copy-cat behaviour in the corporate world is rampant. its the safe thing to do. middle managers are most concerned about safe decision making.
your points are mostly correct , but language like “ripping off” is over doing it slightly. to me it looks like standard copy-cat behaviour you see between rivals.
What is the first thing that happens when some sports team win the championship? every team tries to play like them.
Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan.
There are certain archetypes that are pretty common themes. The idea of a animal uplifted with science goes back at least to '50s Pulp and probably farther. Most other characters fit in common achetypes too, so it is more of a struggle making any one of them look unique when there are years and years of works drawing from the same inspiration.
I get that the concept itself is not new, hell in some Larry Niven books they have a race of humanoid cats (Kzin) in armor who wage war with humanity multiple times. My point is that all three games come out close to each other while having all this similarity. If it were years apart then it means less but they are all competing for attention with what seems like obvious mimic tactics.
the “garage programmer” days are over man. its huge teams with committee decision making processes. middle managers in giant corporate infrastructures play it safe ; everyone watches their competition carefully ; everyone copies their competition.
hell they hire employees from the competition… half of Blizzard’s RTS team is from C&C… 10% is from Relic’s CoH team…etc etc
Dustin Browder – RA2 ; David Kim – CoH1 ; Greg Black – RA3 and C&C3
and that’s just off the top of my head.
The SC2 Banshee is a C&C3 Orca.
The SC2 Hellion is a C&C3 Raider Buggy.
Heck, to me Toby has a lot in common with Gunther from Adventure Time but I suspect it has something to do with with evil penguins being funny and Winston (from Overwatch) really feeling like Beast from X-Men (mostly 90s cartoon).
Blizzard games take 4+ years to make. An employee from say 2010 to 2014 could’ve left Blizzard and been hired by Gearbox. The guy is probably still friends with some guys working on Overwatch.
and Bam… now everything happening at both companies is 1st learned about by their competition.
While I’m sure Overwatch will be stunning (we all know what happens to Blizzard games that aren’t considered stunning…) it was the voice they used for the Tracer that cemented my decision to stick with Battleborn.
Also, couch co-op!
The problem with Overwatch is that a lot of its trailers depict this epic story and lore, but the game itself has no story mode what so ever.
…you should hear her voice in spain spanish…
Yes! At least someone understands! This game is NOT worth 60$. Why should console players be force to pay 60$ to play this game? All the content that contains the origin edition is useless for console players.
Heroes of the Storm: Tracer Hero - Useless for console
World of Warcraft: Baby Winston Pet - Useless for console
StarCraft II: Portraits - Useless for console
Hearthstone: card back - Useless for console
Diablo III: Mercy Wings - Can be use with console (But let’s be honest, Who still plays that game in console?)
And last but not least, 5 skins. They want you to pay 20$ extra for 5 skins and a pair of wings!?! I like Overwatch but there’s literally NO WAY I’m paying 60$ for it. The game doesn’t have a single player campaign and only two modes for multiplayer.
but don’t dare say that outside the forums, they’ll flame you twice for that.
Yeah, i still get extremely hateful comments from YouTube… Although, some console players agree with me.
Exactly. I’ve seen this video before and I think it makes the best case for both games. While I do enjoy the occasional pvp free-for-all I get tired of them quickly as there’s a limit as to what you can do. I’ve always enjoyed games like Warframe or MMO’s, that feel of being able to better yourself as you play. Even if you choose to main a single character in Battleborn, the gear, helix, and buildable systems still give a large amount of complexity to master and goes far more in depth. And if you want to master all the characters then you have a ton of content available to you, before you even get into the story mode.
The only thing I can really say is that I find the Overwatch open beta situation hilarious. The open beta starts on May 3rd with a preorder and 5th without. Battleborn is released on the third… the first real chance I have to see if Overwatch is worth it will be dedicated to playing the game I already know was worth it.
Because Microsoft and Sony dictate the prices they’ll allow games made for their systems to be sold at. I’m sure Blizzard would rather sell OW at the lower price point, but they can’t if they want to sell it on the consoles.
Word, yo
Gearbox is better then Blizzard anyday.
Then again both Gearbox and Blizzard are Game producer’s so called Real Estate providers.
Neither one is better or worst because Gearbox or Blizzard don’t produce games they sell them on behalf of game companys that’s all.
Or they are the middle guy like a Game producers shop that sell to public shops to sell to consumers.
EA is another good example of this!
Mostly agreed.
But GBX is indeed a studio producing the games, while their “real estate provider” is 2K as far I know. (Same case as Bioware made MassEffect, while EA was their marketing company - good point there!)
So replace “Gearbox” with “2K” in your post and you are definately right.
How interesting to read.
I remember going to Gearboxsoftware website ages ago and they had 20 or 30 games that they do bissness with. I did not know Gearbox was there own game production company.
Thanks for the Correction.
Nya, don´t take my words to be 100% true, I´m not completely familiar with their inner buissness structure^^
As far as I know they do both, producing own games as well as publishing others. Its hard to keep track on that.