Honey, wake up, another blatant rip-off just dropped, and this one is bound to cause legal troubles sooner rather than later. Tencent Games and subsidiary Polaris Quest have just announced Light of Motiram, a ‘legally distinct’ take on PlayStation’s Horizon series. The biggest surprise? It’s an MMO coming exclusively to PC (for now).
The big announcement arrived out of nowhere, with an extensive press release (via Gematsu) together with trailers and screenshots, plus a Steam page which already packs plenty of details. The game will also release via the Epic Games Store. As for the price tag (or free-to-play model) planned, nothing has been revealed yet.
Palworld devs can rest a bit easier now, I guess, as Light of Motiram will surely attract more attention in the coming weeks, at least when it comes to being a pretty blatant rip-off of an established IP. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Sony doesn’t freak out and starts throwing lawyers at Tencent. From the overall aesthetic to creature designs – which got me to do a double (and even triple) take – Light of Motiram is clearly crossing more than a few lines.
You can check out the main teaser trailer (more videos have been released) below:
The funniest thing about the announcement is that it arrives before PlayStation has even publicly unveiled the online-only Horizon video game, which kinda feels like the company’s biggest bet on the live-service arena that’s giving the powers that be so many headaches. If Palworld’s initial success (which has been more than enough to power its development for years) taught us anything, it’s that casual players don’t really care about how much a game looks like someone else’s games as long as it’s fun. If Polaris Quest has cooked with a satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay loop, this could spell trouble for PlayStation and Guerrilla’s live-service take on Horizon, which is another reason why we think legal battles loom on the horizon (pun intended).
Light of Motiram promises to focus on the survival and crafting formula that’s proven to be highly profitable in recent times, though the combat encounters seemingly play out in similar fashion to Monster Hunter’s, which is clearly the most logical approach to making Horizon’s battles against machines work in a co-op context, to be honest. In fact, I’d wager Guerrilla is going for that too with its long-in-development Horizon project.
Anyhow, this is just another bump in Horizon’s long, troubled road. The franchise, which appears to be big enough to make Sony double down on it as its current ‘big thing’, despite the lack of excitement around it past the first few weeks of each launch, is seemingly doomed to find obstacles around every corner. It’s consistently launched its new entries right next to far more interesting releases, and more recently, Lego Horizon Adventures’ launch sales were reportedly disappointing, at least on PC.
Even the planned live-action Horizon series at Netflix has hit a wall, with PlayStation Studios and the streamer completely shutting down the project for now after it was reported that showrunner Steve Blackman (of Umbrella Academy fame) had fostered a “toxic work environment.” Yikes.