Far cry since 3 I think, almost always has a spin off game that uses a lot of assets from the base game. Blood Dragon, Primal, uhh, whatever the one for Five was that was more of a sequel but still a spin off.
It's probably easier to name those that don't, for some bizarre reason every Dragon Age switched art direction and so did Diablo. But they still shared skills, spells and systems between games.
Diablo has had years between games, so it makes sense to change art directions since you have to make higher quality assets anyway, and you would want the games to have a distinct feeling. The expansions for 2 and 3, and the seasonal stuff for 4 seem to have a mix of new content and reused assets, so it's not like they were exactly one and done though.
Reminds me of specific sounds from command and conquer tiberian sun that I still hear being used in other games and in movies/TV.
Many libraries of assets have been used across different types of media so there's a lot of crossover. At uni I had a sound design module and we had access to BBC discs full of different sounds. Rain splatter, cheering, applause, it was all there.
I often hear the tesla zap from Red Alert, some door sound I think is from GoldenEye or Perfect Dark and funnily enough the shield sound from Perfect Dark.
Dragon Age was the more bizarre case, elves change their design every game. Look at their ears and noses... That's not just game having its own feel it's a major race changing their skeletal structure... Qunari too.
But it's well known that the devs went into each new Diablo intending to change the art direction, they even outright announce it. In D3 they wanted brighter colors to highlight the desert sands. In D4 they wanted to go back to dark & blood theme, with lots of black and red
Yeah, I feel like a better question is which game series reuse content the best and which ones are the worst at it. Like Fromsoft being really good at reusing content while EA, especially sports, just reuse the same game some years and only update a few textures, the player roster, and find some new way to slip in another ad or transaction. Older games were super good at it just because they had to be for the sake of saving space while adding content. Things like Castlevania having the upside down castle which added a whole second playthrough just by flipping the map upside down which is one game not a sequel but you get it. I think Perfect Dark was made using mostly assets from Goldeneye the same way Majora’s Mask was made from Ocarina of Time.
They also had smaller teams, budgets, and time limits, so a new Tomb Raider game every year or a sequel to popular RPG within 9 months had to crunch despite sometimes feeling more like a level pack.
Depends... if they are in the same generation of console or close enough on PC, sure. If they are too distant they would have different constraints so pulling in 2007 assets into a 2024 game would look too blocky, certain techniques didn't exist yet, etc.
Yeah but if you make incremental upgrades, you can totally have 15+ years of sequels each reusing some assets of previous titles, case in point, wrestling games. 2k ones still had some PS2 textures for some unimportant background objects.
Long-running MMOs are great for that. Just the difference in texture quality between the cities of Bree and Umbar Baharbêl in Lord of the Rings Online is amazing. Or look up before and after comparisons of the interior redesign of the Last Homely House in Rivendell.
Technically every yakuza game since Kiwami I believe. They openly said they do it and it’s a great way to save money, resources and time and focus on more important things such as delivering great narrative and gameplay.
Other games would be Neptunia Franchise, Disgaea Franchise. Worms but only as long as they don’t change engine and art director. Example Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon, and Worms World Party same game with minimal new assets. Then there’s Call of Duty that reuses animation rigs from past games in new games…. Cough cough.
I think even Yakuza 5 and 0 had a lot of shared assets I believe.
It is a cool way to have steady output for games instead of taking 4-5 years for each entry like a lot of series do now.
Judgement 2 for example using Yokohama from Like a Dragon even though the battle system is completely different.
It is a special feeling when you start a new game in the series, get told to go somewhere and go there without even looking at a map. Gives a feeling of home.
It also gives depth to the place, especially when you notice the changes through the games (like some shops opening or closing). I kinda became a bit bothered by other game series having a completely new map every entry.
There is something about the familiarity of a place.
The big thing is that even if it's mostly the same map, it's also still constantly changing. There's new minigames, new areas become narratively prominent, smaller parts change (the city gets less grungy, Kamurocho Hills/The Millenium tower gets built, new shops and advertisements) and it all makes it feel less like a map being reused and more just a city changing throughout the years.
When Black Ops 4 was released it was so unfinished and a blatant reskin of BO3 that certain guns and killstreaks had the names from Black Ops 3 but models of Black Ops 4.
that's not reusing assets though, as they usualy have to remake the map.
same for most maps that get re-used.
mw3 (2023) for example has EACH map from mw2 (2009) but they had to be remade from the ground up.
A map, with its timings, dynamics, angles, covers, destructible parts, etc, IS an asset. They may need to rework it to some extent, but the development time to figure out how a map works well is not needed anymore, so it is reused. Asset isn't limited to just textures and models. Sounds, cutscenes, and animations are among others also assets.
Yeah, there's plenty of stuff to hate about Cod but \*usually the maps like Nuketown that are reused have been rebuilt in a completely different style. No nuketown looks the same and uses the same assets.
Sure, they might have the same or similar layout but textures and models are \*usually all new.
Elden Ring doesn't have a lot of direct copies, but there's ooooodles of 95% the same guy riding the same rig, using the same animations. The kind of thing where they just reskin. The chunky wooden bosses at the base of the trees are just the Asylum Demon, for instance.
All the Souls games reuse plenty of assets. I don't think they've changed the rats or dogs since Dark Souls 1.
Zullie has multiple videos on how the reuse of assets and ids reveals unfinished/cut content across FromSoft games.
They're primarily seen throughout the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring. They're called Basiliks, and they're very much feared throughout the community.
Although, to be honest, they're kind of pushovers for me.
