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What makes you chew fire?
What's the thing that was promised, not delivered, and just really upsets you?
For me, it's "The Doors of Stone" promised by Patrick Rothfuss. Every couple of months I think about how badly I'd love to read this book and it just really makes me angry. When I first read The Name of the Wind, I was awestruck. I just freaking loved this book. The Wise Man's Fear was a wait, but when delivered, it really satisfied me. Now, it's been 13 years!! Some days I think to myself, "I'm not even going to read his stupid book when it comes out." But, I'm kidding myself. Of course I'm going to read it...if he or I don't die first.
The Winds of Winter, the (supposedly forthcoming, supposedly penultimate) Song of Ice and Fire novel. Especially since GRRM is going to conventions, writing scripts and pilots for new HBO series, ans constantly saying it'll be out in a couple of years.
The fact that Microsoft bought Bethesda, and thus The Elder Scrolls series, and is making it Xbox exclusive. Though there are rumors swirling that they might reverse that decision since Gamepass has been eroding actual sales in the MS-verse.
Microsoft has really botched that. They scooped up all those studios and have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, Sony releases banger after banger. Horizon is the only Sony exclusive franchise that hasn't been able to hold my interest. The only recent releases I can think of for Xbox are Halo Infinite and Gears, both of which have firmly departed from their original runs imo.
That's interesting. Horizon is by far my favorite story in video games, ever! Such a fascinating world to explore.
I've got nothing against it, just a little burnt out on the open world format. It's definitely still on my list to come back to. I did play a lot of the first one, just never beat it. The combat is very satisfying, and it's definitely beautiful!
Oh boy, you just about ruined my morning until I checked, and it's morr specifically xbox + PC exclusive (I don't really follow gaming news, so hadn't heard about this).
Windows is just a bring-your-own-hardware version of Xbox these days given how much Xbox software is default-on after a fresh install…
Planetary Annihilation.
I backed the kickstarter as its progenitor, Total Annihilation was a staple game of my childhood. PA itself has merits even if it’s flawed and I had some decent times in it. However, the devs didn’t deliver on their promises and abruptly halted development before announcing the successor, which while little more than an incremental improvement was sold standalone. Fans including myself weren’t happy and the devs responded in the worst way possible, lashing out on social media.
Between that and Star Citizen I have firmly learnt my lesson on early access, kickstarter and similar. Fortunately fan made Beyond All Reason has taken the mantle of true TA successor.
Ah yes, Planetary Annhilation. The game that tried to normalize paying extra for the privilege of playing a broken and buggy public alpha. I know they phrased it differently, something about how you should really think about it as donating to the team to help the game succeed. But that’s what it felt like, and other games tried the same thing later without any attempt to paint their pricing as noble.
Prior to that, every early access game I was familiar with, was cheaper than its release price. It feels like it’s kind of gone away now, but at the time it was pretty upsetting to me. Just felt like a needlessly manipulative way to extract even more money out of early access games, when they already had a dodgy reputation at that point.
I think in the end I somehow got the game ridiculously cheap (like $5-10) because my friends and I bought a 4-pack while the game was already on a steep sale. Which just made the earlier pricing even more ironic.
Yeah the devs behaviour was a perfect example of what not to do on just about every level. Shame, because the scale of it was as unique then as it is now.
Dragon Age: Inquisition released on 2014. The Tresspasser DLC, which was released on 2015, ended on a note that left me craving the next installment of the series. It's been a decade since the last game came out. In that time-frame, Bioware focused on other projects, which didn't pan out, and lost a lot of blood due to mismanagement and other reasons. For example, they fired all the unionized workers working on DA4. They even fired Varric's writer, an extremely popular character.
I used to really look forward to DA4, and spent a good deal of time reading theories and theorizing myself on the lore of the universe. Dragon Age has one of the best worldbuilding in video games, in terms of lore. You dig and dig, and find connections that give you enough to feel rewarding, but also mysterious enough to feed your curiosity even more. Then you dig even more, find enough things to speculate and let your imagination run wild. It has a perfect blend of existing evidence and mysteries. The lack of information regarding mysteries makes speculating on the available evidence even more enchanting. It's akin to using negative space to emphasize subjects in a painting. It's very rewarding for people who are into that kind of stuff.
