So People Are Noticing That Overwatch And Team Fortress 2 Are Quite Similar

Seraj33

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Vigormortis said:
Seraj33 said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZBgxS9KUY0

This video brings up some pretty good points in my opinion. They come from a semi-professional TF2 player too.
Egh, I don't know. He kind of ruined his own argument. What few valid points he had (and they were few, since most of what he said was pure, personal opinion) were undermined by the end. Notably when he said, quote, "...they're like a hardware company now. Valve makes Steam and controllers... They seem to care more about that instead of making games." Of which he then follow up with some fairly adamant fan-boy gushing over Blizzard. It seemed to me that the guy was giving a lot of leeway in his criticisms of Overwatch and it's similarities to Team Fortress 2 because of this.

For clarity's sake:
I, for one, am not one of those claiming Overwatch is a rip-off or clone of Team Fortress 2. It bares striking similarities and clear (if blatant) inspirations from TF2, but I do not believe it to be a rip-off.

Certainly not to the degree Final Combat was.
You have to kinda know when he is joking or not. It is okay. It takes practise.
He was joking about thoose things he said about both valve and blizzard.
 

LetalisK

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Yes, it does look like they borrowed from TF2. Or any of the other Pixar-like squad based games though we only care about TF2. Kind of like what they do with all their IPs. They see something they like for the most part but have some issues with, take it, and rework it to what they would want out of it. This is nothing new.
 

Rawbeard

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Blizzard's shtick is to take an existing concept and improve upon it, make it insanly popular. Sounds ok so far, TF2 has some issues like lobby and servers. And hats. Those damn hats. Let's see how this turns out.
 

Braedan

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A world with a million COD clones, or a million TF2 clones... I'll take the TF2 world thanks.
 

Steve Waltz

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Nimzabaat said:
And... Battlecry from Bethesda? Battleborn from Gearbox? Yeah three big game companies are making very similar games. Those who like competitive multi-player arena games will be spoiled for choice. Sadly, i'm not one of them.
Not so much Battleborn, since that game is (supposedly) a shooter based around MOBA gameplay, rather than capture the flag, capture points, or death match.

Still, knowing Gearbox, it?s probably going to be a bad game.
 

giles

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There are worse games to rip off than TF2. And it's not "really" a TF2 rip-off any more than TF2 is a Quake Arena rip off.

However, watching the gameplay footage leaves me... disappointed. It looks ridiculously casual. Let me add that I don't hate casual gamers or games. I just won't play them. Especially not shooters, because casual shooter = cheap kills = cheap deaths = frustration.
 

Vigormortis

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Seraj33 said:
You have to kinda know when he is joking or not. It is okay. It takes practise.
He was joking about thoose things he said about both valve and blizzard.
Fair enough. I'm not familiar with the man's prior work. And, without any meaningful context, it is fairly easy to take his comments at face value.

Thank you for clarifying.

Honestly, at the end of the day, I think it's fairly obvious Blizzard is aiming to make their own TF2. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I certainly am not saying the game is doomed to fail. On the contrary, if Blizzard can put a unique and entertaining spin on the formula set down by Valve, the game could turn out fantastic. And really, part of me hopes that it does. I just think people are being intellectually dishonest themselves if they genuinely think Blizzard isn't trying to copy the successful formula present in Team Fortress 2.

But again, I hope Blizzard succeeds. We could use more quality games in the genre.
 

Little Gray

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Yes because Valve totally created squad based combat. It is no closer to TF2 the a dozen other games that came out before and after TF2.
 

Roxas1359

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Eric the Orange said:
I don't know how people can compare Overwatch to TF2. I didn't see any hats in Overwatch.
Just wait for the updates later friend. There weren't hats at the launch of TF2 either. Then one day as they say, Gaben flew down bestowing hats and buffs for the Spy in 2009. And thus TF2 was never the same...seriously it wasn't. That was also the update in which they added the Dead Ringer for the Spy. Later would come the Spysicle+ Dead Ringer Combo...
 

Infernal Lawyer

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Unfortunately you can't copyright game mechanics, so unless valve could prove that they were ripping off code or something I doubt they could do much. I'll be keeping my eye on this one.

War_Dyn27 said:
I'm not sure I agree that Dota 2 is so different from it's prequel, but at the end of the day, as you said

1. Blizzard never owned it.

2.It was always a mod.

3. Valve never "stole" it, they bought it and got the devs to work on the sequel.

4. It's Blizzard's own fault they didn't realize it's potential sooner.

So even if it was a carbon copy it doesn't really matter.
 

NecroFantasy

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Come on guys, this is obviously not ripping off TF2.

It's ripping off SMNC instead. Winston is Cheston, right down to the whole ape thing, as well as seperating single sentries to minisentries (Engineer and Combat Girl), not to mention Widowmaker and Hanzo being Sniper and Artemis respectively.

I'm kidding, I'm really looking forward to this. Blizzard, you done well.
 

Headsprouter

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Unless they can make it feel really unique, I fear if I ever play this game I'll feel as if I've done it all before.

And by the looks of the gameplay footage, characters seem to die very quickly, which also rubs me the wrong way. Unless they're tanks, but of course, they're tanks.

I'm not saying it's a rip-off, it's pretty clear to anyone not severely misinformed as to what a rip-off is that this isn't a rip-off, I'm just saying as somebody with 700 hours in TF2 over the course of 2 years...all the mechanics are too familiar at the minute, the concept, the characters, none of it catches my eye. It's sad, I looked into it because I was like "Blizzard made a game like that game I like!" and I look through everything and I say "I'm too distracted by how similar it is to that game I like..."

