I thought it was Ikaruga from the thumbnail. But seriously, how many cheap KanColle knockoffs is China going to churn out?
How many DOOM clones (and general FPS games) did America churn out? How many of the exact same "magic/esper school" anime plots have come out since Harry Potter?
It's not like China's central government runs and approves all these games. Every kid with dreams of making it big will follow the leader with a cheap mobile game if they can see a path to money in it. The Chinese ones are just give less of a damn about disguising how much they are just making a cheap knockoff.
There's a big difference between a Doom clone and something like this. Duke Nukem 3D for example could be called a Doom clone, but it's substantially different from it and you could never confuse the two. And if we're talking about FPS games in general, then how much do Deus Ex and STALKER resemble Doom?
There's a big difference between a Doom clone and something like this. Duke Nukem 3D for example could be called a Doom clone, but it's substantially different from it and you could never confuse the two. And if we're talking about FPS games in general, then how much do Deus Ex and STALKER resemble Doom?
Fonzi said:
Yes, let's compare an entire genre with a very specific niche game like KC.
Yes, let's.
Doom was basically when id figured out that there wasn't really all that much variety they could pack into Wolfenstein 3d so long as it was all basically just Nazis in corridors next to a surprisingly large number of hazardous barrels and very little actual furniture, since there was very little situational difference between a nazi standing to the left of a doorway you walk through and one standing to the right of a doorway you walk through. Hence, they came up with actually making the enemies and guns more meaningfully different.
Especially in the first five or so years after DOOM, most FPS games were basically that exact same formula, just with some different coat of polish. Many of them even used the same engine, to the point you could call Duke Nukem 3D a DOOM mod. The FPS genre has been pointed out by games critics to be one of the simplest genres of games, rules-wise, to the point where it basically never deviates much from this idea. The only really major player interaction changes to that same basic formula DOOM perfected that we've been playing for 20 years are cover mechanics and regenerating health... and when those were introduced, they spawned a whole new wave of cloning the exact same games. ("Brown Cover Shooters")
And it's hardly the only example of an entire genre chasing after just one game's success. Every mascot platformer is still just trying to fill Mario's shoes, and that's apparently getting a nostalgia resurgence strong enough to even let Bubsy, of all things, come back.
Like I said, copycats following the leader are industry standard. You can just go to your app store on your phone and see how many varieties of Flappy Bird, Angry Birds, or Candy Crush you can find... which is a ripoff of Bejeweled, which is a ripoff of Yoshi's Cookie. The only thing Chinese games do differently is that they're completely shameless about the fact that they're straight-up trying to just make a Chinese version of the exact same game, while Shadow Warrior or Duke Nukem 3D would at least put a different wrapper on the same mechanics.
Ah, well, that actually makes Azur Lane look somewhat more interesting. Still, I'm waiting for the game that tries to make something like Panzer General or its more contemporary versions that include naval combat that have moe girls. (In particular, something like Order of Battle could have that Sky Witches/Girls und Panzer/Upotte!/Kantai Collection crossover mod if someone could actually put together enough unit models...)
DN3D does not use Doom's engine and its engine has numerous features that Doom doesn't. It has numerous mechanics that Doom doesn't. Its setting, tone, weapons and items are different. More recent FPS games are even more different from Doom, which hasn't been the model for the genre since Half-Life. Have you actually played FPS games?
A game being in the same genre as another game or a game being very broadly similar to another game is not the same thing as Kancolle and Azur.
Edit: also, check out Strife. It actually uses the Doom engine, but has a substantially different design.
I love how, in your twisted hipster logic, every FPS is just a Chinese knock-off of Doom. The problems people have with Chinese knock-off games (and why it's so surprising their KanColle clones have been so memorable) are the same reasons so many other franchises are so debated: the fact that it was clearly done for the money, and not for neither art nor fun.
DN3D does not use Doom's engine and its engine has numerous features that Doom doesn't. It has numerous mechanics that Doom doesn't. Its setting, tone, weapons and items are different. More recent FPS games are even more different from Doom, which hasn't been the model for the genre since Half-Life. Have you actually played FPS games?
A game being in the same genre as another game or a game being very broadly similar to another game is not the same thing as Kancolle and Azur.
Edit: also, check out Strife. It actually uses the Doom engine, but has a substantially different design.
Setting, tone, and items are not 'design'. Those are all superficial aesthetics. The game design of KanColle and Azur Lane are radically different, as JsTuCkEy pointed out, so even trying to argue Duke Nukem had the radical innovation of sloped terrain doesn't really make a more different game from Doom than Azur Lane's being an entirely different genre than KanColle.
I love how, in your twisted hipster logic, every FPS is just a Chinese knock-off of Doom. The problems people have with Chinese knock-off games (and why it's so surprising their KanColle clones have been so memorable) are the same reasons so many other franchises are so debated: the fact that it was clearly done for the money, and not for neither art nor fun.
