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Comment by qarl | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting aspect, I think, is that we can now change the games as we like.

I want Animal Crossing to have an infinite world. I want it to be an MMO. I want the animals to have much better intelligence - for example, if I'm a bad neighbor, maybe they should team-up against me.

Zelda MMO will also be cool. It's just a matter of time. Like two weeks.

These are easy to do now. It's an amazing time to be alive.

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An interesting lesson people will learn is that what we, with child-like wonder, believe will be cool, will turn out to just be a Disneyland of propertyhodgepodge which will not make for an interesting game per-se.

But those that will persist through the awkwardness, might find gold. Zelda Four Swords was a banger after all

Right - you can't let players edit everything. Second Life had that and it was a digital junkyard.

I'm working on a game right now that tries to find a nice balance between player made stuff and gorgeous assets they can't change.

>gorgeous assets they can't change.

How are planning to block that? If they can create Zelda MMO, they can modify your game as much as they want as well, right?

Oh. Well - if it's an MMO you control what the world may contain via the server. They can add stuff to their local version, sure, but others won't see it unless they want to.

They can create their own world but then they need to get people to migrate to it.

This underestimates how much thought needs to go into a game, let alone an MMO.

Like just to start,how are you going to balance intelligence so that it's fun? The AI doesn't magically know.

I'm not suggesting it's one shot. But the technical side is now trivial.

An unbalanced, untested Zelda MMO will be out shortly. Watch.

Nintendo is pretty litigious and protective of their IP. A "Zelda MMO" would get a cease-and-desist letter that would make the authors' heads spin so quickly they'd travel back in time where they'd be dead.

Yes. BUT. A clean-room implementation with all new art assets would be an entirely new challenge for them.

I think we're going to see real quick how this is going to go with those Adobe clones. Clean-room is supposed to be legal. I have a feeling it's about to stop being legal.

But then that will make PC-clones illegal: meaning all modern computers. It's a curious problem for them.

yeah it's going to be an interesting next couple of years for sure.

If you clean room reverse it, the mechanics in a Legend of Zelda game are, for the most part I think in the clear legally speaking. But part of what makes Zelda feel like Zelda (IMHO) is that you’re fighting familiar monsters in a familiar setting with familiar music aka all the lore, otherwise its you've just rebuilt an open world exploration game with dungeons.

However if you borrow lore like even if you change the names of all the monsters, you may still run into legal risk if they remain visibly recognizable. Even if you redraw them in a different style, if they’re still identifiable as Octoroks/Moblins/etc, that might still open you up to litigation.

There was a similar case a while ago, Tetris v. Xio, which might be worth looking into, since I think it sets some useful precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int....

Right. I hear that. You can't take the story.

But to be honest - I just want an open world MMO. I don't need Octoroks, etc.

In fact..... for the last few weeks I've been working on this sort of thing for Animal Crossing. I replaced all the assets with little felt toys. (meshy.ai makes fantastic 3D meshes). But the code only got halfway done before the onslaught of stuff hit this last week... so I lost motivation. Also the clean-room thing is really expensive.

There’s an absolutely massive amount of fan made Pokémon games out there. Some are years old at this point.

Some fans are tired at the lack of innovation from the IP holders and are taking fan games in interesting directions. Look at this for example:

https://undreamedpanic.itch.io/gamma-emerald-ea

Loads more here:

https://fangamesdb.com/series/pokemon.html

That's true and Nintendo can be very inconsistent in terms of enforcement. For my mind as a game developer myself, I'd always be reluctant to use their IP because there's always the chance that all of my work could go down the toilet if they come after me.

https://www.ign.com/articles/zelda-fan-ditches-ocarina-of-ti...

If it’s made open source and brought to a playable release before shadow dropping it then there’s not much that can be done on their end.

The barrier for creating games is already so low it’s underground. Consider the following tools:

  - Deck of cards
  - 3d printers
  - Printing services

And yet, while there are many games available because of these tools, a very, very small minority of those games are worth playing. I’m bearish on this having any meaningful impact on the quantity of high-quality games, just like the Roblox game engine hasn’t had any meaningful impact.

I think the biggest things to come out of asset reuse / engine / remixing are probably DOTA (WC3), ARMA/Day Z, and to a lesser extent Garry’s Mod. Which are the exception that prove the rule given that there have been so many games and engines that have lowered the barrier for game creation.

Edit: maybe you can also give credit to StarCraft for spawning the Tower Defense genre (Turret Defense was the original).

OK. We'll get the answer pretty soon anyway, no need to argue about it.

It's an AMAZING time for mods. The list of mods for games that support it is growing fast. I would start listing them but I'm sure you can check your favorite game and just see for yourself. What I don't care for is Nexusmods. More and more people are getting into indie game dev with the support of AI now and while yes it will produce more slop and crappy games, it will also produce some really good new ones. We need more NEW franchises.

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