This game reuse assets too much

With the new letter from the producer, I realize that 90% of what has been announced is reused assets. I then started looking at Dawntrail and previous expansions, and I don't think it’s fair to the paying customers who buy an expansion and pay monthly fees to receive this many reused assets in the game.

The entire bestiary of FFXIII has been pretty much exhausted at this point, and even most bosses from Dawntrail are reused skins from previous expansions. In 7.1, we will see Cloud of Darkness again, along with Eden, Byakko, and enemies from XI, all marketed as new content. When is enough enough?

Today I did a bit of training in a park.

The trees were all the same, the dogs all had 4 legs and a tail, even the blades of grass all seemed the same to me. When I went out even the buildings all seemed the same, they all had vertical walls and windows.

I pay a lot for my living, and for this price I expect every tree, dog, blade of grass and building to be different from each other.

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Originally Posted by Mr_Gyactus

Today I did a bit of training in a park.

The trees were all the same, the dogs all had 4 legs and a tail, even the blades of grass all seemed the same to me. When I went out even the buildings all seemed the same, they all had vertical walls and windows.

I pay a lot for my living, and for this price I expect every tree, dog, blade of grass and building to be different from each other.

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I see u like wasting money and receive lazy work as result.

They should reuse assets more. I miss the hard mode dungeon revisits :(

I don't really understand the complaint
They're making new fights of old bosses, so of course they'd reuse the assets of them?
and not everyone has played FFIX, so how is using assets from there bad? I'm assuming you mean with the new raid

Every games reuse assets, this game has always done this, and there is nothing wrong with it. It's a time and money saver, if they're able to make some creative fights with Cloud of Darkness and FRU, then I don't think they are 'scamming us'. It's just the same 3D models, but we're getting two new fights, there is nothing lazy about that

reusing asset isn't a problem if there is a good content,

I would love to play sustasha savage

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Originally Posted by Wawaya

Every games reuse assets, this game has always done this, and there is nothing wrong with it. It's a time and money saver, if they're able to make some creative fights with Cloud of Darkness and FRU, then I don't think they are 'scamming us'. It's just the same 3D models, but we're getting two new fights, there is nothing lazy about that

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I'm pretty sure about half if not more of every Ultimate fights are re-use assets, and they are FIRE!

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

reusing asset isn't a problem if there is a good content,

I would love to play sustasha savage

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That sounds dope actually, lol. I want to see sastash ultimate

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Originally Posted by BabyYoda

reusing asset isn't a problem if there is a good content,

I would love to play sustasha savage

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Originally Posted by Eastwall

That sounds dope actually, lol. I want to see sastash ultimate

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...great...thanks you two....now I have new nightmare fuel XP (really fun idea I think!)

Unfortunately they've been recycling very obvious entire boss models and animations for multiple expansions now.
On top of recycling gear models.
And recycling palette-swapped "races" for societies/expansion npcs as "new"

The most disappointing thing about every new expansion they add is how 90% of the monsters are the same set over and over with different textures in spite of supposed to be very different biomes and the lore trying to convince me it's a whole region that's so very different to Eorzea.

Makes you wonder where that increased budget went to. Cutscenes and boss transitions/ultimate VFXs you're forced to stand and watch I guess?

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Originally Posted by Talael

I see u like wasting money and receive lazy work as result.

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No, I'm saying I want dogs with a random number of legs and tails.
The common dog could have 4 legs and 1 tail, the very rare dog could have 10 legs and 9 tails.


Wow is using the same assets since 2004, the dwarf races are the same with a different color, the dragons are the same i met in vanilla in Searing Gorge, I don't remember how many times I did naxxramas/ Zul Gurub/Scholomance/Scarlet Monastery in different expansions, the demon overlords are all the same, the boar... ah the boars.

I can say every online game reuse it own assets, but you talked about "games with a monthly subscription" thus I'm excluding all the f2p/freemium games I know and I don't think you know pvp games like mortal online 2.

I assume that OP never worked in IT.

We re-use code (assets in this instance) a lot. Why re-invent the wheel so to speak, it is a huge waste of time and resources.
That's not to say they should copy paste all over the place but re-using already established work is perfectly normal in development.

Sorry, but if you ever develop a game, you will understand why assets are reused.

They take a lot of time, effort and energy to create. All for what? To appear one time and then never be seen again? It's hard to come to terms with that from a development standpoint.

But they reuse them well! In fact, so many of the reused assets are done so well that I don't figure out that it's a retexture for years in some cases. And that's only when I think really hard about it. There are exceptions that are obvious, of course, but a lot of them you probably don't even notice are reused.

They also use the resize trick. So you have a boss, and initially it's a unique boss you've never seen, but later on it just appears as a trash mob in a different location, sometimes with a different texture if needed.

It all just makes sure that the work didn't go to waste and reached its maximum potential from a development standpoint.

That doesn't mean there aren't new assets. Of course there are. They are just simultaneously extracting the maximum potential of the old ones as well.

Games reuse assets all the time. This is such a non-problem.

