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Fun fact that you may or may not have heard before: the light flicker animation in Half Life Alyx is actually the exact same one used in the original Quake. Half Life 1 was built on the Quake engine, and the same animation was carried over into Source and then Source 2.
https://www.alanzucconi.com/2021/06/15/valve-flickering-lights/
You know, if it meant that more time would be spent on quality, or reducing crunch, I'd be ok with this.
But ubisoft did it, so it's because they wanna cut the department 20% and give that profit to the shareholders. So no.
You see it all the time in Disney animations, Pixar animations, you see it with sprites being the same for clouds and bushes in Mario...
I don't really see an issue with asset reuse, as long as the actions make sense in the new context
I don't disagree with your main point, but I think the Mario sprite thing is just as easily explained by technical limitations as artistic ones.
Studios like Fromsoft are known for recycling assets to a very noticeable degree. It‘s just part of the game and another reason why AI makes so little sense in the creative world. Studios already have their asset libraries. They don‘t need to prompt something that already exists because they already have it. What they need are new ideas and AI is terrible at delivering that.
At this point, I'd be mad if I was playing a Fromsoft game and they didn't have that animation where you're pushing open large double doors.
Or a pig at the end of a long hallway.
Or a poison swamp.
Or, and more seriously, the Moonlight Greatsword.
That's fair.. but also Elden Ring had so many cave dungeons that used the same layout it was painful by the end
You see it in every EA game, but they also reuse the gameplay itself.
Arent placeholders a thing?
This is the main reason why Concord's entirely avoidable failure pissed me off so much. Wildlight's designers and artists spent years creating an entire game's worth of assets (they lacked style and identity, but they weren't bad) and now the game is dead, the studio is dead, and nobody will ever see or use those assets for something better.
I wish they'd sell the assets. I know that some animators would love to get their hands on Scarlet's model.
(edit) Ah fuck, I did the meme. Highguard. I meant Highguard, not Concord.
Ok wait what? Was the game not called Concord? What's Wildlight? I'm confused.
Edit: okay, I am a little more in the loop after some googling. Highguard was another dead-on-arrival live service game, it looks like? Developed by Wildlight? So apparently there was a meme comparing the two?
Wildlight is a game development studio made up of former Respawn developers who (allegedly) worked on the Titanfall and Apex Legends games. Highguard was their first game: a pointless, live service, content incomplete multiplayer shooter. It was revealed in late 2025 as the final showcase of The Game Awards, which resulted in a collective sigh of frustration from the audience. The game was released on the 26th of January to a decent peak player count of over 100k (97k players on Steam). It was immediately clear that the game was in a terrible state and it couldn't retain the players. Two weeks after launch, Wildlight fired most of its staff because Tencent, which had been secretly funding the development, had pulled out. It was later announced that servers would shut down on the 12th of March, 45 days after launch.
Even before launch, it was mockingly compared to Concord, another pointless. live service, content incomplete, competitive multiplayer shooter that only lived for two weeks.
The meme was because it was clearly expensive and also so obviously going to flop, much like Concord. The difference in the money wasted between the two was probably an order of magnitude more for Concord though.
Yea, this is common practice and most of the time you never hear about it, especially if a game is canceled before announcement. Last project I worked on, we couldn't even take screenshots for our portfolios after it was canceled. Leading to most everyone on the team having a two-year gap where they did great work and had absolutely nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile, me walking into that same exact house or neighborhood that's used in every indie game...
A godsend for people without spatial awareness. But apparently I am too shitty to even leverage that. Never recognized anything and will get lost immediately in every game.
When you need to backtrack a house, cave, whatever on a timer that game is over for me 😅
The message is "Games need to get cheaper to make, not shittier and more expensive."
And asset reuse can be a great way to do that. Or a trap.
What assets you're recycling is a huge factor. There are crates in Fallout 4 that were originally made for Oblivion. You almost certainly won't notice unless you're looking for it. Similarly, I'm playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and there are a bunch of little things that were reused for Baldur's Gate 3, like vases. Again, most people will probably never notice.
On the other hand, BioWare reusing animations that were originally created for Neverwinter Nights in Mass Effect 3 is jarring, even though those animations generally worked fine in KOTOR. Or Assassin's Creed 3 using combat animations in the modern day segments that were designed for the flintlock-wielding enemies in the historic segments.
This is because someone wanted to reuse the sabertooth in Far Cry Primal for an Assassin's Creed scene, isn't it?
Anything that reduces costs is redirected into shareholder profit increase and executive compensation increase. If reduction of costs actually led to those savings being reallocated for quality increase it would be far too vague of a notion for profit minded execs to understand or promote...
Nintendo reusing the clouds and bush assets on Super Mario Bross walked so AAA could reuse fighting animation between different genres of games.
Interesting article. I think it would be really stupid to not reuse stuff if your game is set in a realistic universe (would be different for a cartoonish universe).
In fact, it would even be a way to avoid using AI (even if I think we’ll end up with devs reusing stuff and using AI).
Then you can use colors or lighting to create a different feel to the game, just like different movie directors can film the same place in a totally different way.
Or, to put it another way...if you aren't spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time the industry has done so, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.
