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Originality - it’s one of the omnipresent themes in gaming today, and a lack of it is considered by many as one of the most unforgivable sins a new game can commit. This year’s Dante’s Inferno was scorned as a “God of War rip-off” long before its actual release, and it will never escape this taint. Soon, many will pass this title on to the upcoming Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. To be fair, many so-called rip-offs are worse than the games they imitate, sometimes by a big margin and sometimes only by a small one. But is originality what gamers really want? The inspirational success story of indie developer S2 Games - whose development history consists of two under-the-radar original games and one incredibly popular rip-off - seems to suggest otherwise.
Their first title, Savage: The Battle for Newerth, attempted to combine real-time strategy and first-person shooting, along with elements of other genres, into one of the most ambitious multiplayer games ever made. Despite its originality, Savage only received moderately positive critical reception and didn’t sell very well. It was praised for its ambitious attempt to combine two very different genres, but it was also criticized for being an unforgiving, overly complex game with poor netcode and no tutorials whatsoever. It still developed a strong cult following and it won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize award at the 2004 Independent Games Festival. In 2006 Savage was re-released as freeware, and although its player base has slowly dwindled over the years, people continue to play it today. Many of its most dedicated players are willing to claim that it is the best game of all time, and in spite of several shortcomings and annoyances, it remains a personal favorite of mine.
With Savage 2: A Tortured Soul, S2 Games attempted to address these shortcomings and annoyances by building a new game from the ground up. It reinvented the gameplay, added a heavier infusion of role-playing elements, and used an entirely new engine. Only the basic concept remained the same. While Savage 2 was something of a corrective outing for S2 Games, it ultimately met with a similar fate as its predecessor in regards to sales and critical reception. In fact, it arguably fared worse: originally released in 2008, it was re-released as freeware less than a year later. Even worse, the game’s extensive gameplay revision actually alienated many fans of the original, who felt betrayed because they preordered a game that failed to meet their expectations. People still play Savage 2 and it has a dedicated following of its own, but a quote from the Games Radar review seems to ring true: “If anything, Savage 2 leaves us with the distinct impression that perhaps the gaming world just isn't ready for these two popular genres to join together in holy matrimony.”
It would be inaccurate to call either of these games outright failures, but their relatively lukewarm reception and minimal impact on the gaming world at large seem to provide empirical evidence for the case that gamers value originality less than they think they do. I understand that this is not a logically bulletproof argument, but the most curious aspect of this situation is how these two games stand in such extreme contrast with S2 Games’ third title: the immensely popular Heroes of Newerth.
Chances are that you’ve heard of Heroes of Newerth (HoN), and even if you haven’t, you know someone who does. HoN shares the post-apocalyptic fantasy universe with S2 Games’ other titles, but beyond that, it could not be more different from them. There is no first-person shooting and this is not a real-time strategy game in the traditional sense. Instead, HoN belongs to a group of games that also includes League of Legends and Demigod - collectively, they are known as the DotA clones, imitators of the even more popular Defense of the Ancients (DotA) custom scenario for Warcraft 3.
HoN may be fresh to many people, because it’s still one of the first entries into the new genre created by DotA. It is nevertheless an unoriginal game, because not only did every idea in HoN originate from DotA, but HoN is actually pretty shameless about being a DotA clone. The mechanics are basically the same, and many of the heroes from DotA have been ported to HoN, with more on the way. This has angered more than a few DotA fans, who feel that S2 Games stole their ideas from DotA because they lack talent and creativity. HoN has also angered many fans of the first two Savage games, who feel that S2 Games abandoned their first two games in their zeal for this new project.
Regardless of who they have angered, I’m sure S2 Games is happy with the success of HoN. Even with the comparatively low $30 asking price, they are making bank. The number of people playing Savage and Savage 2 at any given time never exceeds 200; at any given time, the number of people playing HoN fluctates between 10,000 and 30,000. On May 19th, 2010, registration began for the HoN World Cup, with $40,000 in prize money. S2 Games chief technology officer, Shawn Tooley, has said that “we’ve sold enough copies to crack the top 100 PC game sales of all time.” For an indie developer, an accomplishment like that is almost unbelievable.
HoN still suffers from the stigma of being a rip-off, but it has nevertheless left a larger impact on the gaming world than either of S2 Games’ more original titles ever will. For S2 Games, being original turned out to be the wrong marketing strategy, and taking someone else’s ideas turned out to be the right one. There is more to it though, because the real value that HoN offers isn’t simply in providing the same gameplay as DotA, but in eliminating DotA’s limitations as a mod for a different game. These are reflected in many of HoN’s features, such as its matchmaking system, stat-tracking and client-server netcode.
When HoN was announced back in 2009, Marc DeForest, CEO and Founder of S2 Games said, “We’ve been passionate about our games in the past, but we’ve always attempted innovative, groundbreaking, and unproven ideas. This time around we have proof in advance that people want to play this type of game.” It seems he knows what he’s talking about.
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