World of Warcraft Copies Off Warhammer Online
Posted by Stropp on October 17, 2008The last few days have seen the release of Blizzard’s Achievement system for World of Warcraft. A system that has been copied directly from Warhammer Online.
Okay. Maybe it’s not quite that bad. I am being a little facetious.
There are a lot of similarities between Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge and Warcraft’s Achievements. But then, there are similarities between the system Warhammer uses, and the Lord of the Rings Online Achievement and Title system.
Even LotRO doesn’t get off cleanly regarding plagiarism charges. They are certainly not the first gaming system out there that has titles based on in-game achievements.
But… I reckon Lord of the Rings Online has the best achievement system I’ve seen in a MMORPG.
In LotRO, not only do you get a title from an achievement, you get a trait that you can apply to your character development. While Warhammer Online has the Tome, all you get is a title that you can give your character. I’m not sure what Warcraft’s achievement system achieves.
So yeah. I’m being tongue in cheek when I charge WoW with plagiarism. For players, it’s not a bad thing for developers to take good ideas from other games, and then give us a better version.
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Once you unlock enough ToK achievements linked to specific races etc. you get Tomb tactic unlocks that can be used. (e.g. increased damage to example race)
It’s hard to say they copied Warhammer without a doubt. When the WotLK alpha was leaked back in early May, everyone found out about the achievements planned for the expansion. I tried to find a Mythic post or blog or anything showing the first appearance of achievements in WAR with no avail, but 5 months is plenty of time to ‘borrow’ the idea going the other way.
Only a WoW fanboy would deny that they havent copied it. But is that a crime? Warhammer and other MMO’s have copied WoW on certain things altho thankfully Warhammer isnt the boring grind of Warcraft.
I will probably buy WoTLK but i know I wont play it every day like i once did, WoW has definately lost something these days.
i do believe they simply copied warhammer. more than that quite a few characters look like copied from older warhammer games to me.
The achievements system is years older than both Warhammer and WoW, and both of those games actually copied it from other developers.
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