And if you have One Bear Model that lasts for N years that most of the industry uses, it can be a really good bear model.
Like, there are a lot of ways that efficiency gains could be expressed.
If only there was a communal source of assets that people and companies can contribute to and pull from. If something doesn't quite fit your game you could instead spend 10 hours editing and adjusting a premade model instead of 40 hours making it from scratch. Then upload the new model for someone else to start with later.
Except reusing the same model/texture can be very good for performance. It doesn't matter if there's 1 instance or 1000 of a model in the game, it takes up the same amount of memory. Even transforming it/scaling it barely changes that.
I don't know what the situation is for commercial games
I don't know if there's a marketplace like that
but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.
goes looking
It's not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that with improvements and changes, though. Like, it's not quite a "GitHub of assets".
I haven't looked at it over time, but I also don't think that we've had an explosion in inter-compatible assets there. Like, it's not like a community forms around a particular collection of chibi-style sprite artwork at a particular resolution, and then lots of libre games use those assets, the way RPGMaker or something has collections of compatible commercial assets.
I'm sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don't know if any span all game asset types or if they permit easily republishing modifications. I know that I've occasionally stumbled across a website or two that have individuals sell 3D models.
I honestly dont know if this is sarcasm or not.
Game engines like unreal engine and unity have huge prefab libraries that contain both free and paid models and people can share or sell their own prefabs too. The problem with those are that you cant just pick models willy nilly as it can make the game feel like patchwork quilt when every asset has little different art style. Also in bigger production games things like polygon counts start to matter a lot, so in some cases its easier to make assets from the ground up than start to fiddle with existing models.
Most bigger studios have pretty large internal libraries they can pull from. Like for example mountain lions in GTA V and Red dead redemption are almost identical. They even use the exactly same sound in both. And bears in Skyrim and Yao Guai in Fallout 4 have same skeleton and some of the animations are fully reused.
I mean, yeah, they already release the same game over and over. Not sure why they wouldn't eventually realize they can also just use the same assets every time.
Oh... he probably thought he said something revolutionary.
Right? FromSoft like... No shit?
For the money those firms are spending on creating those games, he just might be.
This one is interesting. On its face, I definitely agree with the idea that asset reuse is essential. Ubisoft and Far Cry Primal are standout exceptions though. Ubisoft in general has reused so many of not just their assets but also their gameplay systems, such that despite having a half dozen different concurrent franchises, it can often feel like they're all the same game, and that's what hurt the likes of Star Wars Outlaws; we've played that game so many times already, even if it looks like Star Wars this time.
And as for Far Cry Primal: reusing a reload animation is one thing. Reusing your open world map is something else entirely, speaking from experience. The game often is discovering that map, so if I've seen it before, the game can become very boring very quickly. If a sequel to a 2D platformer was the exact same levels but your character had a few new tricks up their sleeve, you probably wouldn't be happy about that either. Likewise, I'm not interested in Crackdown 2, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, or any other open world that reuses the same map. The map is important to be different each time. Spider-Man needs to be in New York, but in order to make that interesting, you're going to need to lean heavily on instanced indoor missions between the open world stuff; Insomniac's games are well-done, but I can't say I'm dying to play Spider-Man 2 after the first game and Miles Morales. I've only played two Yakuza games, so I don't know yet how I'll feel about that map re-use, but they do seem to rely a lot on instanced interiors to mix things up.
The fun thing about Yakuza to me, is that the map kind of becomes its own character. I love going around Kamurocho and doing various side missions. I'd say that since the map is also very small, it allows for that kind of intimate "get to know the map and watch it grow with each game"-vibe.
Yakuza is a prime example of “It’s not the size but how you use it.”
I feel like I legitimately know my way around some parts of Japan thanks to Yakuza.
We went to Dotonbori and Kabukicho last time I went to Japan, and we were surprised at how close it was, Especially kabukicho
Tears of the Kingdom does use the same map but adds verticality that is not in BOTW. I think that is forgiveable since it honestly feels very different in playing.
If the game is still good, why not?
Majora’s Mask heavily reuses assets from Ocarina of Time, and that game is in no way any worse because of it.
The time loop mechanic is definitely something you come up with when you need to do a lot with a little, and while it super worked for plenty of people, it really was the reason I'd say it was far worse than Ocarina.
Rare time I agree with a Ubisoft employee.
Yeah, for sure. Definitely agreed. However, the specific examples cited in the article could've been done better. You can modify existing assets to make them less-obviously reused.
Uh, yeah, 100%. Though I have to wonder who is even arguing against this?
Ive played hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of reused assets spread over Dink Smallwood mods and Neverwinter Nights (1 and 2) user made campaigns
Thank you stranger! I had forgotten Dink Smallwood completely. Core memory unlocked!
The game works on modern systems and are free to get ;)
At the moment you are my favorite person and i hope your socks are never wet and your food always warms up evenly in the microwave.
Get on the ecology and circular economy train and only play games that reuse assets the sub-ocean will thank you!
/S
Ive played hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of reused assets spread over Dink Smallwood mods and Neverwinter Nights (1 and 2) user made campaigns
Edit: Sorry for any confusion, was meant as top level comment
TIL there are mods for Dink Smallwood. Colour me intrigued!