Gameloft’s ‘WoW’ for the iPhone

On the topic of similarity, Gameloft is at it again. Graev showed this to me and I thought it was pretty funny. It’s essentially WoW for the iPhone.

Now before anyone gets too crazy about it, Gameloft has made a name for themselves by shamelessly taking the exact premise and idea of a game and remaking it as well as porting things to the iphone and ipad. I don’t know how they avoid getting sued; I honestly have not done any research into it. I wonder how it will turn out and whether or not it will have anywhere near the scope of even WoW’s 2004 original launch. (I doubt it.) I’m also curious about whether there will be any subscription, which I also doubt.

Mobile MMO’s are getting closer and closer to being a reality. How utterly horrifying.

  • Somehow I read Gameloft as Camelot, and then my thoughts immediately turned to some kind of Golden Sun and WoW mixture.

    After looking at the video, if I didn’t know any information about this, I would have said this was Blizzard putting out WoW-lite for mobiles. It’s so similar, it’s scary.

  • What’s the actual game you’re talking about? Their website keeps shoving an ad for a Rainbow Six game in my face, nothing WoW-like.

  • The video shows it. It’s called Order and Chaos Online. I updated the video in the blog entry to be a youtube video.

  • Actually not too horrifying if you consider that mobile computers willl probably be as powerfulo as what we’re using as desktops and laptops, in the not so far future.

  • My first thought when seeing the movie was Allods Online, but then again Allods do look a lot like WoW 😛

  • I’m a bit puzzled as to why MMOs on a mobile platform would be horrifying. Are movies or books on mobile devices also “horrifying”?

    I’d quite like to have the option of playing a fully-featured, traditional MMO on my iPod Touch. Why does the platform matter if the MMO itself is good?

    Whether or not this particular MMO is good is another question.

  • TibiaME exists for mobiles for years now.
    You also have Pocket Legends and Runes.

  • If there is no subscription, I will be getting it.

    if Blizzard doesn’t want to develop a mobile WoW, then more power to Gameloft for doing something similar. I think it looks pretty cool.

    Hopefully more info is known soon.

  • What I would love is an Ultima Online client for mobile. While the graphics are now very aged for a PC, I believe they would work just fine on a mobile. There’s an untapped potential that could be easily exploited here.

  • If there is a subscription, Gameloft will have to give 30% of that to apple. It’s far more likely to be microtransaction.

  • Have you covered Pocket Legends on Android? Graphics aren’t quite on par with that video, but it definitely fits the MMO on Mobile slot.

  • @Bhagpuss To me, it just seems like it will be a very shallow game. That’s not really a bad thing, but it is not a trend I’d want to see :/

  • “Gameloft has made a name for themselves by shamelessly taking the exact premise and idea of a game and remaking it”

    So their the Blizzard of mobile gaming? How foolish of them, that business model will never work out!

  • @Bhagpuss: I’ll defer to Werit’s comment and just add that the proliferation of shallow games on mobile devices is what I don’t want to see. The mobile devices reach a vast demographic that does not represent the core gamer.

    @Syncaine: No, Blizzard took ideas from multiple sources and combined them into a game that moved forward in a very unprecedented direction of accessibility. Gameloft tends to literally copy of paste. I don’t know if I have an opinion one way or another as to whether or not this is a bad thing yet.

  • Gameloft doesn’t get sued for the same reasons Runes of Magic didn’t get sued. As long as you do things just a little differently. You can take everything a game offers and put it in yours.

  • I don’t own a SmartPhone yet but at the least I’m impressed a game this advanced can run on them now.

    I don’t mind if they flood phones with shallow / casual games as long as it doesn’t detract from the PC gaming market. Alas I fear if the studios can make a fast buck churning out casual games they will increasingly move that way rather than put effort into crafting the next DA:O.

  • Gameloft doesn’t get sued because gaming companies don’t patent the game systems that they develop for their own games.

    Therefore they just need to change names, IP and the like to avoid lawsuits.
    But this game looks eerily similar to WoW. But i bet it will play like Pocket Legends.

    I have mixed feelings about MMOs in mobile devices: are you going to run dungeons and spend time grinding in a game played in a small screen?
    For tablets it makes some kind of sense but for smartphones it doesn’t.

  • Spacetime Studios has a mobile Co-RPG (they call it an MMO) called Pocket Legends. So this isn’t the first time a multiplayer game has been on a mobile device. The studio has also adapted a defunct PC project, Blackstar, for iOS.

  • Why is it horrifying? I’d bet there’s a legitimate audience for it. I don’t think anyone should expect them to be on the same level as PC MMOs, or competitive, but it’s another area of the industry flush for the taking.

    The way I see it, the entire video game genre is moving towards interconnectedness. The mobile platform is a natural evolution. And if it leads to higher quality mobile games with a little more depth, ala a MMORPG, the industry is better for it.

  • Simply put, the path of least resistance that earns the most money is always the path most traveled.

    We’ve been on a downward spiral for a long time. We went fron the UO/EQ/DAOC era to the WoW era and we’re seeing the line danced upon of the mobile gaming genre becoming most profitable. Social media is being mixed up in gaming. True core gaming is being diluted by casual and shallow development patterns.

    I can see this being a wonderful thing if you like shovelware.

  • While the iPhone has plenty of successful shovelware (most people are dumb, known fact), casual titles like Angry Birds are actually well crafted games. Add in solid ports of great NES, SNES, Genesis titles, plus some good original stuff like Chaos Rings or Field Runners, and the iPhone market is not all bad.

    The blame is more on the people buying “hot girl puzzle world” for 99 cents than it is for the dev who took the five minutes to make it.

  • The good games are never the ones in question. Angry Birds is fun for what it is and the emulator ports are ports of classic/greats.

    The amount of shovelware on consoles is making it to the PC market now and it’s been on the mobile platform since conception.

    Maybe at this point the mobile devices can only go up in quality, whereas the PC platform can only spiral downward. It’s the success of mobile device shalloware (cool word we should coin) that scares me in that it will entice shovelware on other platforms.

    Ideally we’d have amazing games on all platforms and the world would hold hands in celebrate how awesome every game is, but sadly the day will never come. If Shovelware makes more money, shovelware will continue to be made. The same can be applied to other things like the WoW-model. If people never know better then the WoW model will continue to make the most money and continue to be made. I dedicate my time to teaching people there’s more out there.

  • SIFFF!

    That looks hilariously fun, id definantly get it.

    Try to think of I-phones as laptops, They will get better, faster and More expensive, but will also become Fun as Cluedo…. and who doesn’t enjoy cluedo.

  • Despite playing computer games for over 30 years I don’t consider myself a “gamer” let alone a “core gamer”. I just like RPGs and Adventure games.

    I can pick and choose the ones I like, but as a rule the more of them there are, the better it works for me. I don’t believe for one second that a lot of bad games means no, or even fewer, good ones. If only 1% of games are “good” then the larger the market, the larger the number of “good” games, even if that percentage never increases.

    Consequently I’m in favor of expansion.