This is one of the biggest differences between say, BG1 and BG3. People who complain about BG1's "empty" areas when you need that spacing to give you a sense of adventure and exploration, as opposed to BG3 where you can't go three steps without tripping over "something awesome".
no she didn't
I think it's not really related to actual depictions of countryside... it's just that people crave handmade design, but can't bring themselves to hate procedural generation.
Todd (PBUH) tried to bring the wonders of nature to a godless demographic, complete with soil erosion AI. Unfortunately the RPG Gamers called his offerings 'walking simulators' so it was all for naught. But y'all aren't ready for this conversation.
The best countryside atmospheres I've felt have been in The Witcher 1 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. You can even feel the whiff of cow dung if you close your eyes.
i agree. you see 'rowling is not really an author' as defence, i see it as an explanation.
and somehow it is autistic to criticize that level of writing
i don't read those
bro your standards are lower than a potterhead's please sit down
That is false. You're talking about the approach taken before the 'wizarding world' became a thing and we started seeing stories that involve the rest of the world. Which is when you go from 'france has its own school' to 'entire continents have their own school'. Which is worth criticism, together with some of the stuff that just didn't transition well into the growing seriousness of the story.
Rowling was very explicit early on that she "wasn't writing fantasy" but children's stories. You really need to consider the genres like British Boarding School and Roald Dahl kids stories that she was operating within. Harry Potter, especially the early 3 books or so, was a fantastic kids story. The key element was strong and consistent "whimsy" related to the magical culture and society. That is what blew the mind of the original target audience. Of course the story fell apart as she tried to move towards more Young Adult(YA), rather than what professionals would call "Middle Grade"(MG) in America, style narratives. This is especially evident in the logic of Harry living at Privet Drive, both the reason he has to and the consequences. Note that The Half Blood Prince was inititally intended to be the second book for instance, iirc.
What stories are these? I thought you guys were talking about social media shitposts.
Or fully buy into the joy of a nonsensical world and read Monday Begins on Saturday by the Strugatskys.
The new movie trilogy starts in the US, then moves onto Paris and I think it has a scene in Brazil? More importantly the expanded universe does feed back into Britain, as the game now has teachers from ugandan school and so on.
Rowling is rather notorious for her creative control. The series is her baby and I think she actually wrote the Fantastic Beasts screenplay, which is one of the reasons the movies try to flow like prose. Yeah, the 'Wizarding World' is a corporate tool to make money, but that's Rowling's estate right there. She's conscious of the fact that lots of things in her books didn't transition well after her roald dahl phase and she's retconning things all the time. She was just a bit out of her depth when creating an entire world all at once, on top of insisting that it had always existed in her notes.
This is not accurate. Rowling had a general plot and lots of story detail but it was mostly narrative and characters and not the kind of stuff that "worldbuilders" focus on. Quidditch was because she was pissed at an ex at the time and he loved sports or something, so she made a silly low effort sport and didn't worry too much about anything but the popularity/jock plotting for Harry. Time travel was NBD in a middle grade story for elementary students. The problems only arise with the shift to YA.
