Tencent is one of the leading game companies in China. Recently they’ve unveiled a trailer for their newest MMO, Tarisland. Plenty of users online have instantly called it a WoW clone, and there is plenty of evidence to back up those claims.
Blizzard and China situation
Blizzard has been cooperating with NetEase for over 14 years. With their help, they’ve published all of their games on Chinese soil and maintained WoW servers and other adjacent services. But this partnership recently came to an end. Blizzard has tried to extend this partnership for six more months, but NetEase instantly refused, citing unfair and unequal treatment. That is a nice way of saying that Blizzard probably underpaid them over the years, and now that their contract has expired, they want nothing more to do with them.
Until the Chinese WoW servers are entirely shut off, Blizzard offers players the option to download their character data. This will allow them to transfer their characters onto new servers, as soon as Blizzard finds a new Chinese partner. How long that will take is anybody’s guess, but I doubt a company as big and successful as Blizzard will struggle too much with this task.
If it looks like a clone and it walks like a clone
Seeing a moment of weakness with the WoW servers going offline soon in China, Tencent has jumped at the opportunity. They’ve just announced a new MMO called Tarisland with a cartoony art style and certain elements that look ripped straight out of the Warcraft universe. You have your standard fare of paladins, elves, dragons, mages, and so forth. This alone shouldn’t indicate a clone since they are staples of the fantasy genre.
But if you take a closer look at the newly released gameplay trailer, there is a ton of content that looks very similar. There is a giant dragon that looks like Deathwing’s stunt double. Certain mobs, like elementals, are highly similar in look to the ones in World of Warcraft. Even some architectural choices when building cities and villages make it look like World of Warcraft with prettier graphics.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that Tarisland will be a bad game. While it might not offer a very original take on the MMO recipe, the graphics look enticing, and the gameplay looks perfectly fine. We will have to wait and see if Tarisland will even be launched outside China. If it proves successful, we just might.
A test period started on January 12th, 2023. There is no established launch date yet, but by the looks of it, it might come as soon as the end of 2023.