Sadly, I don't expect much from the next game. I highly doubt, in terms of writing, it will be as good as the previous games, which is saddening, because it's most likely going to be the finale which was building up for quite some time. I hope I'm wrong, but I really don't feel like they're going to live up to previous writing. Even if the lore writing is good, if the presentation is subpar it won't be as good.
For these reasons, I think the perfect time to be a DA lorebeard is until DA4 releases. We still have the negative space, but it's going be filled in soon. Even without subpar writing or presentation this would've been a kind of loss, because the mysteries would have to disappear anyway, but with lack of quality it's even a harder pill to swallow.
I've made my peace with the death of BioWare. Dragon Age remains my favorite fantasy setting, and I replay all three games with some frequency. But nearly all of the writers that wrote the world and stories and characters I love have moved on or been fired. I'm not convinced that DA4 will ever come out, and while I'll happily play it if and when it does, I still fully expect EA to just closeoy BioWare down sometime afterward.
There are a great new studios make great new worlds, and I'll always be able to enjoy the Dragon Ages that already exist, but it is such a bummer that BioWare and EA couldn't manage to keep a good thing going.
If you're in to D&D, a couple of the Bioware writers who worked on Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic wrote a D&D 5e campaign called "Odyssey of the Dragonlords" that is by far the best 5e campaign I've ever DM'd.
Its an incredible campaign set on a Greco-Roman style continent called Thylea and involves heroes called to prophecy to face off against powerful Titans. It's a huge level 1-20 adventure that straight out of the box is great but also has a fantastic community on Discord who've expanded the adventure and tweaked it further to be even better.
I'm a massive Mass Effect fan and I have yet to fully come to terms with BioWare not being the same. I know that even if ME4 comes out, it will not be the same, but I just keep hoping. Here's hoping to a good DA4 and ME4 for both our sakes. You're right that I should be looking elsewhere for my epic RPGs now (thanks Larian, lol).
DA:O was my favourite ever game for a long, long time, and I actually liked Inquisition a lot (and I even warmed up to DA:2 after a while). But even I stopped following the news about DA:4. It's just not worth it.
I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 now and it kinda fills the same niche, and it's helping me mourn the Dragon Age franchise a little bit. But man, fuck EA. They ruin everything they touch.
On the topic of Rothfuss I had an interesting experience recently. I picked up the new Bast novella ("The Narrow Road Between Desires") and I had to DNF it at about 50%. Really just awful writing, boring beyond belief while taking itself so seriously I almost thought I was reading satire.
I loved NotW/WMF and have read them both a handful of times, but it's been ~5 years since the last time. I'm wondering if I've outgrown his writing style or if he's just losing it. Either way it leaves me not very optimistic for Doors of Stone, whenever (if ever) that gets released.
my fun pet theory (that probably isn't totally true, but maybe has at least a grain of truth, and is fun to think about) is that he initially wrote Kvothe as a "mary sue" completely unironically, and ran with it when people read all this complexity, pastiche, and unreliable narrator stuff into it. now he doesn't know how to bring it together in a satisfying way, unfurling the inconsistencies and incongruencies in Kvothe's regaling, simply because they were never intended in that way - the inconsistencies were just genuinely bad writing and the character is genuinely intended the way he is presented. I flip-flop about it, some of it really seems like it's setting something up; some of it just seems like genuine cringe - e.g. the way women are perceived and written about. it's been a good while since I read the series so far.
I don't participate much in book discussions much, except for looking out for recommendations (and whatever the opposite of recommendations is - warnings perhaps?), so this is my first time hearing this interpretation. Anyway, I read NotW based on someone's recommendation and I totally didn't pick up on any of that unreliable narrator stuff and I just didn't get what people saw in it. It's all making sense now (the hype, anyway), and I think you might be on to something about why the third book hasn't materialized.
When was the last time you revisited WMF? I loved NotW when I first read it but WMF got really bogged down in, uh... authorial wish-fulfilment porn? I guess I should consider myself lucky that it turned off my interest in the series before I got bogged down in a 13+ year wait!
Edit: D'oh, 5 years ago. My guess is you've outgrown it -- I recently had a similar experience trying to read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, which I found unbearably simplistic in every way. And I really liked the last 3 Wheel of Time books, which Sanderson also wrote.
