Gronagor wrote:I agree with you, and yes, however you look at it, it is infringement.
BUT what I was saying is that companies would make a bigger effort to protect their property, by sueing when you take everything as is and just throw it out there. I'm not saying either is a smaller sin, or less illegal. In short I'm saying that only re-programming a game to fix a few bugs isn't worth the trouble you could possibly get in.
Edit: And like always there are ways to claim it isn't the same product... just coincidence, which Disney's lawyers always seem to convince the court of - no matter how blatantly obvious the 'copying' is. Guess it comes down to how much money you have.
I agree, not worth the trouble. Probably not even worth the effort, either! While QG3 has some annoyances, I've always been able to finish the game, and wouldn't actively go looking for a remake/replacement. KQ1's Sierra remake, for example, always felt lacking to me, especially in light of the other ones they had done, and KQ2 never got the same treatment (and I never bothered to try to get it working, as I remembered my original copy had to boot straight to the game); same with KQ3. So I found AGDI through the KQ1 remake (and the, let's say, bastard child
), and through here got to enjoy incredible offerings (including IA's great remake of KQ3, which I thoroughly enjoyed).
Now, if someone could actually expand on QG3, different story (effort-wise, anyway). QG3 sometimes reminds me of KOTOR 2 and its Restoration Project: the anthill was glaring as far as cut content goes, and even the game's release was a surprise to me at the time (QG2 ended with the "Shadows of Darkness" after all)--and it unfortunately felt tacked on, length-wise. It's much too small (especially for some character throughlines) for such a vast, rich world.
And yes, unfortunately, it's a legal system, not a justice system.
Lawyers are expensive, and don't underestimate the (IMO) underhanded practice of miring things in procedure to drag things out and hope that the other party runs out of money and drops out or is financially forced to settle.
But the way Disney usually does it is that they claim the original story is public domain, and the complainant really just rewrote it in such a way to be able to copyright it as new, but really has no claim because Disney supposedly used the original...
Kind of like Dan Brown's argument that he didn't completely rip off Holy Blood, Holy Grail, because he produced creative work around it.
While it's true you can't copyright "factual" research, at least GK3 gave credit (even advertised the book in-game!). You may even argue that GK3 had the better story, but I'm a biased Sierra fan.