Quote:Original post by silverphyre673
I assume you mean the standard "High Fantasy" versions of these races. Orcs, Dwarves, Goblins, Gnomes, Elves, and other bread-and-butter fantasy races have been in fairy tales for thousands of years.

In a way... Then again, in a way they haven't. Fairytale elves are *way* different. We're talking about little forest spirits, basically, or more recently people wrapping presents for Santa. Fairytale elves are not l33t archers who hate orcs with a passion, and go around being arrogant towards humans. That's fantasy elves, and they're Tolkien's responsibility.
Same goes for most of the others. I believe Tolkien pretty much invented orcs, and dwarves are, well, just short people. Again, Tolkien is the one who twisted them into this *one* single static mold.

Quote:We don't need new races, but we do need new, deep, cultures.

We also need new races. [wink]
Either that, or go back to having humans only. Even that would be refreshing...

Quote:
Yes, lets get inventive here, lets not leverage any preexisting symbolism. Lets remove the english language and revert to a new and foreign type language which is only refered to via a language dictionary included as an instruction manual.

Er, I don't think anyone suggested that. As Sneftel said, there are literally hundreds of other *existing* fairytale species to build on. There are literally hundreds of real-world cultures, and literally hundreds of mythologies to build on. And yet, everyone and their uncle chooses to build on Tolkien.

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You need your fantasy, and you need your immersion. These are, in reality, a contradicting set of traits

Not really. Things can make sense without being ripped from the real world. Immersion isn't lost just because you have a game with, say, giant lobsters waving swords around. As long as they act as you'd expect giant sword-waving lobster men to act, immersion isn't really threatened. As long as the world is somewhat consistent, people can suspend disbelief and pretend it's real.
It's only when the world starts breaking its own rules that immersion starts to get into trouble.

It´s not hard to change the standard races like elves, dwarfs and so on into a modern version. You just reduce each race to it´s key properties and transmit them to modern races.

Instead of using a Gandalf-like Person as a sorcerer you can use a Harry Potter-like or Simon The Sorcerer-like (somebody knows him??).
The same for each other race.

Oh, Final Fantasy X is a good example.

Quote:Original post by orionx103
Ifrits are used in like, one series, and that's because it's a series. How many people could tell you that shedim were originally mythical beasts that demonized into goat demons by Christians, or that a Kappa is a water spirit in the form of a green monkey in a turtle shell? Exactly.

I meant around forever in mythology, not around forever in Dragonlance novels. In any case, I think we're saying the same thing.

Quote:Original post by sirGustav
There are atleast two orc's that I can think of. The warcraft orc and the tolkien orc. They are IMHO totally different. The tolkien orc is more like an beast than a human, and the warcraft one is pretty stupid and violent(and not to mention green). In LOTR the orc's obey the evil sauron and in warcraft the orcs are a part of different clans.

Who originally obeyed the evil demons and their evil human masters as I remember. What's the big difference? [wink]
The WC orcs are just part of a longer storyline.
In Tolkien they didn't really have much time to show their personality, did they? It was just "hobbit finds ring, goes home, other hobits finds ring and everyone gets into a big battle, while he drops the ring into a volcano".
I mean, nothing really happened to the orcs as a race during that storyline.

Warcraft is practically all about how the orcs evolve and adapt.

But getting back to your point, yes, there are quite a few differences. So why the %¤"! did they have to call them orcs and instantly inherit those 40 years of clichés? Why did they have to go "We actually have enough ideas here to make soemthing interesting. But no, I think we'll just toss it into a corner and nick stuff from good ole Tolkien instead"? The thing is that even when they're portrayed differently (I actually think the WC orcs are cool, precisely because they're a bit unusual, and don't just steal everything mindlessly from other Fantasy works)

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About the goblins I cant't recall many games that contain them(although I don't play alot of fantasy games). Slaying goblins in rune was fun though.
Added later: I rcalled that goblins were in both tolkien and in warcraft. Again they differenced alot from each other(as the orcs did).

I can't recall many games with dwarfes. They were (almost) extinct in morrowind and the ones in rune were pretty boring. However having dwarfes (or similar creatures) in a fantasy game allows you to add diversity to a level with metal and alot of mashines.

So your idea of "diversity" is "let's steal some more ideas from the same source we got the rest of the game from". Funny, my idea of diversity would be something to do with thinking up different stuff, or at least, nicking ideas from different sources.

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For the 3d (total) remake I plan to keep the enemies, simply because: I need a ranged unit(elves), a close combat unit(orc), heavy close combat unit(dwarf) and some random easy slayable enemies(goblins).

