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(I think this is the right place for this)
Seems like EA's going to be in some hot water with their new C&C mmo, someone in the art team decided "screw it, let's nick GW's stuff"
E2: Eurogamer links dead. Replaced the pic with the notBaneblade because that should have been there in the first place.
Here's another article too.
This should be interesting, I'm gonna keep some popcorn handy.
Last edited by Tristan Sjet; 13th Apr 12 at 1:20 AM.
So what exactly is this anyway?
Is this stuff actually in the beta for whatever this game is, or is it just fancy concept art by someone who is soon to be fired?
It is in the game. But looking on their forums, they know they got caught out and it won't be for much longer.
E: v Probably, but (AFAIK) EA's still liable.
Last edited by Tristan Sjet; 12th Apr 12 at 10:37 PM.
#4
Most likely not the developer fault, more likely a uncreative Artist taking something and claiming it as his own.
How could you not give out the Baneblade expy? I mean come on.
Wow, that's just... I'm normally willing to give the benefit of the doubt to things that are somewhat similar, but in this case I don't think I can. The designs are far too close to be anything but copying, especially given that both GW tanks are fairly unusual configurations unlikely to be arrived at independently. It is a bit odd that they would choose tanks from the mid 90's though, maybe they thought nobody would remember them?
When I saw the name of this topic, my heart sank, but than I was relieved.
I have a very hard time believing that a western artist made this. It's much more likely the vehicles were outsourced to Korea or China, the two countries who have basically mastered the art of blatant rip-offs. There's simply no way someone from the west, especially a game-developer, decided to *completely rip off* a well known IP that almost everyone knows about. Hell most of the video-games made by Relic using the 40k license are moderately/highly successful in their own right, and they're RTS games for crying out loud.
I would love to know if they did indeed out-source the vehicle models, and if not I'd love to know what kind of game-artist thinks it's okay to steal from such a huge franchise and expect to get away with it.
That's a rather sterotypical opinion you have there dd14 (one might also say racist). Do you have proof they have been designed by artists in China and Korea and not by a 'western' artist?
Either way as it has been stated before they won't be in the game long if GW has anything to say about it.
Beware The Shadows.
#10
@dd14, did you read the article?
Users on Reddit noticed a number of tanks in C&C, developed by German studio Phenomic, are pretty much carbon copies of tanks in the famous Games Workshop tabletop game.
#11
It's not racist or stereotypical. In China it is okay to steal creative work from other people. Western copyright law has no meaning there. If they out-sourced the vehicle models it would make at least a little bit of sense, but still not enough sense for it to have actually made it into the finished product. Someone should have caught this before it went retail, you've got to have a team full of idiots for multiple stolen designs to be in the finished product.
Also I like how they named the stolen tanks Forgotten <tank>. "Go ahead and steal those designs, they are from the 90's everyone has probably forgotten about them by now so we probably won't get sued." Looks like they aren't so forgotten after all.
Well there's really no excuse for this then.Originally Posted by Akranadas
The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can touch the poison of hatred without being harmed. Since beginning-less time, darkness thrives in the void but always yields to purifying light.
Interestingly, the Eurogamer article has been pulled. A quick Google search shows that other sites still have their reports up, however.
Look at the bright side, kid - you get to keep all the money.
While im aware of what goes on in China (they have all the plans for the US's current stock of Nuclear weapons) still doesn't mean you can make assumptions. Anyway clearly the GW Lawhammer has been at work :P
Well, looks like the mammoth/apocalypse/overlord tank design has finally been milked dry. Guess the next best thing to do is nick stuff from the most infamous IP protectors on the planet. Nothing can possibly go wrong!
I'm so sick of tanks having double cannons in the turret, it seems that every RTS must have at least one.
Ignorance is at least as likely as stupidity. The vast majority of people on this planet are not intimately familiar with models made over fifteen years by a third party (Armorcast) for another company (Games Workshop) that makes a niche entertainment product most people know little about. It's plausible that the copying is the work of one individual who needed a tank design but couldn't think of anything original, and so copied some old, hopefully obscure, models he had at home. If nobody else on the development team at Phenomic or at whatever portion of EA is responsible for overseeing their work had ever encountered those particular designs before, then they would have no basis to be able to notice the similarity. Of course when the game goes public a far larger number of people get a look, and the power of the internet means it only takes one person to notice and spread the word around.
Rex, that argument doesn't work so well when you realise that the Baneblade is now made in-house by GW, and that it has appeared in both families of Dawn of War games. Whoever took the design is probably familiar with 40k, and knows that the Baneblade is now an iconic tank.
I agree, though, let's not call it stupidity. Let's call it... bottomless optimism, in thinking that they wouldn't get caught.
#18
I was once part of a game development project where one artist was left out of several the team had gone through. The models that were there looked hardly like the style the team was going for, and I found out later "Oh yeah, he just tried to re-appropreate some models of his own to use in our game."
Makes me think here someone on the team had modeled up a Baneblade and tried to use it as an easy asset, just with an additional small turret. Of course with such a high-vis title like C&C, that wasn't going to happen. What could they have possibly been thinking?
