On March 11th, 2020, Moon Studios released Ori and the Will of the Wisps on Windows and
Xbox One. Will of the Wisps is the follow up to Ori and the Blind Forest which released
five years earlier on March 11th, 2015. And while Ori and the Blind Forest is a great
game in its own right, Moon Studios pushed the Ori formula to its limit in Will of the
Wisps.
Moon Studios grew from a team of about fifteen employees in 2015 to over 80 as they worked
on the second Ori game. Since their inception in 2010, Moon Studios has allowed the majority
of its employees to work remotely from their homes, across what is now 43 different countries.
This flexibility lets them hire talent from all over the world. Artists and animators
from companies like Pixar, Disney and Blizzard joined in to help craft Ori’s world and
characters. Chris McEntee, who worked on the platformer Rayman Legends was scooped up to
work on level design. Moon Studios even hired Milton Guasti, the developer behind AM2R,
a popular Metroid 2 fangame. Well, popular with most people.
This larger crew helped make Ori and the Will of the Wisps even bigger and better than its
predecessor, with more characters, more features, monkeys, refined controls, and more levels
as well as an entirely new combat system. Ori can now beat the ever loving crap out
of enemies with a large arsenal of weapons, and the game sports huge, intricate boss battles
for the player to test their skills against. In the end, all of this work paid off. Reviewers
heaped praise all over Will of the Wisps, and outlets everywhere discussed how Moon
Studios had crafted a masterpiece. And that praise is well deserved. If you take nothing
else from this video, let it be that Ori and the Will of the Wisps is one of the most polished,
impressive Metroidvanias ever made.
But, there was another thing people were saying about Will of the Wisps, and it started well
before the game even released. After the Ori and the Will of the Wisps gameplay trailer
was revealed at E3 2018, one of the lead game directors at Moon Studios, Thomas Mahler,
gave an interview with the Daily Star, explaining that they were looking to make the perfect
Metroidvania. This involved studying and researching the games that came out since Ori and the
Blind Forest. Mahler mentioned by name two of these Metroidvanias specifically: Axiom
Verge and Hollow Knight.
This interview was shared on ResetEra, an internet forum dedicated to discussing video
games. The thread contained a variety of opinions surrounding the strengths and weaknesses of
both Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight.
Mahler, a regular on internet forums such as ResetEra and NeoGAF, posted in the thread
as well, responding to comments and questions about the upcoming game. One user, going by
the name “Jeffrey Guang” expressed concern about Ori and the Will of the Wisps copying
too much from Hollow Knight.
I hope Moon Studio doesn't lose sight on what makes the first game that extra special by
focusing too much on replayability.
...Please don't be a Hollow Knight clone, which will be disappointingly hollow.
Thomas Mahler responded to this post as well, assuring “Jeffrey” that their concerns
were nothing to worry about:
...don’t worry about us copying others too much - we always look at what happens outside
our team, but I don’t think people will make many connections to Hollow Knight and
the likes.
And well... Then the game came out.
Experience the new look and feel of the Ori series’ second outing. Where they took a
glance at Hollow Knight and said “I guess we could do that.”
In fact Ori and the Will of the Wisps takes plenty of cues from the other major metroidvanias
of the past few years. That’s right, I’m talking about Hollow Knight.
The first game had one original thought in the form of having you manually plonk down
your save points which was slightly wobbly in execution so naturally it’s been kicked
to the curb in favor of making a game more like Hollow Knight.
If you haven’t played these games, to be a little bit reductive for a second, this
might piss people off, but the base of it does feel a little bit like Hollow Knight...
Let’s start by going over all the Hollow Knight ideas they borrowed, which hey, I applaud
Moon Studios for doing. That’s a good model to borrow ideas from.
If I failed, I knew it was because of my own mistakes. Huh, that reminds me of another
game. Oh yeah!
I mentioned that Will of the Wisps not only features swordplay, but a shard system similar
to Hollow Knight's charms.
Will of the Wisps introduces a system that hues out much more closely to the charms in
Hollow Knight.
So it's got a similar badge system…
I think people have made this comparison, and it’s probably fair, to Hollow Knight’s
badge system. A little bit similar.
Very similar.
Speaking of exploration, there's a map maker that helps you chart each new area, in case
you're looking for another bit of Hollow Knight influence.
And there’s an NPC hidden around the world that sells you maps.
It's even got the one mapmaker dude you keep running into in the world who sells you a
map for the current area.
But that’s not the only Hollow Knight influence. One of the skills is basically the exact same
healing skill.
Moon Studios must have looked at Hollow Knight’s freakishly creepy Deepnest and were like “Hmm…
can we top that?” Well they didn’t, but they tried.
Because Hollow Knight was popular and did well and has therefore gained the favor of
the giant money machine, all praise its benevolent wisdom.
So it’s pretty clear the team enjoyed Hollow Knight. Not a bad thing, it’s a great game.
The comparisons to Hollow Knight came immediately, with several users on ResetEra mentioning
that they could see the clear inspirations from Hollow Knight. One user going by the
name “Mindsale” even created a thread titled “Is Ori & The Will O’ The Wisps
Pastiche or plagiarist?”. Thomas Mahler jumped into the thread clarifying that Hollow
Knight wasn’t really the inspiration for Will of the Wisps, instead citing games like
Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The reaction
to Mahler’s posts were mixed, with a number of users actually disagreeing with him and
calling him a liar and a salty manbaby. In a surprising turn of events for an online
gaming forum, the entire thread turned into a complete dumpster fire. Things became so
heated that the thread was locked by a moderator just over three hours after it was created.
A few months later, the other lead developer at Moon Studios, Gennadiy Korol, addressed
the similarities during a Reddit AMA. Korol explained that while they expected some Hollow
Knight comparisons, a lot of the systems in Will of the Wisps that people compare to Hollow
Knight already existed in early prototypes dating back to 2015.
So what exactly is going on here? Mahler has said in a number of interviews that they studied
Hollow Knight and that the game inspired them. The comparisons have been pointed out numerous
times, by fans and reviewers all over the internet. But at the same time, both co-founders
of Moon Studios say that Hollow Knight wasn’t the inspiration for much of anything in Will
of the Wisps. What’s the cause of this discrepancy? How similar is Ori and the Will of the Wisps
to Hollow Knight?
Before we dive into the comparisons surrounding Will of the Wisps, there’s a whole other
issue that needs to be discussed. It seems when the discussion of inspiration and borrowing
ideas in gaming comes up, a lot of people immediately jump to words like “rip-off”
and “clone”. And discussions immediately becomes hostile. So let’s take a bit of
time to talk about what inspiration and imitation between games actually looks like.
The question of what constitutes a rip-off is hard to answer. That ResetEra thread I
mentioned earlier is a good testament to that. And it’s a question that has been brought
up many times before. In fact, the issue of rip-offs in the games industry has been discussed
by some of the greatest minds of this generation.
Alright, I gotta set the record straight. Something is really pissing me off… If we're
gonna call stuff a rip-off, let's call it what it is. Notch took another game, ripped
it off, created Minecraft.
This is Keemstar. Most well known for his entertainment and social news YouTube channel
DramaAlert, Keemstar is a very polarizing online celebrity. But before Keemstar became
the big YouTube star he is today, his first big break came from handling the PR and marketing
for the 2011 Xbox Live Arcade game, FortressCraft. If you were to take a quick glance at FortressCraft,
you might think it’s just a rip-off of another game that was popular around that same time:
Minecraft. But let’s take a closer look, and use this game as a case study for what
makes people perceive a game as a rip-off. So let’s hear the pitch for FortressCraft.
Here’s Keemstar explaining the game in an interview with MLDxGaming:
So just tell us exactly what is FortressCraft?
FortressCraft is a genre that was developed a long time ago. It was actually a genre that
doesn't have a name. A game was the inspiration for Minecraft which has been very very successful,
but it's only on the PC. In the same genre of block building, if you want to call it
that, we've developed the game FortressCraft, which is very similar but very unique and
different at the same time.
Keemstar’s first point here is that Minecraft didn’t create the block-building genre,
but itself took ideas from another game. This is absolutely true. Minecraft’s creator,
Markus Persson, or Notch, was heavily inspired by another game, called Infiniminer, when
creating Minecraft. Keemstar’s point was echoed by the lead developer of FortressCraft,
Adam Sawkins. According to Sawkins in an Ars Technica article, the similarities found between
FortressCraft and Minecraft are simply part of the voxel, sandbox genre both games belong
to. Sawkins, who had previously worked on games from the Formula 1 and Burnout series,
compared this to the racing game genre, saying:
All racing games have cars, tracks, tarmac, trees, armco, AI, overtaking, braking, chicanes,
and chevrons. To remove any of those things means it's no longer a racing game, apart
from maybe trees. If I were to remove voxel rendering, infinitely mutable worlds, perlin
generation, or—as one YouTube comment accused me of stealing from Minecraft—grass, then
I no longer have a 'Minecraft clone.' I also no longer have a game!
