WAR is not WOW (and did not steal the idea)

Well here I go on about MMORPG’s for awhile, please excuse me if you have no idea what I am talking about.

In production at the moment (09/2007) is a game called Warhammer Online and it is a lot like the very popular World of Warcraft. This is a simple statement but can have a lot of negative interpretations. WAR did not rip off WOW, but how can it be that there are two games that have a lot in common and the second one is not a rip off of the first.

Let me explain.

There are lots of different aspects to a game, so lets go through each one individually.

1st – The look or the graphic style.

Before Blizzard started making games and before Mythic started making games there was the table top miniature game called Warhammer, the Intellectual property is owned by Games Workshop.

Warhammer is a fantasy based game with orcs and elves. It is one of the most sucessful of its kind and one of the first, but of course the whole fantasy genre belongs to no one person, being a mixture of many mythologies and ideas. In my opinion nobody can be attributed to owning the genre.

Now War is based on Warhammer and WOW is based on Warcraft, both belong to the same genre and both have to inherit the properties of being a fantasy world. So, from even this broad point we can see they are going to share similarities.

An orc is an orc and an elf is an elf.

Lets get this straight though, the Warhammer world existed before the Warcraft world did.

So it is right and proper that a game based on Warhammer, WAR, looks like Warhammer, which is does, but it does share a lot of similarites to WOW. This is because the Warcraft world looks like Warhammer and not the other way around.

Anybody lost yet?

In short, WarHammer existed before Warcraft.

Anyway the general look and feel of WAR and WoW is similar, but WAR isn’t copying WoW it is copying Warhammer.

Moving away from the general look, eg Orcs are big and green with spikey armor, we get to the details of the graphics.

Let me show some examples

The ones on the left belong to War and the ones on the right belong to Wow.

Confronted with these pictures you will have some people say they are nothing alike. I think these people have what I call an educated eye, they are looking at the pictures with more depth. They are alike but there is a lot of difference in the detail. The WoW models lack detail, are brightly coloured and have a more cartoonish feel.

There are some really good reasons why the WOW models look like this. The engine behind these graphics is far less intensive on your computer so the game runs smoothly and humans are very good at using their imagination, filling in the blanks so to speak.

Given two dots and closed bracket they will see a smiley face. : )

So you can get a good effect without much of a drain on your computer. Except I really don’t like the colours and the cartoonish feel.

These differences go all the way through to landscape as well.

Anyway, I have always much prefered the DAOC models.

2nd - The Lore or Scenario.

It is interesting that both these MMORPG’s are based on tatical games. One is a computer game the other a table top game, but the premise is very similar. You have an army and you try to defeat your enemies.

Both the original games had intricate stories and lore to support this basic scenario, but I am certain that it is this final purpose and the fact that they are set in a fantasy setting that means they have a similar lore.

There is that word again similar. The lore is in fact different, very different and while I am sure people who are not fans of the genre will not appreciate the differences, those who love it will.

It is really nice for both WOW and WAR to have all this existing lore behind them. It gives an MMORPG stable feet to build upon.

Did WAR steal the lore from WOW? Of course not, once again the lore WAR is based on came first.

3rd – Warring Factions 

Mythic is making WAR and Blizzard made WOW.

Mythic has always been in the business of making MMO’s (founded 1995), and Blizzard have always been in the business of making computer games (founded 1991).

Mark Jacobs the CEO of Mythic started making MUDs in the mid 1980’s and Mythic was responsible for the sucessful MMORPG (nothing like the sucess of WOW), called DAOC.

DAOC was a game were you choose a realm, fought monsters and fought against other players in other realms/factions. It was launched in 2001 and as far as I know was the first MMO to introduce faction based PVP rather than FFA.

WOW was launched 2004, it was also a game that features both PVE and faction based PVP.

Mythic are one of the originators of faction based pvp for online games, which WOW has something very similar too. Blizzard are not the originators of faction based pvp or even RTS, what Blizzard do well is implement these ideas with skill.

So the warring faction scenario was also not stolen from WOW. Mythic did it first.

4th - But Blizzard thought to make this style of MMORPG first.

I have heard an accusation levelled at Mythic that they only went after the WarHammer IP once they saw how sucessful WOW was. This is not true.

Mythic have being trying to get the IP for WarHammer, around the time they had first launched DAOC, but nobody was willing to finance the concept.

“All you have to do is look at the fantasy role-playing books, the fantasy battle books, they published a book called World of Warhammer long before World of Warcraft came out. So we’ve always known there is a hell of a lot of potential there. But we were never able to hook up. I mean you look at where we are now. When we did Camelot … at the time we spoke to them about doing an MMO, based on Warhammer, they already had a deal, and we had no money.“

Mark Jacobs http://pc.gamezone.com/news/04_17_06_11_29AM.htm

Mark Jacobs may not have been the first person to think of making this style of MMORPG, but he did think of it well before he had heard of anything to do with WOW. 

5th Game Engine. 

They are using different game engines. Go look it up.

For the definition of game engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine

6th Game Play.

No one can really say if the WAR’s game play is a lot like or a little bit like WOW’s game play, as WAR has not been released yet and everybody in the beta is sworn to abide by the NDA.

That being said, I am certain that many game elements of WAR will be very similar to WOW, just like many of the game elements of WOW are just like every other MMORPG that came before it. This is because there are some things in these games you will want to do in all of them. Such as slay the big beastie, or cast a spell. There are only so many clever ways to implement these sort of mechanisms. 

I am also sure that WAR will have its own variation on the game play and will be substantially different to WOW. Just as WOW was substantially different to EQ, DAOC, Lineage, UO, AC, etc all games that came before it.

In fact, I think the game will be so much unlike WOW that many people whose only MMORPG to date has been WOW will find themselves right out of their comfort zone and will probably complain.

Conclusion:

The games are similar, the people who claim this are right, but being similar does not equal being the same.

Also the similarities have occured out of the fact that two companies saw the same opportunity at around the same time. One of them had more money than the other and got theirs released first. In fact it could be that Mythic saw the opportunity well before Blizzard, but who can really tell. Someone in Blizzard may have been campaigning for an Online game of this type well before even Mark Jacobs thought of the idea.

Nobody ripped the other off and on this ground both Mythic and Warhammer have a very strong argument to support they in no way ripped off Blizzard.

One thing WOW did was prove the concept. So we should thank WOW for making MMORPG’s big business and convincing people to invest in the market.

My advice if you like the look of WAR give it a go, but don’t expect it to be a certain type of game. Just play what is presented, if you like it, continue, otherwise move on to something else.