You are, of course, aware that none of those things originated where you're listing, either. Given 20 minutes of time with my bookshelf, I bet I can find a dozen or so independent urbanized elf concepts from different authors. Most of the visuals in your second section track back to any well-told myth, though modern representations of them pretty much all hearken back to Hitchcock. And don't get me started on the Templar thing.
Berating people for recycling ideas is an empty exercise....
True, true... but we're not talking someone taking a plot hook from a Hitchcock concept designed 40 years ago. I have no problem with a game being reminiscent (for example) of a particular Conan novel I've read, or having themes similar to a CRPG released 20 years ago.
We're talking an almost point-to-point copy of a major recent PC fantasy CRPG release. The Witcher has sold many hundreds of thousands of units. For many PC gamers, it is the
most recent fantasy CRPG they've played before Dragon Age was released. And the comparison is
startling. We're talking the visual appearance of the elven race, the physical appearance of both their forest camps and the slums they inhabit, their relationship with the humans, the location of their slum in the human world (in their largest city), the disease ravaging their people, and even the point at which you can access the slum (late Act in the game)...
Similar comment on the Ostagar and Dead Trenches cutscenes, among many others. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the Big Boy of fantasy movie franchises. I'm not talking broad themes being copied; I'm talking jarring moments where you see reaction shots of uruk-hai posing and screaming at the nervous defenders of Helm's Deep, before an imposing uruk-hai general waves them forward to attack with his sword.
All fantasy owes a debt to what comes before, but I believe it's fair criticism to point out some really noticeable creative shortcomings. If you've just read Lord of the Rings, and a new fantasy book is released (we'll call it, say, The Sword of Shanarra) that has a mysterious wizard showing up in a rural setting and sending two unlikely heroes on a quest, pursued by ersatz nazgul, aided by a company of diverse heroes (incl. an elf, a dwarf, etc), to bring down an evil sorcerer who is unleashing his armies on the free races, culminating in a major siege and battle...
Well, you get the idea. And that in no way means you can't enjoy the more recent novel. You may find Terry Brooks' writing more engaging than Tolkein's, for example. But dismissing that level of "recycling" as being fair game, given the Mesopatamians were the first people who came up with the heroic quest, is probably a bit much.
I still reckon any serious PC gamer should give Dragon Age a go. It
is a very fun game, and the NPCs are simply terrific (Zevran and Oghran for the Win!). But I hope any sequels, and any setting information for the new pen-n-paper RPG, goes a lot further in avoiding "homages" to
recent,
major fantasy fiction.