Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Brief Words About Walthros

Looking back on Walthros, I learned a valuable lesson about sci-fi/fantasy: Focusing on World Building at the expense of character development is the quickest way to make a story boring and empty. The first half of the game, in which the story is small and personal, is actually pretty fun! The second half moves on from focusing on Bob and Salom and gets all nuts with in-world politics and myths and legends and who cares, it was bad storytelling that diverted players/readers from what actually mattered.

There's several scenes where characters just dump world history on you and it's boring even to me, the guy who wrote it. Discovering the history of the world of your own volition (ie. Dark Souls) is great, having a dozen elf names dumped on you per conversation (ie. Kingdoms of Amalur, 99% of fantasy novels) is horrible. I think this is a big reason I avoid most sci-fi and fantasy novels, even the good ones. It's a matter of personal taste, but generally the more epic a story is, the less I care. I think this shows in the direction my writing has taken, with stories like C. Kane and Cool Guy Bob Surlaw. C. Kane's world effectively exists to make fun of large scale world building; its world is nonsensical, contradictory, but played straight.

No comments:

Post a Comment