Cloning is Good for You
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
And don't forget possibly the biggest series of clones: DOOM. A lot of people throw a hissy fit about Doom clones, but without those clones the entire FPS genre wouldn't exist. Some were reskinned, some not so much. Some like Star Wars: Dark Forces felt and played very similar, but changed the underlying game engine in visually minor but significant ways. The original Doom engine did not allow for traversable terrain to overlap each other. Lucas Arts saw that and said, "If we could make tall levels instead of flat levels, it would completely change game play and pacing," and they were right.
"Another might conclude that it's the game Diablo III should have been."
Yup, that's PoE allright. Smashing, and effing FREE!!!!
Got tons of good ideas in there, boosting what Diablo II did to new hights!
And Puzzle Quest; awesomesauce!!!!
Yup, that's PoE allright. Smashing, and effing FREE!!!!
Got tons of good ideas in there, boosting what Diablo II did to new hights!
And Puzzle Quest; awesomesauce!!!!
In pretty much the first paragraph of addressing the issue, you've found my opinion. Is it a copy or an improvement? There are many kinds of cloning that are despicable - the cloning of Ridiculous Fishing for example by Ninja Fishing, that saw a game with essentially the same gameplay released in an environment with no precedent of that game type released before the original game. On the other hand, Plague Inc expands on Pandemic enough to justify another game, not just a copy.
No, not really. "Diablo clone" has always been simply a description of the genre, not a pejorative at all. ARPG is probably more common these days, but that's actually a much more general genre that includes a lot of other styles of game as well. I suspect it's precisely that lack of any specific term to refer to a Diablo clone that lead to the term not being pejorative, since the other clones you mention already had perfectly serviceable names for their genres already.Shamus Young said:
Really no. Firstly, Dune was not an RTS. That would be Dune 2, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the game it was supposedly a sequel to. Secondly, while Warcraft was one of the influential RTS series, crediting it as the only thing responsible for its advancement is just plain nonsense. C&C was at least as important, if not more so. The games really responsible for making the genre what it is were probably Red Alert and Starcraft.
Actually, we've had a term for years now: "MOBA"Scrumpmonkey said:
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
That's actually really interesting. I was in college for game design and one of the common ways we learn how to make a game was take a game that existed before and modify it in some way. Heck, if it wasn't for some of my assignment requirements, I would have heavily modify the way some of the games played so that they wouldn't have some of the issues the original game had that I didn't like. I'm looking at you, Asteroids, and your sliding movements!
I'm about as old a DOTA fan as you can find, and to that I say: let them throw their fits.batti said:
Manchildren will be manchildren.
Yup, I completely agree. Many things are done by "cloning" stuff, Cave Story is a combination of Super Metroid and Megaman and nobody's calling it a "clone" of either of them, also nobody uses the term of "Doom clone" that was so prevalent on the mid 90's, until the term "First Person Shooter" was coined in the late 90's with the releases of Half-Life, Unreal and many other great games.
BUT, I absolutely agree with just how blatant you are with your cloning is what differenciates the good ones from the bad ones.
Captcha: You don't say!. Goddamit captcha, I'm not in a good mood
BUT, I absolutely agree with just how blatant you are with your cloning is what differenciates the good ones from the bad ones.
Captcha: You don't say!. Goddamit captcha, I'm not in a good mood
I would argue "good and bad" cloning are separate things, and therefore should have different names. "Clone" and "Derivative?/Lineage?"