There's this game some people play, well, just me probably, but it's called Who's Rigging Is That, Anyway? I think the record holder for most uses, or at least a very strong contender, is Calistoferi. She's the easiest to spot anyway. Asset reuse doesn't bother me, though, so long as the game is fun to play. But I also grew up in the NES era where asset reuse was mandatory.

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Originally Posted by Ishe-P

There's this game some people play, well, just me probably, but it's called Who's Rigging Is That, Anyway? I think the record holder for most uses, or at least a very strong contender, is Calistoferi. She's the easiest to spot anyway. Asset reuse doesn't bother me, though, so long as the game is fun to play. But I also grew up in the NES era where asset reuse was mandatory.

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I think after Dawntrail it goes to Scathach.

I agree though it doesn't bother me too much, but I like when it's reused in an interesting way that actually makes it hard to tell that it's the same one being used.

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

And recycling palette-swapped "races" for societies/expansion npcs as "new"

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They aren't necessarily meant to be new btw. I remember a mention in the MSQ about the Hanu Hanu's relation to the ones in the Sea of Clouds. They are more like distant cousins.

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The most disappointing thing about every new expansion they add is how 90% of the monsters are the same set over and over with different textures in spite of supposed to be very different biomes and the lore trying to convince me it's a whole region that's so very different to Eorzea.

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Well maybe but it's not uncommon in real life to find similar relatives in other countries, such as birds, spiders or many other common creatures. Sometimes they have differences, which can just be in color. They've frequently given us new cactuars though.

Some of the actual lore is that things came from the New World so they made sure to put them there (Mamool Ja obviously). Just like how they put Adamantoise in Thavnair for lore reasons.

There are plenty of new creatures.

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Originally Posted by Talael

With the new letter from the producer, I realize that 90% of what has been announced is reused assets. I then started looking at Dawntrail and previous expansions, and I don't think it’s fair to the paying customers who buy an expansion and pay monthly fees to receive this many reused assets in the game.

The entire bestiary of FFXIII has been pretty much exhausted at this point, and even most bosses from Dawntrail are reused skins from previous expansions. In 7.1, we will see Cloud of Darkness again, along with Eden, Byakko, and enemies from XI, all marketed as new content. When is enough enough?

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Every MMORPG out there reuses assets on a regular basis. Why would you expect this one to be any different?

I'm tired of seeing the same mobs over and over again and things have gotten to the point where I can easily recognize the skeleton they're rigged over. I know reusing assets is pretty par for the course and I understand why they do it, so whatever. I'm more annoyed by how much they reuse gear sets though. Especially making them undyeable and/or not bothering to swap classes.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

They aren't necessarily meant to be new btw. I remember a mention in the MSQ about the Hanu Hanu's relation to the ones in the Sea of Clouds. They are more like distant cousins.

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Yeah but, making them and the Moblins simple palette swaps of their Eorzean counterparts is super boring IMO. They could have given them additional bells and whistles like how the Zun have fur and how you can actually see the faces of the Mord. Why not give the Moblins different masks that reveal their faces a little more? Why not give the Hanu Hanu different head feathers or a more parrot-like head shape? Yeah there's the excuse that they're relatives on the same shard so that's why they're so similar but it makes it difficult for me to see them as anything more than any other silly palette-swapped mob in the game.

For each expansion you get -> 12-15 raid bosses, 7 trials, 12 alliance bosses, 9 criterion bosses, 9 deep dungeon bosses, 39 dungeon bosses

so for high level you have 27-30 new bosses (ex + savage + criterion), for casuals you have around 90 new bosses (all of the thing), each expansion

I find it kind of fair (when compared to WoW for example), to me they just need to improve 4 things :
- Gameplay to be more fun for both casuals/raiders (netcode improvement needed)
- Reward/Gear progression to be more pleasing for both casuals/raiders
- Better distribution of content
- Rework of the daily stuff (roulettes)

If something, they should reuse assets a bit more, for example expert roulettes should be something like m+ in wow, so maybe instead doing 13 new dungeons each expansion, they should do 9 dungeons, and each season (7.0 -> 7.2 / 7.2 -> 7.4 / 7.4 -> 8.0) they put in the expert 3 new dungeons and 3 old dungeons reworked for lv100, so you have a pool of 6 dungeons (instead of 2 or 3) and the development time saved can be used to have +1/+2/.../+10 version of each dungeons for example

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Originally Posted by Destati

Yeah but, making them and the Moblins simple palette swaps of their Eorzean counterparts is super boring IMO. They could have given them additional bells and whistles like how the Zun have fur and how you can actually see the faces of the Mord. Why not give the Moblins different masks that reveal their faces a little more? Why not give the Hanu Hanu different head feathers or a more parrot-like head shape?

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It would have been nice for them to have used the graphics update to make them more detailed at least. I assume they just didn't manage it since there are only so many new assets they make vs reusing old ones and must not have seen them as important enough compared to, say, the Mamool Ja.

But they have done this before sometimes. For example, the Hobgoblins in Kholusia could perhaps be their other shard cousins, or maybe the No mou. There are also the Dwarves in Kholusia being their version of Lalafells and the fat cactuars in Amh Araeng. So it's not like they never do this.

The only thing that annoys me with them reusing assets is the contest reuse of armour sets, instead of adding new-looking armour it's just recolours of older armour from the game.