Notch didn’t see it that way. In that same Ars Technica article, he shared his thoughts
on games like FortressCraft and Terraria:
Both FortressCraft and Terraria appear to be inspired by Minecraft, which in turn was
inspired by many other games, including Infiniminer, Dwarf Fortress, and Dungeon Keeper. However,
I do not believe you can achieve something great or interesting by merely attempting
to emulate something successful. It becomes especially embarrassing if you publicly deny
any inspiration when it's painfully clear how much of a copy it is… FortressCraft
is an obvious attempt to just take something popular and clone it as closely as possible.
I still think it's important that people are allowed and able to do things like that, but
it's hardly graceful.
Accusations like this haunted Keemstar and Sawkins throughout FortressCraft’s relevance.
Keemstar tried his best to dispel these criticisms...
Don't fucking talk shit about me and my fucking game, or I'm gonna fucking talk shit about
your whole goddamn crew…
But Public Relations wasn’t really Keemstar’s forte back then. Sawkins directly responded
to Notch’s comments with an open letter detailing how FortressCraft had unique features
that separated it from Minecraft such as more detailed graphics with shaders and reflections,
rayguns... trampolines. Sawkins also said:
FortressCraft is ‘basically Minecraft’ in the same way that Minecraft is ‘basically
Infiniminer’. It’s just that Minecraft has been out a hell of a lot longer, and I
have an enormous list of plans and ideas I want to put into FortressCraft as time goes
on.
It’s undeniable that both Minecraft and FortressCraft started out as clones. If you
look at the video description for the very first video of FortressCraft uploaded to YouTube,
Sawkins wrote in the description:
Minecraft clone, running on the Xbox...
If you look at the first Minecraft video Notch ever posted, the description reads:
This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I'm working on.
So what is the actual difference here? Why does Minecraft get away with cloning Infiniminer,
while FortressCraft gets flogged and crucified? Well, for one, Minecraft expanded new gameplay
mechanics not found in Infiniminer. Infiniminer was an abandoned team based competitive mining
game. Notch took those elements and added survival and RPG mechanics, to transcend beyond
Infiniminer and create something new. FortressCraft was pretty much just Minecraft’s creative
mode, with a few game modes like tag thrown in as well. But if you seriously look at these
games, it’s hard to believe that FortressCraft innovated on Minecraft anywhere near as much
as Minecraft innovated on Infiniminer. Sawkins' defense to this point was that FortressCraft
hasn’t been around as long as Minecraft, so many of the unique ideas Sawkins had planned
for the game hadn’t been added yet, stating that FortressCraft was just the first chapter.
FortressCraft is a novel with chapters unwritten.
But this point leads into the bigger reason why I think so many people called FortressCraft
a rip-off. For whatever new ideas and mechanics it might have added to the voxel survival
sandbox genre, it was clearly overshadowed by the perception that FortressCraft was rushed
and unpolished, banking its success entirely on its similarity to Minecraft.
It seems like FortressCraft’s actual main selling point was that it would be like Minecraft,
except unlike Minecraft, it was on the Xbox Live Arcade. You have to remember this was
2011, which was like a million years ago. Minecraft wasn’t running on every device
known to man yet. There were a lot of young kids out there who couldn’t play Minecraft,
and there were YouTubers like Keemstar who had built their entire fanbases around this
identity of playing Xbox Live and being a hardcore console gamer. So FortressCraft was
the perfect game for people like Keemstar to market to their primarily console gamer
audience. Just watch the official FortressCraft launch trailer and you’ll see what I mean.
This ain't about me. This is about the console gamer. This is about Xbox.
I am not a PC gamer. I have not been a PC gamer and never will be. I am a console gamer.
That is a reality. That's the way it is.
But when I looked into it, I found out it's not exactly Minecraft. But this... I've been
waiting as long as everybody else for this to come out; checking every day. I stayed
up till 12 when I heard that it was supposed to c-
It’s also clear that they knew people were going to call it a rip-off so they tried to
deflect as much as possible. Even the game’s trailer brings up how this game technically
isn’t ripping off Minecraft.
Getting kinda worked up over FortressCraft being like Minecraft. I haven't like, looked
into it or anything, but I think Minecraft is based on another game itself.
In the end, FortressCraft performed incredibly well, selling over 2 million copies. It was
clear that the game did well financially. But as time has passed, Keemstar has spoken
a bit more candidly about his real thoughts on FortressCraft in terms of its design and
quality, saying in 2020:
That was my first big, big break. Not a good game, shitty game, but people bought it.
It was a Minecraft clone but it was the only one available on Xbox, so of course fucking
kids are gonna buy it.
Brilliant, brilliant move.
As for Sawkins, he actually continued development on FortressCraft, creating a sequel called
FortressCraft Evolved, which blended the standard Minecraft-type gameplay with Factorio, mixing
in logistics and tower defense mechanics to make something more unique. So it seems like
Sawkins was honest when he said he had a lot of ideas to make FortressCraft different from
Minecraft. As for FortressCraft: Chapter 1, I don’t think people will ever view it as
all that innovative or unique, and it will go down in history as one of the many video
game clones created to cash in on what was popular at the time. Sawkins actually re-released
the original FortressCraft on Steam to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary. So you can
check it out if you want, if you have a PC that is...
So what can we take away from that little example? First, games take ideas from other
games all of the time. It’s perfectly natural and it’s even responsible for the creation
of one of the greatest video games ever made. Second, video games that exist within the
same genre are bound to have similarities. Racing games all have cars. First Person Shooters
are all in first person. Roguelike are all fucking bullshit. But a game needs to do at
least something unique and different from other entries in the genre, otherwise, it
might be called a rip-off.
Finally, the single biggest part to what makes a game seem like a rip-off is if it feels
rushed, poorly made, and is released shortly after another specific, popular game in the
same genre. Even if a lot of the comparisons between those games might boil down to conventions
in said genre. This is especially true when the genre itself is very young and undefined.
This is why early FPS games were called Doom-clones and early third-person open world games were
called GTA-clones.
But what if the genre is old? Minecraft and FortressCraft were very fresh experiences
when they first came out, so what about the genres that have been around a long time?
How does that impact our ability to talk about rip-offs and inspiration? Since Ori and the
Will of the Wisps and Hollow Knight are both Metroidvanias, let’s talk about the Metroidvania
genre as a whole.
The word “Metroidvania” is a portmanteau of the words “Metroid” and “Castlevania”
which themselves are portmanteaus of the words “Metro”, “Android”, “Castle” and
“Transylvania”. And somehow this portmanteau of a portmanteau, a portmantwo, if you will,
now describes an entire genre of 2D action-adventure platform games which feature open worlds and
power up based progression systems.
It’s safe to say that Metroid, released in 1986 in Japan, was one of the earliest
proper “Metroidvania” games. Metroid featured a non-linear side-scrolling world that the
player primarily progressed through by collecting permanent upgrades such as the morph ball,
high jump and missiles. This set it apart from other adventure platform games at the
time like Zelda 2 and Castlevania 2, which relied more on finding key items and solving
cryptic puzzles.
Other games such as Blaster Master and Wonder Boy also used this Metroidvania formula, but
it wasn’t until Super Metroid released in 1994 that the genre really had its founding.
Super Metroid set the stage for what a modern Metroidvania game would look like, with a
giant map and ability upgrades. Three years later, Konami released Castlevania: Symphony
of the Night. The previous Castlevania games were straightforward level-based romps, with
Castlevania 2 experimenting a bit with an open world and RPG elements. In general, these
games were also hard as balls.
According to the assistant director for Symphony of the Night, Koji Igarashi, they wanted to
keep the length of previous Castlevania games without making this game as difficult. So
they looked to a different game as inspiration. Igarashi explains this in a GDC talk back
from 2014. Well, a translator explains:
We really wanted to extend the life of the game and the one game that popped up in our
heads was Legend of Zelda, an exploration filled action game. Pretty much our entire
team, including myself, were huge fans of the game and wanted to make something very
similar. So now you know, the origin of inspiration actually wasn’t metroid. … and of course
I have the utmost respect for that game, and the folks behind it.
So as it turns out, Symphony of the Night naturally created a Metroid-like game just
by trying to make a side-scroller that progressed like The Legend of Zelda. But people who played
Symphony of the Night and the games that followed it like Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow
saw similarities to Metroid. People started calling these Metroid-like Castlevania games
“Metroidvanias” with the earliest instance I could find of someone using the phrase dating
all the way back to the pre-civilized world of 2001.
