Man, Arkane is not sitting in the position they were before. I’m glad they’re doing this, but I worry that this is only going to get more of their studios shut down.
Much of Arkane is in Europe (specifically France) where workers rights sort of exist. Arkane Austin is already dead as of last year. So it will take a bit of effort for phil spencer et al to kill them.
That said? They also likely already know they are on the chopping block and figure they might as well speak their minds (and get some good will) in the hopes of being able to get funding for whatever comes next.
if they dont’t market it as something related to horizon then what’s the issue? we have millions of clones of various games with different graphics, and so what?
Would not be the first time, although usually developers then go out of their way to make things more legally distinct.
Off the top of my head, the PS1 game Croc was reportedly originally pitched to Nintendo as a 3D platformer starring Yoshi (it was made by some of the team behind StarFox). They obviously reworked it a ton before it released as what it ended up as.
Not as relevant as you would think, and actually somewhat common in the industry; Warcraft (the RTS) was developed ahead of asking for a license for the Warhammer franchise. When that deal fell through, it was rejigged to be its own thing and published.
I think the key here is that it’s completely identical. It’s virtually the same product if you told me it was another game set in the same universe I would have believed you.
When you rejig something you have to change it enough that it’s distinct, I’m not convinced they changed literally anything.
Seriously, it looks like they took a slightly different build of the game, pasted a new face on Aloy, added a few animals, and literally changed nothing else at all. Like not even scanning effects. Doesn’t the last one even have hanggliding?
That’s not to say it looks bad, it could easily just play like a spin-off, but even the regions look similar.
Tbh, though, I really hate how Horizon scaled the combat difficulty with unending spamming AOE attacks.
Horizon 1 was excellent, part 2 was too much. Kinda like Jedi survivor, we went from a somewhat small game to one 10x the size. I couldn’t even finish it
I liked pretty much everything about it except that harder combat just meant spamming meteors at you, like Thanos and Iron Man. If they throw another moon at me, Im gonna lose it. It’s such damn lazy design.
The key is whether or not someone would confuse one franchise for another based on the aesthetics. People were losing their minds over Palworld being a ripoff of Pokemon when it first released.
I could see it going either way. IP law is a mess.
There is the additional case that apparently $0.10 wants to licence the IP. (Autocorrect has just changed the name to a price, and I’m inclined to leave it because it’s funny)
It sounds like what happened here is they developed the game and then approached Sony for the licence assuming they were going to get it (which is a bizarre thing to do because Sony were never going to give them a licence, anyone who knows anything about how Sony operate knows that)
Not sure I care about who will win that one, but if Sony can prove tenc $0.10 actually came to them to get a Horizon licence, only to release “can’t believe it’s not Horizon” shortly after not getting it, that would be quite the smoking gun.
It’s basically a proof that looking as similar as possible was their intention all along.
I saw the trailer for that game and laughed my ass off, i legit thought it was a horizon DLC and when I realized it wasn’t, I couldn’t get past the obvious fact that it’s a straight ripoff that barely changed anything
It does look like a clone, but fuck IP law. Sony winning this will only hurt games because any publisher with a genre creating / defining game could gatekeep any competitors from coming in *cough Nintendo.
The original horizon came out 8 years ago, that’s plenty of time for them to cash in on the monopoly they get for all the creativity that went into creating the genre / style.
Its not like they’re marketing it with a similar name or main character or any other identifier that could trick someone into buying it instead either.
Eh this lawsuit actually sounds like it has grounds… Tencent asked to make a spinoff, got rejected, then made it anyway.
Sony states that during the pitch meeting, Tencent did not disclose it was already working on Light of Motiram. According to the lawsuit, Sony rejected Tencent’s Horizon pitch in April 2024, stating that while it “greatly appreciated Aurora’s level of passion and the effort put into the pitch,” it would not be pursuing the partnership.
When Tencent did announce Light of Motiram in November 2024, Sony states in the lawsuit that its gameplay trailer did not feature any of the “Eastern-inspired clothing, aesthetics, and backdrops that Tencent pitched and instead copied Horizon whole cloth.”
I went to the game’s website to see how they portrayed the game as opposed to taking whatever cherry-picked similarities Sony chose to use as their argument.
Wow. It is fucking identical. Maybe the gameplay is different, but the art is indistinguishable.
The world needs to be fleshed out so an RPG would actually be pretty good. The problem is it’s a pretty world but it isn’t really very interesting. The humans who occupy the world are frankly boring and you can only fight so many robot elk before you want to do something else.
A prequel would be interesting, detailing what happened and maybe explaining how things ended up the way they now are.
Yeah I don’t have the greatest love for Sony but they have a really good point with this.
It’s basically the same game; Robot animals have taken over the world because reasons, Humans survive in small groups and have reverted to some kind of native american inspired spirituality for some bizarre never explained reason, you play as hyper athletic female warrior type who has to fight said robot animal things, your mission is to acquire some long lost secret technology from before the world was taken over by robot animals.
Some are the designs are pretty close I will admit, even though I don’t think Nintendo should be able to randomly shut down gamea that are vaguely similar to Pokémon.
gamespot.com
Aktywne