Here is the primary source:
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/state-of-the-sanderson-2025#video-games
I’ve been a big Sanderson fan for a long time. I’ll be super happy if the Cosmere is adapted to any other format, but if it’s not a good adaptation, forget it.
And Vice is reporting on “a game could enter development, we’re talking to studios about it.”
They’re farming clicks.
I think it can work very well as a video game if it’s done correctly. It needs to be about movement. If it’s made kind of like Spider-Man was it might have a chance. If it has that type of movement and weight to it I could see it working. It’d be super easy to screw it up though.
Now that you mention it, a Mistborn’s Pushing and Pulling could move around a lot like Spider-Man. Pewter and tin for Spider-strength and Spider-Sense. Soothing and Rioting can work as dialog options or like Repels in the overworld.
With a proper stat tree I think it could work.
Even better if they throw in savant mechanics. Make the user dependent on the metal for boosted effects but debugged if not getting enough of it.
From what I recall the powers were written as an RPG type game, it wouldn’t take a lot to make an RPG or video game out of it (yes I know it is a tabletop RPG as well now).
I think I only got 3ish books in (maybe 4 can’t recall) but having to hear the exact amounts of material for their powers really struck the idea home is all. I believe I read he played DnD and if true it shows.
The movement may make it more fun than the rest of the ideas combined really (just look at spider man, the agility alone makes that a fun combat system), that’s probably where’s it’ll succeed or die off I imagine. It may be good without a good movement mechanic there but it’d be awesome with it done right.
Been awhile but not all powers were movement based either, while it can make or break a game it may break the setting if not done well either, which would suck for fans but if it’s fun to play then it’s fun to play.
At my age I’ve played enough adaptations that weren’t overly true to the material but still has a fun game underneath can’t recall exactly but I know I’ve had that thought previously.
Well he is a proponent of hard magic systems so it’s not so much that he wrote it like a video game I think, that video game is necessitate hard magic systems.
I was more thinking he wrote it like a tabletop RPG system that adapts to a video game. I realize now I left out the tabletop bit from my previous comment.
ill never forgive his homophobic bigotry and defense of the LDS church. i realize he tried to reform, but i believe he did it for sales. Dude is toxic, regardless of his capitalist reforms
Bro lost me on the first “secret project” book deal. A crowd funded campaign to release like 4 books that “will never be on audible or kindle” as this big stance against the audible/kindle monopoly.
He pulled in $43 million.
What did he do? Put the books up on audible and kindle less than 6 months later with a half assed social media post about how he “won” better conditions for VAs and bigger cuts for authors.
What a crock of shit. Here comes the fattest grifter of the LDS church, again, to fuck up yet another media format with his horseshit.
Mechanically, it would make a great hack and slash like Devil May Cry.
It could also be fun if done well like The Witcher.
Sadly, for every success like The Witcher, there are 20 Wheel of Time games.
Could be fun. I just desperately want an animated adaptation of the Stormlight Archives. Mistborn would be a killer three season animated show too.
All of the Cosmere adaptations should be animated. There’s nothing more jarring than seeing actors age 10 years between 10 episode seasons.
Idk I feel like filming all three seasons of mistborn in one stretch could work. That said, it really lends itself to arcane/spiderverse style animation
Is that the one where they have to eat metal to do magic? That always struck me as weird. Like that kid you knew in grade school that ate pennies.
Somewhere between Spiderman and Arkham Asylum style games would really work really well.
The setting of the first book was very cloak and dagger with lots of similarly and overly powered opponents.
Book 2 and 3 got turned on thier head and you’d probably want to slowly adapt towards Prototype or inFamous as the setting loses its cloak and dagger story elements.
That’s a pretty classic game series progression though.
Looking at you, Assassin’s Creed and whatever it is you’re doing now with stat checks for shoving a knife in a dude’s neck
Please don’t suck
I’m sure it’ll have the “not like the other girls” protagonist who is smoking hot and doesn’t know it, but will it also retain the cringey dialogue and cliché teenage love triangle of the book? Those are the most important elements of that literary slopfest. It could truly become the next Marvel franchise.
God forbid teenage girls have someone they can look up to in Fantasy in SciFi! Oh, the horror!