And thus the grandparents of the genre were born, and the term Metroidvania was eventually
co-opted to mean any game that follows the design philosophies of the Metroid and Castlevania
games. And… There's a lot of debate about whether or not it’s a good term to even
use, with people suggesting alternatives like Mapformers, Platform-Adventures. Platform-RPGS,
non-linear 2D action platformers, action adventure 2D platformer adventure-like non-linear action-RPG-like
non-closed-world side-scrollers, and open-world Mario games.
Regardless of if you like the term or not, one thing the phrase “Metroidvania” does
do well is demonstrate how much these games are influenced by those two franchises. But
at the same time, they will mix other games in as well. Axiom Verge drew ideas from other
NES classics such as Contra, Bionic Commando, Rygar and Blaster Master. Guacamelee, originally
inspired by another indie game, Castle Crashers, combined the Metroidvania genre with brawler
elements. Ori and the Blind Forest mixed the Metroidvania genre with the more fluid platforming
found in Super Meat Boy. Want to play a Metroidvania but with Pokemon? There’s Monster Sanctuary.
Maybe a Metroid pinball game? There’s Yoku’s Island Express. Metroidvania with anime girls?
Actually, I don’t think any of those exist.
And then, of course, there’s Hollow Knight. Developed by Team Cherry, most of what we
see in Hollow Knight comes from the minds of William Pellen and Ari Gibson. Aside from
the Metroid and Castlevania games, Hollow Knight took inspiration from a lot of old
school NES and Super Nintendo games like Mega Man X and Zelda II. William Pellen explains:
We’ve stolen a lot of ideas.
But there was one game in particular that people saw a lot in Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight is a metroidvania souls-like game.
This is more of a metroidvania souls-like.
Hollow Knight takes a lot of cues from the Dark Souls series...
It’s really the Dark Souls of games that are trying to be the Dark Souls of Dark Souls
without actually being Dark Souls...
Dark Souls…
Mario…
Hollow Knight is pretty much just Dark Souls.
Of course, there was a certain craze back in the day of comparing everything to Dark
Souls. But the comparisons to Hollow Knight are probably more apt verses something like
Cuphead. After all, a lot of people seem to consider Dark Souls a Metroidvania as well,
at least in some vague sense.
The original Dark Souls game is also a Metroidvania game, just in 3 dimensions instead of 2.
Dark Souls, itself a cousin of the Metroidvania…
And I love Symphony of the Night, but no non-2D games have captured the essence of Metroidvania,
I'd argue since Metroid Prime, and then I knew where we all were and was free hereafter
to happily halberd hellspawn.
This just shows how vague and malleable terms like “souls-like” and “Metroidvania”
are to a lot of people. It’s this vague definition of difficulty and exploration.
Is trying to find the bathroom in a crowded mall after eating Chipotle a “Metroidvania
souls-like” experience? Team Cherry has never really championed Dark Souls as one
of their main inspirations, but they do acknowledge it.
Maybe a bit of Dark Souls in there as well. That type of stuff.
When pressed, they usually downplay the comparisons a lot of people tend to make, saying that
Hollow Knight feels similar to Dark Souls because both games draw on early Nintendo
games.
You have a new generation of people who haven't played Nintendo games, who haven't played
those early games. So they don't have the touchstones like Zelda 2 to talk about and
it's much easier to say "like Souls" as a capsule, as a modern game, that emphasises
all of those qualities of the unknown, and discovery and challenge and overcoming challenge
to access new areas.
Although they do admit that the corpse running mechanic in Dark Souls directly inspired what
they did in Hollow Knight. They’ve also cited the Rally mechanic from Bloodborne as
a loose inspiration for Hollow Knight’s soul and focus system.
When you hit an enemy in Bloodborne, you regain a bit of health... There's a parallel there
with our soul system which is just that you hit, and you stock the soul, which you then
use to heal at your own rate.
However, there was another comparison some people made during the game’s early days.
A game that appears to have had no influence over Team Cherry: Ori and the Blind Forest.
Again, Hollow Knight's cartoony, slightly Ori and the Blind Forest, esc style...
The atmosphere created in this Ori and the Blind Forest meets Salt and Sanctuary artstyle...
The comparisons to Ori were not quite as prevalent as the comparisons to Dark Souls, but they
happened enough to warrant a comment from Team Cherry themselves.
When you're coming out as an unknown developer and you have no game, people have no touchstones.
Everyone who saw this game, or I’m not going to say everyone, but certainly, there was
a lot of sentiment which was “Oh, it looks like that game Ori.” Which we’ve never
played. But it looks fantastic and apparently it is fantastic by all accounts and I’m
sure we’ll be able to get some time once we…
There’s a sequel soon so we’ll just wait ‘till then
We’ll wait till the sequel and buy a bundle pack or something.
So even before Ori and the Will of the Wisps was being compared to Hollow Knight, Hocllow
Knight was being compared to Ori and the Blind Forest. Which begs the question. Why have
the claims surrounding Will of the Wisps been so much louder? There’s certainly a case
to be made that Will of the Wisps shares more design elements with Hollow Knight than that
game did with Blind Forest. But I think another big factor in all this is the fact that the
Hollow Knight fanbase is much bigger than the Ori fanbase. For example, the Hollow Knight
subreddit and Discord server are both over 10 times larger than the Ori counterparts.
That’s not to say that Hollow Knight is a better game than either Ori 1 or 2. But
I think it contributes to why so many more people are seeing similarities between Hollow
Knight and other games. And I’m not just talking about Will of the Wisps.
In December of 2019, Nintendo showed off the trailer for a game called Gleamlight. This
game was developed by a Japanese company called DICO. The company is a decent sized publisher
who even helped with the development of another recent Metroidvania game, Bloodstained: Ritual
of the Night: Koji Igarasha’s spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night.
The immediate reaction to Gleamlight’s trailer was that it was a cheap knock off of Hollow
Knight. The game’s publisher, D3, addressed these accusations in a Polygon article saying:
Gleamlight is still in development and it’s not final at this moment… The dev team is
aware of Hollow Knight but the game has nothing to do with that title.
Very few seemed to actually believe this statement. In his review of the game, NintendoLife reviewer
Stuart Gipp said the following:
Gleamlight's developers have claimed that their game isn't a rip-off of Hollow Knight.
They're right. If it was a rip-off, then it'd share some kind of inspiration, some mechanical
flair. The creativity, the baseline of enjoyable moments, some solid fundamentals. It's all
missing. It's not a rip-off of Hollow Knight, it's a stupid child's drawing of it.
So what exactly is it about Gleamlight that makes people call it a rip-off? Much like
FortressCraft, the game looks very rushed and unpolished, and it was released somewhat
recently after Hollow Knight’s huge success. On top of that, the game shares a number of
similarities. They are both platformers with somewhat dark atmospheres and enigmatic protagonists.
They both feature a melee combat system where the primary method of attack is a short range
sword swipe. And some of the areas bear a resemblance to the areas found in Hollow Knight…
but is any of this really all that unique?
With FortressCraft it was a lot easier to notice, because there were very few games
that looked like Minecraft in terms of game design. But the things that Gleamlight has
in common with Hollow Knight are not very new ideas. For example, Hollow Knight’s
moody atmosphere is not particularly original, with some early impressions calling the game
Tim-Burton-like.
It brings to mind "The Nightmare Before Christmas" almost.
It's a little bit "Tim Burton".
There’s definitely going to be a connection to that.
It’s got that like “Tim Burton”, or gothic vibe to it. That type of thing.
And remember how people compared Hollow Knight to Ori and the Blind Forest when it was coming
out? A lot of that was probably due to the fact that both games were non-pixel art based
metroidvanias featuring small-sized protagonists.
As for combat, melee combat in a Metroidvania isn’t particularly unique either. The Castlevania
games have primarily used melee combat as well. Hollow Knight’s combat seems to draw
somewhat from the side scrolling combat of Zelda 2, which in case you didn’t know,
is really old.
As for areas… Well forests in real life are green, so I don’t think that’s fair
to say that’s a rip off. And there are purple crystals in the real world called Amethyst
crystals. So that’s not really that unique of a concept to Hollow Knight either. I mean,
come on, have people not been playing 1.17?
On top of all of this, Gleamlight is barely even a Metroidvania. I know that term is vague,
but Gleamlight doesn’t really emphasize exploration in any way. You travel through
each room linearly, and there’s no map at all. There are power ups that you gain but
it really is the bare minimum.
All that being said, it’s certainly possible that Gleamlight was just an attempt to cash
in on Hollow Knight’s popularity. But if that’s the case, then the developers really
had no idea what it was that made Hollow Knight such a good game. Honestly, I think this is
less to do with developer intentions and more to do with how we as gamers discuss video
games.
