Was reading some feeds today and discovered on one of my gaming feeds that a certain software house has copied environments from one of the biggest games last year and put it into their own game.
Now, when I initially read this, I thought, well, if an environment's 'presence' and 'setting' is right, then ok, I could see how the ambience from the environment (lighting etc) could be copied over to another game in a similar genre.
However when I was looked at the screen shots, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.
Shown below are the offending screen shots. Remember these are from two TOTALLY separate games, written by different developers and published by different publishers.
How the developers ever imagined this wouldn't be noticed is quite beyond me.
Now, coder's throughout all industries use code snippets, 'design patterns' and algorithms created by other developers. From a developer's perspective, it's a great self-teaching tool as well as for the original developer to know that that great piece of code they laboured over is being admired and used elsewhere. But artwork? And more specifically, almost identical textures? I doubt the same argument applies.
I'm sure Bethesda are currently investigating their options here (the top is from Oblivion which is the original).
UPDATE: This story has hit the gaming world and the internet in a big way over the last 48 hours as the amount of games that have 'made it into' "Limbo" is huge. WikiPedia even has a page now detailing the controversy. Go take a read, it's quite astounding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_of_the_Lost#Controversy
UPDATE 2: NeoGaf.com has an absolutely fantastic thread on this. It's long, but if you have some time to spare it's probably the best read you'll have in weeks. It also contains a huge amount images showing what games have been 'ripped'. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=310683