Amused Geeks

Excuse the hyphens.

I’m constantly hearing all of this great news related to gaming and such that happens in Japan, but for some reason it hardly ever seems to show up on the major gaming news sites until well after the fact, if at all, so I figure I’ll start posting some of it to see if there is any interest.

This time a Japanese Web-based (but supposedly developed in China) mmorpg called “Destare” apparently run by a company called Smith & Mobile Japan Inc. (who apparently also develop for some of the big mobile phone companies here in Japan) which was apparently using screenshots directly lifted from Bethesda Softworks’ Oblivion as backgrounds for their game.

This doesn’t appear to be an “inspired by” or based on type of deal, but actually straight lifting of images from Oblivion for use in the game.

This was originally reported on in the game’s forum (site and post in Japanese obviously, screenshot posted below in case the post goes missing or for those who can’t view the text for whatever reason), and then spread around the Japanese gaming blog world back in April. It seems there was a sudden “maintenance” downtime after the post, and the images apparently went missing from the game soon after.

Loose translation for the Japanese impaired:

http://www1.axfc.net/uploader/Img/so/80816.jpg
The left are screenshots of exploration scenes from the game and the right are the original images from The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion.

From top to bottom
The water area is Fort Roedeck
The town is TalosPlaza
And the snow area is Apple-Watch

I asked a friend who was into Oblivion to check for me and he found the original images in an hour.
Seems the final exploration images were changed, but others are still there…

The original screen capture for reference, also hilariously shows a link to the Twitter account of the company’s public relations manager immediately to the left of the post, comedically and sarcastically mentioned in the comments, “I wonder if public relations manager Shimizu is the one who’s going to have to fix it?”

Apparently some other images in the game may have been “borrowed” from other sources as well. Have a look through the Google image results for the game’s name in Japanese.