One of Hollow Knight’s first exposures to a wide audience came in 2015. On November
19th, a friend of the dev team and the voice of Sly, Graig, posted about Hollow Knight
on Reddit, linking to the Ferocious Foes trailer on YouTube. This post received over 25,000
upvotes, and hundreds of comments came flooding in. And what were people saying? Well, they
were comparing Hollow Knight to other games. Dark Souls. Super Metroid. Bloodborne. Symphony
of the Night. Ori and the Blind Forest. Dust Elysian. Castle Crashers. Shovel Knight. Child
of Light. Mario. Uhh… Bleach.
How many of these games did Team Cherry actually take inspiration from? Like 3. Whenever we
see a new video game, our brains immediately try to find some kind of analogy, other games
that resemble it, to help us get an idea of what the game is like. Our brains are pattern
recognition machines, seeing things even if they aren’t even there. Anyone who’s been
online in the last year should know this painfully well. So it’s pretty much impossible for
new games to not be compared to old ones.
Gleamlight was dropped into the limelight in the middle of an Indie World direct, and
I can tell you, a large chunk of the Hollow Knight fanbase watches Indie World directs
in the futile hope that there might be even just a monochrome of Silksong news presented.
So when Gleamlight popped up, and shared a few superficial similarities with Hollow Knight,
the comparisons happened immediately.
Now those comments on Hollow Knight from 2015 were mostly positive. There were still a few
people calling Hollow Knight a rip-off, but in general people were kind to the game. And
that was probably because Hollow Knight looked like a pretty good game. As for Gleamlight,
well… I’m gonna have to say something mean here, so if there are any developers
at the Japanese company DICO watching this video, please plug your ears. Gleamlight’s
trailer looked really shitty. Like the game just looks bad.
So when a whole bunch of Hollow Knight fans saw this game, and saw how bad it looked,
it was inevitable that everyone would start calling Gleamlight a rip-off. But if you actually
played Gleamlight, it doesn’t seem much like Hollow Knight at all. I mean, it’s
still a bad game. I got every achievement after four hours of playtime and I can confirm
it’s a bad game. But I think that has more to do with DICO being primarily a publisher
and having very little experience with game development than them trying to quickly cash
in on Hollow Knight’s success.
Of course, that’s not to say that Hollow Knight hasn’t inspired other developers.
There have been quite a few games to pop up such as Haiku the Robot, Lone Fungus, Chiaroscuro,
Curse of the Sea Rats, Ender Lilies, Unbound: Worlds Apart, and Zapling Bygone, which all
claim Hollow Knight as an inspiration in some way. But one Hollow Knight inspired game in
particular, Crowsworn, ended up getting some heat for looking too much like Hollow Knight.
When they posted their pre-Kickstarter trailer on Twitter, a number of tweets were posted
calling the game a rip-off of Hollow Knight.
Once the game was brought to the attention of the wider Hollow Knight fanbase, partly
due to me tweeting about it over on my twitter at twitter.com/mossbag69, discussion became
a lot more positive.
Since then, Team Cherry’s marketing director, Leth, has even joined the Crowsworn team.
In an interview with the The Indie Gamer, Leth made it pretty clear that Team Cherry
has no issues with Crowsworn:
Look, this game looks cool. We don’t mind if people look at Hollow Knight and go “I
want to do that too”.
Leth also pointed out how it just makes sense that small-team indie studios working in the
Unity game engine would make games that look similar to Hollow Knight.
There’s only so much you can do with Unity for a 2D game. And the fact is that Team Cherry
and Ari were very clever with how they developed Hollow Knight in a way to make it super efficient
and it’s also very good. So if you depart from that to a great degree you risk making
something bad.
And when Crowsworn went live on Kickstarter, it hit its $100,000 goal in less than three
hours. So the game clearly has value to a lot of people. Even Team Cherry left a comment
on their Kickstarter saying their game looks great.
Now to be fair, I understand why some people making these comparisons are so negative about
Crowsworn. Crowsworn does wear its Hollow Knight inspiration on its sleeve. But from
what we have seen of Crowsworn, it appears that they do have ideas of their own, and
are putting work into making their game stand out as a unique Metroidvania. The developers
reference the Donkey Kong Country games as an inspiration, and yeah, these things are
basically barrel cannons. They’ve American, or I guess Canadianized, the game quite a
bit with the inclusion of guns, which I thought was a pretty glaring omission from Hollow
Knight, to be honest.
In reality the vast majority of the games within the Metroidvania genre draw direct
inspiration from Metroid and Castlevania, combining elements from those games with other
games like Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls to try to create something new. This isn’t
controversial and those games are seldom called rip offs. Then Hollow Knight came along and
became extremely popular, resulting in both a lot of people inspired to make games similar
to Hollow Knight, and a lot of people seeing Hollow Knight’s mechanics in other games,
whether or not that was actually intentional on the developers’ part.
So what makes it okay to draw ideas from Metroid, like Axiom Verge does, but not draw ideas
from Hollow Knight, like Crowsworn does? I think a lot of people think it’s fine to
copy Metroid and Castlevania because those games are old, and Hollow Knight is new. But
keep in mind, the gaming industry is very different now than it was in the 80s and 90s.
There are now thousands upon thousands of indie games being released every single year,
so we are likely going to see iterations of game ideas and designs happen faster and more
frequently. It took so long for games to take from Metroid because indie developers weren’t
really a thing until Cave Story came out in 2004, which is a Metroidvania by the way.
Well, depending on who you ask.
At the end of the day, as long as a game does enough to set itself apart from the games
that inspired it, we really shouldn’t be upset about clones or rip-off or however old
the games it takes from are. And just watching the trailer for a game sometimes isn’t enough
to know if that’s the case. Seriously, the amount of people saying that Hollow Knight
looked like Ori after watching the Ferocious Foes trailer is kinda crazy considering how
different those two games are.
Enter Ori and the Will of the Wisps. You know, the game this video is supposed to be about.
After the completion of Ori and the Blind Forest, it wasn’t a done deal that Moon
Studios was going to make a sequel. The co-founders, Thomas Mahler and Gennadiy Korol, weren’t
exactly onboard with making a sequel, until they started thinking about the ways a sequel
could improve on Blind Forest’s weaker parts, comparing it to how Super Mario Bros. 3 improved
on the original game.
If you would see Ori and the Blind Forest as the original Super Mario Bros... The sequel
could actually become like Super Mario Bros. 3.
Sort of like what Super Mario Bros 3 was to Super Mario Bros.
We want Ori and the Will of the Wisps to become to Blind Forest what Super Marios 3 was to
the original Super Mario Bros.
My next guests say this game will be the best Ori and will be to Ori what Mario 3 was to
Super Mario Brothers. I guess that's a quote. That's impressive.
And part of that process of refining the sequel was to look at the other Metroidvanias that
were released since the first game.
In terms of the gameplay we really just wanted to push it a step further so we looked at
all the Metroidvanias that also came out after Blind Forest. We just basically wanted to
say "How can we even take it a level further than that?"
Like we saw earlier in this video, Hollow Knight was one of the games that Moon Studios
looked at when creating Will of the Wisps. But since the game has come out, Mahler and
Korol have both denied taking any inspiration from Hollow Knight. When I first caught wind
of all this back in March 2020, I went on a bit of a rant. I posted to my twitter account
over at twitter.com/mossbag69 claiming that Moon Studios had obviously taken several elements
from Hollow Knight, and were now blatantly denying it. Now I know this is a really rare
occurrence for Twitter, but my tweets were perhaps a bit reactionary and ignorant to
the greater context surrounding the situation. I hadn’t even played the Ori games when
I made those tweets. But that was over a year ago. Since then I have taken the time to play
both Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I also played through
Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures a few times just for good measure. I also researched the
development of the Ori games to better understand how they were made.
So, have my thoughts changed? Well, yes, but it’s complicated. There really isn’t a
clear cut answer here. So let me just answer this question in two parts.
Was Ori and the Will of the Wisps influenced by Hollow Knight in some way?
Most likely.
Did Ori and the Will of the Wisps directly copy mechanics or ideas from Hollow Knight?
Probably not.
In order to get to the bottom of this, I’m going to be digging into a number of interviews
Moon Studios has participated in, as well as looking through posts Thomas Mahler has
made on the websites ResetEra and NeoGAF. Mahler has been open about sharing his opinions
in gaming forums. And once we dig into his posts, we soon realize something. Thomas Mahler
doesn’t really like Hollow Knight.
Mahler first played Hollow Knight right as the game came out in February 2017.
After playing the game for a few hours, Mahler posted in the NeoGAF thread dedicated to discussing
Hollow Knight. Mahler criticized the game’s slow pacing, calling it too slow when compared
to games like Super Metroid, Symphony of the Night and Blind Forest. In later posts, Mahler
also said he isn’t a fan of Hollow Knight’s “simplistic combat”. And while he didn’t
say this next point was criticism, Mahler also talked about how he thinks that games
like Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight don’t really do anything new to push the Metroidvania
genre forward, as opposed to the Ori games which blend the genre with the more fluid
platforming found in games like Super Meat Boy.