... So by your 'twisted hipster logic', all the other major corporations like EA, Activision, and Ubisoft that spit out constant streams of FPS games make games not for money, but love of the craft, and their design decisions are never, ever influenced by market forces? (They're not a franchise until after the first one in a series is made, after all...)
My point is that the line between "Chinese knock-off" and thinly veiled knock-off that tries to pretend it's something different because it changes some of the art assets while keeping the exact same game mechanics underneath is a rather pointless one to try to make. Super Noah's Ark is Wolfenstein 3D made "Christian Friendly" by replacing nazis with sheep and guns with slingshots that shoot fruit that put animals to sleep, as an extreme example. Exact same game, superficial graphical differences.
Also, Ms. Pac Man was originally an American-made unlicensed knockoff of Pac Man done in the early days of near-zero copyright protection, where literally just slapping a bow and some lipstick on Pac Man was enough to qualify. It's only differences in copyright law and the reaction people give that make the lazy cash-grabbers out there put the effort in to make things even seem superficially different. And considering that there were at least a dozen different 'asset flips' of the exact same pre-bought Unity asset pack that people attempted to put on Steam wholecloth, the shame factor only applies so far as there's awareness of what they're doing.
Again, the point is that China gets a bad rap for it because they're more flagrant about it, but any real look at the meat and substance of most of these games shows flagrant reuse of ideas that worked in the past are the meat and potatoes of the game industry.
I love how, in your twisted hipster logic, every FPS is just a Chinese knock-off of Doom. The problems people have with Chinese knock-off games (and why it's so surprising their KanColle clones have been so memorable) are the same reasons so many other franchises are so debated: the fact that it was clearly done for the money, and not for neither art nor fun.
That sounds so romantic, but the truth is all games are done for the money. That companies nor producers had extra cash to invest in things not been done before it's a different matter. If I recall correctly the reason Chinese could get away easily from ripping off, was because products we all know about couldn't be sold easily into the country (specially during the home console banning for example). Then they created identical local versions that could sell on their own. Most looked identical but lacked the substance that made the original games popular.
Also it's true that WWII mecha musume while popular isn't something KanColle invented. The earliest commercial product I know dates back from 2008, the Daisenryaku spin offs. But I'm sure it dates from a lot back.
An ovewhelming number of anything can share essentially the same plot depending on how much you simplify things, and unprecedented plots don't exactly grow on trees.
Yes. That's exactly what I've been arguing this whole time, and what I've been pushing you towards realizing with my arguments. This is why it helps to actually notice the forest instead of arguing about every individual tree every now and then, it helps you remember what you're actually arguing about.
People don't think of Duke Nukem 3D as having radically revamped the concept of the FPS because that game had swinging doors, they think of it as basically the same as DOOM, but with a sillier attitude. (In fact, YOU called it a "Doom clone" YOURSELF before trying to argue it somehow was totally different because it has a few technical advancements that aren't really core to the gameplay in between trying to argue that gameplay doesn't matter to games, because only setting matters... And not even trying to respond to my actual argument on the topic of plot or setting...)
Everything in gaming is standing on the shoulders of giants. Saying that the Chinese are somehow the only ones who do it, or who only do it "the bad way" because "they do it for money" is willful blindness to the nature of the industry.
For that matter, Kantai Collection itself is just a new skin on the same gacha game concept DMM had already made a dozen times before and after Kantai Collection (including Flower Knight Girl and that castle-collecting game whose name I can't remember, plus a blatant Love Live! ripoff that didn't make money, so they remade it turning all the high school girl idols into prostitutes, instead...), and those were cheap knockoffs of an already-existing trend of gacha games. (I'm sure nobody at DMM or Kadokawa ever had a thought KanColle could ever be used to make money, and was only done for pure love of the artwork inherent in randomness-heavy gaming put together on the cheap!) KanColle's WW2 skin on the same game that they always made just happened to suddenly really take off to the surprise of everyone, including the people who made the game in the first place. (As people have noted, a lot of the early art and voicework seems to have been phoned in, and they're trying to paper over some of it with newer just plain kai art where there isn't yet a kai-ni, the way that the 7th DesDiv has been getting.)
Every time anything gets popular in gaming (or media in general), there are going to be tons of me-too copycats jumping on the bandwagon trying to add some tiny variation of superficial setting changes or minor, incremental improvement of technical capability to try to get rich on someone else's success. After Band of Brothers, there was a hundred military shooters before Call of Duty really struck it big, and then everyone wanted to be a modern shooter after CoD4:MW made all the money in the world. After World of Warcraft, everyone and their dog tried to recreate WoW with some minor technical improvement or another nobody cared about that died in utter obscurity because WoW already had every player for that sort of game on their servers, and there was no market left to share.
You know, I agree with you on this one, yet people wouldn't focus on tree branches if you weren't swinging all over them. You weren't pushing towards but burying valid arguments into piles of trash, cherry picking bad arguments and swinging back to the original point. Maybe the down voting part isn't your doing but given your previous reputation it wouldn't be a surprise either.