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Sat, 06 Nov 2021


What If The Era Of Video Game Mashups Is About To Begin?

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Search the Techdirt pages for the term "mashup" and you will see a metric ton of ink spilled on the topic. Most of those posts deal with the copyright implications of mashup creators, be they for music or literature. It is, frankly, a tortured landscape largely littered with the metaphorical bodies of artists creating new and interesting artwork by combining previous works to create something new. Music is the easiest entry point for those not in the know. Take the music from one song and lyrical output from another, put them together, and you get something new and interesting. When done well, the results are mind-blowing. As are the constant attacks from original creators and rightsholders that seem to see such mashup work as a threat to the originals.But what about the video game space? Go poke around for terms like "video game mashup" and you'll get plenty of results, but all of them discussing theoretical mashups. You can get a Cracked article entitled "4 Video Game Mashups Too Awesome To Exist", or a GameRant post entitled "5 Video Game Mashups That Would Blow Our Minds". Even in those headlines you get a common theme: we wish we could have these things, but they don't exist.Well, at least one does. Crusader Blade is a mashup mod combining Paradox Interactive's Crusader Kings 3 and TaleWorlds Entertainment's Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. Confused? Well, this will take some brief background.Mount & Blade puts the player in a medieval fictional world and allows them to hack and slash their way to glory, fighting battles alongside the rest of their army, with some RPG elements thrown in. The battles featuring hundreds of combatants are really the sell for the game, however. Crusader Kings 3 is a medieval grand strategy game focused on diplomacy, intrigue, relationship management, managing a family dynasty, and warring with other nearby kingdoms and realms. My listing warfare last was not coincidence. The warring part of the game is extremely barebones by modern standards, literally just showing an avatar for an army that marches and then fights to a mathematical outcome. Think of the battle sequence like one in a Civilization game. It's not an afterthought, but it's close to one.What this mod has done is make owners of both games able to seamlessly use both games to play both the grand strategy portions of Crusader Kings and conduct actual battles using Mount & Blade. Yes, seriously.

Crusader Blade is a mod that lets you directly control any battles taking place in the game by literally using a whole other video game to do it. That game is medieval combat title Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, and in the simplest sense possible, the mod works by pausing CKIII at the time of a battle, switching over to Mount & Blade so you can resolve it, then switching back again.
And here you can see the mod in action.
The comments both on Twitter and in that YouTube video can be generally sorted into two categories. The first and most prevalent can be paraphrased universally as "Oh my sweet god I want this right now!". Descriptions that this mod has created "the greatest game ever" are common.But the second category can be described as sincere concern that either Paradox Interactive or Taleworlds Entertainment firing off cease and desist letters, issuing DMCA takedowns, or otherwise taking action on the mod as some sort of copyright infringement. And those concerns are entirely understandable, given all the copyright action that has occurred over mashups in other entertainment genres.To be clear, those fears don't appear to have come true as of yet. And to continue to be clear, such actions by the game studios would be asinine. In fact, we can perhaps say that the video game industry is uniquely positioned to be fully accepting of a new video game mashup world like this should this sort of thing flourish. The reason for that is because mashups like this require the player to have copies of both games in order for it to work. In other words, this mod is likely chiefly doing two things: giving the players of each individual game a reason to buy the other and rewarding players that have already bought both.What does that sound like to you? Because to me, it sounds like an incredible way to increase sales of both games at the cost of not being the copyright fun police with their games. We'll see both if this sort of game mashup becomes more than a one-off and if the industry can stay out of its own way.

Read more here

posted at: 12:00am on 06-Nov-2021
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