Armed Heroes Online’ – Inspiration Or Blatant Clone?

‘Armed Heroes Online’ – Inspiration Or Blatant Clone?

It’s not exactly a brand-new practice on mobile gaming: mobile videogame developers for years have been utilizing successful ideas from PC and consoles, squeezing them into the small packages of IPAs, and tossing them onto the App Store. Many have been successful so far, with great fame and popularity following. We just can’t express how GameLoft is a great — and probably the best — example of this. From Call of Duty -esque Modern Combat to StarCraft -inspired Starfront: Collision , principle concepts and general themes were captured, with a small dose of the designers’ own originality in details. Receptions to such cases are mixed: some folks are definitely not happy with the idea of reverse-engineering and cloning, though others praise the final products for giving what the audiences wanted without violating the original copyright. Things went several steps farther with the case of Armed Heroes Online though.

In case you missed it, Armed Heroes Online is an MMO developed by the Beijing-based EGLS. The game features four player character classes, rather decent graphic, and bunches of quests, loot and items in a medieval fantasy setting which is all too familiar to any gamer. Something this scale in the world of mobile gaming would not go unnoticed, and apparently, some people liked and expected it. There’s one (huge) problem though: it stole a ton from the popular PC Action-RPG Torchlight .

It might be an over-stereotyping, but the most of mobile gaming enthusiasts aren’t exactly the geeks who would spend a few tens of hours farming on a PC Action RPG. The game has gathered attention for a while, and though the “WoW/Diablo-feel” was noted, the case was not well-known to public until it caught the eyes of Travis Baldree — the president of Runic Games, and developer of the original Torchlight . Travis has since joined the discussion through forums to point out similarity between the two games, down to the typos in sound file names.

EGLS didn’t remain silent though. Serena Zhang, presumably EGLS’ representative, responded to the contraversy:

“First of all, we have to say that it is a great shock hearing what Mr. Travis Baldree, president of Runic Games, said about Armed Heroes Online last weekend. We can hardly agree with Mr. Travis Baldree who judged that EGLS “wholesale stole most of the assets from Torchlight!” only based on the similarity between several small monsters. The judgment is simply untenable. Armed heroes Online is an action MMO role-playing mobile game, while Torchlight is a console PC game. Not only the platforms (Mobile devices vs. PC/Mac), but also game mechanics (multiplayer online vs. console), engine support ( self-developed 3D engine vs. commercial authorized OGRE engine) , scenes and techniques employed in Armed Heroes Online developing are all largely different from Torchlight.”

Serena also pointed out numerous similarities between Torchlight and Blizzard ‘s Diablo 2 and World of WarCraft , as well as WildTangent ‘s Fate . Travis replied with a feeling of inadequacy, but to no further reaction from EGLS at the moment. As a side note, we would like to point out that among the leading staff of Runic Games , Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer were former founders responsible for numerous works of Blizzard Entertainment. Among these is the original Diablo series, while Travis Baldree himself was the designer of the aforementioned WildTangent ‘s Fate. Regardless of the outcome of the case, EGLS probably should spend more time learning about folks of the industry.

Armed Heroes Online was released last week in the Canadian App Store without a worldwide release, presumably with an Android launch following soon. Apple was certainly notified of the current issue. The case is not yet concluded as we are waiting for responses from both EGLS and Apple. Meanwhile, Travis Baldree shared his thoughts with PC Gamer:

“I have no doubt that the assets were taken from Torchlight. I actually noticed the infringement myself and showed the rest of the team, when I saw their announcement video which was linked from a news post about the Canadian release.”

When asked about how difficult it would be to steal said assets, he had this to say.

“They were all available in the SDK, and it’s actually quite trivial to do. The model files are in Ogre3D’s native model format, which is convertible to other formats fairly simply. Our textures are raw and uncompressed, as are our sounds. This was all done intentionally in keeping with Torchlight’s moddable nature. Our terms of use for the SDK and game content of course prohibit using those assets for monetary gain.”

Though nothing is official, the plot is quite thick with this case. IGM Mobile will be watching this one closely, so stay tuned here for details on the situation.