Here I thought the thread was going to discuss another round of cease-and-desists against the boardgaming community that tried to keep some of GW's ancient titles still alive. Space Hulk is still very popular there.
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While the modern Baneblade is somewhat recognizable (though definitely not a ubiquitous pop culture icon), the design has evolved enough since 1995 that the parallels might not be obvious unless you're viewing them side-by-side, or arguably if you only have the modern Baneblade to compare to, the copied version is still similar but different enough not to be infringement - copyright cases are rarely clear-cut.
Knowing GW, I'm certain they have renewed their copyrights for all versions of the Baneblade, including the ones that are out of print. That's the legality of it, though. For a person simply looking at the two models (old vs new), it's pretty clear that even if they're not the exact same tank, they at least share a lineage.
#21
See I've played both dawn of wars and I wouldn't have made the connection without the above picture. Funny that.
#22
It's a tank. There's only so many designs to go around.
That being said, the similarity does mean it's most likely a ripoff. Especially from a Euro studio (I could see such an incident happening in the U.S. without the developers' knowledge but not in Germany.)
that's instantly recognizable as a baneblade...
this is gonna be fun
I'm short and misanthropic. I'll bite your nipples off.
There is another tank that they stole (the RPS link in the OP has pictures) that is even more obviously a direct copy. The Baneblade rip off has some minor differences, but the Bonecruncha is flat out identical from what I can see.
Tiberium Alliances, a soon to be Facebooky "game" C&C'ish port.. eurgh. They really are messing the boats up with the Tiberiumverse, what with the radical changes in Tiberium Wars, the horrible abomination that was C&C4 and this.So what exactly is this anyway?
Is this stuff actually in the beta for whatever this game is, or is it just fancy concept art by someone who is soon to be fired?
But yeah, I'd have totally said that's a Baneblade, just with a more janky turret (which it seems is a direct translation of that earlier Armorcast port in 1995). As for the Bonecruncha, that's just an identical carbon copy- they might have got that one under the radar considering it was an Epic 40k vehicle but yeah, it's good to find savvy people spotting this.
Saw that same picture Bubsy, dead on rip-off.
Wonder if they tried to copy-paste any eldar craft and claim it as the C&C alien race? =P
Hilarious.
Fair enough. That says more about you than the ripped off tank, though. The fact that you wouldn't recognise it as a rip-off does not diminish the fact that it shares a large majority of its features, and the totality of its detailing, with its 40k original.
As Fish of Doom said, it is instantly recognisable to someone as a Baneblade, but then as you've pointed out, one would have to know the Baneblade in the first place.
Last edited by Ramrod; 13th Apr 12 at 5:09 AM.
#28
Looks like the majority of the art design comes from a contractor, not EA Phenomic.
Since there are only a few topics less interesting than some copied designs (even when GW is involved), I assume the real news is that someone must've actually played this appalling browser game to notice something like this?
One step closer to the end of the decadent Eldar race.
[...] the reason we don’t like DRM solutions is because they punish the innocent and they have to jump through all these hoops. We don’t want to do that [...]
I can't wait to see what happens to next. I'm not sure this game will ever be profitable after the GW legal team is done stringing that studio up by the ankles.
"We are the most civilised race in the world. We have more exquisite ways to kill than any other."Lord Vraneth the Cruel, master of Har GanethFormerly DarkelfLord
#30
That Browser game...
Can we give EA the official title of Franchisicide?
It's bad enough that they killed the C&C franchise, defiled it's corpse and did their best to make money from selling the spectacle of it's horrible demise. This is like seeing them sell the bones to the glue factory and putting the pile of limp decomposing flesh that is all that remains on display as a testament to their evil handiwork.
I HAS WRITTEN A BOOK!
As soon as the cover artist, proof reader and everything else I rely on other people to do is done, I'll let you know.
#31
Hey, Tiberium Wars was quite good (save the MP balance patches messing up the SP) and Red Alert 3, while being a bit too silly, was quite solid in the gameplay department with a lot of fun units and great balance.
4 was an abomination thanks to EA wanting to recycle work done on an online-only title that flopped. We shall never speak of it.
The Tiberium tactical FPS could have been amazing T_T
Who am I kidding? It would have probably been bog-standard, but I can dream!
Well we have Generals 2 coming soon, lol.
#34
Niche as GW's hobby is, it's still the most popular tabletop system I am aware of, with loyal fans who DO remember 'obscure' models from decades ago, and bought from a company that is serious about protecting its IP.
Ramrod also has a point, I didn't need to see the 'original' Baneblade to know that that model was a blatant rip-off. The Baneblade has gotten bigger and longer but its overall features are the same, not to mention as Ram said, has appeared in enough popular RTS titles as to be 'household name' for any self respecting RTS gamer anywhere.