Mahler’s criticisms of Hollow Knight are certainly not unique. As much as I love Hollow
Knight, it’s not a perfect game. There are aspects of it that just won’t do it for
some people. One of Hollow Knight’s biggest stumbling points for a lot of players is its
pacing. Hollow Knight is a massive game with a huge map and the movement upgrades are few
and far between. As a result, some areas feel like they are missing content or satisfying
moments to keep the player engaged. This can seriously affect the game's sense of pacing
and progression if the hook of exploration doesn’t grab the player. This has been pointed
out by a few reviewers here on YouTube.
And even with every ability it can take a while to get where you need to because the
map is absolutely massive. Massive and boring!
And the world is fun to explore, but asks for a bit more than what these kinds of games
usually entail given its sheer size.
A building of tension in exploration, story, and gameplay complexity, that ends with nothing
instead of a climax. I’d call this poor pacing.
Boooooorriiinnnggg!
Even people who praised Hollow Knight as the best Metroidvania ever made such as Game Maker’s
Toolkit have issues with how long the game goes on.
I felt finished and satisfied with the game after dispatching Hollow Knight for the first
time, and when I discovered online that there was a lot more to do, I didn't really have
the drive to carry on and seek out yet more secrets.
In terms of combat, Hollow Knight’s combat is more simple on the surface when compared
to what is featured in Ori and the Will of the Wisps, especially in the first half of
the game, when the player doesn’t have a very complex moveset. This also spills over
into affecting the games pacing as well.
Up first is that it takes far too long to go from this… to this.
This means that there is a long stretch of game time wherein the player has very few
options during combat compared to the potential you have at the end. Things don’t stay quite
as simple as they are right at the beginning, but they don’t get really interesting until
you’re close to finished.
And it is fair to say that Hollow Knight doesn’t really do anything unique. There were a number
of reviewers pointing this out.
Although Hollow Knight may have many of the same trappings we've seen countless times
before, it stands above thanks to the strength of its artistry and execution.
The mechanical aspects of the game aren't anything truly innovative or unique, but they're
responsive, easy to learn and most of all completely fair.
Hollow Knight maybe doesn't rewrite the book on the new abilities aspect, but it does make
them feel meaningful and very important to your progression.
I should point out that while Mahler has discussed his problems with Hollow Knight a number of
times, he has still consistently said that he has a lot of respect for Team Cherry. And
he has also constantly said he’s happy that more and more great Metroidvanias like Hollow
Knight have released since Blind Forest. But he’s also made it very clear that the game
just didn’t do it for him, saying:
I get that fans might see similarities between the games, but I wasn't even a fan of the
game when I played it, so…
However, Mahler has done more than just talk about how he dislikes Hollow Knight. He’s
also gone back and forth on whether or not he actually finished the game. He said he
did finish it in a post from shortly before Will of the Wisps released, but then he said
he didn’t finish it after everyone started comparing the two games a month later. At
another point he compared the sales figures of the two games after another user said Blind
Forest just came and went while Hollow Knight was extremely popular. And in general, Mahler
has expressed a very competitive mindset whenever he talks about Hollow Knight.
So it’s clear that Mahler has a complicated relationship with Hollow Knight. For comparison’s
sake, the only thing Team Cherry has ever said about the Ori games is that they’ve
heard they are fantastic.
Of course, Team Cherry are pretty tight lipped in general, and don’t have much of an online
presence, either personally or professionally. Probably to a fault sometimes.
Mahler has the opposite problem. He is just really open about sharing his opinions, and
even he admits that it lands him in hot water sometimes. Back in March of this year, he
posted a public apology on his Twitter account after calling the developers behind No Man’s
Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 snake oil salesmen in a post he made to ResetEra. To be fair,
Mahler made some interesting points in his post, and honestly, I kind of agree that hype
culture in gaming incentivises studios to overpromise what their games will be. But
he probably should have avoided calling specific people like Sean Murray “snake oil salesmen”.
In his Twitter apology, Mahler said the following:
I always really liked the idea of gamers and developers alike having an open discourse
about games, so that we could all figure out together how to improve the artform.
I think this is why Mahler is so open about sharing his opinions on Hollow Knight. He
likes discussing game design with other gamers, and he isn’t afraid to share unpopular opinions.
And I don’t think there’s any problem with him saying he doesn’t like Hollow Knight.
But it’s the amalgamation of his attitude and statements surrounding Hollow Knight that
make me think his feelings towards the game go deeper than just not liking it. I think
Mahler has a competitive mindset when it comes to game development, and he viewed Hollow
Knight’s massive success as a challenge to overcome with Will of the Wisps.
Looking at the language used by Mahler and Korol to describe Will of the Wisps, it really
seems like the goal for this game was for it to surpass Hollow Knight and become the
“perfect Metroidvania.” In an interview with the Daily Star in July 2018, he said
the following:
A lot of what we’re doing with Will of the Wisps is trying to perfect the genre, perfect
Metroidvania. We looked at a lot of games that have come out since the first Ori - Hollow
Knight, Axiom Verge - and studied them and researched them. Now it’s our turn to take
it to the next level. That’s how Ori evolves. We look at what’s been done since the last
game, and we push it further. We take it further. It’s pretty bananas!
Korol has said this as well:
We really want to make sure that absolutely every single aspect of a Metroidvania can
be perfected.
And we can see this was the case before Will of the Wisps. With Ori and the Blind Forest,
the goal was to push the platforming found in Metroidvania games further than ever before,
bringing the fluid platforming of Super Meat Boy to the genre. They literally even put
Meatboy’s rotting corpse in the game, in case you didn’t notice the inspiration.
Thomas Mahler explains:
We wanted to improve Metroidvanias by really focusing on the platforming component because
honestly, if you look at your typical Metroidvania. If you look at Symphony of the Night and Super
Metroid, yes they do have platforming but it’s very simple, right? It’s not on the
level of Mario....
So that’s where we wanted to improve things. To me, it just made no sense that, hey if
one of your core aspects, if one of the core hooks of the game is platforming like jumping
around these levels, why wouldn’t the levels and the platforming component be as good as
Mario? Like that should be the case. So that’s where we took it.
After the release of Hollow Knight, however, Mahler and Moon Studios looked to push combat
further as well, thus having both the best combat and the best platforming in the Metroidvania
genre. And to do that, they seemed to compare themselves a lot to Hollow Knight:
Then Team Cherry came in and did Hollow Knight and they did a much more traditional thing,
right? Or Axiom Verge for example also did a much more traditional approach to Metroidvanias.
And I think that’s fine, but in terms of the combat system, we wanted to kind of like…
I always like that competition and the challenge and say. Okay you guys did that. Let’s see
how you can follow up when we do this stuff. You know, like that kind of thing.
The combat itself in Blind Forest was much more focused around the platforming, and then
you have games like Hollow Knight coming out which focused a lot more on just precise hits
and so on which just wasn’t the focus for Blind Forest and we thought “Hey, you know,
we could do that as well, right?” And we could really create this perfect package that
here’s what a metroidvania should look like in 2019 and 2020.
So it’s clear that Moon Studios was very aware of Hollow Knight while making Will of
the Wisps, and I think part of the whole “perfect Metroidvania” mentality really just meant
“better than Hollow Knight”. So does Mahler’s feelings towards Hollow Knight, mixed with
Moon Studios’ philosophy of perfection prove Ori copied ideas from Hollow Knight. Well
no, but I think it shows that Hollow Knight likely had some influence over them as they
made the game.
But if we ignore the Hollow Knight stuff for a minute, the basic philosophy of perfecting
the Metroidvania genre is an interesting approach from Moon Studios. It’s also very different
from what Team Cherry did. William Pellen and Ari Gibson actively avoided even calling
their game a Metroidvania at all.
So when we were making the game, obviously the blueprint for it was a lot of those games
like Metroid and Castlevania, but we weren’t super conscious of staying true to the genre
or anything like that, you know? It was just what we thought would be fun or what made
sense, what we wanted to make...
In another interview, Leth confirms that they consciously chose to avoid using the word
Metroidvania:
Team Cherry was the same way. They didn't want to use the word Metroidvania either.
They were calling it "action platformer" or something like that.
In fact, Team Cherry has even said that Hollow Knight is actually most like Faxanadu:
Everytime we say Faxanadu, which is probably the one that it is most closely alined to,
everyone just goes. “Ah what?”
Faxanadu is another one of those early 2D Metroidvania games from the 1980s, before
Super Metroid truly defined the genre. Faxanadu sticks out with its impressive atmosphere
for an NES game and cohesive world design. Faxanadu starts with a lone traveller arriving
at a ruined kingdom in despair, with some inhabitants under the curse of an evil force.