What I'm saying is, while I don't fault the game for taking inspiration from TF2, I'm so deep into TF2 at this point that I don't see a reason to heavily engage myself in a game that interests me but only because it seems to be a familiar experience. If it wasn't like TF2, I wouldn't even be looking at it.

They don't have a Pyro, though. And the robo-monk looks pretty unique.

Dragonlayer said:
I was half-expecting this article to go: "People are noticing that Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 are quite similar - so here's artwork of Disney Princesses as the classes!"
Thank you.
 

War_Dyn27

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Infernal Lawyer said:
Unfortunately you can't copyright game mechanics, so unless valve could prove that they were ripping off code or something I doubt they could do much. I'll be keeping my eye on this one.

War_Dyn27 said:
I'm not sure I agree that Dota 2 is so different from it's prequel, but at the end of the day, as you said

1. Blizzard never owned it.

2.It was always a mod.

3. Valve never "stole" it, they bought it and got the devs to work on the sequel.

4. It's Blizzard's own fault they didn't realize it's potential sooner.

So even if it was a carbon copy it doesn't really matter.
Well, mechanically, Dota 2 is bascially identical to DotA, with DotA being a balance patch behind Dota 2, but Dota 2 is missing 4 heroes, so I agree that it is the same in that respect.

But, stylistically Dota 2 is quite different, favouring simpler, muted colours, compared to Warcraft. Also any reference to orcs, dwarves, tauren, etc. have been removed. Dwarves and goblins are now the 'Keen Folk' a kind of pink skinned hybrid of the two. Orcs are now 'Oglodi' a muscly red skinned race that worship storms.

Now about Overwatch, I don't know whether it is or isn't copying TF2, but it does seem to be more like the Monday Night Combat games based on what I've heard about them: Shooters with DotA-Style elements. Then again, I think I heard somewhere that it has a payload equivalent so who knows. The real make or break for this game will be the balance and the business model, and Blizzards track record in both leave me less than enthused.
 

Sandjube

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I didn't think it looked all that similar, except for the dwarf engie. Every time I see gameplay I have to stop myself from wondering why he's building a sentry and not building a dispenser nearby.
 

Kahani

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Holy carp, games in the same genre are similar to each other! And well established archetypes such as tank, healer, and so on are used in more than one game!

Seriously people, it's an arena-based FPS. Team Fortress was a mod for Quake in the first place. If you're expecting a new arena shooter not to have any similarities to existing ones, you're an idiot.

RedDeadFred said:
People didn't think Hearthstone would be successful since MTG was already dominating card games in video games.
One point to bare in mind there is that MTG is a fucking terrible video game. It's just a direct translation of the tabletop rules, which results in one of the most awkward and frustrating interfaces I've ever seen. Just playing a single turn with nothing happening takes about 100 times longer than it should because of all the pauses for interrupts, separation of phases, and so on. What Hearthstone did was take a similar idea, but design it from the ground up to be played on a computer, and that resulted in a game that is far easier to get into and far less frustrating to play, so it shouldn't be surprising that it did well. And of course most of the rest of the competition simply doesn't have the budget or experience with game development to compete on equal terms.

Overwatch, on the other hand, doesn't have any of that. FPS controls and interfaces have been developed for computers from the start, and they've had a couple of decades of refinement already. There's simply not the same room for improvement that there was with Hearthstone. I have little doubt Blizzard will manage to make a perfectly functional and reasonably fun game, but there seems to be a lot less scope for them to manage much more than that when the competition this time is a highly refined and successful game made by a large company with plenty of experience making this sort of game.
 

Fordo

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Aeshi said:
Yeah, funny how nobody was crying "rip-off!" back when Valve was copy-pasting WCIII models and adjusting their colour a bit for DOTA2. I'm sure the fact that bashing Blizzard is cool/in and bashing Valve isn't is just pure coincidence.
Dota was a mod for war3, not dev'd by blizz. That's why no one is crying 'rip-off'... pretty sure a lot of the original dota guys went to valve to work on their game.
 

TwiZtah

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Steven Bogos said:
So People Are Noticing That Overwatch And Team Fortress 2 Are Quite Similar

Video and fan-art mash-ups of Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch are starting to appear online.

When Blizzard revealed Overwatch [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/138476-Blizzard-Reveals-Overwatch-at-BlizzCon-2014] as its brand-new IP at Blizzcon this year, I figured I wasn't the only person who noticed the game's distinct similarity to a certain war-themed hat simulator. The internet has been quick to react, and has already produced a variety of video, and fan-art Team Fortress 2/Overwatch mash-ups.

First up, check out the YouTube video to the right from user RizkitsunΣki [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qvFxGoQ3ME], which substitute's the sound from Overwatch's reveal trailer for voice-overs and sound effects from Team Fortress 2. It's almost too much of a coincidence how well the TF2 classes slot into Overwatch's efforts.

Next, for an even more striking comparison, artist Silsol [http://silsol.tumblr.com/] has made these stunning fan-art mash-ups, showing the Medic in Mercy's outfit, and the Scout and Tracer wearing each other's clothes. Check them out below:

[gallery=3508]

While it does have a bit more of a sci-fi twist, these fan comparisons make it quite obvious where Overwatch draws its inspiration from. Blizzard are no strangers to taking a popular game and putting its on unique spin on it, and so far at least (see: World of Warcraft) it seems to have worked out for them.

Let's hope that Overwatch has enough to keep it distinct from Team Fortress 2, otherwise my money is just going to keep being funneled into crate keys.

Sources: Tumblr [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qvFxGoQ3ME]

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So?

LoL, Dota, Dota 2, HoN are pretty much exactly the same with a few differences in gameplay and that is enough. Overwatch will be diffrent enough from TF2 to feel like a new game. Jesus shitting christ.