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Pancracio17

▲ Legend ▲
Avenger
Oct 29, 2017
18,709
Copy/Paste design only goes so far (trust me I would know LOL) so hopefully they have good solutions for the myriad of times they actually have to make creative decisions
Yeah, I was thinking "wow BotW was good so maybe this will be too", but BotW was only good because of how creative it is and lets you be, copying it isnt going to result in a game nearly as good unless you come in inspired. Which I doubt the devs of this game are judging by how blatant it is.

Ill hold off final judgement but im not expecting this to be good.
 

LuigiV

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,684
Perth, Australia
This is beyond shameless. The music, the art direction, the UI, the beginning, the gameplay, enemy bases. lol how is this legal
As long as they don't directly copy any actual copyrighted, trademarked or patented assets then there's no issue. There's no automatic legal protection for gameplay mechanics, so unless there's a patent involved (which is pretty rare), you can't infringe on those grounds. The closest it comes to actual IP infringement is with it's UI design, but even then it seems like it's just different enough to be safe (and it's not like BotW's UI was super unique to begin with).

Also even if there were some actual IP infringement, CCP don't care. Foriegn IP is free game within China's border.
 

XaviConcept

Art Director for Videogames
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
4,900
Yeah, I was thinking "wow BotW was good so maybe this will be too", but BotW was only good because of how creative it is and lets you be, copying it isnt going to result in a game nearly as good unless you come in inspired. Which I doubt the devs of this game are judging by how blatant it is.

Ill hold off final judgement but im not expecting this to be good.

To expand on this a bit, what happens when you copy games, and Ive been in many scenarios where this happens (not EA, other places) you go with this mindset
"well take this and this from BotW, but this from Dark Souls and the economy from Horizon" (those are just example names)

You do that, copy copy copy, then you realize after 4 months it doesnt work quite well. How do you fix it? Then you start having doubts, do you keep going and hope it fixes itself or pivot in time to fix it?

If you were making a copy/paste game, you were already a coward, so you pivot, of course, you always pivot. The new thing is a bit more BotW, scrap the Dark Souls Part and the economy is now based on what NieR did, because NieR just came out and everyone at work is playing it.

Nevermind using your, you know, game designers to come up with any creative solutions, that shit aint proven! We must look at the market and do what works! It makes sense, after all, because you havent trained a team to be solution minded, you instead instruct them to copy other games when faced with a problem instead of trying to come up with a solution. This happens super often, nullifying hiring great talent when all you do is not use that talent and instead task them with borrowing shit from elsewhere.

You will repeat this dance until the end of dev time. You will probably get cancelled along the way because your publisher will be shocked by the lack of progress when, yeah, no shit, we didnt work on the game for 2 years, we worked on 5 games that died after 3 months. If you are very lucky youll ship and who knows! Maybe its good? Its really random at that point and if it does well, nobody on the team will know why so dont bet on repeated success.
 

Pancracio17

▲ Legend ▲
Avenger
Oct 29, 2017
18,709
To expand on this a bit, what happens when you copy games, and Ive been in many scenarios where this happens (not EA, other places) you go with this mindset
"well take this and this from BotW, but this from Dark Souls and the economy from Horizon" (those are just example names)

You do that, copy copy copy, then you realize after 4 months it doesnt work quite well. How do you fix it? Then you start having doubts, do you keep going and hope it fixes itself or pivot in time to fix it?

If you were making a copy/paste game, you were already a coward, so you pivot, of course, you always pivot. The new thing is a bit more BotW, scrap the Dark Souls Part and the economy is now based on what NieR did, because NieR just came out and everyone at work is playing it.

Nevermind using your, you know, game designers to come up with any creative solutions, that shit aint proven! We must look at the market and do what works! It makes sense, after all, because you havent trained a team to be solution minded, you instead instruct them to copy other games when faced with a problem instead of trying to come up with a solution. This happens super often, nullifying hiring great talent when all you do is not use that talent and instead task them with borrowing shit from elsewhere.

You will repeat this dance until the end of dev time. You will probably get cancelled along the way because your publisher will be shocked by the lack of progress when, yeah, no shit, we didnt work on the game for 2 years, we worked on 5 games that died after 3 months. If you are very lucky youll ship and who knows! Maybe its good? Its really random at that point and if it does well, nobody on the team will know why so dont bet on repeated success.
Nailed it. Games go for different experiences and their mechanics and visuals are made to service that experience, so, ideally, they should all synergize. By just jamming in concepts and mechanics from different games you destroy that synergy, so no wonder the game isnt good.
 
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Deleted member 11413

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
22,961
I mean sometimes they quite literally rip assets from other games. It's weird to see.
Yup, but if there is no enforcement and there is demand for these clones it will keep happening. Basically a combination of China letting domestic companies copy foreign companies without consequences and most foreign games/consoles prohibited from official sale in China.
 