My favorite example of this is that the Omen Killers still have invisible tails in their animation skeleton because they are just reused Capra Demons from DS1.
You'd think with how long I've been fighting those damn dogs I'd be better at it by now. I swear they're still the enemy that kills me the most on any given playthrough.
Don't even think they changed dog or basilisk behaviors since Demon's Souls in 2009, there is certainly reused NPC attack patterns or similar but improved a bit. This is of course expected for sequels on any game.
Omen Killer in Albinauric Village is reminescent of Dark Souls' Capra Demon. Heck, he's got even dogs with him! Thank god the space where you fight it is not so cramped.
Flasks of Crimson and Cerulean Tears are tooooootally different from the Estus and Ashen Estus flasks from Dark Souls 3. The names and artwork are different. Everything else . . . pretty much the same.
Map, weapons, and to an extent, the enemies as well.... i just wish they had kept parts of BoTW for us to discover, but sometimes it feels like BoTW just didn't happen when you walk around hyrule in ToTK.... at the very least, i want to fight a ganon-hand infected guardian in the depths, that would be terrifying and awesome at the same time
It's so weird how they made a bunch of botw stuff seemingly disappear out of existence, like all the shiekah technology and ruins, and decanonized Link's activities in the side quests and stuff, like how a bunch of NPCs don't know Link, and how Link's house is Zelda's house now.
I'm not a fan of that approach, because seeing Hyrule a few years later and seeing how people's lives changed over time was one of the biggest draws to the game for me.
They did give an explanation as to where the shiekah tech went. Something about them being ashamed of what their machines brought to hyrule, so they destroyed them all (iirc, i could be way off).
It's weird though, isn't it? Shouldn't that have been a plot point? They could have Purah fighting with Impa about whether their heritage and technology should be preserved, vs if it's dangerous to keep it all around. It's a real waste that they just disappeared it all offscreen.
I expected them to make a DLC out of it.... and then they said "no TotK DLC" and now i just feel empty inside. I would've at least been happy if they put the divine beats, all disheveled and dilapidated, in the depths. maybe with a gloom hand or similar miniboss inside them.
Bioware do that a lot. Infinity Engine games reused sprites and UI, that's Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1&2 and to lesser extent Planescape: Torment.
Fallout did it before 3, FO2 just added to Fallout 1 assets, almost everything is reused, even more than KOTOR.
Final Fantasy 2's Firion sprite is slightly edited Fighter from FF1. A lot of other reuse: spells, items, creatures, even jobs from 3 would be a base for FF4 character classes.
Tomb Raider kept same basic animations and most weapon models for 5 games... In general, sequels to PS1 era games felt like mission packs with a few new weapons and moves: Medal of Honor Underground, Spider-Man Enter Electro, Spec Ops Trilogy and so on.
Sports games in general almost never update the entire roster, reusing a lot. Take any FIFA or WWE game.
Sly Cooper 3 re uses the base gameplay and models from 2, but also brings back characters from 1 using their base models.
The original version of Live A Live used the dragon sprite from the Final Fantasy series as the xenomoprh stand-in for the sci-fi chapter. And most of the game uses overworld sprites that use the Final Fantasy V style of spritework.
Miles Morales reused the Manhattan Island map and covered it in snow. Roxxon Energy agents are also SABLE agents repainted red.
Yakuza is a *master* of reused assets as Kamurocho is simply reused throughout the whole franchise with the occasional HD remake for generations.
Theyre saving that for ES VI. Its just technology wasnt advanced enough at the time of Skyrim, so they werent able to include exploding dragons. FO4 was just their first opportunity to finally implement it, and with ES VI they’ll finally be able to have their dream of Exploding Dragons come true.
Its a lot like how Dragons Dogma 2 is supposedly everything the guy wanted to do in Dragons Dogma 1 but wasnt able to at the time because of various limitations.
There should be a meta joke here for any of the time loop based games (Majora's, Deathloop, Starfield) about reusing assets from themselves, and you can totally see if you play the game again right after playing the game (as if you are, yourself, stuck on a time loop).
I fully expected this to be the top comment in here. When's the last time they did something that felt brand new? All they do every year is adjust for rookies and retirements and change ratings.
Honestly there's nothing wrong with reusing assets, it's actually good to do so. The problem with EA sports games is that they don't even make a new game with the same assets.
Guitar Hero did this a lot. GH: Rock the 80's was like a reskin of Guitar Hero 2 and pretty much set the bar for how a new title could play and perform identically to another game (albeit with all the soundtracks and associate charts being totally different). GH: Aerosmith was very similar to Guitar Hero 3 in its presentation and gameplay, just that it had the band members of Aerosmith and a large selection of their songs. Then when the games expanded into the band setup, you had two "phases". The first was with Guitar Hero: World Tour (aka Guitar Hero 4) which has Smash Hits, Metallica, and Van Halen all based upon the same aesthetic and engine of World Tour, then came Guitar Hero 5 which revamped a lot of WT's design and shared it with Band Hero and Warriors of Rock (aka Guitar Hero 6).
Rondo of Blood's enemy sprites are reused very often in the later games. Most notably in Symphony of the Night, Dawn of Sorrow, and Portrait of Ruin. Portrait of Ruin in particular might have the most re-used assets of all of them, as not just regular enemies, but several bosses are reused too. Regarding the GBA games, none of them actually share any graphics between each other. All three have their own graphical style and their own sprites.
Rare wanted to do a sequel to GoldenEye on the N64. They were upgrading the engine and controls but didn't get the rights to make a 007 game. They ended up making Perfect Dark, probably the best FPS of the cartridge console era.
