Should Allods be Considered a Clone or should Not

Should Allods be Considered a Clone or should Not By Dmitry Shestakov Dmitry has been observing history of gaming and its development for a decent period of time. As for now, he is looking for an interesting MMO projects and concepts, amongst the ones constantly appearing one after another, in hope of introducing to others some of them, worthy enough to mention.

In a lifecycle of any game there are the times when the game is begin to show itself.... artwork, screenshots and videos are flowing out, and then — a gamers' reaction suddenly becomes that just a WoW ripoff. Or not warcraft, whatever another popular game. Like, every 2d game is compared to Maplestory (not without a reason). It bugs me for a while and just recently I found out this quite interesting situation.

Time for sweet viral marketing, no comparison started yet.
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Another MMO named Allods appeared, made by Nival interactive. You might heard about that somewhere, since it finally came out in english. I saw that same reaction its just a ripoff on it here, and actually the pure outrage took place in russian part (the native part for this game, that is) of the Internet about similarity of Allods to Warcraft. Mostly, probably, because Allods universe proved itself interesting due to series of singleplayer rpg games ages ago. You can consider them as classics now. So it is no wonder why fans of Allods were surprised to see it looking so similar to the popular western mmo. Or maybe its just moody todays to make flaming about how one game is superior to another.

But what is similar between these games in particular? I played it in open beta and playing it once in a while now, and I had difficulties to define this game as a total clone or completely original subject... But I must say, if you really want to see absolute undebated copy, you should check Alganon.

it's unlikely you saw this somewhere else, isn't it?
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But I ain't here to blame or praise Alganon, and that will be considered as deviating from the main topic. Let's suppose, there are two ways to look on the fact of imilarity of Allods and Warcraft....

Acknowledgment

We can face it like a men and say that there are a real reason for thinking that Allods looking pretty close to world of warcraft in many aspects.

Well, I didn't even describe yet what Allods actually is, given that the game itself isn't very popular (yet). So, you have probably already read the review or don't even interested in all that fuss... But let's correct that. Allods is a mmorpg with a classical system and movement controls executed via mouse or keyboard. There are free world without transitions, well, despite the fact that the world itself is a bunch of giant floating islands in space, which make some transitions psychologically and technically unavoidable. Though you can fall whenever it is possible, jump over obstacles and so on.

There are two factions in the game, lets call them bright and dark, because real names doesn't do anything for us. And these factions are striving to destroy each other (but they will never succeed due to being in MMO).

Nothing too suspicious yet, probably. Moving on to the actual gameplay screen ...

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You probably got it.... if not, Im afraid I will sound silly if will try to make some hints. Of all things usual gamer would rage to, he probably won't notice all these small but decisive differencies. That is why its called WoW clone and was greeted with discontent at first.

Game looked like Warcraft at a glance. And the main graphic style is only supports that feeling: not so good, neither detailed nor highly polygonal picture create a great feeling in motion – body animation, magic splashes and weather effects make up for anything that static cartoonish models and textures can't do.