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Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new me
by Someone1234 6mo ago
Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes.
So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time:
- Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
- Turtle WoW is more compelling than anything Blizzard has done with Classic WoW in years, and they should be commended for that.
So it was foreseeable, just a shame for what was lost.
- x187463 6mo agoMany hit games originated as mods. If the Turtle WoW team really are on to something, they should pursue it as an independent game.
- charcircuit 6mo agoI don't think this is true. I think what you may be thinking of is many hit games did not create their own game engine.
- danschuller 6mo agoNo many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.
- Matl 6mo agoFamously Counter Strike as well.
- charcircuit 6mo agoLeague of Legends is its own game built on an engine Riot made from scratch.
- pseudo0 6mo agoLeague's Wikipedia page describes it as "inspired by Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III." I believe they also hired some of the core Dota devs to work on League. I guess if you want to be pedantic it was a custom map, but that was more a consequence of WC3 lacking support for mods. They ended up having to work around a lot of limitations to make Dota work in the custom map framework.
- bogdan 6mo agoThey hired a former dev, guinsoo. At the time when LoL was announced dota was being developed by icefrog for a few good solid years already. Most of dota's popularity happened during icefrog's years. Icefrog later joined valve and helped create Dora 2.
- reactormonk 6mo agoAnd some hijacking of the old DotA forums to advertise LoL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439036
- bilekas 6mo agoYou don't need to make your own engine to make a hot game from a mod though?
- skupig 6mo agoEver heard of Dota 2? PUBG? Team Fortress 2?
- charcircuit 6mo agoNone of those are mods. Dota 2 is its own game built on Source 2. PUBG used UE4. TF2 used Source.
- NekkoDroid 6mo agoThey all started out as mods to games. DotA specifically was a Warcraft 3 mod and ended up making Blizzard change their stance on such things because they lost such a massive IP to a different company. PUBG started as an Arma 2 mod and TF was a Quake mod. All the mendioned games effectively have their origins in mods for other games and likely wouldn't exist (at least in the form they are today) if that weren't for that, is what they presumably were indicating.
- charcircuit 6mo agoHaving gameplay originate in a mod is different from a hit game being a mod.
- somewhatgoated 6mo agoJust semantics - DotA 2 and LoL like 90% the same game as the wc3 dota “mod” ( we called them funmaps or custom maps)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nrdvana 6mo agoIt was a "hit game" while it was still a mod. They were able to find investment to graduate to a standalone game because they already had a player base in the tens of thousands.
- 6mo ago
- drbscl 6mo agoCounter-Strike Every MOBA that exists (DotA, LoL, HoN, etc) Team Fortress Killing Floor PUBG Natural Selection Undoubtedly, many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.
- ViewTrick1002 6mo agoTower defense games. Warcraft 3, the birthplace of so many amazing genres.
- charcircuit 6mo ago>Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Natural Selection These games used the GoldSrc engine. Any game built on this engine gets called a mod. But this is not what most people actually think of when people are talking about mods. Rust is not a mod of Unity. These are game engines that people built a game using. >DotA This was a custom map. Not a mod. >LoL, HoN These were built on in house game engines and were not a mod. >PUBG This game used UE4 and was not a mod.
- CodeArtisan 6mo agoCounter-strike was definitively a mod, you had to install it in the same folder as Half-Life and start it with 'hl.exe -game cstrike'. It became a standalone game later with the retail release. edit: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike#Versions https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike#Vers...
- tayo42 6mo agoAre we getting so old that people are forgetting cs was a mod.
- bogdan 6mo agoDota is a wc3 map but, pendanticism aside, there is no distinction between a "map" and a mod in this context.
- chmod775 6mo ago
- crote 6mo agoHow is that supposed to work when the main product is nostalgia? It's a mod for people who think the first-party expansions aren't true to the core of the original game - how could an independent game with completely new IP ever have the same draw? You really can't compare this to something like DotA, where the original engine and IP was basically set dressing for the new game built within it. People were primarily interested in the mechanics - which is why DotA-the-game and League of Legends were able to become so popular.
- 10000truths 6mo agoIt can work. Old School RuneScape runs almost entirely on nostalgia, but the community voting system they have for introducing new content keeps the game alive and fresh, even after 20 years.
- blanched 6mo agoYes, but Jagex owns all of the IP there. Turtle can't use Warcraft's... world.
- forrestthewoods 6mo agoif the main product is nostalgia then it’s a derived work and you don’t get to claim moral superiority. if they created genuinely novel mechanics that can stand on their own then they should do that. Like you said, DOTA2 was a 1:1 mechanical clone but built from scratch without relying on Blizzard IP. League of Legends was a spiritual sequel with new IP. Almost all fan projects that get shut down are 99% derived IP and 1% original. That will never fly. Nor should it.
- Aerroon 6mo agoInstead we get every game reinventing the wheel a thousand times. They all end up similar, because the base takes all of the effort to create, so the innovation on top ends up essentially being noise.
- rhdunn 6mo agoSo it's similar to Defence of the Ancients that resulted in DotA and other MOBAs. It wonder if they'll be able to create a version of this with the new mechanics/gameplay loop but with different art/assets.
- JoshTriplett 6mo agoYeah, that seems like the logical next step here.
- zythyx 6mo agoThere's 3 scenarios they could follow: 1) Create a new IP with the knowledge they have from Turtle WoW, create a similar game and market it 2) Contact Blizzard, apologise and maybe be brought into the team to develop updates for Classic or Retail 3) Drop the whole thing, leave the project and disappear Would be great to see #1, but I'm more expecting #3
- xdertz 6mo agoIt is not similar at all. DotA was a completely different game from Warcraft 3, Turtle WoW is just Vanilla WoW with extra content. The core gameplay is the same.
