GRRM is not a great writer in my opinion. Ive read his cycle and it just didnt realy jump out to me.
Its not fantasy its historical fiction withut the part where you can open up wikipedia to get spoilers.
Of course theres fantasy elements but the parts wehre those come up are essentialy the weakest parts of the narrative.
ive recently come to change my mind on fantasy and came full circle admitting that tolkien was right about fantasy.
Fantasy should feel like mythology, especialy like Heroic sagas, with specific themes, allegories and exagrations.
Naturally DnD doesnt do this due to its random nature, beeing much closer to... well to real life in the sense that theres no given out come for anything.
Video games CAN emulate this, ,the question is wehter or not they ought to.
DnD based novels are, if anything, retellings of stories. Lodoss war comes to midn. Thats where you can go into the proper fantasy part. The retelling, the exagration, the part where you insert random songs into the narrative.
With DnD video games youre essentialy asking the question: should you be telling the story, or should you let playerrs enact the story taht is beeing told?
Who is in the right and in the wrong, who is the big damn hero? thsoe questions are to be answered after the action happened.
I think insofar, BG3 works in that it has deliberatley chosen the echew the forrmer and embraced the latter.
This of course makes it look less "epic", but think about recent fantasy, what realy is epic? Witcher? i disagree.
The last fantasy game that even tried that would be Skyrim, and thats almost 10 years old.
Well ok looks you are Elder Scrolls fan. There exist them and even Elder Scrolls MMO nowadays you can play them.
The last thing I would like to turn this game is some huge kind of Sandbox like Elder Scrolls. Oh and I really bought Skyrim when you could get it for less then 10 euro. I have not liked any Elder Scrolls game. I am not Witcher fan either though Witcher is great in that way that they have lots of nudity, great graphics and fairly ok combat.
What I want is something like Baldurs Gate 1... you have main story... there are side quests of course. However it is not some huge Sandbox (except in that sense that many classes and races to choose from) the quests are clear.