See, that's where it becomes a horrible overused cliche.
Getting back to your Warcraft example, Blizzard decided to use orcs because "Hey, they're cool, and we've got some ideas for making them stand out", and the same goes for the other races really (Dwarves and gnomes and goblins aren't usually as hi-tech as they are in WC, and (almost) tossing out elves in favor of night elves is an interesting twist too).

But picking those races simply because of their most overused, clichéd properties is exactly the reason most fantasy settings suck so badly.
There's a big difference between "I need a cliche to fill out this gameplay hole", and "I have enough ideas to make something interesting, but for convenience, I'll adapt a standard race/name".

I can live with the standard races if they're at least implemented in the same way as Tolkien (or Blizzard) did. He didn't go "Hmm, I need someone to shoot arrows at people and argue with the dwarf", and then go to look such a race up in his books.
Instead, he started with the idea of fairytale elves, and then used his imagination to come up with an idea of how such a culture could work in his world. Blizzard's saving grace is that they did basically the same thing. They (probably) read LoTR, and then sat down and tried to imagine how orcs would work in the universe they were designing.

Quote:The thing is I really don't think you are against EGOD. I think you are against the standard EGOD. Each EGOD in every game are the same. Rouhly the same appearance, stats, sounds and skills over and over again.

Which is why you're implementing them in their most cliche'd forms in your game? [wink]

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I don't think a game will be better if we remove EGOD. If you want you can call the orcs Klingons and the dwarfs Malons(sp?) if that makes you feel better. (The elves roughly translates to vulcans and magicians translates to Q)

I guess that's another part of it. Once you start "translating" those races, you're going too far. That means you're reducing them from being a distinct (if overused) race, to being a set of skills and traits that can be applied to anyone anywhere.

"Elf" shouldn't equal "archer". Elf should be the name of a race that tends to appears a lot in fantasy games, and has a few, well, racial distinctions (looks pretty much like humans, but has pointy ears and are more graceful, and are connected to trees somehow). That describes a race (however vaguely), while "archer" just describes what the player wants to use them for.
Same goes for orcs. Making an orc a "melee unit" means it's not a race, it's a skill. I don't mind orcs in the sense of "big brutish and aggressive green people", because again, that means they're a distinct race/culture.

Quote:Original post by orionx103
An elf is an elf is an elf.

Not really. Elves have been around a lot longer than Tolkien. In the mythology I've read there's some blurring between elves, pixies and fairies, but there's a lot of different personalities you can go on.

To take reasonably well-known example, you could base your elves along the lines of the Fairies in Shakespeare's "Midsummer-Night's Dream". It's still a bit like Tolkien of course, because the mythology is based on the same roots, but in this case the elves are more masters of enchantment (and beings you don't particularly want to meet, unless you want to look like an ass [grin]).

Or there's the elves in "The Elves and the Shoemaker" (although you might prefer to classify those guys as gnomes).

Quote:Original post by orionx103
I disagree to your disagreement. I agree that Elves have been around longer than Tolkein, but not in the Tolkein prototype/format. The idea that Elves and Fairies have the same mythical background is completely wrong. Elves were originally of Norse origin. There were Light Elves and Dark Elves. Light Elves live in Alfheim, while the Dark Elves ("svartalfar," or "dvergar," the original dwarves) lived in Svartalfheim or Nidavellir.

Elves later became a synonym for fairy, but that's like the ancients calling a whale a fish. Non-Norse elves, aside from the Tolkein adaptation, had became things like brownies and spriggans.

Well, I was really just comparing the elves from Tolkien to the fairy-folk from British folklore. I can see some parallels between Galadriel and Titania. I'd always thought the Tolkien elves were based on the ones I'd read in English and Scottish legends. The translations I've read of Norse myths always described them as dwarves (which is the source I thought Tolkien had taken his dwarfs from).

Suffice to say, there's more than one direction you can take the elves of old; it doesn't have to be "Tolkien++".

I think one of the major problems with using tolkiens races, or some similar version of them, comes from not making the race diverse enough. It's like Star Trek. When you have fifty different races, you don't go into detail to describe each race. Instead each race becomes a totally homogenized population. E.g. introducing an elf that does not particularly like trees would do wonders for diversifying elves. As elves are used now, mostly, you say that someone is an elf, and automatically assume that all the traits of all other elves are true for that character (good archer, magician, tree hugger, pointy ears etc.).

Anyone care to explain 'EGOD' to me?

[Edited by - Wombah on October 23, 2005 2:36:09 PM]