninspired 'arrogant nobility'. That's what disappoints me more than, I don't know, "run he did", or the fact that his fighting the armoured pursuer was too drawn out.

 

What does the chapter makes us look forward to? Probably Maric working out what he can do to get back at the Orlesians and restore his kingdom. Loghain will probably, after some soul-searching, ditch his background (maybe his dad will die, too) and join Maric. They'll pick up an elusive love interest on the way who is either connected to the Orlesians, the dynasty, or harbours a secret related to that. At least one member of Maric's band of misfits will have been an Orlesian collaborator in the past. There will be a raising of an army later, and the discovery of some dastardy plan on the part of the Orlesians or some other villains.... In other words, it's your average fantasy novel. Uninspired. That's really the problem I have with it. If, on the other hand, I turn out to be wrong and the plot and characterisation and situations are a bit more interesting, the prose itself won't be much of an issue IMO.

[Monte Carlo]

I'm not a big fan of fantasy novels either. The problem, as I see it, is that there is marked tendency towards portentousness. They play it too straight. I tried one of those big Robert Jordan books on a plane once, and it was a much better way of getting to sleep than the pills the doctor gave me.

 

Interestingly, in a movie, this can work. LotR only works as a movie when played on a completely straight bat, if they'd tried to be humorous of campy it would have crashed and burned.

 

Anyhoo, Dave G (who I actually really rate in his day job) falls straight into this trap. Why is Terry Pratchett one of the most popular fantasy writers? OK, apparently he's a good storyteller (As I said, I don't read much fantasy) but also he's funny and makes people feel comfortable with the genre. My favourite fantasy, BTW, is 1970's acid trip 'Science Fantasy' a la Moorc0ck (language filter!), with guys with flame lances riding giant flamingos (honestly, man, I like saw that for real!). For me, Ian Fleming is a better fantasy author than Tolkien.

 

Thing is, given the medieval and / or ancient culture influences of a lot of fantasy, why is it so serious? Chaucer is full of jokes.

 

Cheers

MC

[Tigranes]

I'm not sure how, but I read five or six Jordan books. I couldn't stand Salvatore or those other big names, though.

 

The way I read them is, I read them really quickly. On the 'small scale' their writing is often atrocious - there are no delicious play of words, there are no ironies or commentaries of worth, and yes, they play it too straight, and to boot a lot of them are prone to throwing in sickening crap about freedom or democracy or multiculturalism or whatever, as if they were Universal Values of Good. But I enjoyed Jordan just for the fact that if I skim-read I could watch a massive, massive narrative unfold. Of course, the said narrative stopped actually going anywhere halfway through the series - I think in the latter books it was following 5-6 characters which had all split and done different things, and for one of them, in a 500 page novel, the only thing she managed to do was do some emo pondering about pregnancy and cut her hair, which somehow Jordan turned into a massive political event. Lord of the Rings I loved as a child, precisely because Tolkien knew what the point of these books were: to provide a detailed, massive world, history and setting. The point wasn't to freaking introduce soul-searching and righteous anger and angst for Aragorn. The characters were merely representations of facets of the world.

 

I tried Terry Pratchett, and I wasn't really impressed. He does take stock fantasy and tries to make it wacky and weird, but that can only be entertaining for so long. Just like you can't sit and read a Salvatore (or similar) after another, you can't sit and read Pratchetts.

 

Thing is, given the medieval and / or ancient culture influences of a lot of fantasy, why is it so serious? Chaucer is full of jokes.

 

Any true 'influence' from different settings ceased a long time ago, and I think that's one of the reasons.

[Monte Carlo]

Just a quick one. Some authors can be serious and whimsical simultaneously, writing epic prose that can also make you laugh out loud.

 

OK, it's a very flawed novel (all the best ones are), but Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres is a good example. First time I read the bit about the sappers and the land mine I spat coffee all over a tube carriage laughing out loud.

 

Maybe Louis needs to write a fantasy novel.

 

Cheers

MC