Copyright laws don't exactly work in China like they do in the United States. In fact, that don't really work at all. Case in point: this hilariously blatant Chinese rip-off of Blizzard's recent hero shooter Overwatch.
Called Legend of Titan, the game is an almost exact carbon copy of Blizzard's critically-acclaimed game ... if Overwatch looked terrible in almost every way imaginable. Many of the characters look awfully close to their Overwatch counterparts. There's Tracer, Bastion, Reaper, Pharah, Roadhog, Widowmaker, Reinhardt and more. The whole Overwatch crew is in Legend of Titan, looking much worse for wear. The general art style of the game has nothing on Blizzard's gorgeous-to-look-at shooter, so each character comes off as looking like a cheap knock-off of the official versions.
Which, of course, is exactly what they are. However, it's not just the characters themselves that have been copied. Each hero's set of unique abilities is also featured in Legend of Titan. Bastion still transforms into a turret and then into a tank when using his ultimate ability. Reaper still wields two shotguns and can teleport. It's nearly identical. Overwatch's entire user interface is also lifted from Blizzard's game into Legend of Titan wholesale.
It's bad ... very, very bad. It doesn't help that the framerate looks terrible and the game's maps have nothing on Overwatch's colorful globe-spanning locations. Activision is already taking down Legend of Titan videos on YouTube by filing copyright claims, so check out the video of the game in action below before it's gone. You won't be disappointed.
One interesting note about the game is its name. "Legend" pops up a lot in Chinese rip-off games, likely due to the popularity of the MOBA League of Legends, but the word "Titan" actually holds some significance when it comes to Overwatch. Blizzard's shooter was born from the ashes of Blizzard's long-in-development but eventually cancelled Project Titan MMO. Did the developers of Legend of Titan actually follow Overwatch's development history, or were they simply putting two cool words together to make a name that might appeal to the widest number of Chinese gamers possible?
Thinking the former is probably giving the con artists who developed Legend of Titan far too much credit, but if nothing else, it makes for one hilarious lesson in how screwed up Chinese copyright laws can be.
