Kratos' Inferno

Back near the end of last year the highly anticipated new Prince of Persia came out. It received very divided reviews, some calling it excellent and others calling it crap. Stephen Totilo instead wrote about some of the stark similarities between Prince of Persia and Shadow of the Colossus. I remember wondering how copyright laws for similar media is handled, but just shrugged it off because I thought the games were different enough. I'm guessing Team ICO and Sony did too because no one ever got sued over it.

Fast forward to a couple months ago and you'll find people making these same accusations about EA's new game Dante's Inferno. The only difference this time is the two games, the other being God of War, look incredibly similar. I'd link a video, but I'm still at Squash's house and his internet is far too painfully slow to sift through a few streaming videos for a good example. Anyway, I didn't think much of it until I got to demo Dante's Inferno at PAX. Now I think I can safely be astonished that this game has been allowed to get so far along into development.

After playing for a few minutes it was clear that the art style, while set in hell as opposed to ancient Greece still felt quite remiscent of God of War's fairly distinct style. The enemy design also looked a lot like stuff we've all fought and killed throughout the various temples in our ancient escapades. Clearly, whoever designed that fat snake looking thing has seen the Medusa type creatures rampant in Sony's game, especially the third sister in GoW2. Not to mention the main characters animation, he wields a scythe, but he swings it around leaving a nice blur of whatever and the camera slows down just as he finishes off a powerful combo to add that awesome effect for emphasis. Something we all fell in love four years ago, once again in God of War.

The combat in Dante's Inferno also uses the same QTE's and even the same little glowy ball things that the player must interact with in order to get the needed height to fight the giant monstrosities so typical of the God of War series.

In the games defense, I have no idea what the story will be. I can't imagine it could be very similar to God of War at all seeing as how it's named after a famous book about hell, while God of War is loosely based on Greek mythology. However, after watching a few trailers and playing the demo, I question how much of the source material from The Divine Comedy they used at all. It's been several years since I read Dante's Inferno, but I don't remember anyone running through with a scythe pulling off crazy Kratos-esque action in the poem I read. Still, I doubt the story will be very similar.

As I said earlier, I was left wondering with Prince of Persia where the line for copyright infringement is drawn, but shrugged it off because they were so different. Now we have one game that is very obviously ripping off another game, yet Sony still doesn't seem to care. Is this all legal or what? I'm sure both companies have a huge team of lawyers, and we hear all the time about industry giants suing the crap out of each other. I wonder if Sony is perhaps holding out to demand a share of the profits once the game is released, or they simply don't think it's worth the trouble, or maybe through some series of loopholes all this replication is actually legal? I wouldn't be surprised is there aren't any copyright laws to protect specific gameplay elements, but it is shocking to see just how similar the two are. I'm curious to see what ends up happening, if anything, when Dante's Inferno is released in the coming months. And if any of you know anything about copyright law, leave a comment.