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The Road to Mordor: Double dragons
Last week Turbine released the concept art for one of its major bosses from the upcoming Rise of Isengard expansion: Draigoch. With it came a number of appropriate "oohs" and "ahhs," and no doubt raiders began thinking up uses for a giant dragon skull in their homes. But there was also a crowd that popped out to cry foul about lore molestation -- that this was a blatant example of Turbine pandering to MMO players by including the expected dragons even when the lore shouldn't support it. A couple examples of quotes, first. "Yet whatever way you cut this idea, how can you integrate another dragon into the story? Smaug was the last one of his kind," Contains Moderate Peril complains. A commenter on our article sniped, "So Turbine's decided to entirely drop the pretense of sticking to the lore, then?" Ouch. As much as I am totally not attached to MMO lore in general, I feel like this might be a good time to both address this particular argument and also the larger one of Turbine's approach to Tolkien's world. Are giant dragons lore-breaking? Does Turbine simply not care about remaining faithful to source material? Do you have my decaf light mocha with cinnamon sprinkles?
DC Universe Online's developer reading list
Whether or not you're a fan of DC Universe Online, the game clearly goes out of its way to make nods to comics that spawned the franchise. That naturally has to lead to a question -- what books has the team been reading? After all, it makes a lot of difference if the team is reading The Killing Joke when it comes to designing the Joker. Fortunately for all of us who know more about DC than may be entirely necessary, ComicsAlliance has unveiled the reading list for the game's development team, replete with all of the recommended books for getting a feel for the universe. The resultant list has a number of expected entries (The Killing Joke is indeed among them) and a few unexpected ones, covering both recent events in the continuity and studies of individual character behaviors. It also contains a few surprising omissions and a couple of questionable inclusions, even with the caveats of the comics not being in continuity (Watchmen is an excellent book, but not really in the game's milieu). Still, even if you can find fault with some of the choices, it's certainly a good primer for what to expect from DC Universe Online's in-game continuity.
