I honestly don’t get why so many people consider Gothic to be the gold standard of fantasy. To me, it’s basically the exact opposite of what I actually want from a fantasy world.
When I jump into fantasy, I want to see stuff that doesn’t exist in real life:
- Huge castles
- Majestic cities
- Magical architecture
- Exotic races
- Enchanted forests
- Dragons
- Mind-bending landscapes
- Massive temples
- Taverns, music, festivals, adventures—and just utterly insane, bizarre places you could never see in the real world.
And what does Gothic give me instead?
“Here’s a prison. Here’s a mine. Here are three groups of convicts fighting over territory. Here’s a dirty shack. Here’s another dirty shack. Here’s a camp. Here’s an ore pit. Now go figure out who owes what to whom.”
And I’m just sitting there thinking: Wait, where’s the actual fantasy?
When people play fantasy, they want something more than a gang war between three groups of prison inmates. This feels way more like a gritty 90s crime drama or a show about cartel turf wars, not high fantasy.
Sure, on paper there’s magic, orcs, runes, ancient temples, and all that. But the vibe of the world is still just petty criminal drama—except every now and then, one of the convicts mutters some bullshit like “Wingardium Leviosa.”
Everything is gray and brown, there’s filth everywhere, and the game world consists of literally three and a half shacks, a pit, and a hideous forest. If you have the freedom to design literally any world you want—why the fuck would you build a landfill?
Fantasy gives you almost limitless freedom. You could invent:
- A city built around a giant tree that glows at night
- A palace floating above the clouds
- A massive valley full of floating islands
- Elven cities that look like masterworks of art instead of three dilapidated shacks
- Colossal bridges, waterfalls, temples, and lush gardens
- Magic that physically reshapes the land
- Completely non-Euclidean spaces
- Entire civilizations with architecture that couldn’t exist in reality
And instead, what do you usually get?
- Here’s a village.
- Here are some ruins.
- Here’s a tower missing half its wall.
- Here’s a cave.
- Here’s a skeleton.
- Here’s another tower missing half its wall.
- Here’s a peasant with a problem.
- Here’s yet another ancient civilization that left behind three rocks.
Get the fuck out of here with this kind of fantasy.
And apparently, this is what people love. They go: “Wow, such deep atmosphere! Such realism! What a living, breathing world!”