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The story
On 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G (a general live-discussion board), posters debated whether games seen as copying an original can ever actually surpass it. The thread ran through specific comparisons one after another — Genshin Impact vs. Breath of the Wild, Minecraft vs. Terraria, Palworld vs. Pokémon — and opinion split between those who felt that even when a follow-up adds convenience and polish, “something’s just off,” and those who rated the newcomer highly, as in “Genshin Impact has completely surpassed Breath of the Wild.” On PUBG, posters noted that its developer originally got his start as a mod-maker for H1Z1, pointing out that not every case is a simple rip-off.
What people said
For open-world fantasy, Breath of the Wild is still the most fun,
and for battle royale, PUBG is still the most fun.
Pay-to-win games? Kinda pass.
Same producer was behind both, so it's not really a rip-off.
He was originally just a mod-maker, but the H1Z1 lead brought him on, gave him a budget, and that became PUBG.
That's exactly why CS:GO's popular again lately.
Is there any other game where a hovercraft climbs up a building to capture a rooftop objective?
Legendary as always
Still, it's hard to say Terraria outranks Minecraft.
Never heard that take — got any specifics?
Nah, there's nothing like that.
Apex just has zero tension by comparison.
People call it a 'walking simulator,' but if you hate scavenging for loot you could just drop at Pochinki. (a notorious loot-heavy hot-drop spot in PUBG)
You're not one to talk.
The one where the risk and tension fade away right along with the inconvenience
Apex is a perfect example
it's so comfortable to play that it drains the fun out of battle royale.
Is Palworld really just a Pokémon rip-off in the end?
That one's actually ripping off 'Suresupa' (fan shorthand for another idol franchise).
I was playing an action RPG and suddenly this Ibis-series enemy showed up — totally killed my mood.
I don't even know what 'Ibis' is, but that's probably referencing something too.
It's probably just reused assets.
Both Fortnite and Apex cut vehicles to focus purely on player-vs-player combat
so you never get shootouts with guys hanging off the side of a moving car.
PUBG's vehicle combat is great
I get why it draws criticism too, since a lot of players hate getting one-shot run over by a car.
The others are mainly about gunfights, but PUBG leans into looting and staying stealthy — it's aiming for something completely different.
I don't think it's the number-one open-world game.
Yeah, it's pretty barren.
Honestly on the boring side
Maybe it was different at launch, but when I played it in 2019 it fell way short of the hype, and I was disappointed.
No open-world game's going to top RDR2 anytime soon.
Well, there is that flying-toilet-looking thing, but it's basically just a target.
There's a thing you can ride around in though.
There are hoverbikes
though good luck actually fighting from one.
Towers, gliding, wall-climbing — all that stuff that evolved out of earlier open-world RPGs.
Now that you mention it, wall-climbing and gliding were both in Assassin's Creed too
though Breath of the Wild's so empty I barely remember it anyway.
Gliding blew up in Western games after Ubisoft did wingsuits
and then when Nintendo does it, suddenly it's 'Nintendo's invention.'
I think Just Cause 3 has way more freedom in its physics than Breath of the Wild
You can grapple all sorts of things together with the wire
and chaining parachute → wire → parachute for high-speed travel feels amazing.
Background and key points of this discussion
Palworld, the example that came up repeatedly in the thread, was sued for patent infringement by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company in September 2024 — a point that’s easy to misread, since it isn’t a copyright suit directly litigating “copying.” PUBG, too, has a history that’s hard to call simple imitation: its developer, Brendan Greene, was brought onto H1Z1 on the strength of his track record as a mod-maker. As for Breath of the Wild, posters in the thread pointed out that elements like wall-climbing and paraglider-gliding follow conventions already established by open-world titles such as Assassin’s Creed, raising the question of how much can really be called “original invention.” The line for what counts as a game “ripping off” another isn’t simple to draw, and evaluations often shift depending on which title — the original or the follow-up — a player happened to experience first. That, in essence, is the core of this debate.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread ‘[Sad news] Copycat games, without exception, can never surpass the original.’
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