This is very similar to Hollow Knight’s general story, a lonely warrior arriving at
a civilization wrought by an infection.
So you have one developer working to push the conventions of the genre to their limit
by crafting the best platforming and combat mechanics of any Metroidvania game, using
Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night as references. And you have another developer
that isn’t really worried about sticking true to the conventions of the genre and instead
taking inspiration from other old school open world games.
Both Hollow Knight and Ori and the Will of the Wisps have their own unique strengths,
ideals and weaknesses that may stem from their design philosophies. And these games do differ
quite a bit, mainly in their level design and storytelling.
Hollow Knight’s level design prioritizes exploration, with lots of diverging paths
and an insane amount of secret areas to explore. You can beat the game without even seeing
the majority of the content Team Cherry created. And your path through the game will likely
look very different from someone else's.
In contrast, pretty much every area in the Ori games is entered through one intended
path. Because Moon Studio does this, it allows them to carefully craft platforming challenges
around what abilities the player has obtained so far. While there are some hidden areas
here and there, you will be seeing most of what each Ori game has to offer just by following
the critical path.
In terms of storytelling, Moon Studios uses swelling orchestral music and the detailed
character animations to convey the plot of the game. All of this is done to achieve a
more universally recognizable story that doesn’t rely too heavily on dialogue.
There's still a certain tone to Ori where we try to tell our stories with as little
dialogue as possible, because I want people from India who don't necessarily speak English
or something to get as much out of the games as Americans and Europeans and so on. I want
this to be a global thing.
Hollow Knight, on the other hand, has tens of thousands of words for the player to read
and analyze, if they can even find those words that is. And even then, the story isn’t
exactly clear on a lot of the details. To fully grasp Hollow Knight’s plot, you’re
going to need to go online and discuss it with other people or watch YouTube videos
about it by people who constantly remind you to like the video and subscribe. God, I hate
it when YouTubers ask you to like the video and subscribe. It really kills the whole pacing
of the video.
So those are two very different approaches, indeed. Ori is a much more guided experience.
Whereas Hollow Knight is much more open ended. And I think this is part of why the Hollow
Knight fandom is so big compared to other great indie titles. People have to talk to
one another online to find out about that one hidden boss in Deepnest, or that one segment
where the game turns into Super Meat Boy, or to even figure out what the hell is even
happening in half the cutscenes of the game. But does Hollow Knight’s approach make it
a better Metroidvania? Can we even know what a perfect Metroidvania looks like?
Personally, and I might be a little biased here, Hollow Knight better encompasses what
I value most in Metroidvanias. Why is it that so many gamers connect Dark Souls with the
Metroidvania genre? It’s because Dark Souls nails the biggest part of what I think people
like about Metroidvanias: the interconnected world. It doesn’t matter that there aren’t
movement upgrades in Dark Souls. It’s still satisfying to explore the kingdom of Lordran.
And I think Team Cherry kinda stumbled into the realization that the strict upgrade progression
system that’s found in games like Castlevania and Metroid isn’t necessary. When making
their game, they weren’t afraid to strip Hollow Knight of its rigid Metroidvania structure
to create a more freeform experience:
The basic outline of the game at the start, especially because it was really small, was
a much more rigid kind of traditional “this power up first then this power up then this
power up” and you follow that through the game. As the game expanded and as we kept
working on it, we kept finding interesting connections between areas that didn't exist,
so we kinda chipped away at the floor or the ceiling to allow you to move between areas
a little more freely.
While I think Hollow Knight better captures what it is I like about Metroidvanias, I wouldn’t
say Hollow Knight is a better Metroidvania than Ori. Both games are trying to do their
own thing within the genre, and they both do them so well it’s not really reasonable
to even compare them. Oddly enough, Thomas Mahler has even said this too:
I think Hollow Knight and Ori honestly both have their own thing going on, I don't really
see all that much overlap apart from them being both Metroidvanias... It's like comparing
Mario and Sonic to me - Sure, both are platformers, but that's where the similarities end. I'm
just glad we're seeing more amazing Metroidvanias finally again…
So while Mahler does talk a lot about wanting to perfect the genre, he still understands
that there is room for variety within that genre, at least sometimes. Thomas Mahler is
a very complex man, in case you couldn’t tell. He’s like an onion. He’s got layers.
The whole notion of figuring out what constitutes a good or perfect Metroidvania is a bit silly
to me. We would need to set up a rubric and strictly define all the components of a Metroidvania
and methods for evaluating those components. And you probably could do that, at least to
some degree. But this system would be worthless because a lot of what makes new Metroidvanias
interesting and worth playing is that they mix the Metroidvania genre with something
new. And a lot of times, when people make these mental checklists in their head about
what makes a perfect Metroidvania, they use older games as reference, like Super Metroid
and Symphony of the Night. But there’s no guarantee that the specific mechanics and
design choices that worked well in those games are going to work well in other games. Would
the pinball Metroidvania Yoku’s Island Express be better if it had the Shine Spark? Or Form
of Mist?
While it’s certainly possible to compare and contrast games and argue which ones did
certain mechanics better, it’s important to remember that each game is unique and we
should judge them based on how well they execute their own ideas and not pigeonhole them with
comparisons to 20 year old games.
Anyway, now that I’m done talking about how we shouldn't compare games all the time,
let’s compare these games.
Earlier in the video, I mentioned that a lot of Hollow Knight’s ideas that Gleamlight
apparently stole weren’t all that original in the first place. Some of that applies here
as well, but luckily Moon Studios has provided us with more info on Will of the Wisps’
development than DICO ever did. So let’s start off the comparisons with the biggest
new addition to Will of the Wisps: combat.
If we look back to Ori and the Blind Forest, one of the largest and most common criticisms
of that game was the combat.
As fun as exploration is, combat is a little more uneven.
Combat isn't one of Ori's strengths.
Basically the combat in Blind Forest consisted of standing near an enemy and button mashing
a homing energy attack until they died. So about as interactive as watching YouTube ads.
A big part of Will of the Wisps' reason for even existing is to improve upon the combat
from Blind Forest.
When we started really working on the game we immediately looked at all the feedback
that people gave us. And one of the big things was the combat system. We completely refined
the combat system and made it crazy in terms of what you've ever seen in a Metroidvania.
That's the first big thing about Ori 2 is that we really wanted to take the combat and
completely revamp it. Make it absolutely awesome in a way that we believe maybe wasn't done
in a Metroidvania before.
When people point out the similarities between Hollow Knight and Ori’s combat, they usually
just point out that the Knight’s nail and Ori’s Shard Sword are similar. Or they are
just pointing out that Will of the Wisps has more combat now. But in reality, Will of the
Wisps probably would have had more refined combat regardless of if Hollow Knight existed,
since combat was the weakest aspect of Blind Forest.
As it turns out, a prototype version of the sword weapon in Will of the Wisps was created
during the development of Blind Forest. According to Korol:
We had a working version of sword fighting in Blind Forest, but it was very hard to make
it work. It was such a big game and we needed to ship a game at some point.
Due to Moon Studios’ small size and the complexity of combat systems in general, Blind
Forest ended up letting combat take a backseat so the developers could focus on platforming.
For the sequel, Moon Studios wanted to create a combat system unlike what has been done
in a Metroidvania before.
We saw earlier that Thomas Mahler looked at Hollow Knight and wanted to one-up what Team
Cherry did with that game’s combat, while also saying that he doesn’t really like
Hollow Knight’s simplistic combat system. So it seems like Moon Studios looked at Hollow
Knight’s combat just so they could try and up the ante with Will of the Wisps. Apparently
they even reached out to one of the developers on Killer Instinct, Ken Lobb, to discuss designing
combat for Ori. And looking at the final products, the combat system between Ori and Hollow Knight
are noticeably different.
According to Korol and Mahler, the combat system for Ori drew more from Dark Souls and
Symphony of the Night as opposed to Hollow Knight. Mahler said in a ResetEra post:
The Melee stuff is inspired by Symphony of the Night and Dark Souls, mostly, those are
games we looked at when it came to how to make the combat feel satisfying and crunchy…
Korol also mentioned Dark Souls in another interview:
We were almost inspired by games like Dark Souls... we're really creating really interesting
dances with the enemies…
Dark Souls and Symphony of the Night differ from Hollow Knight in that you can equip a
wide variety of weapons aside from just a sword. You can use shields, spears, rods,
your goddamn fists, it’s really up to you. In Hollow Knight, all you ever get is the
nail. There are still different playstyles thanks to charms and spells, but you’ll
be whacking off with this thing from the very start to the very end.
In Will of the Wisps, Ori has a variety of skills, which allow it to use energy to create
a sword, a bow, a giant hammer, a giant spear, a shuriken/boomerang thing, and most devastating
of all, a feather. These attacks, and a few more, can be quickly set to face buttons,
allowing the player to change weapons on the fly.
