Is Warcraft a "ripoff" of Warhammer?

[Mandible]

Yes, very insightful. WoW just looks better on every level. Plus, it has an actual art style, as opposed to EQ2.

Any way things being drawn is an "art style"...

[Xothic]

YOU don't anything about EQ2 graphics with that commentary...at all.

Environmental bump mapping in EQ2 is made via polys. It's not done by textures. Point blank. Rocks to the sand to the filigree pattern even on my status armor is carved/extruded....

http://s970.photobucket.com/albums/a...=EQ2_Glare.png

That's not a slapped on textures, materiasl and diffuse map tricks. You can clearly see the grooves on the elbows. Can see the indention on the tree behind him. Can see how the cheekbones are formed, let alone the facial lines on the forehead. All carved. All Extruded. All indented.

It's why it takes a very decent computer to play the game (let alone it's CPU rendered, not GPU).

EQ2 looks like Morrowind. Not that that is a bad thing, I fucking loved morrowind.

[Trassk]

They were influenced by warhammer, doesn't mean what they thought up wasn't original, which it was.

I tried to play warhammer online, but the concepts in there story was obviously very different to warcraft. I prefered warcraft due to race lore and backstory to the characters and heroes involved.

Also, if you want to presume everything rips off everything else, all genres of this nature rip off from lord of the rings.

[Pull My Finger]

Any way things being drawn is an "art style"...

Yes, in the same sense as that any brainfart is an opinion. I'm talking by professional standards here.

[Deleted]

I read an interview with Blizzard back in the mid-late '90s (post WC1, pre-WC2, iirc) in a gaming mag where someone from Blizzard said more or less exactly the same things, specifically:

1) "We wanted to do a Warhammer game but couldn't work out a deal with GW"

and

2) "We were very heavily visually influenced by the Warhammer universe"

I've brought this interview up a few times over the years, and thought it would be uncontroversial (as the Patrick Wyatt himself says, the similarities are pretty obvious), but people have insisted that Blizzard would never, could never, have said such a thing, that the similarities are pure coincidence, and particularly that suggestions that Blizzard was ever interested in Warhammer were pure internet-wank, not memories of them actually saying it. That the art style was pure coincidence and anyone asserting that it was obviously somewhat derivative of Warhammer was just being a hater. Also, of course, that I had either made up or hallucinated the article, because they couldn't find evidence of it on the internet, which automatically means it never happened!

Can you give me a source for that please? Maybe a photo of the mag ?

[Verdugo]

I tried to play warhammer online, but the concepts in there story was obviously very different to warcraft. I prefered warcraft due to race lore and backstory to the characters and heroes involved.

Thats like saying you base warcraft lore on wow alone.

Remember Theramore?

[Deleted]

Can you give me a source for that please? Maybe a photo of the mag ?

Might not be the source, but it's kinda here:

http://uk.kotaku.com/5929161/how-war...that-saved-wow

"[Blizzard co-founder] Allen Adham hoped to obtain a license to the Warhammer universe to try to increase sales by brand recognition", Wyatt says. "Warhammer was a huge inspiration for the art-style of Warcraft, but a combination of factors, including a lack of traction on business terms and a fervent desire on the part of virtually everyone else on the development team (myself included) to control our own universe nixed any potential for a deal."

[Linzo]

You're right, if a community even existed. Everyman for Himself isn't a community, you know?

my guild for 5 years and the people i regularly play ARE a community.

It seems that you don't understand what a community actually means.

[Deleted]

This Question has probably created the most flames wars since the dawn of the internet. No one here knows the truth but most assume that Games Workshop and Blizzard had plans for an RTS sci fi game, mostly with Warhammer content.

Games Workshop backed out of that contract leaving Blizzard with an unfinished game, they turn the tables around and finish the game, call it Starcraft and made history, yada yada.

Its not a Rippoff, of course die hard fans of GW will claim it is. :P

Its heavily, really heavily influenced by GW, just take a look.
Space Marines (Terran's) is a young race that tries to conquer the Universe and fight back the evil.
Elder (Protoss) Damn old space dude's who try to fight back the evil young races and conquer the universe for their own.
Tyranid (Zerg) Hive mind alien Race that consumes millions of worlds, both Protoss and Terran's fought them endless times.

