Meet me in Minrathous

I wonder if the demon sealed under the city (the Formless One most likely) has been affected by the radical magical shenanigans that have been going on. It has been there for ages and the weakening of the Veil might finally allow it to break free.

I have to agree I was imagining something more like ancient Rome or possibly Moorish architecture such as can be found in southern Spain or the Islamic architecture of the middle east and central Asia. If you have ever been the Samarkand or other old cities on the Silk Road, you will know what I mean.



It is why I thought the screen shots of the city by the sea with the castle wrapped in magical energy were going to be Minrathous but these have now been identified as Antiva City. Still it is possible that the steam punk shots are of the seedier parts of the city that have grown up more recently but we have yet to see the Altus districts, the ones Dorian says have barely changed from ancient times.

On the time skip between DAI and DA$, I think Solas words at the end of Trespasser is the biggest hint: "That should give you a few more years of relative peace"
So I'd say 3- 5 years tops

There's not really any such thing as a "classic" fantasy setting, but whatever.

Oh, so when you say "classic", you mean you want only the most shallow, narrow, derivative, lazy fantasy. Got it.

Are you a "fantasy" fan or are you really just a Tolkien fan? Have you read or even heard of any fantasy authors besides Tolkien? Or do you think the entire genre is just LOTR and DnD?

To be fair to bierkrug, Thedas is heavily influenced by DnD, which in turn was heavily influenced by LOTR and Tolkien was heavily influenced by Anglo Saxon and Celtic folklore. So in that respect you can say the setting is "traditional" fantasy.

There are, of course, many other fantasy writers who have moved away from the LOTR/DnD type settings and opted for something completely original to them. My own personal favourites are Brandon Sanderson and David Gemmell (now sadly deceased), whose fantasy worlds, so far as I am aware, do not have a vestige of elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs (the Kossith as a race are the Thedas equivalent, particularly if it turns out they were genetically engineered elves) or dragons.

Well, we have some notion of ancient Tevinter architecture by looking at ruins in the Frostback Basin and the Western Approach. What we saw in the trailer seems to match up mostly aside from a few structures. None of it looks particularly Roman or Byzantine.

There were also fantasy writers BEFORE Tolkien. Conan the Barbarian pre-dates The Hobbit by several years, as does the work of H.P. Lovecraft, which is as much fantasy and sci-fi as it is horror. Tolkien also had contemporaries, like Lloyd Alexander and C.S. Lewis. And the big name writers who came soon after LOTR, like Stephen Donaldson and Ursula Le Guin are NOTHING like Tolkien. Even GRR Martin was writing short stories and other fantasy novels for 20 years before he published the first ASOIAF in 1996. And this isn't even taking into account the countries outside of the US and the UK, which have their own strong, long-standing history of producing fantasy and science fiction.

Tolkien is only "the father of modern fantasy" if the only "modern fantasy" you're aware of is incredibly derivative shit like Dragon Age. Fantasy worlds can be and *are* set in any time and any place you can imagine, and they *always have been*. Tolkien and his style of fantasy only became popular because, for some reason I can't fathom, people consider his work to be more "literary" and "adult" and the rest of the genre (now excepting Game of Thrones) to be juvenile: an attitude Tolkien himself despised! He had great respect for so-called "children's" fiction, which he referred to as "fairy stories", and wrote entire essays arguing that the genre deserved more respect and more adults should enjoy it.

Even in video games, if you look beyond the entirely homogenous output of "The West" (really just the US and Canada), you see that fantasy can be anything. In fact, if it weren't for Final Fantasy VII, a fantasy epic from Japan with a Diesel/Cyber-punk setting of the kind Bierkrug says they hate, there wouldn't BE any goddamn Dragon Age because it was the wild international success of this game, almost 2 years prior to the first Baldur's Gate, that convinced game developers that there was even a market for long-ass fantasy stories of that kind.

EDIT: And really all of this is beside the point. Aside from ONE magical light that looks vaguely like electricity, there's nothing in the picture that remotely resembles a cyberpunk setting at all.

You're hilarious, dude. I'm over thirty and still read youth literature. The likes of Firebringer and Ickabog are more mature than some supposed "dark" fantasy for adults. Am I subverting your expectations already?

I said nothing about hating the cyberpunk thing though. To quote myself: "It ain't my thing". The same way sci-fi or JRPGs ain't my thing. Classic (high) fantasy settings, to my western sensibilities anyway, are usually vaguely euro-medieval (castles, knights in shining armor, yadda yadda) with added magic and several sentient species (usually humans, elves, dwarves and orks). Plots often revolve around saving the world. Tolkien's influence can be felt everywhere within that genre. Elves may be called Tiste or Sylvari but they are still essentially elves. The elves that Tolkien created by combining myths of the fair folk and injecting his own spin.
What is it with centering so on the US and Canada? I'm European. German fantasy literature is probably even more derivative than what you whine about. I dare you, read one single book by Markus Heitz.

You need to get off your high horse calling everything that takes inspiration from Tolkien "derivative shit". Unless you're the author of a genre redefining epic, you have no place putting other works down like this (and not even then). Remixing elements that were there before has been a part of storytelling for as long as humanity has existed and there are many ways to do it well.

And to answer your former question: I've read, watched and played plenty of fantasy. Steven Erikson, Glen Cook and Terry Pratchett being my fave authors. You might want to readjust your prejudice accordingly.

LOL. Should've saved yourself that effort.

A concept art from 5 months ago and I only see this now lol. The "debris" around the staff makes me think of the archers they've shown previously, even though it's weird considering it's obviously a Tervinter staff and I don't think the archers are from Tervinter.

My only problem with this is that it doesn't really scream Dragon Age to me. Not because of the environment, but because of what she's wearing. It looks very much like general D&D, like someone's OC being drawn. I think my main problem is the flat cape. It giving sci-fi, not fantasy. A bit out of place in my opinion.

I don't really give a shit what a bunch of "significant fantasy authors" would think of my statements, and especially not Terry Brooks and Timothy Zahn, because I'm not going to read anything with elves in it ever again, and I have never and will never read a Star Wars tie-in novel. And don't think it's escaped my notice that all the names you AND Bierkrug have listed are old, straight white men. Like, you are just proving my point. "You don't like Tolkien? Well all the boring, unimaginative white dudes who copy him would get pissed at you for saying that!"

Good! I don't care! Fuck em!

I don't like constant, long-winded digressions and excessively flowery language, so I don't like Tolkien, not his fiction anyway. I also resent how the tropes he pioneered have dominated the genre so thoroughly and made it incredibly homogeneous and bland. I'm allowed to have that opinion.

And saying he's not the originator of the fantasy genre is just spitting facts. He's not. It existed long before him, it was just regarded as low-class and juvenile. Tolkien didn't actually do anything special to elevate it and he didn't condone the denigration of "children's stories", he openly advocated for adults reading and enjoying them. He wrote entire essays on the subject! Have you read them? I have! And I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and I do not like them, and I do not have to, but even if I did like them, I wouldn't want every fantasy novel, film and video game to copy him, and I wouldn't be so narrow-minded and ignorant to call Tolkien knock-offs "classic fantasy".

The whole point of the fantasy genre is that it can be anything, and if you don't like fantasy that departs from the tropes established by Tolkien, then you don't actually like fantasy, you just like Tolkien and Tolkien knock-offs!