This is an odd card to play here because the protagonist only comes to value her appearance by seeing it through the lens of the male gaze. Ursula LeGuin or Becky Chambers would be far better places to look in that respect.
This is an odd card to play because she also murders a lot of people and mentally dominates an entire race.
I think, compared to these absolute crimes against humanity, that her journey to self-actualization seems an odd nit to pick.
She’s basically traumatized up until
Spoiler
she sacrifices herself to kill the last living god in their world.
I don’t think she ever really does value her appearance like you assume. At most she realizes there’s more to life than survival, whether it’s because of her beau or not. He’s just one aspect she finds in life to make it worth living.
I don’t remember the appearance of either Vin or Spensa being in any way an important or even relevant piece of the stories.
The entirety of the focus was on what the girls were doing, not how they looked.
Plenty of people love Sanderson and Mistborn, no need to yuck somebody else’s yum.
Lots of people love AI too, but that doesn’t make Midjourney an artist. Liking the taste of slop doesn’t make it not slop.
Then it’s a good thing you don’t have to play it if the game ever comes out, huh? And believe it or not but you also don’t need to be an asshole about other people enjoying something. There are a lot of objective downsides to AI, but an IP you don’t like is just something for you to ignore. The horror.
Yikes
A book series so poorly written, you’ll never believe the author did so on purpose.
I feel like this is not the popular consensus…
Like… maybe some people aren’t a huge fan, but saying poorly written seems harsh. Maybe you just don’t like fantasy?
I’m not denying that Brandon Sanderson sells a lot of books, which is what those lists track. His aggressive mediocrity is, in many ways, precisely why he’s on those lists.
Not to speak of this particular series one way or the other but… Popular things can also be poorly written. Case and point: Harry Potter.
Regardless of how you feel about the author, Harry Potter is not poorly written.
Yeah my son was given a copy for Christmas and reading it for the second time ever I have to agree it’s well written. Lots of little details that are simultaneously fun and world/character building.
Eg: Hagrid giving Dudley a pig tail and then grumbling that he’d tried to turn him into a pig, but it turns out he’s already so piglike he’s only missing a tail. It is funny (for a 7 year old), it builds Dudley’s character and also foreshadows Hagrid’s iffy relationship with magic.
I loved it as a kid. But it was one of the first books I ever read so I didn’t have much to compare it to. I tried rereading it a few years ago and it’s fine up until about the third or fourth book. Rowling loses control over the world building and the plots become boring. So many things could have been avoided if Dumbledor wasn’t so secretive about Harry’s past. There’s no reason Harry should have thought that Sirius killed his parents and was a crazed lunatic. Dumbledor just hid the truth for no reason. Petrigrew not being spotted by George and Fred was a huge oversight. There’s too many contradictions by the end of the series. Also the fourth book is just a mess with all the side plots like Hermione trying to free the house elves from Hogwarts. Hilariously no one gives a fuck at all and she just abandons trying to do the right thing. Even Harry who didn’t grow up as a wizard was just like “if they wanna be slaves then let them”. Its fine for kids, especially as a first series, but there’s too many issues to ignore.
That’s fair.
Huh? How you figure?
Some people just hate anything that’s popular. Most of them grow up at some point.
Nah, I love lots of popular things. But I can also separate my personal enjoyment of something from its inherent quality.
Mistborn’s actual plot is fun! I enjoyed it. That said, the books are very poorly written. Everything from the characterization to the style is objectively bad. Brandon Sanderson is not intellectually gifted or well-read or emotionally intelligent, etc, and that impedes his writing ability.
Would you say “How I Met Your Mother” is some incredibly well written work of art? Come on, it’s one iota removed from fart jokes.
You are just saying that it IS bad without offering any actual explanation.
How is it bad in your opinion, what specifically is an example of bad and why you think that way.
“Everything from the characterization to the style is objectively bad”
Is no different than saying “it’s bad” you offer nothing about your opinion other than how you feel about it, which you have already expressed and are just repeating yourself with more words.
If you don’t care to explain your opinion beyond stating what you’re opinion is then your opinion isn’t worth much to anyone else which makes your comment a waste of time and energy. A waste of your time and energy as well as everyone else’s
Perhaps you only wanted wanted attention though as your only motive which if it’s in fact what you wanted then congratulations on that
Even if I explained in painstaking detail how Sanderson mixes metaphors or fumbles diction, what’s the point?
