Well they had to change all of the characters and give them new lore when they were clearly based on designs from OG Warcraft 3. I grew up playing a lot of Warcraft 3 as a young kid, only in vanilla game modes though and offline, so when I started randomly playing DOTA 2 on launch with friends in highschool, I thought it was so neat to see so many characters I recognized as being derived from/based of Warcraft 3 characters I used to play.
Though I don't think the playable characters in the original Dota mod were the same as the characters that used the same character model in the story, like they were renamed with altered abilities, I could still tell they came from Warcraft 3 nonetheless.
I could tell Gyrocopter was originally the Dwarven Flying unit, that Omni Knight was the human paladin, Drow Ranger was a night elf archer, Nature's prophet was a night elf druid, Crystal Maiden was that female mage (Jane or whoever? I don't remember most names from W3, it's been so long) who could summon the water minion, morphing was the water minion as a standalone character, Abbadon was the Lich King etc.
But yeah, they defintely couldn't have them as the same as the Warcraft 3 characters, but I do think the Dota characters were already altered as is. To be safe though, they even made them different from that.
Sure, I think am surprised a title as generic as "Wind Runner" and its possible valve coulda stuck to their guns and won, but if blizzard pushed on it, its just better to change it
I think it's because the name becomes less generic depending on the traits you give the character. Like "Wind Runner" on it's own is generic, but if both characters with that name are long-haired elven women who wear hoods and practice archery in a fantasy setting... you're starting to hit infringement territory.
I remember there being a bunch of similar issues around comic book characters in the 90s. I think there was a Liefeld character "inspired by" Captain America, and the homage was so close that a court ruled he couldn't depict the character throwing his shield.
It was a little more than just the characters looking similar. Rob had just finished a captain America run before he went off to make his own stuff under "Awesome comics". Marvel alleged he was improperly carrying over stuff from his time at marvel and writing Captain America. He also had to scrap his original idea, a character named Agent America, and instead go find and buy the rights to use another character with similar themes called Fighting American.
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u/Arstulex 8h ago
Valve did have to change the names of some characters (like Windrunner becoming Windranger) but that was just due to those being Warcraft characters.