Bit_Reactor

Banned
Apr 9, 2019
4,413
To expand on this a bit, what happens when you copy games, and Ive been in many scenarios where this happens (not EA, other places) you go with this mindset
"well take this and this from BotW, but this from Dark Souls and the economy from Horizon" (those are just example names)

You do that, copy copy copy, then you realize after 4 months it doesnt work quite well. How do you fix it? Then you start having doubts, do you keep going and hope it fixes itself or pivot in time to fix it?

If you were making a copy/paste game, you were already a coward, so you pivot, of course, you always pivot. The new thing is a bit more BotW, scrap the Dark Souls Part and the economy is now based on what NieR did, because NieR just came out and everyone at work is playing it.

Nevermind using your, you know, game designers to come up with any creative solutions, that shit aint proven! We must look at the market and do what works! It makes sense, after all, because you havent trained a team to be solution minded, you instead instruct them to copy other games when faced with a problem instead of trying to come up with a solution. This happens super often, nullifying hiring great talent when all you do is not use that talent and instead task them with borrowing shit from elsewhere.

You will repeat this dance until the end of dev time. You will probably get cancelled along the way because your publisher will be shocked by the lack of progress when, yeah, no shit, we didnt work on the game for 2 years, we worked on 5 games that died after 3 months. If you are very lucky youll ship and who knows! Maybe its good? Its really random at that point and if it does well, nobody on the team will know why so dont bet on repeated success.
This is why I gave up trying to be anything but an indie dev. I'd rather make something with a set vision from the getgo and take 10 times as long than to push out some project that someone higher than the people literally in charge of designing of the game telling them to change the design to appeal to something different.

Thanks for sharing your insight into the industry though.

As long as they don't directly copy any actual copyrighted, trademarked or patented assets then there's no issue. There's no automatic legal protection for gameplay mechanics, so unless there's a patent involved (which is pretty rare), you can't infringe on those grounds. The closest it comes to actual IP infringement is with it's UI design, but even then it seems like it's just different enough to be safe (and it's not like BotW's UI was super unique to begin with).

Also even if there were some actual IP infringement, CCP don't care. Foriegn IP is free game within China's border.
You have to be being pretty intentionally dense to not see elements/gameplay/animations/menus ripped wholesale from another game and see what they're doing with it. Intent matters somewhat but this isn't one of those "I'm promoting people copyright dances or mechanics" this is one of those "They put gacha in literally the engine of BOTW and are looking to make money." Copying mechanics isn't the only thing at odds here. IT's literally EVERYTHING but a few elements ripped wholesale. Come on.

Well at least they're copying the best game in recent memory. If my laptop could run something like this without melting, I'd at least like to give it a shot


It's been like that for a while, man :P
Fair enough.
 

CrazyHal

Member
Nov 1, 2017
1,321
It's pretty disappointing to see Mihoyo so shamelessly ripping off BOTW. The people who work here seems like decent folks and Honkai impact 3rd didn't rip off anything as far as I'm aware. I think they can do better than that.
 

LuigiV

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,684
Perth, Australia
To expand on this a bit, what happens when you copy games, and Ive been in many scenarios where this happens (not EA, other places) you go with this mindset
"well take this and this from BotW, but this from Dark Souls and the economy from Horizon" (those are just example names)

You do that, copy copy copy, then you realize after 4 months it doesnt work quite well. How do you fix it? Then you start having doubts, do you keep going and hope it fixes itself or pivot in time to fix it?

If you were making a copy/paste game, you were already a coward, so you pivot, of course, you always pivot. The new thing is a bit more BotW, scrap the Dark Souls Part and the economy is now based on what NieR did, because NieR just came out and everyone at work is playing it.

Nevermind using your, you know, game designers to come up with any creative solutions, that shit aint proven! We must look at the market and do what works! It makes sense, after all, because you havent trained a team to be solution minded, you instead instruct them to copy other games when faced with a problem instead of trying to come up with a solution. This happens super often, nullifying hiring great talent when all you do is not use that talent and instead task them with borrowing shit from elsewhere.

You will repeat this dance until the end of dev time. You will probably get cancelled along the way because your publisher will be shocked by the lack of progress when, yeah, no shit, we didnt work on the game for 2 years, we worked on 5 games that died after 3 months. If you are very lucky youll ship and who knows! Maybe its good? Its really random at that point and if it does well, nobody on the team will know why so dont bet on repeated success.
Great post.

You have to be being pretty intentionally dense to not see elements/gameplay/animations/menus ripped wholesale from another game and see what they're doing with it. Intent matters somewhat but this isn't one of those "I'm promoting people copyright dances or mechanics" this is one of those "They put gacha in literally the engine of BOTW and are looking to make money." Copying mechanics isn't the only thing at odds here. IT's literally EVERYTHING but a few elements ripped wholesale. Come on.
If it were "literally the engine of BOTW" you'd have a point, but there's absolutely no evidence that's the case (it would be totally ridiculous if it were case as that would be more work than simply recreating the look and gameplay systems in another PC native engine).