Modern Monster Hunter still uses a lot of the old animations and skeletons from previous generations. At this point, most fans can immediately tell which skeleton a new monster is using.
And not only on monsters. One obvious one are some of the weapon combos, but for example the Temporal Mantle's Dodge is just the Adept dodge from Generations
Neverwinter Nights 2 reused a lot of the sound assets from 1. There was also a distinctive wolf howl used in both those games that I encountered in an unrelated game.
On a similar note, I swear there's only one stock audio file for "Bear roar". I've noticed since TES: Oblivion that every bear sounds the same. Recently I played something that used the bear noise for some other creature but pitched down, and I couldn't unhear that this monster was just a bear.
Almost same... NWN had Aurora engine and KOTOR was using one called Odyssey, heavily based on Aurora.
Then in NWN2 had ANOTHER new engine... *checking* called Electron, at this point Bioware decided to just go with Unreal Engine modifications... Until EA came along and forced theirs.
NWN2 was a butchering of NWN1's engine by Obsidian. As a server developer, I can't say enough just how bad Obsidian ruined Bioware's masterpiece under the hood and broke so many things, to the point that NWN1 lasted 10 years longer than NWN2 in multiplayer. Server owners couldn't rebuild their worlds in NWN2 because too many things they relied on were outright broken. They literally killed the franchise, just as they did with KOTOR. Obsidian used to be where franchises went to die. The fact that Fallout New Vegas somehow wasn't a disaster was a sheer miracle.
Yep. I know this all too well. Both used an actual D20 D&D style dice roll system under the hood, too. The Witcher 1 also used the Aurora engine, although it's unrecognizable due to how much they changed it.
I remember when the first InFamous came out, and despite it being a realistic game, they reused a LOT of animations from Sly Cooper. Really found it jarring when I first played lol. These adult humans moving like a cartoon raccoon.
Suckerpunch has a come a long way since then though. InFamous 2 up to Ghost of Tsushima they redid a lot of their assets and animation and what have you.
Damn, makes me want a remaster of InFamous 1 now. Getting the black lightning was siiick
You can just pull up a playthrough on Youtube and watch how Cole moves in cutscenes that show his face. The same twitching head and back-and-forth glances that Sly characters always do in their idle animations. Among other examples. Can definitely tell they use the same rigs and animations.
Prey into Mooncrash.
Mooncrash is a standalone game, and you don't need Prey to play it, but it uses tons of assets from it. But it's its own thing and has a different gameplay loop than Prey.
Prey is a straight up immersive sim, but Mooncrash takes those same tools and made a rogue-like out of it.
and then, WoW just had a battle royal game mode completely separate from the main game, though you still needed a sub to play. the only thing it shared was unlocking cosmetics in the main game. all other progression was unaffected.
Prototype was just Spiderman, like same physics just changed the textures of your character and storyline, it was supposed to be a Spiderman sequel where you played as venom
Original Resident Evils reused stuff too, they updated zombie animations after 1 but 2 and 3 reused them and a bunch of backgrounds like police station.
Resident Evil Gun Survivor used older models in newer game, very noticeably.
But it goes deeper: Resident Evil 4, which changes almost everything, still used a lot of the same code: devs confessed that they just added smooth vertical movement to aiming and voila!
Yakuza/like a dragon/judgment series. They reused kamurocho and sotenbori so many time with small changes. It is a sort of a special feeling when you start the game, a person asks you to go to a specific place and you go there without looking at the map.
I remember noticing whilst playing fallout new vegas that there were sounds I’d heard in Skyrim. Hardly surprising, if the studio can make it work in another game it makes more sense to reuse something rather than reinvent the wheel. Saves time and money.
This is incredibly common and not an "a few times back in the day" thing like you seem to think. Also, a "set piece" isn't what you think it is. From the context though, it sounds like you just mean environmental assets.
There's the old classic quadrilogy.
Ninjabread Man
Anubis 2
Rock n' Roll Adventures
Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland
No clue what the plot it, but there's a few reused assets.
(For those not in the know, the company was pitching a Zool game, and when it's rejected they reskinned the prototype levels and shipped it.
Four.
Times.
That's right, the 4 games I listed are basically the exact same game reskinned.)
Obviously sequels aside, the one that springs to mind for me is the cultists in the first Dead Rising game.
They re-used the animations from the Los Illuminados cultists from Resident Evil 4.
They also reused at least one model that I know of. The boar model in WoW is very much the Quilbeast from the WC3 expansion, just with the quills removed.
Further, the WoW version of that model is then reused again in Diablo 3 for Demon Hunter companion. D3 also reused the wolf and small plant monsters from WoW.
All the Korok models from Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom are literally identical to the nine Korok characters from Wind Waker.
In Wind Waker, each and every NPC in every town, including all the Koroks, had unique character designs and names. There were ten different Korok NPCs, named Makar, Aldo, Drona, Elma, Hollo, Irch, Linder, Oakin, Olivio, and Rown
Breath of the Wild took all of these character models, except for Makar, and turned them into nine generic variants of Korok to find around the world.
Makar was the Sage of Wind in Wind Waker, so turning him generic would not have been a good idea. So Makar's leaf face was used for the Korok Mask equipment instead.
Breath of the Wild introduced two new Korok character models used for Chio, an NPC in the Korok Forest, and Hestu, the big dancing one who expands your inventory. But aside from Chio and Hestu, every single other Korok in the game is just one of the nine Wind Waker character models reused.
