Sure, but when you have all the access they have to the source code, etc, it does seem a touch suspicious.
Theres that movie Battle Royale, and all the mods inspired by it.
Battle Royale is a social criticism of the japanese society where people is pit to success “or else”. A inhuman society that force people to run and compete.
But yea, if PUBG was released before 1996, yea, PUBG invented it.
The guy behind PUBG is the guy that created the original mod, did the H1Z1 thing, and then PUBG, so yeah he invented the genre.
I just don’t get Fortnite. It seems totally silly and weird. Building a random series of ladders and shit to get kills just looks so unappealing. Maybe it plays better than PUBG, but it isn’t even really close to being the same game. It’s just a wacky cartoon game that has a battle royale mode.
Finding loot is FAR more interesting in Fortnite than PUBG.
That said, the exploding popularity and over-saturation of Fortnite is quickly making me lose interest in it.
Building adds a strategic element to the game that’s very hard for players to execute well in real time. You know how real-time strategy games have that cool appeal of building things? You get that along with exploration, constant danger and high tension. It’s just a heck of a lot of fun.
It is a true sandbox of play that has a simple goal but massively varied possibilities to be a winner. The neat thing too is in Solo play, a less skilled player can still win with their brains. You can be tricky. I watched a guy win yesterday without firing a shot at the end. He was just… smarter.
There really aren’t a lot of competitve first or third person shooters where you can win with brains as much as skill and brawn.
So so true. Time and time again the majority of players are “balls to the wall” aggressive. A few well timed misdirections can even provide a slow, non-twitch friendly gamer a few kills :D
If this were something that people could sue over, the whole games industry would collapse. Look at how many people stole the man-shooting idea from Id. Hell, Blizzard wouldn’t have anything left in their catalog, considering their entire business model is “take someone else’s idea, add a pinch of salt, and do it better”.
None of those companies purchased the product they used to make the game from the people who stole it.
Game design isn’t found in source code.
Now if they stole PUBG’s netcode or rendering system then they might have something to sue over. But that wouldn’t be likely, giving that it’s PUBG using their engine.
OK, sure. You guys love Fortnite. Good.
Oh come on, Jason. If your argument has a leg to stand on surely you can do a little better than that.
I’ve never played Fortnite’s PVP or PUBG, for what it’s worth. I don’t have a dog in this race.
Obviously there’s nuance involved, but there’s no way PUBG was completed without some sort of technical assistance from Epic. How much, if any, actual design was discussed and whether any details, if any, that were discussed were sufficiently firewalled from the rest of Epic is pretty important. To me at least, it makes this makes things a little more murkier.
That said, I assume lawyers for the two entities would already be talking if there were actual legal merit to it.
Does use of the Unreal Engine give Epic access to the code of everything created with it? And is there reason to believe that Epic copied or referenced the code from PUBG?
I’m not challenging the claim, I’m just legitimately curious what elevates Fortnite from “copycat” to “theft.”
What I envision is more along the lines of technical requests made to Epic for changes to the engine that could better support the style of game they made – changes that probably required payment. Such requests could contain design details that they might assume would remain confidential and wouldn’t be used to create a direct competitor.
Then again, if PUBG willfully submitted pull requests then that’s on them. :)
Obviously no shortage of equivocation on my part here :)
Wouldn’t this have been an issue all along?
Epic taking ideas from other Shooter IPs using the Unreal Engine and copying them for Gears or War, etc.?
Making a Battle Royale is absolutelly trivial and the implementation is pointless. Companies can literally put togueter some resources and release a Battle Royale version of their existing game in a month.
People from outside of videogames may believe theres some secret sauce to making a BR mode for a game, but we here know better.
Hey, I only spent 10 years making games professionally before realizing there’s better money in engineering software, but I get it, it’s cool to be a condescending ass.
I have no doubt that some studios could rebrand their games to be BR-style in pretty short order. That said, PUBG was the first successful BR title and I find it unlikely that they would have been able to accomplish that without some level of engine assistance. Oh, and then the entity they licensed the engine from (and who likely provided said engine assistance) just happened to release a BR game mode for a title that they never could quite figure out what to do with. Nope, totally above board.
That said, @AntediluvianArk has a good point.
Seems like it ought to at least give anyone else trying something innovative with shooters a pause before choosing the Unreal Engine.
PUBG does not have destruction of environments like Fortnite does. It does not have building like Fortnite does. The base game that Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode is built on, while PvE, uses all that stuff, obviously supports similar sized maps, the same weapons, etc. To be quite honest, I think this was a rather trivial thing for them to add to what they had built already.
And as @AntediluvianArk points out, why hasn’t this criticism been leveled at Epic for the last twenty years? They’ve been selling this engine a very long time. This is the first time I’ve seen this sort of criticism.
The two games are very different in how they play. Third-person vs. first-person, building, destroying, no vehicles in Fortnite, etc. Yes, both games give you X vs. 100 as a goal and shooting as a way to take out your opponents, but that’s about where the similarity ends IMO.
I’m also not sure why this seems to be upsetting people so much?