Seeing as Lost Ark came out after Shadowlands launched I have high doubts that it was that what which the devs copied. At best they got the idea from Final Fantasy 14’s tower of the dead.
They all copy from each other. Not uncommon and wow has always taken everything in lore from real life stories and mythology. Just look at the titan keepers, they are all copies of Norse gods.
It came out in the west after shadowlands. Otherwise it’s a pretty old game. Like more than 4-5 years. Back in my old mmo people were talking about waiting on its western release. They had a Russian server for a few years and there was even a fan translation from Russian to English until people got access to the western release.
Soo it’s very much possible they copied things over, considering it was a pretty big mmo.
Even Everquest had the Tower of Frozen Shadow in the Velious expansion, with seven layers if I remember correctly, that you unlocked layer by layer with keys from bosses. I now wonder where these shadowy towers started, it’s apparently a thing
If games werent allowed to draw inspiration from eachother, we would have like 5 genres and one game in each genre. Why do People always get hung up on who stole what from where. They all do it and they always have, thats how the industry evolves.
Like many other things, I remember the MMO-craze during the 00’s, Blizzard literally absorbed all these other MMO “WoW killers”, copied alot of features from them and then they died x).
Those are the only 2 I ever came across with those things. I don’t play “infinite rogue” like dungeon games. Otherwise I would have more information to pull from
Tower of The Damned type minigames in an MMO is not new. FF14 did it, evidently Lost ark did it (never played it) but it’s not like either game invented it, they borrowed it from rogue-likes, which have been around since the 80’s. Each MMO can utilize it in their own way to make it unique
