Witcher 3

Really, it would be a shame to lose out on stylized fantasy in general in exchange for the Game of Thrones knockoff "wow so realistic" aesthetic, especially when a lot of the people who write or jerk themselves off over settings like that lack the contextual historical knowledge to even know what "realism" ought to be.

Case in point:
People who think believability takes priority over fun in their make-believe games

People who think their preferred aesthetic is the "good one" and that they're above [whatever the "normies" like.]

There's room for everything, as there should be.

Yeah dude Dark Souls and Bloodborne sold like shit. Fuck your false flag shit, you're making us M&B fags look bad for no reason

But game of normalfags doesn’t even look that realistic, in fact everything looks too modern for a supposedly medieval setting

>especially when a lot of the people who write or jerk themselves off over settings like that lack the contextual historical knowledge to even know what "realism" ought to be.
The worst example of this is the Wicther devs deciding to make the wheat in their games green instead of yellow for 'historical realism' purposes (even though it doesn't take place on irl Earth and no one alive today was alive in the dark ages anyway). They put that in, but you can't even fucking grapple(wrestle, not the hook you get for some reason) in those games.

>Witcher
>dark ages
A) the dark ages were a Victorian meme
B) what were thought to be the dark ages took place in the early medieval period, the Witcher is clearly running on a 15th-16th century analogy

t. pollack dev

every thread deserves a bump

Anything you'd recommend to read on the topic?

>fantastical = cartoony

Butterlord isn't fantasy.

Not that user, but you can see how deconstructionist and reconstructionist fiction move in their own cycles if you look at other genres. Hell, Don Quixote is deconstructionist fiction. Capeshit is the classic example, because the lines are the most clear-cut. Started out with silly 40's Superman, got sillier by 60's Adam West Batman, and then started down a long road of deconstruction from Spider-Man getting his girlfriend killed to The Dark Knight Returns... until people got tired of that and started building it back up.

But when a genre is particularly popular it doesn't have to stick to the same trends so rigidly. As an example, Mass Effect is just reconstructionist Star Trek, even though you can't really say there was a deconstructionist Star Trek that it was refuting.

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But I prefer the witcher universe to the witchers themselves. The schools are just a whole lot of protagonist-bait.

I'd say Mass Effect has more in common with Babylon 5 and DS9 than TNG or TOS, so it could be seen as deconstructionist itself.

No, we're seeing niches come to be occupied.

Warcraft won't die no matter how much wow becomes like a facebook game.

Cartoon fantasy might be losing in popularity but that doesn't even remotely make it dead, considering how profitable warcraft derivatives are and even more silly shit like clash of clans becoming extremely popular.

That's not a bad thing. It's fun to unwind. Fuck, I used to play the Wizards RPG back before wow got popular just to unwind with a pretty, very fucking comfy rpg.

Liking that hasn't diminished with my coming to love the gritty low fantasy, and I've come to drool over the no-magic fantasy just because I think it gives more options for deep and mature storytelling to take precedence over cinematic setpiece fantasy.

Niche genres coagulating into their own spaces are a good thing. That's how stuff like Dungeon Keeper continues to spawn derivatives that are getting closer and closer to being like the original 2, and those are all to an extent abbreviated and cartoonish.

I sincerely doubt that major fantasy styles die in any decisive, permanent sense. It's not like science fiction, which often so beholden to the limitations of a contemporary technological understanding that reading old scifi like EE Smith is an exercise in not laughing your ass off at how oddly the technology has aged.

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so now brown and bloom is hailed as the hallmark of fantastic creativity

You could say that Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 were the deconstructionist Star Trek and have a fair point, but only relatively. DS9 is no Watchmen, it takes a hard look at some of Trek's ideas but it still completely embraces things as they are.

But Mass Effect came about in the Internet age, so the deconstruction it was refuting was a collective one, a response to every "rubber forehead aliens are dumb" comment instead of any piece of fiction in particular you can point to.

