Chinese dev stole Torchlight assets, claims creator

Chinese developer EGLS stole numerous art and character assets from Torchlight developer Runic Games for its own mobile title, claims the studio’s founder.

Taking to Touch Arcade, Travis Baldree said that EGLS’s Armed Heroes Online directly ripped off its assets, voicing and sound effects from Torchlight, and said it had complained to Apple to take the game down.

“All of the monster assets and every dungeon tileset, as well as voices, and most sound effects, are direct rips from Torchlight,” said Baldree.

“We’re having to contact Apple about it, so, just a heads up – this may not be available for long.”

He added: “In fact, I didn’t see any monsters that weren’t ours. Also featured are the Lava tileset, the Sunken Temple tileset, the Black Palace tileset, the Mines tileset, and in some of their other videos, some NPCs from our town, including the child NPC.”

EGLS developer Serena Zhang fought back however, and expressed her shock at accusations of stealing assets, and claimed Baldree’s judgement was “simply untenable”.

She also said that whilst the team had taken inspiration from many other games and films, it had never stolen assets from Torchlight, and felt Baldree’s comments "rudely depcreciated" the team’s efforts.

“We guarantee that all of our models are made by us, and each mapping is drawn with our own hands,” said Zhang.

“As mentioned at the very beginning, our team got inspirations from other brilliant games and movies, but had never straightly stole assets from Torchlight. What Mr. Travis Baldree said rudely depreciated the efforts our team had devoted into the game.

“We would love to submit any documents, files and other materials related to the game development to Apple to prove ourselves if Runic insists on that we wholesale stole most of the assets from Torchlight.”