TW is too radical, given that they changed the atmosphere of what was Tiberian Sun where the world was more or less screwed (no colour defined "Green Zone/Yellow Zone/Red Zone", everywhere was "Yellow/Red" by definition), they turned Nod from a cool, elite military nation with some fanatical bent to actual jihadists, they changed GDI from a technological United Nations powerhouse to American hegemony with power suits, introduced the Scrin where the conflict was always a human one (basically human ingenuity vs faith, guess which side each represents), made the Scrin hardly alien but more in line with generic Starship Troopers invasion bugs coated with metal (also hammering up lines like "Earth will fall", why would they reference it as Earth?). Finally they don't really advance the plot as it's just GDI has internal bickering, Kane does scheming, Scrin are introduced and screw up.Hey, Tiberium Wars was quite good (save the MP balance patches messing up the SP) and Red Alert 3, while being a bit too silly, was quite solid in the gameplay department with a lot of fun units and great balance.
funny.. i saw an advert for some contemporary military program on phoenix tv or whatever that chinese tv station is that's available on sky (uk).
what do i see? baneblade tanks... some lazy git can't be bothered to build a model of a rl tank and just grabbed a baneblade.
----
no doubt, but then again, who can forget apple getting sued for selling pirated chinese books, eh?
thing about copyright is that, whilst not applicable in this case, they lengthen the copyright when it suit their purposes. furthermore, go back a hundred years or two, copyright of european items? what copyright..
Last edited by Yankov; 13th Apr 12 at 9:00 AM.
Well, i always wondered who has the best lawyers, EA or GW, guess i'll get to find out pretty soon.
#38
I don't think it will come to lawyers. EA will most likely pull the models and fire the artist(s)
#39
@Elerium, Scrin were always planned for C&C 3. In fact, the original plans for the game had TWO Scrin factions involved, a rebel one that created the Tacitus and a loyalist one who were interested only in invasion. It wasn't going to stay a human conflict.
The blue zones stuff was definitely silly, but the changes to Nod were not major going by their protrayal in previous games except for the look of their infantry. I also do heavily prefer the unit style of TW over the Dune-ripoffs from TS. I do wish CABAL and the Forgotten had been given more screentime though.
#40
Of course it does. It just says I didn't realise that's what the original Baneblade model looks like! :PFair enough. That says more about you than the ripped off tank, though. The fact that you wouldn't recognise it as a rip-off does not diminish the fact that it shares a large majority of its features, and the totality of its detailing, with its 40k original.
@Mokino - I didn't mind Nod in Tib Wars. Actually I even liked the squad based infantry model to 1infantry per 50 monies. However I didn't like that my Nod infantry were just rag and tag militia. I actually wished for my sexy Nod infantry from Tib Sun
Lol, i told them that it was a baneblade in a email, a little ago. They was like the design is fine we won't get sued. So i guessing they are getting sued now?
No qaurter back men, only forward or we will hold this line forever!!!
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Row Row Row Fight the Powha
#43
Do you have copies of those e-mails CommissarRezail? I sense some additional hilarity from releasing those into the wild
Ya think EA would have looked back 20 years or so ago when Games Workshop took Blizzard to court over starcraft concept art and ideas being to close resemblence to 40k and won.
Personally I don't know what the modeller was thinking, even the gun sights are teh same on all parts of the model. Just because a models shape and design is no longer in use on the tabletop doesn't mean its still not under IP or copyright, heck its UK to so the copyright is the lifetime of the original designer + a bare minimal of 65 years, and armour cast was hm...20 or so years ago so its no where near expired.
Oh well, should be amusing.
#45
@Misiok, funny enough in Kane's Wrath they changed the look of the Nod soldiers to one closer to TS. The sub-factions changed it up even more (Black Hand replaced the militants with the elite confessors, Marked of Kane had cyborgs as standard infantry instead.)
I think the shadow teams showed that Nod still was an elite group. They just weren't equipping their front line meatshields as well as before.
#46
You should think that if you rip off the design of someone else, you would at least try to cover it up a bit and make significant changes. But no, those designs are a carbon copy deluxe. How can anyone be that stupid is beyond me, and i do not believe in the rouge artist theory. I mean, you have whole teams working together, you have design meetings, somebody somewhere should have spotted it long ago. Failure to do so can only mean a highly unprofessional team/studio at work here.
#47
On the subject of eastern countries and copyright infringement, it should be noted that the issue is partly culture-clash. Eastern culture in general traditionally had less emphasis on individuality and there was "copy-cat" stigma attached to emulating someone else's work. In the west, making a painting of the same subject using the same sort of treatment as a previous artist would be considered unimaginative at best, forgery at worst. In say, China or Japan, it would have been considered a compliment to the original artist.
So there's a whole different cultural view established, and it's not necessarily a wrong one either.
"Fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain."
-The Maestro Sartori, Imajica by Clive Barker
#48
Paladin, this was a GERMAN company. They should be pretty familiar with copyright law AND WH40k.
#49
Duh. Did you read the whole thread and the bickering about how they must have farmed out their artwork to China because the Chinese are evil copy-cats?
#50
That was about 30 posts ago, and it was cleared up quickly.
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