And yet he's right.

For dullards, sure, but if an actual history buff runs a game they're usually pretty liberal with the bright colors and patterns and shiny treasures you read about in so many classic epics.

>Wizards RPG
I knew it was a movie but I didn't know it was a game. Tell us more.

Why are cartoon fags so defensives? Jesus.

You. I like you. You can stay.

Vice versa.

Warcraft is ugly as fuck. I'm so glad I have never played it.

Was “cartoony fantasy” ever popular in general?

This.
Warcraft is just a kitchensink vomit, hardly even a fantasy. I do not like realistic turbo medieval shit either, but it beats the incoherent mess of flashy pictures like crafts or generic mobas.
I wish for more stuff like Banner Saga, Legacy of Kain, Okami, etc.

Functionally it's a bit like AD&D with the character creation in GURPS. Art wise it's entirely faithful to the movies. It has the Main book, in my last post, and then Scorch and Montagar supplements for character creation and locations. Scorch's illustrations are all those old Ian Miller backgrounds and some really nice character designs. The game itself centers around the actual war between magic and tech that Blackwolf kicked off and you can play as all the little factions in the movie plus some new ones. It's hard to get tho, otherwise I'd post the pdfs. I don't know if they exist.

What's beautiful in comparison, then?

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>Banner Saga
I hated that game but the art was neat

Why aren't there any black people in that picture? RACIST BASTARDS!

WE

Why? It's like a dozen of simple tactical battles and then it is visual novel, only less gay and more beautiful.
I can understand how it can be boring and uninspiring, if you are a fan of tactical rpgs, but to hate it?

>Judging a book by its cover.

It sucked.The story sucked. The combat sucked. The characters sucked. The pace was slow and monotonous rather than grand and evocative like they wanted. Music was flat as hell.

It ain't no fucking Tactics Ogre.

No lie, I was so fucking happy when i saw that. Like 30 minutes of a smile on my face.

>People who think believability takes priority over fun in their make-believe games

It's actually worse, since it's not believability they're admiring, it's realism.

Realism->in accordance with the laws of reality
Believability->internally consistent, relatable and logical

A setting can have no supernatural elements at all and still be intensely unbelievable (e.g. because characters don't act like human beings or the plot is extremely contrived), while conversely it's possible to have trolls and dragons and fairies up the wazoo but still come off as believable since it does obey *logic*.

The most commonly provided examples are Superman and Batman: Superman is never "realistic" (he's a guy flying around shooting lasers out of his eyes) but the very best Superman stories work because they're "believable" - they explore the logical consequences of the existence of such a being and have him behave like we, real people, would if we were in his place. It works because if the reader only suspends their disbelief a tiny little (Superman can exist) the rest falls naturally into place.

Batman, meanwhile, is lauded by some as a "realistic" superhero, since he doesn't have supernatural powers... but his worst stories REALLY STINK in the believability department since every page requires you continue pretending that logic and human nature apply to a reality in which a person so brilliant he's mastered basically every field of knowledge, with access to infinite amounts of money (both of them, you might not, are realistic yet unbelievable), would deduce the best way to fight crime is to spend billions on bat-themed gadgets and go beat up muggers in a jet powered car.

Genre fiction has ample room for unrealistic stories. Unbelievability , though, is virtually always, always bad.

(cont.)

>A) the dark ages were a Victorian meme

More like a Renaissance meme.

The key thing to realize here is that people's ability to suspend disbelief is very high, and it's easy to work out new laws of physics/biology/etc., but for a story to work (or for people to be able to function in an interactive world) it MUST still obey the laws of logic. Causes and effects must still be clearly related. People must still behave like people. The same action under the same circumstances must lead to the same result, etc.

This is where many settings fail. They implicitly run on our own world's system of logic but then proceed to describe situations which aren't congruent with it.

