Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

My reaction would probably be:

Wha... Nooo... lmao
and then I'd very slowly and methodically would free my stuff.

GamesIndustry.biz: The Witcher heralds an era of game IPs on TV | Opinion
www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-01-24-the-witcher-heralds-an-era-of-game-ips-on-tv

"That the hunt for the "next Game of Thrones" seemingly ended up finding it in a videogame is potentially a defining moment for the relationship between the game and TV industries -- it should have companies scrambling to see what else is out there that could possibly work as a premium TV show.

They shouldn't have to look far, because there are dozens of game franchises that fit the bill admirably. The adaptation process would not be uncontroversial, but it's easy to imagine any number of major game properties being translated into hugely popular fantasy or science fiction shows -- from fantasy IPs like The Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age, through alternate history epics like just about any of the Assassin's Creed games, space operas like Mass Effect, post-apocalyptic drama like The Last of Us or Fallout."

- It'll be interesting to see over, say, the next 10 years if this is the case, and more video game IPs get turned into high production TV series. I think it's less a question of "if", but "how many".

I don't see that as an issue as lot of the game series mentioned have both mountains of lore and novels to draw from. The Witcher series started as a book series, but would never have made it to Netflx if it weren't for the popularity of the games.

If they did make BioWare games into tv series, I hope they just do original stories with original characters rather than them be based on the games.

I think the biggest difference is that a lot of game-novels aren’t of sufficient quality to attract many fans outside game fans. I think that applies to most DA novels. Lore is set dressing when show makers will be looking for source material to work from. The Witcher was a book series first, reasonably successful in Eastern Europe before the games. That source material was what the series used and I think showrunners will be looking for that sort of already written material.

So I guess the question is, what sort of adaptation of something like DA would you like to see? Origins’ story is very much Fantasy by the numbers in many respects. It was also written to accommodate a main character that might be substantially different from playthrough to playthrough. It’s appeal rests heavily in the medium rather than in the story itself. I think people who say they want adaptations of their favorite games are often missing that.

It might be better then, to write a new story with Dragon Age as the setting, like Amazon is doing with LotR, but I think few games have sufficient fan bases to make that seem worth it.

A Mass Effect series staring Shepard, using the games as a loose source material might work, I think.

I’d agree, the Witcher’s worldbuilding is actually annoyingly vague at times in my opinion.

Characters are what make a show work, as you say, and that’s where I don’t think something like DA will have the same appeal to showrunners. Dragon Age as a franchise has many good characters, but no central ones, they’re all a revolving door. It’s harder then to advertise and make the show appealing through characters, especially since it looks like an unexceptional generic fantasy setting on the face of it. To make a Dragon Age show work, they’d have to make a compelling protagonist themselves and that’s a risk.

I like the idea, mind you, of a Tony Stark-like main character. For a setting, I’d be interested in seeing one of the Free March cities we haven’t seen yet, probably best to keep the number of locations minimal for budget’s sake at least for the first season. I just think a DA series would be hard to market as a distinct fantasy setting with the lack of instantly recognizable central characters. A showrunner might decide they would be better off foregoing the licensing fees and creating their own fantasy setting under those circumstances. The question is, why use Dragon Age when you can tell similar stories with your own fantasy setting?

Now, if DA4 is released to wide acclaim, and DA itself gets a lot of name recognition out of it, then I could see it happening.

I'm not sure I agree here. As much as it can be argued the lore or world may be deeper, there's not a ready-made story that is easy to tap into. Witcher is fairly easy in this regard, because as much as games made it as popular as it is AND are the reason TV series exists, it was a book series first, set around a very specific character and his friends/associates, with the story not spanning the whole of continent and a fairly tight timeline.

Dragon Age, on the other hand, is a world and story inherently tied to the medium it originated from. Even auxiliary materials - to which the TV series could be similar to - are there to ultimately serve as expansions to game an its story. They are very niche and mostly consumed by hardcore base and lore junkies.

That's not to say that stuff can't be done with it. Of course it can. But it would require a lot more effort to make something that is appealing to audience beyond DA's fanbase. There's a ton of other fantasy/sci-fi universes that are as expansive and more well-known (or at least people heard of them). 

There's also the problem that DA, as a story, didn't yet come to any solid conclusion. The current overarching plot is still ongoing and many reveals are still before us. That complicates things further.

I'm not going to get into pages-long argument over this, so fair enough.

I don't see any conceptual problem with adapting a DA or ME game to a TV series. Bio games are typically episodic anyway.

Mark Darrah @biomarkdarrah
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