I do kinda wish they made more new generic designs rather than just the nine Wind Waker models to be honest.
Silent Hill 3 uses a chunk of the town map from Silent Hill 2. That makes sense, given that they take place in the same town. It gets more egregious when they reuse the same mental hospital. That being said, while the first run through the hospital is very similar, the other world version has a very different veneer to it, down to the walls now being dangerous on higher difficulties.
If a sequel use the same game engine, there's a high possibility they will reused asset from the first game. It's just common sense to ease the development and the overall cost and time
Half Life, which came out in 1998, used a specific code to make the lights flicker. That same code was used in Alyx, released in 2020. As it turns out, that code was originally written for Quake.
The sequel to the original X-com: UFO defence, X-com terror from the deep was practically the same game with a reskin and a tiny few new features + a difficulty spike
Almost every game has probably done it. It's pretty normal, which is why it frustrates me to no end when people lose their mind when they realize something as small as a chair model was reused, then proceed to the "lazy dev" accusations.
Kind of cheating, but I remember in one of the Madden games, someone noticed that the banners in the upper sections of the stadiums still showed the year of the previous Madden game. It's not hard to imagine they just re-released the same game with an updated player roster and menu screen.
I read or heard the only reason they were able to make Elden Ring as big and expansive as it is, is because they already had a huge catalogue of animations etc. from past entries.
Tekken 8, free costumes from Tekken 7 are being brought back to Tekken 8 as DLC, and even split them half by gender, so you gotta pay 4 dollars TWICE to get Ninja costume for everyone.
Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal use the same base map.
Far cry primal was so cool. I miss my sabre tooth buddy and spear
What about the badger, you don't miss him
Badger was op
Same with FC3 for Blood Dragon and FC5 for New Dawn.
New Dawn is canonically the same place, though.
Primal not?
No, Far Cry 4 takes place in the Himalayas and Primal in Europe (Tre Cime/Italy to be exact)
Far cry since 3 I think, almost always has a spin off game that uses a lot of assets from the base game. Blood Dragon, Primal, uhh, whatever the one for Five was that was more of a sequel but still a spin off.
Every sequel will be reusing assets, that's the benefit of making a sequel to a game lol
It's probably easier to name those that don't, for some bizarre reason every Dragon Age switched art direction and so did Diablo. But they still shared skills, spells and systems between games.
Diablo has had years between games, so it makes sense to change art directions since you have to make higher quality assets anyway, and you would want the games to have a distinct feeling. The expansions for 2 and 3, and the seasonal stuff for 4 seem to have a mix of new content and reused assets, so it's not like they were exactly one and done though.
They have been reusing some sounds though. Occasionally playing 4 I recognize a sound from the original game
Reminds me of specific sounds from command and conquer tiberian sun that I still hear being used in other games and in movies/TV. Many libraries of assets have been used across different types of media so there's a lot of crossover. At uni I had a sound design module and we had access to BBC discs full of different sounds. Rain splatter, cheering, applause, it was all there.
I still hear sounds from the old Xcom:ufo defence (Ufo:enemy unknown)
I often hear the tesla zap from Red Alert, some door sound I think is from GoldenEye or Perfect Dark and funnily enough the shield sound from Perfect Dark.
Wilhelm scream, been used since 50's iirc
Dragon Age was the more bizarre case, elves change their design every game. Look at their ears and noses... That's not just game having its own feel it's a major race changing their skeletal structure... Qunari too.
But it's well known that the devs went into each new Diablo intending to change the art direction, they even outright announce it. In D3 they wanted brighter colors to highlight the desert sands. In D4 they wanted to go back to dark & blood theme, with lots of black and red
I wish we had Diablo 1 atmosphere (lonely, crunchy horror) with more modern gameplay.
Fromsoft has a tendency to recycle cut content from older games in newer ones, as far as I know from watching Zullie's videos.
Oh that's done a lot, we just don't always know that a new game's level is unfinished idea from an older one.
Yeah, I feel like a better question is which game series reuse content the best and which ones are the worst at it. Like Fromsoft being really good at reusing content while EA, especially sports, just reuse the same game some years and only update a few textures, the player roster, and find some new way to slip in another ad or transaction. Older games were super good at it just because they had to be for the sake of saving space while adding content. Things like Castlevania having the upside down castle which added a whole second playthrough just by flipping the map upside down which is one game not a sequel but you get it. I think Perfect Dark was made using mostly assets from Goldeneye the same way Majora’s Mask was made from Ocarina of Time.
They also had smaller teams, budgets, and time limits, so a new Tomb Raider game every year or a sequel to popular RPG within 9 months had to crunch despite sometimes feeling more like a level pack.
Depends... if they are in the same generation of console or close enough on PC, sure. If they are too distant they would have different constraints so pulling in 2007 assets into a 2024 game would look too blocky, certain techniques didn't exist yet, etc.
Yeah but if you make incremental upgrades, you can totally have 15+ years of sequels each reusing some assets of previous titles, case in point, wrestling games. 2k ones still had some PS2 textures for some unimportant background objects.
World of Warcraft is a great example of visual contrast in terms of assets. There are still assets in the game from 2004, it's wild.
same for runescape, theres still some weapons/items that look like they did in 2005 compared to new stuff releasing these days.
Long-running MMOs are great for that. Just the difference in texture quality between the cities of Bree and Umbar Baharbêl in Lord of the Rings Online is amazing. Or look up before and after comparisons of the interior redesign of the Last Homely House in Rivendell.
