Unfortunately games of this nature draw inspiration and ideas from others, its like a waltz where every one is steping on each others toes, the Genre demands certain things and many of these things are cliche, this is not however a bad thing, what has to be done is take thsoe cliches and give them a new twist. Originality in MMORPG\'s is a damn hard thing to come up with especialy when you consider just how many of them there are in the makeing as of today.
Yes cat people are not nothing new and EQ did (well didnt realy if you consider Furrcadia had Cat people ages back) have the Vah shir first, but considering that Ive had ideas for a Cat anthro species for my own project for 14 years then hey I could say EQ and PS took my idea but I dont, because the idea is not new but my take on it isnt the same they have.
Ground breaking ideas are hard to come by, especialy when a genre of game matures, how many new variatants can you think up for First person shooters that dont exist yet?... not many I can tell you. Another example is take a look at the first designs for cars over 100 years ago and look at the designs for Cars in our modern times, the older the concept the less original the new designs.
Consumers prefer, well from my own experiance with people in other MMORPG\'s is that they like feeling comfortable, and cliches or familiar things give this comfort, people dont like radical changes (why else has such concepts as perma death and the like alwasy been sidelined in game developement), unfortunatly this pandering to the mass market consumer is more a harmfull thing than the fan game made for those that enjoy the new concepts. Just look at the manufactured demographicly sound Pop music industry... unfortuantly, if your not a Britteny spears(EverQuest) of the online RPG industry the average mindless consumer keeps you at arms length. Although to be blunt this tends to be a attitude of the average american consumer, the european counter parts in both developer and consumer tend to be alot more adventuorse (and hence the more interesting the game) in there products.
PS has many ideas that are in my mind original and unique to it, the Kran for instance are a PS first as far as player usable races go, Talad had the idea prior to games such as DaoC (the midgard trolls) and 2 other games (forgotten there titles) that have Rock based creatures as playable races. However these races have already been put into the aformentioned completed games. and many that come to PS will be marked by this lack of knowledge and say, \"Hey there copying the idea from DaoC\", unfortunatly that cant be helped.
I my self have had and developed many new Ideas for races, gameplay concepts and characters and teh like for my own project that have subseqeuntly been designed and used in commercial games. While I might feel mildly annoyed at them being the first to get the idea out into solid form, this can not be helped, especialy if i dont put that idea out on teh web to show i thought of it, or layed claim to it first.
Above all you cant realy mar a game for a few points of unoriginality, it happens. but a games ideas and premessis taken as a whole are what make it original, not teh one or two parts that might be modeled on some one elses quicker to the mark ideas.