I felt the same way about Mistborn. I discovered Sanderson through The Way Of Kings a couple years ago and was totally engrossed. After I finished the Stormlight Archive (what was published, anyway), I was craving more so I dove into his other works, starting with Mistborn. It felt like dropping from adult to YA fiction and I was a bit disappointed.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it, same with his other stuff too, but either he has improved over time (to my tastes) or I started to pick apart his style.
Sanderson is a fun writer to read, but I find that a lot of his action scenes are written sorta like movie action scenes or anime fights - whether that is Mistborn or Stormlight Archive. I didn't pick up on it at first but now I can't "unsee" it. I don't think it makes his action scenes bad or anything, just not your traditional fantasy sword and board stuff for the most part.
It worked really well for The Last Battle in The Wheel of Time, actually. If you can get into that larger than life sort of headspace, it seems a bit less silly when you read his standalone works, because I think that's just how he writes action scenes.
Mistborn is a bit more YA in terms of feel than Stormlight for sure, but I think it's still a fun read if you can look past some of it's flaws.
I listened to most of the Stormlight books via Graphic Audio on my commute, and the fights were always super epic. I always attributed this 100% to the Graphic Audio production, but perhaps part of it was just the text translating well to the format. 🤔
I refuse to read the novellas. He’s a perfectionist, and procrastinating and needs to just finish the book. No book is perfect and an unreleased book is worse than the flawed work of fiction that is possible in the real world.
I love his fiction and world building but the wait is so unprofessional.
Similarly I was not impressed with The Slow Regard of Silent Things.
Been sitting on the first two books waiting for the third one. Then i found out about the will he/wonthe do it/finish it...anyone got latest update about it?
The Dark Tower movie.
Fingers crossed Mike Flannagan will be our redeemer.
Silent Hills.
I'm also forever tormented that Fire Emblem: Awakening turned the series into a color-your-own JRPG series revolving around shipping people, rather than the tightly-designed narrative that had finite amounts of EXP, let character supports be locked out from one another to force real character development to happen, and gave characters character via the gameplay rather than making everyone an amorphous stat blob so you can just turn them into whatever you wanted anyway. There's some really brilliant stuff when you DON'T just let the players do whatever they want - like in 7, where Wil, Rebecca, and Dart have brilliant support conversations with each other despite being pretty bland by themselves, and one of the three is forever doomed not to have the full story of what went on in their village. Can't have FOMO, no one gets directed writing anymore! Guck. Anyway it sold like hotcakes, so I'm just yelling at clouds for the rest of my life.
War against the Chtorr
Fourth book (of what the author said was to be a series of seven) was published in 1993. And as of 2024, nothing. No three other books. I'm not bitter. I'm annoyed.
David Gerrold pieced together a really interesting apocalypse universe, one of biology where the science isn't a few throwaway lines to justify action scenes. The psychology of surviving in a world where well upwards of two-thirds of humanity has been killed by the invading extraterrestrial ecology is also not given short shrift. Themes of responsibility, decisiveness, awareness, and accepting uncomfortable facts are all explored.
I can't imagine they were easy writing. But he just gave up. Like, crickets. Which is one thing I'll give him credit for I suppose. Much better than the bullshit with Martin, where every six or nine months that old has-been makes a new post about "Real Soon Now(tm)" regarding his breakout series.
I gave up on GRR Martin and ASOIAF about five or six years ago. I think Martin likes having written much, much more than writing. I also think he has a pretty bad case of Perfect Surprise syndrome; where he feels like the story has to be perfect, and further has to take the readers by surprise. When everyone began figuring out his endgame for the series, it seems he got a lot less interested in writing any of it.
I still sort of, a little, hold out hope for War against the Chtorr. And I really miss what Honor Harrington used to be. Eric Flint is dead now, but I will always blame him for infecting David Weber. Before Weber and Flint got together and began collaborating, Weber wrote military science fiction with a steadily deepening built up world. After they began working on projects in unison, Weber started writing Political Opera. Really disappointing.
David actually runs weekly chats and a writing class, and he's commented on it too. Apparently he's having to rewrite a lot of it because it's so old and he's learned so much since the last one came out (and he adopted a kid back about the time he wrote that last one, so there were a lot of interruptions). He hasn't given up-- he's been putting out the occasional chapter on his Patreon and such. But yeah, he's acknowledged the frustration, on his part as much as anyone else's.
