NCsoft sues TERA creators - Are you serious? Nerd Age

It’s a sad day when the company publishing Guildwars 2, NCsoft, is threatened by a virtual unknown. But that is exactly what is happening, and it has some troubling results.

That’s Right, NCsoft has filed against Bluehole. The actual case appears to stem from the fact that Bluehole has several people who worked at NCsoft. They believe that these employees left and took information with them.

Their main accusation centers around Yong-Hyun Park, the project director of Lineage. They believe that he was unhappy with his work at the company, and caused the conspiracy.

It can’t be denied that there are some similarities between the Tera and GuildWars/Lineage characters. Which means very little, as there are also some striking similarities between the following games:

• GuildWars
• Lineage
• Phantasy Star Online
• World of Warcraft
• Every MMO that appeals to a teen demographic ever made

I think you get our point here. The main problem lies in whether it can be proved that TERA really did steal gameplay from previous games. While it’s possible, that’s a hard case to prove in court. This is because battle systems all over the industry are currently borrowing from other games. It has become a rather dull sludge of the same gameplay mixed together. How are you going to prove that your sludge is especially flavorful?

That being said, NCsoft is a massive company with enough money to drag this out. Bluehole is not. If they want to they could tie the company up for quite some time. That is assuming that a judge doesn’t throw the case out as being entirely unworthy of their court.

Some of those in the media are saying that this could kill an international release, but that remains to be seen. It’s certainly going to throw a monkey wrench in the works.