Of course there is much more Lore to Warhammer then that, im just pointing the things out that Blizzard did. And its frickin obvious, the Terran's look like a copy of the Ultramarines, which is a chapter in the Space marines itself.

[Deleted]

All the lawsuits won by warhammer creators and all the lawsuits lost by blizzard indicate that it is a ripoff.

[Linzo]

All the lawsuits won by warhammer creators and all the lawsuits lost by blizzard indicate that it is a ripoff.

So..... Zero?

[Juno86]

All the lawsuits won by warhammer creators and all the lawsuits lost by blizzard indicate that it is a ripoff.

Yea, going by all the link's you have provided to back up your claim your a hard person to argue with. Oh wait..

[TheWindWalker]

The biggest problem I always have with this topic is simply there's a rather big hypocrisy with acting like Warhammer was completely original in its roots.

Any story, any game, any form of fiction whatsoever that has "Orcs" as monsterous humans is, without any exceptions, a ripoff from Tolkien. Middle-Earth is the source of the name, "Ur'uk" being the lore-based source of the name "Orc", and most almost anything that has "Elves" as "divine beings nearly identical to humans in appearance" is pulling from Tolkien as well.

The vast majority of fiction involving Elves, Dwarves, Trolls and Haflings are borrowing from Dungeons and Dragons. DnD was heavily inspired by Middle Earth. There are very few examples of "actual originality" but Middle Earth scrapes against this by taking drastically altered versions of European folklore. At least Warhammer's creators did take the time to make an extensive, and quite rich, library's worth of lore on even the anatomy of the humanoids involved, so they at least have more going for them than Warcraft did until WoW came out.

[Yriel]

Wrong. Starcraft predates the updated Tyranids. When starcraft came out, WH40k tyranids were limited to the human genestealer cult.

Sorry, had to let my neckbeard out for a second there.

Sorry but you are wrong there. Tyranids were in the first edition 40k rulebook (rogue trader) from 1987.
And many people got Tyranid minis from the Advanced Space Crusade game from 1990, here is an image of them :


Starcraft was released in 1998.

[deviantcultist]

Guess what. Warcraft has orcs as leaders of a faction and warhammer has "dark humans" and elves as the core features with orcs being the slaves. I cannot accept people calling wow a ripoff since they are that proud of playing a silly looking orc and constantly mock the Blood Elves who are objectively superior to every other horde race.

[Beavis]

It was pretty much a straight rip off through WC2. Now WC is it's own thing.

[blib]

Wow is and will always be better than Everquest and you base this off what?

That wow has more subs?

Yes, when the answer to the question is subjective majority opinion is the answer. That doesn't mean it is better for, or in your eyes, but the majority finds it better thus it is better.

[sir-connor]

I don't plan on actually participating in this thread, again, it's merely here to keep the arguing about whether or not X is a rip off of Y out of the thread above.

Made me lol after seeing just how many posts you then made in this thread;

OT; I totally agree with you OP: It'd be a rip off if they just literally copy+pasted everything and changed the names, they didn't do that.

Everything new borrows from stuff that has been successful in the past, this is how we progress. It isn't just true for games but also music, movies, novels, technology - there is no such thing as being truly original.

[GeordieMagpie]

Perhaps at WarCraft 1, maaaaaybe at warcraft 2, but once WarCraft 3 came out, No way, WoW's story just changed itself, big time.

[Beefhammer]

Well you really can not say a game is good off of the number of subs. yes 10 million subs sounds good for marketing but lets be real how many of the 10 million are pay to plays from the east.

Why are you people afraid of the eastern accounts? They are paying customers and per hour they pay more than the NA/SA/EU/Oceanic accounts do. Just because you have a perceived notion of what an Asian account holder is does not mean they do not count. As of the last official counts that listed numbers half are Eastern and half are the rest. That was at the 12M mark. During Cata and the 2M purge/exodus almost half we banned accounts, around 1/4 were non eastern account losses and the other 1/4 were eastern accounts that left but were playing D3. So it is still about half and half between eastern and the rest of the world.