Honestly, go read a few thousand books, then revisit Mistborn and see for yourself. Or maybe make friends with a literature professor and ask them to explain it to you using tiny words.
You chose to express your opinion for a reason. You chose communicate it to other people by the medium of Lemmy which exists so that PEOPLE can talk to other people.
This isn’t a diary or a journal.
The point would be to help other people understand what the fuck you mean with your words you chose to string together, Jesse.
I’ve been reading for almost 40 years and I’m asking you to explain what you meant. Initially because I’ve read those books and many others and it was anything other than clear to me why you hold the opinion you hold.
Asking you to explain yourself and you can only say go spend literally decades reading other things if you didn’t implicitly understand why I said what I said.
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As someone who has read thousands of books you should be able to clearly and accurately describe the major flaws and recommend books that were superior in relation to the problems you see.
That’s why I bothered reading this back and forth for so long. I am someone who has NOT read thousand of books , but enjoyed the 8 books of mistborn.
I’d be joyed to read something in the same vein but even better.
A) I could do that, as I already said, yes.
B) I’m glad you enjoyed Mistborn. I enjoy frozen pizza. Is it culinary art? No, and I’m not writing an essay to explain why. Just try some other food and then reflect on your experiences.
Not sure if I want this. Like others are saying, you have to have great freedom of movement, and it can’t be sloppy. Think about the allomancer rail systems Kelsier and the others used. Metal spires that go from city to city that they can hop along. You would have to be able to do this effortlessly for it to work. Our girl (I forget her name, sorry) had to learn how to do all that, but that would be the worst part of the game. The game needs to assume you know what you’re doing and err on the side of caution. Basically seamless hand holding.
I’d much rather it be a series (on HBO or the like). The actual metal jumping and whatnot is not the most interesting thing about this world.
It seems like we just need to look at games that have fantastical and parkour based movement — Mirror’s Edge, Assassin’s Creed series, Cyberpunk, Hogwarts Legacy, the recent Jedi games with that guy from Shameless — to see how this could work. And others. But for a lot of those games, the movement becomes one of the most important things. You focus on how cool it is to get around. Oh and all those games have a sense or scan feature, so you get all that, and it’s not really what you want to play.
Better to watch it as a series IMO.
A few years ago I’d have wanted a series too. Now? You get to choose HBO, Netflix, or Amazon. All three have a better chance at fucking up an IP than doing right by them at this point.
I think small(er) studio gaming is at a really good place where they can punch above their weight right now.
Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I think there’s a better chance of us getting a pleasant surprise from a video game than a TV show now.
Fair.
Maybe it would be better to have a Mistborn game that takes place in the Mistborn universe than a retelling of Vin’s story, or Kelsier’s. Maybe another attempted coup on the Lord Ruler, or something set after the events of the first book but before the end of the third one. Trying to avoid spoilers but if you’ve read them, you know the events I’m speaking of. Sanderson kind of boxed in when a game could reasonably take place. No one seriously attempted to take on the Lord Ruler before Kelsier (the first time, when he was thrown in the mines) and after the third book… why, you might as well just go the Wax & Wayne era (which might be better, have kind of a Dishonoured kind of setting). Maybe an original story in the W&W era.
Era 2 would be fun. You could have guns and/or the player be a misting/ferring/twinborn and then maybe have a quest happen where you become full mistborn.
Or you could do Era 1 but have the game set like 1000 years before Kelsier. Just say the events were suppressed by Rashek and the canton of Inquisition.
Vin*
Hope she isn’t in the games at all. Worst Sanderson character ever, by far.
‘I’ll do everything stupid because my intuition and never learn or change. Everyone will always be surprised by me doing the same things over and over.’
She’s so whiny. Like a worse prototype of Shallan.
Most of his books are written like he’s pretty desperate for someone to make a video game adaptation. The metal (“fuel”) and “classes” in Mistborn, the way weapons work in the Cytoverse, etc., etc., it all seems specifically designed for a game adaptation.
Hopefully Mistborn goes to a studio that knows what they’re doing and the gameplay is actually fun!
