This sort of thing is always kinda tough to draw an exact line on. A general rule of thumb is: Could what I'm making be confused for something else easily by the intended audience? Its how warcraft and starcraft can exist beside warhammer and warhammer: 40k without being copyright violations, while say, some of the old…
My nostalgia has been really irking me recently to make me ask this question for the less than 1% chance that it would ever come up in the future. How far can you take (or more so expand on / be inspired by) another games ideas before it's considered copyrighted? Personally I never really payed attention to this but there…
Since you mention naming and design. An interesting example would be dota and dota2. Dota originally being a warcraft3 mod and using the warcraft 3 heroes/names/some spells. Hero models: all of the hero models are basicly copied from the original designs, wich are all warcraft3 models. I probably wouldn't advice this,…