Another major difference with Ori’s combat is how attacks actually happen when you press
the button. In Hollow Knight, you press a button and the Knight swings its sword. It’s
very straightforward. Mahler didn’t like how simplistic this was, saying:
We really wanted to take it to that level where it’s like, ‘No, it’s actually
an animation-based combat system.’ My idea for Ori is always that you have to feel like
a super fucking cool ninja.
That being said, I think Hollow Knight still gets better use of its combat. It may not
be as complex, but the game gets a lot of depth out of it. The combat in Will of the
Wisps is certainly an improvement from Blind Forest, but it’s still not as satisfying
or enjoyable to me as the platforming.
The YouTube channel Ingeniousclown Gaming did a really thoughtful critique of Ori and
the Will of the Wisps. And I pretty much 100% agree with his critique on Ori’s combat:
Granted, Ori's combat is significantly more complex than what Hollow Knight offers, but
the inspiration can be seen regardless. Hollow Knight had over 40 bosses to explore the game's
combat with, while Ori has a measly six.
But keep in mind, I’m definitely biased here. I’ve played through Hollow Knight’s
boss rush mode several times. If I didn’t think Hollow Knight’s combat was fantastic,
then I’d be an absolute lunatic for doing this. And I haven’t put anywhere near as
much time into fighting the bosses in Ori.
So did Ori copy Hollow Knight’s combat? Well, they were aware of Hollow Knight, and
they seemed to take it as a challenge of sorts to push their combat further than what Team
Cherry did. But in reality, Moon Studios was always going to revamp the combat system because
it was Blind Forest’s biggest stumbling point. And the combat system they did implement
into the game is very different from Hollow Knight’s in a number of ways.
So… yes?... but actually no.
The healing system is another comparison I’ve seen thrown around. In Blind Forest, Ori could
heal either by finding health drops in the world, or by unlocking an ability that healed
Ori whenever it created a save point. In Will of the Wisps, Moon Studios wanted to use the
face buttons for equipping skills, leaving no place to put the manual save ability. Due
to this, they decided to replace that feature with an autosave system, and the healing ability
was turned into one of the equippable skills.
On the face of it, expending a resource in order to heal isn’t all that unique, which
is pretty much what Mahler said when people brought this up as being similar to Hollow
Knight. But it’s the way this healing plays out during gameplay that I think makes it
feel similar to some people. Healing can now be performed in the middle of combat, and
requires Ori to stand still and avoid taking damage for a short period of time. This is
very similar to Hollow Knight. On the other hand, it’s also very similar to Dark Souls.
Both Team Cherry and Moon Studios have cited Dark Souls as inspiration for their games.
And we know that Moon Studios wanted to replicate the “interesting dances” the player has
with enemies in Dark Souls. Part of that dance involves finding the right time in between
enemy attacks to use an Estus Flask to heal. And I think it’s reasonable to say that
Hollow Knight’s focus mechanic took cues from the Soulsborne series in this regard
as well.
So did Ori construct their healing spell to act more like Hollow Knight’s because they
wanted to replicate Hollow Knight’s gameplay, or did they go back to Hollow Knight’s source,
Dark Souls, and replicate that? Did Ori copy Hollow Knight’s idea to copy Dark Souls?
Or did Ori just copy Dark Souls? It’s at this point where even trying to figure out
where an idea came from or how it migrated to other games becomes pointless to even talk
about. It’s like jumping. Does every game draw direct influence from Donkey Kong because
it popularized the jumping mechanic?
I think the healing spell change in Will of the Wisps ties into Moon Studios’ more combat-focused
design philosophy, and might just be an extension of Dark Souls’ influence over them. Is it
possible Hollow Knight influenced them in some regard as well? Maybe, but leaving Dark
Souls out of the equation and saying they are just copying Hollow Knight leaves a lot
of details out of the picture. And that goes for the entire combat system in general. Both
Ori and Hollow Knight draw from that series, and that might be a big part of why the combat
in these games “feels similar” to a lot of players, when in reality, they are quite
different.
The concept of Metroidvania games using RPG elements has been around at least since Symphony
of the Night, which boasted an experience system as well as equipment management. And
both Moon Studios and Team Cherry also put RPG elements into their games.
Ori and the Blind Forest features an ability tree, which allows Ori to gain different abilities
and perks, such as breathing underwater, better resource drop, showing things on the map,
and making attacks more powerful. The tree has three separate, linear branches, so a
lot of the later power ups are locked behind a bunch you might not even want. Korol explains
this issue:
With Ori 1 we kinda had a tree system, so if you wanted to get an upgrade you gotta
get all the upgrades before it on a certain path so it kinda locks you in.
The shard system introduced in the sequel offers a lot more flexibility. On top of not
having to spend resources on abilities you don’t want, the player can also switch out
shards depending on what they are struggling with currently in the game. It’s also very
similar to Hollow Knight’s charm system, with only a few minor differences. Each shard
in Ori is worth exactly one shard slot, whereas notches in Hollow Knight have different costs
depending on how powerful the charm is. Shards can be upgraded to become more powerful, which
was a planned idea for Hollow Knight’s Godmaster update, but was ultimately cut.
Both Moon Studios and Team Cherry cite different RPGs for their systems. Team Cherry says they
looked at the badge system from Paper Mario. In that game, you had Badge Points which could
be spent to equip badges, with some badges having different cost requirements, very similar
to what we see in Hollow Knight. The developers at Moon Studios, on the other hand, originally
based their shard system on the Materia system in Final Fantasy VII. In that game, weapons
and armor have a certain number of Materia slots. If you equip a Materia to a character,
they gain the Materia’s power, and the Materia itself can be leveled up by gaining AP points
through combat.
According to Mahler, the shard system in Ori was going to work a lot more similarly to
that, saying:
… at some point in the game we literally had slots in all the skills that you inserted
shards into - that became too cumbersome, so we turned it into a global system.
Gennadiy Korol echoed this inspiration, saying:
We looked at the materia system from Final Fantasy and the shard modifier system where
you can customize your character and have more choice…
Korol also mentioned that the shard system existed in prototype form since early 2015,
long before Team Cherry ever showed off Hollow Knight’s charm mechanic.
The ability to level up shards is probably a remnant from this original idea. So while
the final implementation of the shard system looks a lot like Hollow Knight’s, Moon Studios
didn’t just rip that system straight out of that game and cram it in Will of the Wisps.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps features a much larger cast than the first game. And some
people have compared this to Hollow Knight’s large cast of characters. But there’s a
good reason why Ori and the Blind Forest didn’t have many characters: budget.
Ori and the Blind Forest had a very unique pipeline for the creation of its characters.
First the developers would create and rig a 3D model of the character. But this 3D model
wasn’t actually used in game. Instead the 3D model was then rendered into individual
2D sprites. These 2D sprites were then modified to add in details like motion blur and depth
of field effects. Then a whole bunch of ingame effects are used to make the sprite match
the surrounding lighting. This was done for all the characters, including the gigantic
owl Kuro. So when you look at Ori in Blind Forest, you are actually looking at a 3D model
that has been rendered as a bunch of 2D sprites. It’s an interesting process, and if you
want to learn more about how it was done then I’d recommend this GDC talk by animator
James Benson.
In Hollow Knight, Ari animated each character in Photoshop… and yeah, that was pretty
much it.
Moon Studios’ involved process for creating characters kept them from creating more than
just the barebones cast we see in Blind Forest. But with the larger team and budget for Will
of the Wisps, the developers were able to add in way more characters for Ori to interact
with. They also just ended up using 3D models as well. Mahler says the inspiration for this
larger cast comes from A Link to the Past, which had way more NPCs than the first Zelda
game. And honestly, I think saying Will of the Wisps copied Hollow Knight just by the
virtue of having more NPCs is pretty dumb. The same thing happened with Hollow Knight
and Dark Souls, with people saying Hollow Knight’s system of recurring NPCs was taken
from Dark Souls.
However, there is one specific NPC that a lot of people hone in on when comparing the
two games: Lupo. Lupo is a cartographer who shows up all over the world, selling maps
of each area. This function is similar to that of Cornifer.
When people on ResetEra brought up the comparisons between Lupo and Cornifer, Mahler mentioned
that the Castlevania games have merchants who sell maps, so Hollow Knight didn’t invent
the concept. And that’s true. In Symphony of the Night, Alucard can purchase a castle
map from the Master Librarian, among many other things. But that’s not really the
same as Cornifer and Lupo. The Castlevania NPCs are shopkeepers, not cartographers. The
concept of a cartographer NPC wasn’t present in those games, which does make Cornifer more
unique.
