Gameloft has made a lot of money for themselves by - shall we say - taking inspiration from other classic video games. For a while most iOS gamers were willing to accept this for a variety of reasons. For one, "inspiration" and even outright copying has been around since the earliest days of video gaming. Many were also just thrilled to have near-copies of their favorite games on their iProducts. Gameloft's new MMO Order and Chaos may be too much for some gamers to stomach though.
They've got a large back catalogue of clones already. Modern Combat [iTunes Link] is a thinly veiled copy of Modern Warfare, N.O.V.A. is very like Halo, the newly announced Starfront: Collision [iTunes Link] is like Starcraft, and Hero of Sparta [iTunes Link] is dead ringer for God of War. Given all of that history, and the amount of money we've spent supporting it, it's hard to criticize Gameloft here. The new video below introduces us to Order and Chaos.
It's easy to jump on Gameloft and say they're ripping off Blizzard. However, let's not forget that Blizzard's two most famous series - Starcraft and Warcraft - have both been highly criticized since their inception for taking too much inspiration from the Warhammer series of tabletop games. Going back even further, it's easy to imagine Warhammer's fantasy game being criticized for borrowing too much from Tolkein-esque fantasy. Where does the blame game end?
We'll have to wait and see how much Order and Chaos cribs from WoW. It may very well just be a visual correlation. After all, it's hard to imagine Gameloft borrowing the game's actual mechanics given that one uses a small touch screen, while the other has a full QWERTY keyboard.