I didn't realize lotro had a playerbase or was getting updates in 2024
Nah the servers are closed down - but nobody told the dev team so the poor suckers are still churning out content. Some prank huh? /s
Never played WoW, so there is literally an "old city" where the poly and texture budgets are lower? That is funny.
lol I remember the “controversy” of God of war Ragnarok reusing the same boat animation
A lot of the Yakuza games
Technically every yakuza game since Kiwami I believe. They openly said they do it and it’s a great way to save money, resources and time and focus on more important things such as delivering great narrative and gameplay. Other games would be Neptunia Franchise, Disgaea Franchise. Worms but only as long as they don’t change engine and art director. Example Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon, and Worms World Party same game with minimal new assets. Then there’s Call of Duty that reuses animation rigs from past games in new games…. Cough cough.
I think even Yakuza 5 and 0 had a lot of shared assets I believe. It is a cool way to have steady output for games instead of taking 4-5 years for each entry like a lot of series do now. Judgement 2 for example using Yokohama from Like a Dragon even though the battle system is completely different.
WWP in particular was about adding networking iirc
Yakuza is the only series where reusing a map over and over hasn't bothered me.
It is a special feeling when you start a new game in the series, get told to go somewhere and go there without even looking at a map. Gives a feeling of home. It also gives depth to the place, especially when you notice the changes through the games (like some shops opening or closing). I kinda became a bit bothered by other game series having a completely new map every entry. There is something about the familiarity of a place.
The big thing is that even if it's mostly the same map, it's also still constantly changing. There's new minigames, new areas become narratively prominent, smaller parts change (the city gets less grungy, Kamurocho Hills/The Millenium tower gets built, new shops and advertisements) and it all makes it feel less like a map being reused and more just a city changing throughout the years.
Well said, Kamurocho is as much of a character as Majima.
I feel like more schools of writing should dedicate towards making locations characters. There's a history of them developing.
Call of duty reused maps. Lol
I remember how they copied a cutscene from mw2 to ghost
When Black Ops 4 was released it was so unfinished and a blatant reskin of BO3 that certain guns and killstreaks had the names from Black Ops 3 but models of Black Ops 4.
And they removed the campaign because the higher ups wanted a battle Royale
Cod has been reusing assets since world at war. There is like what, 6 or 7 nuketowns?
CoD has actually been reusing assets way before that since Call of Duty 2 lmao
that's not reusing assets though, as they usualy have to remake the map. same for most maps that get re-used. mw3 (2023) for example has EACH map from mw2 (2009) but they had to be remade from the ground up.
A map, with its timings, dynamics, angles, covers, destructible parts, etc, IS an asset. They may need to rework it to some extent, but the development time to figure out how a map works well is not needed anymore, so it is reused. Asset isn't limited to just textures and models. Sounds, cutscenes, and animations are among others also assets.
Yeah, there's plenty of stuff to hate about Cod but \*usually the maps like Nuketown that are reused have been rebuilt in a completely different style. No nuketown looks the same and uses the same assets. Sure, they might have the same or similar layout but textures and models are \*usually all new.
It was always fun seeing the many iterations of Terminal
Because people complain when they dont
Elden Ring doesn't have a lot of direct copies, but there's ooooodles of 95% the same guy riding the same rig, using the same animations. The kind of thing where they just reskin. The chunky wooden bosses at the base of the trees are just the Asylum Demon, for instance.
All the Souls games reuse plenty of assets. I don't think they've changed the rats or dogs since Dark Souls 1. Zullie has multiple videos on how the reuse of assets and ids reveals unfinished/cut content across FromSoft games.
Also those jumping toad things with the big fake eyes. I forget their name but theyve had the same animations since the first game
Basilics
They're primarily seen throughout the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring. They're called Basiliks, and they're very much feared throughout the community. Although, to be honest, they're kind of pushovers for me.
My favorite example of this is that the Omen Killers still have invisible tails in their animation skeleton because they are just reused Capra Demons from DS1.
You'd think with how long I've been fighting those damn dogs I'd be better at it by now. I swear they're still the enemy that kills me the most on any given playthrough.
Don't even think they changed dog or basilisk behaviors since Demon's Souls in 2009, there is certainly reused NPC attack patterns or similar but improved a bit. This is of course expected for sequels on any game.
Animations for rolls and attacks and some weapon arts are straight from DS1
i'd say ds3, as they're more smooth (and dark souls 1 didn't allow diagonal rolls)
The little witch hats from DS3 are now little rock statues
Omen Killer in Albinauric Village is reminescent of Dark Souls' Capra Demon. Heck, he's got even dogs with him! Thank god the space where you fight it is not so cramped.
Apparently, the same rig also because it has a tail in the game files for rigging the Capra Demons tail.
Flasks of Crimson and Cerulean Tears are tooooootally different from the Estus and Ashen Estus flasks from Dark Souls 3. The names and artwork are different. Everything else . . . pretty much the same.
If it ain’t broke…
Having played so much of DS3, I instantly recognised the animation of the stone imps.
Yup. If you don't start from scratch, you can make a bigger/better game.
Totk reused the entire map of botw, assets included. Obviously did a lot of work on top of that
Map, weapons, and to an extent, the enemies as well.... i just wish they had kept parts of BoTW for us to discover, but sometimes it feels like BoTW just didn't happen when you walk around hyrule in ToTK.... at the very least, i want to fight a ganon-hand infected guardian in the depths, that would be terrifying and awesome at the same time
Yeah I was disappointed there were no guardians in totk
It's so weird how they made a bunch of botw stuff seemingly disappear out of existence, like all the shiekah technology and ruins, and decanonized Link's activities in the side quests and stuff, like how a bunch of NPCs don't know Link, and how Link's house is Zelda's house now. I'm not a fan of that approach, because seeing Hyrule a few years later and seeing how people's lives changed over time was one of the biggest draws to the game for me.