- kibwen 6mo ago> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down. Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
- iLoveOncall 6mo agoWoW vanilla is being sold right now by Blizzard themselves, under a subscription model.
- stavros 6mo agoOh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
- RandomGerm4n 6mo agoI think you're confusing this with Ascension which is a different server. Turtle was more like Classic WoW but with additional content that fits in as if the official expansions had never existed. So basically it's like Old School Runescape for WoW.
- IMcD23 6mo agoTurtle WoW also attempted to rebuild the entire game client from scratch in Unreal Engine, using Blizzard's art, textures and maps.
- protocolture 6mo agoCool and Good. I mean, thats basically what OpenRA is. Or OpenMW. Or many other indie games where they build a modern engine for old assets.
- tsimionescu 6mo agoExcept OpenMW and OpenRA don't charge players for access/extra content, they only accept donations and give everything away for free otherwise.
- Salgat 6mo agoI wish for multiple-decades old content the laws did allow for charging, that way more projects like this could be funded to keep alive old content.
- protocolture 6mo agoGood point, they absolutely should
- Daegalus 6mo agoI am curious, can you elaborate more on these Roguelike features and mechanics. Its up for 1 more month, i might be interested in trying them out before it shuts down.
- mock-possum 6mo agoBlizzard should’ve offered the team making Turtle a job, and payed them to develop the next big WoW game. Unfortunately blizzard is not Valve.
- jmyeet 6mo agoTurtle WoW was also porting their fork to Unreal Engine 5 [1] but that got cancelled ~6 months ago due to a Blizzard lawsuit. For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves. WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse. This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2]. This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now. So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model. [1]: https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghnLIc8EFIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghnLIc8EFIM [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUSRkBwQdc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUSRkBwQdc8
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- marklar423 6mo agoIf it turns out the private server code was a greenfield reverse engineered effort - do you still think that's a copyright violation? Why?
- Xunjin 6mo agoThat's one of the things that Blizzard does so bad and private servers try to solve, which is previous expansion content: Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible. MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR does it way better, in GW2 content from Path of Fire is still relevant in the gameplay of the current expansion, while their PvE/PvP content is done by all players. I feel Blizzard should just keep per expansion servers up and people can play “over and over again” the same expansion as much as they like.
- dminvs 6mo agoFFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content 4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed
- ocdtrekkie 6mo agoWoW has been doing this for like a decade. A lot of the old expansion content gets level scaled for new players, many dungeon groups get scaled to the same level, some of their time travel events have scaled old dungeons up for current players, etc.
- vbezhenar 6mo agoI don't know much about FF. But a thing with WoW is that new release often brings a significant rework of many game mechanics; they might squish everyone's level; edit stats for millions of items; rework class talents and abilities, sometimes even bringing up the whole new approach to the talents. So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience. And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.
- jadbox 6mo agoWhat did they do that was different from other roguelikes?
- blharr 6mo agoThe comment above is completely wrong, and Im not sure how they got that misconception unless it's an AI fabrication (although it doesnt read like AI)... Turtle WoW had nothing rougelike about it at all. It was the normal classic WoW experience with added content. I suppose you could say it did a lot different from other roguelikes... because it wasn't one at all
- SlightlyLeftPad 6mo agoWhy not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.
- Thaxll 6mo agoYou understand that the people playing Turtle don't pay for it, they don't use the official game because they don't want to pay.
- thaumasiotes 6mo agoThat seems to conflict with the idea that Turtle's problem was that they charged money for services related to the game.
- littlestymaar 6mo agoThey will could have shut down the free service but brought the new gameplay to retail.
- deminature 6mo agoPeople played Turtle because it was a superior experience to the paid official classic offering. It had properly balanced classes, tons of new, high-quality content, real support staff instead of bots with sub-5 minute wait time for service, policing bots properly instead of ignoring them. Blizzard could offer this quality of service but chooses not to.
- littlestymaar 6mo agoI don't think we needed any more proofs that blizzard is ran by actual assholes, but here be are.
- breakfastduck 6mo agoValve aren't owned by private equity and other giant corporations so they make good decisions and do things fans like. A lot of their entire platform is built on mods they've bought and turned into proper 1st class games (cs, dota, Garys mod etc)
- Thaxll 6mo agoI mean they use the same game client and assets / quests on the server. It is stolen material. On top of that you can pay for it, they have a business model based on intelectual property from another compagny.
- AbraKdabra 6mo agoI'm all for private servers, I even started playing WoW on one before playing retail, but Turtle crossed the wrong line and fucked up bad, they deserved what happened. You don't fuck with an IP big as Warcraft like it or not.
- protocolture 6mo ago>and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down. Moral? Nah. They had done work, and they should be able to charge for that work. Its not Moral to shut a competitor down using tricky IP laws. If anything this is yet another great example of how immoral IP actually is.
- AbraKdabra 6mo ago> using tricky IP laws. Lol what.
- zythyx 6mo agoBy that logic, I should be able to sell Taylor Swift merchandise and music without asking her, but only if I make it myself. I'll call it Turtle Taylor Swift and charge a little bit less than official Taylor Swift merchandise and music. I'll record a mix tape with her songs on it and sell it as a 'new' album.
- protocolture 6mo agoSounds great to me.
- nextlevelwizard 6mo agoTurtle wow definitely wasn’t a roguelike it was “Classic Plus” experience with new class/race combinations, all new races, new zones, and new quests
- michaelcampbell 6mo ago> Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, Can you expand on this a bit? Examples on its new mechanics, etc?