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Clone or Stepping Stone?

By Cody "Micajah" Bye

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton

Throughout the course of history, men and women have worked from the advancements of their forebears, using the concepts, motivations, and accomplishments that the past generations developed to bring about a more advanced civilization in which they could live. Whether it was math or cooking, architecture or the written word; our culture and lifestyles have been influenced the people that existed before us. Today, we still strive to improve upon what we were given previously – even Internet gaming hubs like Ten Ton Hammer work from examples we’ve seen in other successful and failed online community attempts.

Many online games were compared to EQLive before WoW rose to the height of its popularity.

Yet in the gaming communities there is a very prevalent undercurrent seeping into our collective mindsets; one that argues against the use of previous knowledge to our advantage and tries to persuade us to rid ourselves of it all-together. The term is referred to as “cloning” – or being an “X clone” where X is the most popular game at the time – and it crops up almost everywhere you gaze in the MMOG marketplace. It’s a term fraught with problems and generally is used only when a gamer does not want to take the time to compare or contrast a game to another. They take a look at the game and believe it to be so like another game that they give it the “clone” title.

Being dubbed an MMOG “clone” originally occurred when the popularity of Everquest was at its pinnacle. There was a core group of die hard MMORPG fans that loved Everquest, and they were quick to compare anything that was released with their favorite game. At first, being dubbed a “clone” simply occurred because Everquest fans saw several games on the horizon – namely Dark Age of Camelot and Anarchy Online – that were each implementing some of the basic gameplay elements of Everquest (timer-based combat, dungeons, character classes, fantasy-based setting, etc.). It was a term used to gauge the competition and judge whether they brought anything new to the table. People didn’t want to play a copycat – or “cloned” – game.

The World of Warcraft also borrowed features from FFXI, including the Auction House.

However, as gamers fell out of favor with Everquest, growing tired of the endless grind of mobs and hectic tempo of raids, the “clone” term eventually began to metamorphose into a derogatory term. “Oh, that’s just an EQ clone. I’ve played EQ, and I don’t need to play another EQ clone,” players would say as they tried out other MMORPGs. Clones began to be known as games that simply copied the look, feel, and gameplay of other games, thus making them a clone.

When World of Warcraft initially hit the market, it was christened an Everquest clone. Prestigious game sites like Gamespy were quick to compare elements of WoW to EQ, the Vault Network readers ranted about WoW being similar to EQ, and Slashdot users had similar responses. While some users looked past the “clone” label, still others talked about it. It was a common response to a new game.

In fact, WoW really could have been named a “clone-of-everything”. World of Warcraft, at its very core, is a collection of gameplay elements from the titles that came before it. It pulled instancing from Anarchy Online, battleground combat from Dark Age of Camelot, the auction house from FFXI, and a whole slew of features from Everquest. Really, the only thing WoW made innovative was how well the entire assortment was put together. Pile on top of that the most player friendly introductory experience, and WoW climbed quickly to the top of the MMOG mountain.