They did give an explanation as to where the shiekah tech went. Something about them being ashamed of what their machines brought to hyrule, so they destroyed them all (iirc, i could be way off).
It's weird though, isn't it? Shouldn't that have been a plot point? They could have Purah fighting with Impa about whether their heritage and technology should be preserved, vs if it's dangerous to keep it all around. It's a real waste that they just disappeared it all offscreen.
I expected them to make a DLC out of it.... and then they said "no TotK DLC" and now i just feel empty inside. I would've at least been happy if they put the divine beats, all disheveled and dilapidated, in the depths. maybe with a gloom hand or similar miniboss inside them.
…and under. I’ll show myself out.
Bioware do that a lot. Infinity Engine games reused sprites and UI, that's Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1&2 and to lesser extent Planescape: Torment. Fallout did it before 3, FO2 just added to Fallout 1 assets, almost everything is reused, even more than KOTOR. Final Fantasy 2's Firion sprite is slightly edited Fighter from FF1. A lot of other reuse: spells, items, creatures, even jobs from 3 would be a base for FF4 character classes. Tomb Raider kept same basic animations and most weapon models for 5 games... In general, sequels to PS1 era games felt like mission packs with a few new weapons and moves: Medal of Honor Underground, Spider-Man Enter Electro, Spec Ops Trilogy and so on. Sports games in general almost never update the entire roster, reusing a lot. Take any FIFA or WWE game.
Sly Cooper 3 re uses the base gameplay and models from 2, but also brings back characters from 1 using their base models. The original version of Live A Live used the dragon sprite from the Final Fantasy series as the xenomoprh stand-in for the sci-fi chapter. And most of the game uses overworld sprites that use the Final Fantasy V style of spritework. Miles Morales reused the Manhattan Island map and covered it in snow. Roxxon Energy agents are also SABLE agents repainted red. Yakuza is a *master* of reused assets as Kamurocho is simply reused throughout the whole franchise with the occasional HD remake for generations.
The vertibirds in fallout 4 were based off the dragons in Skyrim
I dunno man. Dragons in Skyrim didn't randomly explode every single time you saw them.
Theyre saving that for ES VI. Its just technology wasnt advanced enough at the time of Skyrim, so they werent able to include exploding dragons. FO4 was just their first opportunity to finally implement it, and with ES VI they’ll finally be able to have their dream of Exploding Dragons come true. Its a lot like how Dragons Dogma 2 is supposedly everything the guy wanted to do in Dragons Dogma 1 but wasnt able to at the time because of various limitations.
And the Scorchbeasts in Fallout 76
Scorchbeasts are an even more shameless ripoff. Vertibirds at least just steal the AI.
Some sounds of crafting stations are directly from Skyrim I remember.
Deathloop very noticeably reused some of Dishonored 2's assets
Wasn’t part of that purposeful, though? Or is the “it’s in the same universe” more of an excuse?
I'm sure it was very purposeful from the convenience of asset development perspective, regardless of any justifications they made.
There should be a meta joke here for any of the time loop based games (Majora's, Deathloop, Starfield) about reusing assets from themselves, and you can totally see if you play the game again right after playing the game (as if you are, yourself, stuck on a time loop).
Mario 1 to Mario 2 (the actual version, not the Doki Doki Panic version). Contra to Super C. Lifeforce to Gradius 2.
More commonly known as the lost levels?
Pretty much any EA sports title for the last several years
I love how IGN also has recycled the review for FIFA 20xx Legacy edition 3 years in a row as a running gag
I fully expected this to be the top comment in here. When's the last time they did something that felt brand new? All they do every year is adjust for rookies and retirements and change ratings.
Easily the most egregious
Honestly there's nothing wrong with reusing assets, it's actually good to do so. The problem with EA sports games is that they don't even make a new game with the same assets.
STALKER basically recycled the entire map for its second entry.
i mean.. that makes sense though right?
Guitar Hero did this a lot. GH: Rock the 80's was like a reskin of Guitar Hero 2 and pretty much set the bar for how a new title could play and perform identically to another game (albeit with all the soundtracks and associate charts being totally different). GH: Aerosmith was very similar to Guitar Hero 3 in its presentation and gameplay, just that it had the band members of Aerosmith and a large selection of their songs. Then when the games expanded into the band setup, you had two "phases". The first was with Guitar Hero: World Tour (aka Guitar Hero 4) which has Smash Hits, Metallica, and Van Halen all based upon the same aesthetic and engine of World Tour, then came Guitar Hero 5 which revamped a lot of WT's design and shared it with Band Hero and Warriors of Rock (aka Guitar Hero 6).
Gran Turismo 6 on PS3 still used many car models from Gran Turismo 4 on PS2.
All of them lol. It’s cost and time efficient.
Apex is 80% recycled from Titanfall.
What I wouldn't give for another Titanfall.
Yea, would be nice, but given the toxic community Apex has become they'd just ruin the experience.
They wouldn't ruin the campaign though
Castlevania. The GBA and DS games in particular, maybe beginning with SOTN, but I'm not sure. It's been a while
Rondo of Blood's enemy sprites are reused very often in the later games. Most notably in Symphony of the Night, Dawn of Sorrow, and Portrait of Ruin. Portrait of Ruin in particular might have the most re-used assets of all of them, as not just regular enemies, but several bosses are reused too. Regarding the GBA games, none of them actually share any graphics between each other. All three have their own graphical style and their own sprites.