Not to get your hopes up too high, but David just remarked that book 5 will be finished this year. Here's hoping!
His unreleased chapter he used as bait to get people to donate to his chosen charity pisses me off even more.
Agreed...one thing to be delayed. Another to just straight up lie to people.
With the Megabots vs. Suidobashi Heavy Industry giant robot fight, I'm not even angry anymore, just sad. I was pretty excited after seeing the initial challenge and response, given how much of a mecha fan I've always been. Then the actual fight premiered.
Everything leading up to the fight from Megabots indicated a legit contest, only for them to put out something looking like a low-budget Discovery Channel reject, with all the excessive padding, cringe-inducing acting, and ridiculously contrived drama you expect from that. What both teams were able to show off with their mechs was cool albeit underwhelming, but the whole package made it all look scummy. If they had been upfront about the change of plans and kept the reality TV producers away, I wouldn't have had my heart broken.
Wow, that was... incredibly underwhelming. Couldn't imagine how bad it would be if you were excited for that, that seems crushing.
I remember seeing the challenge and response, but never saw the actual fight. Guess I didn't miss anything. The camera work is so bad I can barely watch even bits and pieces of it, and the parts I did see before closing the video so I wouldn't get seasick were so staged-feeling it's almost insulting.
The conclusion to the Dune series written by Frank Herbert's son (Brian Herbert) and Kevin J. Anderson. I read the series in highschool and have meant to go back and read the originals again.
I didn't mind the prequel series they wrote since it felt like supporting stories in a way since they existed to build lore and tell a back story. The two novels they published as conclusions do the main series just felt lack luster and it has stayed with me over the years. The ending of Chapterhouse Dune left such a cliffhanger and then just a meh wrap up.
People have gone on about A Song of Ice and Fire already and I agree on all counts.
When people spend time bashing on American fraternities and sororities (called Greek life due to the names of the organizations using Greek letters) I do tend to get annoyed. I was a very involved member of my chapter and in the international organization as well during my time as undergraduate. I'm always going to acknowledge there are problems that take place in different chapters but there is a reason the organizations have survived and been cherished by the members for so long. It was an amazing support network and opened my eyes to so many different points of views, backgrounds, life circumstances, and more.
I stopped myself before typing paragraphs on why I found the Greek life system important and worth defending. People saying you pay for your friends or get mad they didn't get into social events have no idea what it's like being a member. Fine to criticize people who do dumb/awful things but calling for the system to be abolished because of individuals takes it a step too far.
This was never really promised, but more like "I plan to write it" which turned into "there are more important projects and I can't do this one justice"
For all that Brandon Sanderson writes- between Stormlight and his Secret Projects- he sparked a TON of interest with his book The Rithmatist. Some years ago he said he would put a sequel to it in the pipeline... and then he decided to move onto other projects. I've heard that he wanted to do justice to Aztec/Mayan culture, and hence why he's never written it.
And yet... he writes so much else, but getting a sequel to Rithmatist seems to be one he's abandoned.
Between ASOIF, Rothfuss and other forever-unfinished fantasy series I'm glad that Sanderson at least completes the other 99% of his series that he sets up.
Personally, I'll take one dropped sequel over an entire story not being finished indefinitely, even if I have smaller gripes with Sanderson's writing style sometimes. He's fun to read, for the most part as well.
Steven Erikson often tells the story about how he almost died on an archeological dig in Mongolia, and how it spurred him to go home and finish the series as quickly as possible. Just to make sure he'll never have people angry with him after he dies and in his words "piss on his grave".
If he sets his mind to it, he'll finish it if no freak accident kills him first.
Considering his main story is ten books long it would've been an awful thing to have happened at book nine.
I absolutely love Malazan: Book of the Fallen, despite how jarring the first half of the first book is in terms of narration. I tend to recommend it to any of my friends that haven't heard of it and enjoy fantasy.
It is right up there with LOTR and The Wheel of Time for me, and probably a few other series. I have a lot of "favorite" fantasy books/series.
It's been a transformative series for me. Even the first book, which speaks to the imagination through Darujhistan, is a great read. Especially on a second read through. Difficult to parse, yes, but good.
I remember on Reddit that speaking about Malazan on /r/fantasy was a bit of a non starter because the people that like the books can sound a bit proselytizing, but it really does set its own standard. Not to say it's without faults, but it's up there with the greats.