Which is really where the problem lies: some people think that so long as they depict the Middle Ages as sufficiently shit smeared, the priesthood as sufficiently corrupt and the peasants as sufficiently downtrodden, they've checked the "realism" box and all is well. In fact, applying LOGIC, rather than "science", would show many of those settings are LAUGHABLY unbelievable.

Good example: older editions Bretonnia from Warhammer Fantasy. In their quest to make the country as ridiculously oppressive as possible, GW has, at one point, described an economic system which just COULDN'T WORK (i.e. with a 90% tax rate the peasants would simply not survive and the country will crumble instantly).

Or Westeros. Even if you assume that in the early editions there wasn't much magic being thrown around, the fact remains that, for example, the country is far too LARGE to contain the kind of political structures it does. In a logical setting, civilization on Westeros could NEVER evolve the way it did.

>some people think that so long as they depict the Middle Ages as sufficiently shit smeared, the priesthood as sufficiently corrupt and the peasants as sufficiently downtrodden, they've checked the "realism" box and all is well
Isn't it the genre of its own? Dirtpunk, manurepunk or something like that?

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I'll take cran apple juice vending machines in the back of an oxcart if I can just grapplefuck some shithead squire with my beefy armour-clad physique and then punch his face in with a gauntlet like a real chivalrous knight would.

pls stop slapping punk on eveything, I swear it's the Veeky Forums genres all over again

Ah, I see you're into pedanticpunk, too.

Fine, just to save your feelings I will call it Manure Fantasy

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Warcraft III is one of the best (if not the very best) vidia of its genre, and I do find that its aesthetics fits the game very well. Granted, it becomes awful when you transpose it in other genres, but you should not hate a good game just because it was so good it spawned many retarded childrens

Doodoopunk has a nice ring to it though.

Agreed, poopoopunk isn't bad either

Wow, you are the first dude I see with such a strong opinion about this game.
I disagree on every point, aside from
>It ain't no fucking Tactics Ogre
It sure isn't, thank God.

>witcher isn't good
what's it like having irredeemably shit taste

>Cartoony
Nigga if you actually would read warcrafts old lore it's pretty fucking brutal. The only thing that's cartoony is just the art style.

Example, it's not commonly known but you know those harpes? Yeah they abduct males of species then rape then in their nests to breed them and then feed them to their young.

Nelves back in the day we're more like animals then generic wood elves. Before they worked a lot more like amazons. Also let it be known that elune literally fucked a deer god. She likes that stag meat.

So yeah it's cartoony if you take it at face value.

>Warcraft III is one of the best (if not the very best) vidia of its genre
It isn't. It died pretty quickly as a CS discipline, but modding kept it afloat to the present day. Starcraft is a better example of RTS, and if you dig deeper, there are such things as KKD and TA, who came before, but are on another level completely.
Most people of today know it simply because of WoW or Dota.

Oh, so it's not just cartoony, it's brutal, cartoony and has porn in it. Good to know.

>randumb fetish shit makes it more mature and serious
And he was talking about artstyle, so I don't really know why is this relevant.

Bannerlord and Kingdom Come aren't even fantasy games though.

1. M&B (and Bannerlord, as far as I'm aware) take place in a fictional world. Magic or no magic, that technically makes them fantasy.
2. Kingdom Come has potions that actually work magic.

All of those games are pretty brightly paletted.

>The only thing that's cartoony is just the art style.
Hi, welcome to the discussion.

So NElves is WHFB Wood Elves but looks worse. Good to know

>Witcher 3
Came out years ago after several other Witcher games
>Kingdom Come
Not fantasy
>Bannerlords
Sequel to Mount&Blade and neither are strictly fantasy. Also, vaporware that's never goiong to be released.

Your point is inane and stupid and I declare this gay-ass thread over.

>wow you actually didn't like it?
no

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/thread

Warcraft is meme-fantasy, it did good for a while but died over time.

>noblebright manurepunk

>Kingdom Come
>Not fantasy
What is it then, historical fiction?