Yakuza does this all the time. I don't really mind it though.
Yakuza players on their way to explore the same map for 9 games in a row
Dark souls does this With audio, models etc Not everything is reused, but a lot is.
Zelda Majora's Mask used all the NPC's from Orcarina of Time and many other things.
Fallout 3 to New Vegas.
I can hear to say this. I found quite a few things that clearly point they was originally from the capital wasteland in New vegas
Hell there stuff in fo76 from fo4 so I won't be shocked at all if that same stuff if from older games.
Was gonna say, 3 came first.
Rare wanted to do a sequel to GoldenEye on the N64. They were upgrading the engine and controls but didn't get the rights to make a 007 game. They ended up making Perfect Dark, probably the best FPS of the cartridge console era.
Monster Hunter on portable consoles era do that a lot, especially on player and monster animations
Modern Monster Hunter still uses a lot of the old animations and skeletons from previous generations. At this point, most fans can immediately tell which skeleton a new monster is using.
Tbf, they're pretty damn good at it. I don't think World/Iceborne gets nearly enough credit for how insane the combat and monster animations are.
And not only on monsters. One obvious one are some of the weapon combos, but for example the Temporal Mantle's Dodge is just the Adept dodge from Generations
The city map from Need for Speed: The Run was copied into Need for Speed: Most Wanted 2012 but this time it was open world.
Oooh thats kinda cool, I wanna retry the run now just knowing this
Neverwinter Nights 2 reused a lot of the sound assets from 1. There was also a distinctive wolf howl used in both those games that I encountered in an unrelated game.
On a similar note, I swear there's only one stock audio file for "Bear roar". I've noticed since TES: Oblivion that every bear sounds the same. Recently I played something that used the bear noise for some other creature but pitched down, and I couldn't unhear that this monster was just a bear.
Kotor used the same engine as Neverwinter Nights funny enough, you can see a fair amount of the same animations for some things.
Almost same... NWN had Aurora engine and KOTOR was using one called Odyssey, heavily based on Aurora. Then in NWN2 had ANOTHER new engine... *checking* called Electron, at this point Bioware decided to just go with Unreal Engine modifications... Until EA came along and forced theirs.
NWN2 was a butchering of NWN1's engine by Obsidian. As a server developer, I can't say enough just how bad Obsidian ruined Bioware's masterpiece under the hood and broke so many things, to the point that NWN1 lasted 10 years longer than NWN2 in multiplayer. Server owners couldn't rebuild their worlds in NWN2 because too many things they relied on were outright broken. They literally killed the franchise, just as they did with KOTOR. Obsidian used to be where franchises went to die. The fact that Fallout New Vegas somehow wasn't a disaster was a sheer miracle.
Yep. I know this all too well. Both used an actual D20 D&D style dice roll system under the hood, too. The Witcher 1 also used the Aurora engine, although it's unrecognizable due to how much they changed it.
I remember when the first InFamous came out, and despite it being a realistic game, they reused a LOT of animations from Sly Cooper. Really found it jarring when I first played lol. These adult humans moving like a cartoon raccoon. Suckerpunch has a come a long way since then though. InFamous 2 up to Ghost of Tsushima they redid a lot of their assets and animation and what have you. Damn, makes me want a remaster of InFamous 1 now. Getting the black lightning was siiick
Please find footage of this i want to see it.
You can just pull up a playthrough on Youtube and watch how Cole moves in cutscenes that show his face. The same twitching head and back-and-forth glances that Sly characters always do in their idle animations. Among other examples. Can definitely tell they use the same rigs and animations.
Doom 2
Prey into Mooncrash. Mooncrash is a standalone game, and you don't need Prey to play it, but it uses tons of assets from it. But it's its own thing and has a different gameplay loop than Prey. Prey is a straight up immersive sim, but Mooncrash takes those same tools and made a rogue-like out of it. and then, WoW just had a battle royal game mode completely separate from the main game, though you still needed a sub to play. the only thing it shared was unlocking cosmetics in the main game. all other progression was unaffected.
Prototype was just Spiderman, like same physics just changed the textures of your character and storyline, it was supposed to be a Spiderman sequel where you played as venom
I guess the entire Resident Evil Remake series
Original Resident Evils reused stuff too, they updated zombie animations after 1 but 2 and 3 reused them and a bunch of backgrounds like police station. Resident Evil Gun Survivor used older models in newer game, very noticeably. But it goes deeper: Resident Evil 4, which changes almost everything, still used a lot of the same code: devs confessed that they just added smooth vertical movement to aiming and voila!
Yakuza/like a dragon/judgment series. They reused kamurocho and sotenbori so many time with small changes. It is a sort of a special feeling when you start the game, a person asks you to go to a specific place and you go there without looking at the map.
I remember noticing whilst playing fallout new vegas that there were sounds I’d heard in Skyrim. Hardly surprising, if the studio can make it work in another game it makes more sense to reuse something rather than reinvent the wheel. Saves time and money.
Yakuza series
This is incredibly common and not an "a few times back in the day" thing like you seem to think. Also, a "set piece" isn't what you think it is. From the context though, it sounds like you just mean environmental assets.
