Hey, I'm working on a grand strategy game as well based on a fictional setting, would love to chat and compare notes if you're open to it, my email is in my profile
I mean, I don't disagree with you in this case, but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for?
This just happens to be a positive example, IP still exists to restrict certain kinds of competition
I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this, as much as I'm a fan of pirate servers, assuming that they don't stifle the original game and considering calling Blizzard an 800 pound gorilla is quite an understatement in this case, I doubt this could
A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this
In case I wasn't clear enough, I'm not a fan of this move, I don't think it's a good thing they're doing, however I can't deny they can choose to do it
If we want their behaviour to be constrained, then we've got to either convince them otherwise, regulate away their ability to do this or weaken copyright to prevent this
> A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this
Sure, but I'm sure that IP laws don't demand you send CnD any fan project[1]. In the past, they were way more lenient. I guess they got scarred by their DotA experience. And honestly DotA mismanagement was their own fault.
Stuff like that has a hugely detrimental effect; see Games Workshop and Warhammer 40k fan projects.
[1] As far as I know the law doesn't prohibit to giving the server a license to run as a non-profit or giving them a cheap, short term license.
IANAL but from what I understand, failure to enforce your IP in situations like this is often legally interpreted as a forfeit of your IP, and creates much more friction if you ever need to enforce it down the line
Sure, but giving them a generous IP license isn't considered a forfeit of your IP.
Blizzard actually went a step beyond and asked for your forfeit of any IP that you make with their tools. Not that any of those tools was used for Turtle WoW.
Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets. Sounds like they could have made a cool, new game with their own assets and been successful if it stands so well on its own merits.
It's substantially different from a pirate server.
> Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets.
At the end of the day, they are in essence WoW modders. Plus, a new game with own assets and engine is a different beast compared to modding an existing engine.
Turtle WoW built off a 20 year old client with their own original content. After how many decades do you think it is acceptable for people to be allowed to mod and sell their own version of it? 75 years like with Disney? Would you feel that society would be worse off if people were allowed to sell modded N64 games?
Totally agree with this. Blizzard nowadays is a giant, but nobody would have blamed them if they remained a small studio, trying to protect what they've worked hard for to create. Just because they have a lot of money now, doesn't legally change a thing. It sucks because Blizzard has become a shitty company, and I'd like these types of devs from Turtle WoW to be able to continue their work, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?
The team have proven credentials at this point surely?
Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia
Having the prebuilt client and art assets you hack and change on saves you million of up front cost.
The foldingideas videos about decentraland talks about this. "Dead" mmorpgs work on a small skeleton crew despite the original game having taken 100s of people years to make. Looking it up the turtle wow server was like 5-10k concurrent players? A lot for sure but bordering on that category.
It takes a lot of work to manage that but nothing compared to making an original IP from scratch.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is not the last we hear from them. The server itself is not based on proprietary Blizzard code so they could keep using it and they already started developing their UE5 client. Maybe they will go the full way, create their own art assets and relaunch as TurtleMMO in the future.
There is no shortage of game dev talent or adjacent creatives. It’s doubtful they will go on to find roles in the industry given the current climate and they presumably don’t have the capital to gamble on multiple years of game dev for potentially no return.
It's not a small thing to create a team who's proven to ship a successful offering, trust me I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and hitting that bar is hard
Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting
I’ll never understand modding in this day and age, I got it back in the quake and half-life 1 days when teenagers didn’t have access to commercial game engines but modding total seems crazy to invest time into building on infrastructure you don’t own, you can’t successfully monetize and will likely be taken from you if you do.
So much has to go right for a new game to see even moderate success. In addition to the programming, you need an art director to give your game a coherent style, 2D texture artists, 3D model and terrain artists, UI designers, music composers, narrative writers, etc, and on top of that you need a compelling universe and concepts for all of these people to work from. And then once that's all done, you need competent marketing so people actually know about this game so they can want to play it.
By comparison, with a pre-existing game much of this is already out of the way and amateurs can get pretty far by just kitbashing existing assets and occasionally mimicking them when creating new assets. Marketing can be as simple as, "this thing you liked, but more, in the way you want it". It's a much smaller lift.
I guess you haven't played many MMOs. Unless you just mean "it moves like wow and and has quests" because that is not what I meant. I meant that you have to make a whole new world with its own lore and all new quests and NPCs and monsters and spells and classes and whatever. You can't literally just slap a coat of paint on WoW and expect to get away with it.
Honestly I'm not sure, but I suspect it's because for Gabe, Valve is his iterated prisoners dilemma
He's got to take care of it or no more yachts
Though part of it just might be helpful knows and respects hit market, at least well enough to understand them, I vaguely recall he left Microsoft to start a game company after seeing how much people fell head over heels with games and thinking there was value there
The most interesting factor of the dynamic around things like near singularity is the things that I feel are coupled to it
Basically the ability to reason about first and second order effects
IE, before the cellphone was invented you could have predicted the it, things like star trek envisaged a world of portable communication
What impact the cellphone had was predictable to some people, on the one hand increased convenience of communication as well as the end of making a call and wondering who was going to pick up, which was a definite consideration pre-mobile when you called a place and not a person, now we just assume that when we call someone we'll get them and not their family
The second order effects were less obvious, ease of access to someone meant being always accessible, so now everyone could be contacted whenever someone wanted them, it changed the dynamics of life for many, not to mention the effects of different technologies combining, the personal computer and the mobile phone becoming one in the form of the smartphone gave everyone a computer in their pocket, let alone adding the internet into the mix
Each of these changes were completely unpredictable to the people pre-cellphone, once again, compare modern day trek and the originals
I still vividly remember the moment one of the characters in discovery asked the computer to give her a mirror, the same behaviour of countless people now using the fact that their selfie camera functionally gives them a portable mirror in the form of their phone, that was unpredictable
So that's one form of being unable to predict the future
But there's another interesting dynamic I think, which is each direction of technical development is accelerating, which means that we may soon hit the point that only a subject matter expert will be able to predict or perhaps even be aware of what happens in any particular field, so we may get a period where before we can't predict the future, we may have some strange middle ground where we're constantly surprised by the developments we see around ourselves and when we look into it find this new discovery has been around months or years
I certainly have experienced that once or twice, however I'm wondering if that may become the new normal
I've been building small games on and off over the last decade, started taking it a bit more seriously over the last 3 months and I've started building a specific game that I'm slowly building out
It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs
Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside
Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem
Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out
It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions
Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better
If anyone has experience lighting + vfx in this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)
Sure, I saw the video links at the bottom of the article. What I meant was that it would be more engaging if there's was an embedded video with a big play button at the top of the article.
I've been building small games on and off over the last decade
Started taking it a bit more seriously over the last 3 months and I've started building a specific game that I'm slowly building out
It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs
Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside
Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem
Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out
It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions
Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better
If anyone has experience lighting this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)
reply