Grab-itron (Fortnite) VS Graviton (NW3)

[Feralidragon]

Recently someone told me that Fortnite had introduced a new weapon which was eerily similar to another weapon I developed: Graviton from NW3.

I didn't think anything about it, because this is not a new concept... however, what caught my attention was the fact that it looked similarly (elastic beams, etc), behaved similarly and even the names were really really close to one another:
Grab-itron VS Graviton

So, either way, I tested it out and made a video about it today:

NOTE: This is NOT to say that Epic Games "stole" or was in any way inspired by this weapon in particular, not at all.

Despite the fact that Epic knew about the mod, given that 9 years passed since it was first released I doubt that they even remember the mod at all.

It's far more likely, to me at least, that they just had a very similar idea 9 years later independently, maybe even inspired by another weapon (like the HL2's Gravity Gun, which in a way played a role as an inspiration for this weapon as well), and personally I very much like their take on this kind of weapon.

Again, not an entirely new concept, it's just that the similarities between the two were too noticeable for me to ignore, so I felt like doing this video showing as much, that's all.

Either way, have fun watching.

[TankBeef]

Oh man, did they really... , wow Ferali, you just gave one more reason not to even get near that cash cow.
The graviton rocks!!! One of my favorite NW3 weapons. I love crushing bots with it. I enjoy it even more after they humiliate me in a previous match, I then fire up the NW3 just to get even.

[EvilGrins]

Frankly, I find both weapons to be derived from a well known other type weapon.

[Acoma]

lol the nw3 version is better overall and the nw3 gore makes it a thousand times more fun. not to mention you can literally nuke the universe in nali weapons 3. if they tried that in fortnite it would be a screen overlay and a noise lol

eehhhh but also arent you guys forgetting something

[esnesi]

Kinda awesome!

It always remembers me of the weapon i played in one my first Playstation games Wild 9.

Although the model isn't really visible, the features are the basically the same.

[Feralidragon]

Yeah, like I said, this type of weapon is not a new concept by itself, even in my case I was somewhat inspired by HL2's gravity gun (which has a different official name, but that's what people nicknamed it as).
Pretty much 95% of the weapons any game comes up with was inspired by some other weapon in another game, and in my case that's also true.

In this specific case however, although there are many variations of this type of weapon, most of the features here are exactly the same, down to the very name of the weapon, the bending and dragging of the beams, beam color, grabbing projectiles as a main feature, and so on, and so forth, as I have shown in the video.

But again, not saying they actually copied or took direct inspiration from it, and I actually like their version a lot to be honest, I think it's really well made and had fun trying it out by myself, but it's so damn similar that is at the very least unsettling to me.

On the other hand however, if you check out this season's trailer of Fortnite, the entire thing is a reference of the Independence Day movie, which was of course on purpose, so they do take inspiration and copy plenty things from many different places, albeit in half of them they fell short of doing them correctly (like their ping system, copied from Apex, and unlike the Apex ping system, Fortnite's is horrible to say the least, they haven't put any serious work into at all).

Either way, regardless of what the case might really be, I'm fine with it, but I did want to point it out at least.

[TankBeef]

Ok, time for "noob question". Ferali, where did those boxes come from? Is that a mod?

[Feralidragon]

No, they are already in the game, they are just box decorations.

In the Unreal Editor you can find them in the Actor browser under Decoration, namely SteelBox and WoodenBox (the first one is indestructable, the second one is breakable as shown in the video).

In-game you can spawn them with:

• summon unrealshare.steelbox
• summon unrealshare.woodenbox

but they will match your current view rotation and they will never be upright again that way, so if you want to play around with them, you can do what I did for the video: open an existing map, add a few of these there, and save the map with another name (I named mine CTF-FaceBoxes).

[TankBeef]

Thanks Ferali, you rock!!!

[Neon_Knight]

I'm surprised everyone acts shocked, since Epic and DE have a history of adding stuff to their games inspired by third party mods. Translocam, Fragball (Bombing Run) and Zoom Instagib in the UT200X games, for example. Greed in UT3 (though this also involved hiring Mysterial as part of the staff). And Inoxx has confessed developing CTF-Face inspired by a third-party Unreal map.

In fact, this trend has quite the history.

[Feralidragon]

OK... this just came to my mind, and I just did a little experiment, and typed:
fortnite "graviton"
exactly with "graviton" in double quotes for an exact match, just for the last week, and look at this:

graviton_search.jpg

At this point, I don't really know what to think, almost sounds like it was done on purpose.

---

Automatically merged

Update: I think I found their original source of inspiration for this weapon, it was perhaps Doom 3 Grabber:
https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Ionized_Plasma_Levitator

It matches more closely with the set of features the Fortnite weapon has:

• it's commonly called the "Grabber", which also resembles their given name "Grab-itron";
• it's able grab and redirect projectiles: here it matches more closely the Doom 3 weapon, since it's able to do exactly that, mine only grabs them but doesn't really redirect them;
• the beam bends in a similar way in all 3 cases;
• the Doom 3 beam is green, which matches one of the beam colors of Fortnite's weapon;
• both the Grabber and Grab-itron have infinite ammo;
• the Grabber is able to pick up smaller monsters and you're able to kill them by flinging, similarly to mine (Graviton), whereas the Grab-itron is only able to grab and pick up "stuff" (not players).

Considering that Doom 3 came out in 2004, 8 years prior to my mod release, one could assume I took inspiration from it to do the Graviton, but I didn't know this weapon at all until I did some more research today (never played the game myself).

Goes to show what I said at the start: coming up to the same ideas independently is possible and happens often.
So, if they took inspiration from any weapon or game, it's likely to be Doom 3 which although is older, it's also far more widely known, without comparison.

I will set my video to private since it doesn't make any sense anymore to be public.

[Neon_Knight]

A small search in you-know-where, and turns out there aren't tropes related to gravity weapons, the closest equivalents I could find were Gravity Master (a character with the power to manipulate gravity) and Wreaking Havok (developers showcasing the physics features of their engines... quite a lot).

Maybe I should propose that one.

[Feralidragon]

That's one of the reasons I was caught off guard.

Gravity weapons are not new, but they were always kind of unique in their own and only a few games actually did one, and each one did so with their own unique flavor.

And out of all gravity weapons there are and that I knew about, Fortnite's looked and behaved way too similarly to mine... that is, until I found the Doom 3 one, after I did some more deep digging into this, because even with all similarities, I still didn't fully believe my own weapon had anything to do with it, as NW3 is not really known at all outside of UT99, and within Epic maybe only Flak may vaguely remember it, but even then I am not sure if she does, it was too long ago.

Even within UT99 not everyone knows about it.

[Neon_Knight]

You're right! I ended Doom 3: RoE some days ago and it had a similar weapon!

For now I've opened a TLP entry with the name "Gravity-Manipulating Ability" (originally Device, but it was extended in order to count spells as well, as long as everybody can use them).