Reading the Stormlight Archives while playing The Veilguard makes Dragon Age seem generic

There are no elves or dwarves in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series. Your journey will not be guided by wise, gray-bearded wizards. The land is free of orcs and goblins. Its setting, Roshar, has little to do with traditional fantasy worlds like Middle-earth and its descendants, and it doesn't draw on monsters from folklore like The Witcher. Although Brandon Sanderson's high fantasy series has clear inspirations, they are not the common pillars that support much of the fantasy genre. But there are a few things holding Dragon Age: The Veilguard back.

The Weirdness of the Stormlight Archive

The Stormlight books are set primarily in the Shattered Plains, and it's basically what it sounds like: an expanse of plateaus separated by slot canyons and inhabited by giant crustaceans called Chasmfiends. Two armies fight for territory and conquer plateaus to gain valuable Gem Hearts by either killing Chasmfiends with powerful magical swords called Shardblades or claiming them from the crystals left behind. One army is made up of humans, the other is a race of humanoid creatures called Parshendi, whose skin is marbled and hard like an insect's shell.

The series is full of ideas, but the organizing principle of life on Roshar is that high storms – extremely powerful storms that will kill people caught in their wake – move across the land from east to west with consistent regularity. Buildings are built with their windows facing the storms, the continent's animals are often covered in shells, and plants often grow in “rock buds” so they can take shelter during storms. It is a fascinating world that is different than anything I have ever experienced in the fantasy world.

And that's just stuff from the first book.

The familiar tropes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In comparison, Dragon Age seems to throw all known fantasy motifs into a blender. There are interesting ideas in there, such as the Gray Wardens being uniquely qualified to fight the Corruption, but many of these aspects seem to have been sanded down in Veilguard.

In the end you're left with a fantasy world with people and elves, dwarves and dragons, warriors and magicians. There's just not much in this game that deviates from what you'd expect from a high fantasy setting. The darkspawn are boring, evil monsters. “The Blight” isn’t a particularly novel take on fantastical evil. The Fade is a pretty ordinary other world.

I may be missing something, as this isn't a series that inspired me to do a lot of wiki browsing. While the Dragon Age series delves deeper than most fantasy series into the tensions between the various fantasy races, ten hours into Veilguard this theme seems out of control. I'm sure if I delved deeper into the story I could find more things that set the series apart. But that's the thing: With Sanderson, you don't have to dig deep to see what makes it different. Most of the worlds he creates feel like a fantasy version of a highbrow script for a new film that feels like nothing you've seen before. Usually you can present your books with a single sentence and that sentence makes readers want to read it.

Everything is possible in fantasy

His debut novel, Elantris, is set after the fall of a city of gods where the magic that elevated its inhabitants to radiant immortality is inexplicably altered, transforming them into lesser zombie-like creatures who can never heal from any wound they suffer. The book is a mystery and the hero tries to find out what happened to the city and its inhabitants.

The Mistborn Trilogy is set in a world where the evil Emperor and a group of thieves join forces to rob him using their supernatural powers fueled by consuming and burning metals. Tress of the Emerald Sea is set in a world where the oceans are made not of water, but of colored spores that exhibit violent physical reactions when they get wet. The most difficult of his works is “Stormlight” to present, but that's because he introduces so many interesting ideas that it's difficult to focus on just one.

Dragon Age, on the other hand, doesn't have a strong tone from a narrative perspective. “A fantasy RPG series with an emphasis on narrative choice and interesting companions to befriend and/or form romantic relationships with” is a good pitch, but that tells me how the game plays, not its world .

I have the same problem with Avowed, although I imagine I'll like this game a lot more.

You don't have to create completely new worlds to create an innovative and interesting pitch. Baldur's Gate 3 was set in the Forgotten Realms, a fantasy setting as well-excavated as ever before. But his elevator pitch — what if a bunch of self-interested people had to work together, otherwise the tadpoles in their heads would turn them into mind flayers — immediately conveys the urgency of the search and gives these strangers strong motivation to come together. The Veil Guardian needed a better setup than “evil gods are out in the world spreading evil.” But ten hours later, that seems to be the crux of the matter.