Mind, I only watched mabe 2 minutes of footage total, so I could have missed something, but I'm not seeing anything that would actually be protected by copyright that's being ripped off (again, other than the UI, which is borderline). Copyright only protects tangible assets, such as the graphics, music, story, writing, code, etc. The overall look and feel is not protected as long as no actual assets are being copied and as far as I can tell, all assets are original, despite their obvious *cough* inspirations (at the very least, if they're not original, they're not the same assets from BotW). Copyright also doesn't extend to gameplay or interactive elements, at all, regardless of how much is "ripped wholesale". There's no abitrary ratio of how much is ripped off that suddenly makes it illegal. It's all fair game (and that's a good thing too, if you like the idea of game genres). So despite it's shamelessness, it does appear to be within the legal boundaries, at a first glance.
 

Bit_Reactor

Banned
Apr 9, 2019
4,413
Great post.


If it were "literally the engine of BOTW" you'd have a point, but there's absolutely no evidence that's the case (it would be totally ridiculous if it were case as that would be more work than simply recreating the look and gameplay systems in another PC native engine).

Mind, I only watched mabe 2 minutes of footage total, so I could have missed something, but I'm not seeing anything that would actually be protected by copyright that's being ripped off (again, other than the UI, which is borderline). Copyright only protects tangible assets, such as the graphics, music, story, writing, code, etc. The overall look and feel is not protected as long as no actual assets are being copied and as far as I can tell, all assets are original, despite their obvious *cough* inspirations (at the very least, if they're not original, they're not the same assets from BotW). Copyright also doesn't extend to gameplay or interactive elements, at all, regardless of how much is "ripped wholesale". There's no abitrary ratio of how much is ripped off that suddenly makes it illegal. It's all fair game (and that's a good thing too, if you like the idea of game genres). So despite it's shamelessness, it does appear to be within the legal boundaries, at a first glance.

The climbing animations are 1:1 in speed and movement.
The camps are pretty much the exact same with the same domed structures and same exact watch towers.
The fire creates an updraft just like BOTW.
The Menus are ripped 1:1 minus one sidebar change.

I understand playing devil's advocate or stanning for creative expression but if you can't see it based on the images and gameplay (since you "skimmed it") then I guess I should just start "borrowing" from games when I'm trying to make mine and just slap a cel shader on it and call it a day if that's all it takes.
 

LowParry

Member
Oct 26, 2017
5,734
Combat looks really good. To think Nintendo could take what combat they see here, and make it a character switch between Link and Zelda with different styles of combat and weapon use.
 

srtrestre

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
18,967
I knew BotW would be influential, but this is not what I had in mind

Edit: and holy shit at that Oceanhorn 2 vid as well.
 

bionic77

Member
Oct 25, 2017
30,888
Would love to know what it is like for the people making that game when your job is to just rip someone else's shit off and pass it off as something new.

Can't imagine they are too happy with it.
 

Crossing Eden

Member
Oct 26, 2017
53,303
Nintendo should sue the hell out of the developer.
I doubt they can do that. 👀
WOW I didn't know BOTW created cell shading and green landscapes! Nintendo gonna sue.
You should read the thread. Specifically my post on the last page, here I'll quote it for you because you're lazy:



I mean, even the UI sound effects are nearly identical to BOTW. Like there's blatant and then there's kill all enemies in this base camp that looks nearly identical to the ones in BOTW which will trigger an animation signaling that the chest is now open:
9iFDdOb.gif


a stamina fueled climb everything system that looks nearly identical:
lkSJtM3.gif


An incredibly similar UI and sound effects for picking up items:
oE85lHO.gif



Hell even the dialogue layout nearly identical:
Simple-Choice-Dialogue-menu-in-The-Legend-of-Zelda-Breath-of-the-Wild-Nintendo-2017.ppm

7kMxsVO.png




All things considered it's most likely an intentional ripoff. One that will likely appeal to those who're off put by creativity and inspired art direction and prefer something much more derivative and lame when it comes to character art.

Some other choice things, a nearly identical UI for the food menu/general menu in BOTW:
65015637_405141203423970_4265102490015367168_n.png



and the sailcloth:
CZF7dSo.gif
 
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Crossing Eden

Member
Oct 26, 2017
53,303
The dungeons are weird, they appear to be inspired by the aesthetic of the shrines but function closer to the original LoZ's combat focused dungeons:
 

Swiggins

was promised a tag
Member
Apr 10, 2018
11,446
I mean...it's ripping off BOTW but at least it's ripping it well.

I'm curious to try this.
 

Agent Matt

Member
Oct 31, 2017
81
Wow, this looks incredible! Sure it's a blatant ripoff but I couldn't care less. Especially since they're bringing new mechanics to the BOTW table.
 

Hucast

alt account
Banned
Mar 25, 2019
3,598
I'm watching the video and it looks exactly like botw but it feels so hollow compared to it and I can't put my finger onto why that is