That being said, the idea of a map making cartographer NPC seems pretty logical for
a Metroidvania. Honestly, it’s weird that Hollow Knight’s the first well known example
of one. And there are memorable cartographer NPCs outside of the Metroidvania genre. It’s
really not that unique of an idea.
Regardless, Lupo’s implementation is nothing compared to Cornifer’s. In Hollow Knight,
you need to find Cornifer to even get a map. You also have to buy the quill to update your
map, which only happens when you sit at a bench. And you have to buy and equip the Wayward
Compass to even see where you are on the map.
In Ori, your map still fills in without talking to Lupo, but his maps help reveal large chunks
of each area. And the player icon and map updating all happens automatically. It’s
way less involved, which makes sense because Ori is less about exploring a large interconnected
world, and more about moving through areas sequentially. Also Lupo doesn’t have a smoking
hot trophy wife. So that’s a pretty big game changing difference.
On top of that, there are other parallels we can draw between NPCs. Tokk is a wandering
traveller who drops random bits of lore and advice, similar to Quirrel. Opher teaches
new attacks, similar to the Nailmasters. At the end of the day, there’s only so many
different archetypes of characters you can make that would be relevant to a Metroidvania
game. And Cornifer and Lupo just happen to overlap the most.
Okay, this one is pretty damning. Did Moon Studios really think people wouldn’t notice
the fact that both Will of the Wisps and Hollow Knight both had spiders in them? Thomas Mahler
has never commented on this blatant rip-off, and honestly, I don’t blame him. It’s
undeniable that they stole this idea from Team Cherry.
But it goes a bit deeper than that. As it turns out, before Hollow Knight popularized
the concept of putting spiders in games, there was another game to do it. A game that was
truly ahead of its time.
Another minor comparison people make is that one of the spirit shards Ori can obtain is
called “Thorn”, which is obviously a rip-off of Thorns of Agony from Hollow Knight. Except
the concept of thorns dealing damage like this has shown up in plenty of games before,
such as Diablo 2 and FortressCraft.
Those are the main notable comparisons I have seen floating around online. Hopefully you
can see that on an individual level, these similarities aren’t that deep and often
have alternative explanations. A combination of drawing from similar sources and pure coincidence
can explain a great deal of Hollow Knight and Ori’s overlapping features. All that
being said, when you take a step back and look at how Ori incorporated these elements
together, what elements they chose to include, and how they differentiate it from Blind Forest,
the final product does end up barring some resemblance to Hollow Knight. It’s the totality
of these baseline similarities that seems to be driving the claims here.
And from looking at the developers’ claims about wanting to “perfect” the Metroidvania
genre, it’s possible that Moon Studios was trying to “out-Hollow-Knight” Hollow Knight
in some way, and this lead to a game that feels like Hollow Knight to a lot of people,
even if when put under a microscope, those similarities disappear.
That’s why I prefer to say Hollow Knight influenced Will of the Wisps, especially in
terms of combat. I think while the combat in Will of the Wisps is very different from
the combat in Hollow Knight, the developers still looked at Hollow Knight as a reference
for them to compare themselves against. So it would sort of be like how they referenced
the platforming of Super Metroid and Castlevania as something they wanted to improve on. Even
if the final product isn’t much like the reference, the reference is still there and
still visible to a lot of people.
I personally think Moon Studios should have acknowledged Hollow Knight’s influence over
Will of the Wisps’ development once everyone started making the comparisons. They seemed
to acknowledge some influence before launch, but have downplayed it since then. Although
I can understand why they did so. Team Cherry did something very similar with Dark Souls.
They did take some inspiration from Dark Souls, that’s undeniable, but they preferred to
play that down in interviews because a lot of the connections people were making to Dark
Souls weren’t intentional on Team Cherry’s part.
That being said, Team Cherry never contradicted themselves on if they ever played Dark Souls,
and they’ve never compared the sales figures of their game to that of FromSoftware’s.
And that does set them apart from Mahler.
So to sum this all up, Hollow Knight certainly had a vague influence over the development
of Will of the Wisps, but I think people overstate how much Moon Studios directly copied Hollow
Knight. I think the wise people over at Honest Game Trailers said it best:
Where they took a glance at Hollow Knight and said “I guess we could do that.”
There’s a strange irony to all of this. It’s pretty clear that Thomas Mahler doesn’t
like Hollow Knight. But at the same time he seems to have set out to create a game that
could surpass Hollow Knight in the public eye and become the pinnacle of the Metroidvania
genre. But in attempting to do so, he created a game that people just compare to Hollow
Knight anyway. Even if Mahler didn’t intend his game to look like Hollow Knight, the pieces
fell together to make a game that was arguably much better than Ori and the Blind Forest,
but also seemed more like Hollow Knight. It’s sort of like a greek tragedy, like Oedipus
Rex just without the eye gouging.
And I should say, while I have scrutinized Thomas Mahler’s words quite a bit in this
video, I still respect him. He’s clearly talented and has a strong creative vision.
The beauty and design of the Ori games are strong testaments to that. And he seems content
to take heat for what he says on the internet. When he posted his controversial thread calling
other game developers snake oil salesmen, Mahler said the following:
Trust me, me talking openly about games and sharing opinions and such has gotten me into
quite a bit of trouble before, I'm very aware of that :D I just still like the discourse
that happens and when I was younger, I loved when actual developers jumped into public
forums to explain this or that. It's great when the discourse happens from both sides,
at least I think so.
My goal with this video isn’t to make you hate anyone at Moon Studios or think Thomas
Mahler is a bad person, but to highlight how complicated talking about inspiration and
influence in the creation of any work of art can be. There’s a lot more going on behind
a game than people usually realize just watching the trailer or playing the game.
Also Thomas Mahler isn’t the only one working at Moon Studios. Dozens of people have worked
on these games, each bringing their own creative ideas, influences and skills to the table.
And like I’ve said 100 times by now, the Ori games are definitely quality games, and
totally worth picking up if you enjoy platformers or Metroidvanias. To simplify Will of the
Wisps down to just being “Ori but more like Hollow Knight” you’re underselling what
it is that makes both Ori and Hollow Knight such amazing and fun experiences. The last
thing I want from this video is to start some stupid flamewar between the Hollow Knight
and Ori fandoms over which games are better. They’re all great games.
I first played Hollow Knight back in April 2017. In those days, the Hollow Knight community
was small, and it felt like this undiscovered gem. I only heard about it because videogamedunkey
recommended it at the end of his video shitting all over Yooka-Laylee. And guess how he promoted
it? By comparing it to other video games.
Bam! Hollow Knight. It’s like “cute Castlevania” with some nods to Dark Souls and you can do
the DuckTales hop.
But now, Hollow Knight and its fandom loom large over the Metroidvania genre, with its
sequel, Hollow Knight Silksong being the third highest wishlisted game currently on Steam.
With such a successful title and large fanbase, I don’t think the comparisons of other games
to Hollow Knight will be ending soon. It’s certainly possible that Hollow Knight will
become like Dark Souls in that people will start comparing it to any and every game that
looks even slightly similar.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. I think the comparisons of Hollow Knight to
Dark Souls probably helped convince people to pick it up. And like I said earlier, that’s
just how people describe new games to one another. But I hope that comparisons to Hollow
knight aren’t done just to put games down or insult them. Team Cherry is clearly okay
with games taking inspiration from them.
Look, this game looks cool. We don’t mind if people look at Hollow Knight and go “I
want to do that too”.
Just like how Team Cherry took a lot of their ideas from other games.
Zelda II, Metroid, Castlevania, Faxanadu, Bloodborne, maybe a bit of Dark Souls in there
as well, Megaman X, Megaman Zero as well, Pac-Man 2 The New Adventure
According to their website, Moon Studios “prides itself on an excessive 'iterative polish'
process”. And that’s how great games get made, through iteration and polish. Whether
that be through popularizing an entire genre through the clever use of disparate mechanics
[Minecraft]. Or by combining and executing on established mechanics to an insanely high
degree of polish [Hollow Knight]. Or by transferring ideas from one genre into another to create
something fresh and unique[Ori and the Blind Forest].
And we as a community should try our best to be supportive of developers taking inspiration
from great games and finding new ways to build upon those ideas. Getting defensive about
developers taking mechanics or art styles from other games isn’t a great idea, especially
since it’s really easy to falsely attribute where a specific idea came from. That’s
not to say that some developers aren’t just trying to cash in on the success of another
game, but as long as the final product is something of quality and worth playing, I’m
not sure the other factors matter all that much.
I’m excited to see how the Metroidvania genre evolves, especially in the wake of such
amazing games as Hollow Knight and Will of the Wisps. As the barriers to entry for aspiring
game developers continue to drop, and the genre gets more and more amazing titles, who
knows what Metroidvanias will look like in a few years. Maybe by then we’ll have come
up with a better name for them. Eh, probably not.