I’m so sick of game journalism. Every game is a sum total of ideas someone previously developed at that point. Why stop here - team fortress is counter strike with quake weapons. DotA is Warcraft with Chinese RPG gameplay. Bioshock rails are portal lifts but faster. Oversimplifying video games implies that the developers did nothing new and is stealing credit from them.
Agreed. But also, it’s a good way to communicate complex ideas quickly like Darmak and Jalaad. And many novel ideas come from “What if (blank) did (thing) but differently?” Like a huge portion of art history is just artists doing something another artist did in a different way.
It’s not that big a deal. It’s just easier to describe a concept when you can compare it to something the reader may already be familiar with.
Of course, if the reader isn’t familiar, it’s completely opaque.
