I never thought we would reach an "inspired by" singularity, but here we are (spoilers for various games)

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I have played every single game blizzard is ripping off for the next 3 expansions. I therefore know how it is going to end before it even started. Just from the expansion titles and base descriptions I can even glean the story beats as it weaves from ff14 to swtor to gw2 to ff14 again.

Anduin even looks like a mix of ven zallow / cal kestis and alleria is wearing an outfit that looks like satele shan / cere junda; hell, Anduin is outright giving off-brand dark knight cecil quotes from the beginning of final fantasy 4 for the snes (just about plagiarizing the ds remake’s dialogue too). I could write a thesis on every single mmo and jrpg these next three expansions are doing the “hey can I copy your homework” meme to. Even on the expansion key art, Anduin’s pose is a mix of ven zallow’s pose from the swtor base game box art and the cal kestis’ fallen order box art.

Then again, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until right now that dragonflight is almost beat-for-beat a rip off of guild wars 2’s overarching dragon plot, even down to the main villains being elder dragons that have even the same personalities as their gw2 counterparts. The 10.2 story is almost the same thing as “living story season 5” with slight alterations. Then again, a lot of the plot to shadowlands is just guild wars 2 base game and living story 1 as well (with one big difference).

guild wars 2’s story is so tiresome it’s easy to block it out, but why didn’t I notice this before?

What’s interesting is that azeroth is clearly being set up to be aurene, but that’s “living story 4,” so we are not only ripping off guild wars 2 but doing so out of chronological order.

elune is clearly venat/haedelyn.

I wonder which void lord is going to be darth vitiate / emperor valkorion / tenebrae, who has been secretly possessing major figures throughout history.

I can tell metzen is back on the team, because this has been his schtick since 1993.

P.S. the funny thing is a lot of these stories were themselves “inspired by” wow (or the same places metzen was stealing from) but “deconstructed,” so we are now dealing with a dead horse that has been beaten so hard that he was shoved into the ground and now has been pushed out the other side of the earth.

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Blizzard has always been at its best when they took ideas from games around them.

At the end of the day everything is inspired by something. Originality seems to have escaped the last two generations of people.

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There is “inspired by in the chris metzen sense,” which worked back in 1993-2003 because blizzard games appealed to non-nerds who didn’t already gobble down all the media he was ripping off.

Then there is “emergency metzen,” where there is a confused blizzard key artist somewhere asking himself “we’re even going to steal the box art?” Someone was even pointing out a little while ago how the titans storyline from dragonflight is so close to a dc comics run that warner brothers has a solid case to sue for royalties.

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May I remind you, that FF14 was actually inspired by WoW when WoW was at its peak

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I joked just yesterday that if you want a new feature in wow, just put it in ff14 (or guild wars 2 if it can increase metrics) and it will be in wow in 4 years.

Whereas ff14 has always been “wow but 6 years ago.”

This is more than “inspired by” though, and the story rips a lot from guild wars 2 as well.