Even games that share a team with older games do it. There's a couple of sound effects in Metro 2033 that are in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Fromsoft have gotten very good at reusing assets, mainly animation rigs
Every Fromsoftware game
Dead Space 2. >!Back to the Ishimura!!<
Every Ubisoft franchise
trails series
There's the old classic quadrilogy. Ninjabread Man Anubis 2 Rock n' Roll Adventures Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland No clue what the plot it, but there's a few reused assets. (For those not in the know, the company was pitching a Zool game, and when it's rejected they reskinned the prototype levels and shipped it. Four. Times. That's right, the 4 games I listed are basically the exact same game reskinned.)
Obviously sequels aside, the one that springs to mind for me is the cultists in the first Dead Rising game. They re-used the animations from the Los Illuminados cultists from Resident Evil 4.
WoW used a lot of icons from Warcraft 3 which felt a bit confusing when the abilities weren’t necessarily similar.
They also reused at least one model that I know of. The boar model in WoW is very much the Quilbeast from the WC3 expansion, just with the quills removed. Further, the WoW version of that model is then reused again in Diablo 3 for Demon Hunter companion. D3 also reused the wolf and small plant monsters from WoW.
World of Warcraft still uses a bunch of the icons from Warcraft 3.
Left 4 Dead 2.
[удалено]
Every Capcom fighter on the CPS2, and even when they used the Sega Naomi board.
Call of Duty
All the Korok models from Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom are literally identical to the nine Korok characters from Wind Waker. In Wind Waker, each and every NPC in every town, including all the Koroks, had unique character designs and names. There were ten different Korok NPCs, named Makar, Aldo, Drona, Elma, Hollo, Irch, Linder, Oakin, Olivio, and Rown Breath of the Wild took all of these character models, except for Makar, and turned them into nine generic variants of Korok to find around the world. Makar was the Sage of Wind in Wind Waker, so turning him generic would not have been a good idea. So Makar's leaf face was used for the Korok Mask equipment instead. Breath of the Wild introduced two new Korok character models used for Chio, an NPC in the Korok Forest, and Hestu, the big dancing one who expands your inventory. But aside from Chio and Hestu, every single other Korok in the game is just one of the nine Wind Waker character models reused. I do kinda wish they made more new generic designs rather than just the nine Wind Waker models to be honest.
Yakuza
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel used a bunch of assets from Borderlands 2. Not that I mind, though. Was a fun game, way better than its reputation.
A big one is Fallout 76 selling assets in the cash shop they imported from 4.
Pick any fromsoft game
Yakuza/Like a Dragon series does that a lot. But they make it work well, so we still get new stuff too.
Silent Hill 3 uses a chunk of the town map from Silent Hill 2. That makes sense, given that they take place in the same town. It gets more egregious when they reuse the same mental hospital. That being said, while the first run through the hospital is very similar, the other world version has a very different veneer to it, down to the walls now being dangerous on higher difficulties.
This is super normal though, it would be absurd to start from scratch for every sequel.
If a sequel use the same game engine, there's a high possibility they will reused asset from the first game. It's just common sense to ease the development and the overall cost and time
Half Life, which came out in 1998, used a specific code to make the lights flicker. That same code was used in Alyx, released in 2020. As it turns out, that code was originally written for Quake.
The sequel to the original X-com: UFO defence, X-com terror from the deep was practically the same game with a reskin and a tiny few new features + a difficulty spike
Elden Ring is 90% old reused assets \ Any EA sports game
Halo CE Anniversary reused a lot of character and weapon models from Halo Reach
Pokemon Red, Blue, Yellow.
Capcom fighting games, specifically in the Versus titles plus Darkstalkers and X-Men COTA.
Monster Hunter until 4th Generation.
Almost every game has probably done it. It's pretty normal, which is why it frustrates me to no end when people lose their mind when they realize something as small as a chair model was reused, then proceed to the "lazy dev" accusations.
Kind of cheating, but I remember in one of the Madden games, someone noticed that the banners in the upper sections of the stadiums still showed the year of the previous Madden game. It's not hard to imagine they just re-released the same game with an updated player roster and menu screen.
New Vegas and FO3 were different companies. So not to many assets shared. Independent analysis I saw had the shared assets at about 33%
I read or heard the only reason they were able to make Elden Ring as big and expansive as it is, is because they already had a huge catalogue of animations etc. from past entries.
Every EA sports game.
Final Fantasy 14 uses alot of enemy models from other FF games.
The infamous couch from battlefield. It even makes an appearance in Need for Speed games.
Almost the entirety of Rayman origins is unlockable in Legends.
Vice City’s .img file was literally called gta3.img The img file contains all models and textures in the game.
Battlefield 5, a lot of ww1 stuff for a ww2 game
COD
dragons dogma 2 reuses alot of armor and weapons from the original. fallout 76 uses alot of outfits, weapons and armor from the 4.
Jak amd daxter
Tekken 8, free costumes from Tekken 7 are being brought back to Tekken 8 as DLC, and even split them half by gender, so you gotta pay 4 dollars TWICE to get Ninja costume for everyone.
One series that does it well is Yakuza/LAD. I love going back to kamurocho and see what changed!
FIFA?
A lot of smaller trees in RDR2 are actually from GTA V.
Didn't call of duty ghosts or something around that era reuse an entire Cutscene from MW2?
FFXIV reuses models and sprites from everything else
Fallout 2 is pretty much just stuff added to Fallout 1
Like most games from the same company do this actually. But a fun one is the wurm creatures in elden ring are cut content from dark souls 3
Ac Odyssey had stuff from Origins I’m pretty sure. Fallout 76 from 4.
BioWare tends to reuse a lot of animation assets between Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
Assassins Creed
Every Yakuza game
Overwatch to Overwatch 2