>historical fiction
That's what I'd call it, given that it's set in a real time and place.

That ugly fucker Henry certainly isn't in many women's fantasies.

>he actually thinks Bohemia was a real place and not myth fabricated by the Czechs to scare Bolsheviks

>Cartoon Fantasy
I don't think this is the right description for Warcraft. When I hear "cartoon fantasy" I think of a fantasy world that is explicitly a cartoon like Shantae or My Little Pony. You might not like Warcraft, but Warcraft is very much a regular fantasy setting, just with an exaggerated art style.

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>m-muh bikini purple elf setting actually has deep and dark lore if you look at it

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tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDungAges

But of course, anyone who hasn't studied statecraft for a living (99% of any given audience at any time) wouldn't know that about Westeros. Same with people who aren't economists by trade and Bretonnia. It's believable enough to them because they don't know better, because - fun fact - most people know what they NEED to know to not get FIRED, and not much else.

>people who like game of thrones aren’t very smart
Who would’ve guessed?

>To be fair, you have to have a pretty high IQ to understand Game of Thrones...

Why does realism scare redditors so much? Is it because theyd actually have to take it with sincerity and would have trouble hiding behind irony?

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Versimilitude is better than realism every time when it comes to fiction, fight me.

As to OP's question, cartoony fantasy won't die, it'll just go from being the thing Veeky Forums hates to the thing Veeky Forums will whine they don't see enough of anymore, gritty realism is boring and overdone, remember WoW those were the days.

Doesn't fantasy require actual fantastical elements, and not just fictional setting?

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No, that’s just you and every other moron who can’t get off of Tolkien’s dick for 5 seconds

There's also the fact that cartoony graphics simply age better as technology moves on. Although now we're at the point where it doesn't make much of a difference, just look at realistic graphics from 20 years ago and more stylized games from the same time.

Man, this painting really didn’t age well. Especially when you compare it to WOW art

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wow dude you're retarded?

No, apparently there's a difference in definition of fantasy between different (languages? cultures?). Here (czech), fantasy is specific subgenre of fantastical literature, while in anglo countries, the definition is much wider.

Was this the face model for andromeda?

Witcher 3, Kingdome Come and Bannerlords have one thing in common. They're all from Europe, where people aren't that interested in cartoony fantasy. Stuff coming from the USA will still be crappy.

The only thing that's changed since the 90's is graphical capability. Realism has always prevailed in the west's RPGs and fantasy settings, especially on PC.

He didn't say Witcher isn't good, he said the protagonist is a mary sue, which is true.

>They're all from Europe, where people aren't that interested in cartoony fantasy

>concept art for Allods Online, developed in Russia/Ukraine

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M&B Warband is my favorite game but I'd be upset if it was standard for a fantasy setting considering it isn't fantasy.

I actually liked Nelves since they're every elf cliche sub-race rolled into one. Arcane, ancient high elf crap, ambushy druidy wood elf crap, and shadowy demon dark dark elf crap. As far as elves go they're okay.

Then they also put High Elves in any way, so fuck me

I guess people want to divide "childish" fantasy and "adult" fantasy because enjoying simple colorful bold stuff is considered sort of silly? Well, the industry got us all covered I guess. I also think OP should've thought about what be meant by "cartoony" before posting, because it's a complex thing, you can't shove vidya style in 1 word without losing lots of meaning on the way.

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>>bannerlords
kek

>Good example: older editions Bretonnia from Warhammer Fantasy. In their quest to make the country as ridiculously oppressive as possible, GW has, at one point, described an economic system which just COULDN'T WORK (i.e. with a 90% tax rate the peasants would simply not survive and the country will crumble instantly).
you do realise it was supposed to be a bit of a joke and the nobles actually redistributed the grain back to the peasants? Its like communism but with even more brainwashed people.

>did good
stuffing dogshit into your mouth with both hands is doing good?

Because neocommunists rail against reality and anything that reminds them of reality.