We have all had moments where we see something and find ourselves strangely thinking we have seen it before in another game but Runic Games President Travis Baldree found after witnessing Armed Heroes Online, a Chinese MMO that a number of assets from Torchlight had allegedly been ripped.
In a forum discussion Travis states, “All of the monster assets and every dungeon tileset, as well as voices, and most sound effects, are direct rips from Torchlight… I didn’t see ANY monsters that weren’t ours.”
This was not the only thing Travis found, after doing some digging. The sound files that were used for both games were identical, right down to their typos.
Currently Runic Games is seeking the removal of the game from Apple’s app store for Canada and asked for the game not to be released in the states.
However the flip side of this story, EGLS gave a response to Runic Games on TouchArcade.
Some members of our team are both crazy game fans and ecstatic movie lovers. They indeed get inspirations from other games and movies, which however is totally different from directly decoding or “stealing” assets from other games. Learning and getting inspired from other games or movies actually helps many game designers generate new ideas and creations. We are always making great efforts to develop games with creative features to find a balance
EGLS further elaborates that Torchlight pulled from similar sources and “ripped” ideas directly from a game called Fate which came out in 2005.
This has been known to happen in the industry but do you think Runic Games is going too easy on EGLS Technology or is this just a misunderstanding on Runic Games if both companies borrowed from a similar source? Leave a comment below and let us know.
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