As I recall Brandon Sanderson plays a lot of games, especially tabletop ones, so this would make a lot of sense.
His writing group all but started as a DnD campaign.
Have you ever read a litrpg? It’s like that but more. It’s a whole genre and people do it in purpose… IMO it’s bloody awful. I read one by accident once.
No, I wasn’t familiar with that term.
That being said, if you look past the “gamified” world rules, his writing is really good. I enjoy the worlds he crafts, they’re pretty unique in design, the magic systems are interesting and fresh. And his narration style is also up my alley.
I actually think his writing in the sense of his prose is mediocre. It’s like someone invented a world and then wrote a wiki on it.
It’s a conscious choice though; he has talked about “transparent” prose. (That is, in my opinion, dull prose).
But: he writes very good plots and if you like world building for its own sake, I’m sure it’s great.
I agree 100%. I finished the dark tower series then jumped straight into mistborn. His worldbuilding and plots are superb but his prose is that of a highschooler. Not awful, but very mundane and uninspired. Also, I came up with a drinking game for the mistborn series. Take a shot everytime a character snorts or rolls their eyes. You’ll never read it sober.
You can do similar with Storm light and “rock formation” 🙃
Mistborn animation please, I don’t trust any other media to adapt this story properly
Mistborn can be live action, I can see it being done well if Sanderson keeps a tight grip on the reigns. None of the effects would be all that difficult to show. Stormlight, on the other hand, 100% needs to be animation. Far too many scenes and effects that just would not translate well to a live action medium.
I dont trust anyone with a live action mistborn imo. Stuff like the mist, rain of ash and flying around the city it just needs to be animated. With live action they would try to save money everywhere, like the dragons in game of thrones.
My understanding is that epic had a project in progress, but it got canned. I wonder if they had to give up the rights, or if they still hold them and Brandon is just not saying?
Never heard of it before though I’m interested in adaptations of books but that’s more in hopes of ones I like getting something
Just FYI, the series devolves into Mormon propaganda in the first trilogy. I wasn’t sure why the third book felt so off until I saw that Sanderson went to Brigham Young University. I also talked to an ex-Mormon friend of mine, and he apparently noped out halfway through the first book when he saw the signs
I bet I wouldn’t have even noticed on my own, I liked battlefield earth till I saw videos pointing out the problems
I just finished the first era of mistborn. I know nothing about Mormons, how does Mormon propoganda fit into those books?
I didn’t notice anything in the first book, my ex-Mormon friend did; and I think it was more to do with the writing style.
In the third book, it got more pronounced. I only know broad strokes about Mormonism so it’s hard to put a finger on more than a couple of details. That being said, the two spirits merging together to destroy/remake the world plays into some Mormon beliefs and plays into their focus on being doomsday preppers. Plus, the whole pivot to the main character handing the book to Sazed at the end to spread its teachings was a huge nod to John Smith allegedly finding the Book of Mormon and starting the church.
Those things are what caused me to do a bit of digging on Sanderson and finding out he went to Brigham Young University (and I just found out he teaches there too). Brigham Young is well known for being a Mormon University, since it’s named after the religion’s 2nd leader (and iirc he was also the guy that pushed the church to go poligamist)
Which, mistborn? How’s that?
I know it because its the reason jordans wife chose him to complete the wheel of time series. Never read it myself but it would be on the list if I start reading a lot again which I thought was unlikely two decades ago but with enshitification I am moving to less and less tech.
Thought Robert Jordan chose Sanderson and that Sanderson spent time with Jordan discussing how he wanted it to end the series as well as explaining all the extensive notes he prepared for Sanderson.
Jordan who? Jordan Holmes is more into dune than the wheel of time
Apologies. Robert Jordan is the author of the wheel of time series and I guess im used to speaking about him with wot (wheel of time) fans or such. I do the same with asimov (foundation and robot series), herbert (dune), and such. Its a bad habit.
Outside of terry pratchett I can’t say I ever manage to remember author’s names even if I go through series multiple times but maybe that’s an audiobook problem, ooh and david wong
It might be just a thing with so much media. I think older folks who were reading before the millenium remember authors names because reading was a very significant source of entertainment compared to anything else. So much so that books were made from movie series like the star trek and star wars ones.