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Originally Posted by CaedemSanguis

If something, they should reuse assets a bit more, for example expert roulettes should be something like m+ in wow, so maybe instead doing 13 new dungeons each expansion, they should do 9 dungeons, and each season (7.0 -> 7.2 / 7.2 -> 7.4 / 7.4 -> 8.0) they put in the expert 3 new dungeons and 3 old dungeons reworked for lv100, so you have a pool of 6 dungeons (instead of 2 or 3) and the development time saved can be used to have +1/+2/.../+10 version of each dungeons for example

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Yes, I agree with this.
WoW has something like 4 mythic dungeons but there's 4 more from previous expansions that are simply upscaled.

I wish they'd upscale more content, wouldn't it be fun if we had a new savage tier every even patch and an upscaled older savage tier every odd patch balanced around BiS?
And their rewards could simply be the maximum ilvl gear... or mounts, like give me the titan car already.

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Originally Posted by Talael

With the new letter from the producer, I realize that 90% of what has been announced is reused assets. I then started looking at Dawntrail and previous expansions, and I don't think it’s fair to the paying customers who buy an expansion and pay monthly fees to receive this many reused assets in the game.

The entire bestiary of FFXIII has been pretty much exhausted at this point, and even most bosses from Dawntrail are reused skins from previous expansions. In 7.1, we will see Cloud of Darkness again, along with Eden, Byakko, and enemies from XI, all marketed as new content. When is enough enough?

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You clearly never played pso2 ngs....come back to me after you play that and tell me how often they reused the content in aelio - stia and tells the community to be hype for reused assets.

I mean, for how much time they ask us to wait (and pay) between content updates, I don't think OP is really asking for a lot here. Dude's right. Most of the new content are just rehashes or "updated" versions of things we've already done. Even the mechanics themselves are conceptually the same. But you guys will defend everything here, so now we're comparing new video game content to blades of IRL grass. Which is ironic, because anyone who makes a comparison like that should probably go touch some.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

They aren't necessarily meant to be new btw. I remember a mention in the MSQ about the Hanu Hanu's relation to the ones in the Sea of Clouds. They are more like distant cousins.

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That doesn't necessarily mean they had to use the same models – the writing can come after the decision to reuse the models, to support and integrate it. I think there are other reasons for the base decision though.

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Originally Posted by Destati

Yeah but, making them and the Moblins simple palette swaps of their Eorzean counterparts is super boring IMO.

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It would have been nice to get redesigns, but I suspect they have a budget on how many new non-human character models they add, and I think they must have exhausted it on expanding the Mamool Ja instead – they added children and unique female models for two of the three tribes, which I think is the more valuable use of their time over new assorted races if it really came down to a choice of one or the other.

Yeah I don't take "well they're related by blood to" as an excuse. Much like half the scions who had nothing to add to Dawntrail's MSQ being included in it, this is just a case of "we wanted to use the same models and base races like this so we wrote the lore to make it fit".

There's a continuum here between "reusing old assets in new and interesting ways that disguises the old asset or makes it feel new some other way" and "obviously reusing old assets with little effort (like palette swaps) to save time and money on labor costs."

I don't mind the former. There are some enemy designs where I had no idea they shared a base animation rig until I saw it pointed out to me because the characters built over the rig looked so unique that it didn't even occur to me.

But Dawntrail had A LOT of enemy mobs and especially dungeon bosses that were very obvious reskins of old monsters. When I start to notice to the point it pulls me out of the game, where the illusion breaks and the immersion bubble pops, that's when I feel it's started to cross a line and be an issue. "Wow, it's that one tentacle monster model from Void Arc again but now it's a computer program tentacle monster that looks really silly and out of place...oooh..."/s

A lot of Eureka monsters were reskins, but the reskins still felt artistically unique to me, I guess? It's a fuzzy line, I will admit. For an example in Dawntrail that I think works, Honey B Lovely is a reskinned Shiva in her spear stance, but she doesn't look, behave, or have battle effects much like Shiva, so I don't really mind. But when it's like "that one enemy mob you've seen literally everywhere, but GREEN this time!" it's like, man, come on. Try a little bit harder, maybe? Reusing assets is fine (it'd be stupid not to reuse some assets), just put some effort to make them look nice.

That's MMOs for you. WoW's been reusing models and reskinning models for 20 years.

I've been wishing (and I'm pretty sure a lot of people too) for a hard version of the Crystal Tower series. It's reusing to provide a new harder version. It's not they're marketing it as brand new stuff.

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Originally Posted by Zakuyia

You clearly never played pso2 ngs....come back to me after you play that and tell me how often they reused the content in aelio - stia and tells the community to be hype for reused assets.

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Why is another games failing used as an excuse for the same lazy approach here? I mean, sure, i dont know much of programming, im a nurse, however of all the enemies from the last Dawntrail MSQ dungeon (supposely the climax of the expansion) we have a bunch of FF 13 mobs, 1st boss reskin of cuchulaim (void ark), second boss a reskin of Pharos Sirius second boss and i guess the last one (Eliminator) is new. I could excuse it a bit if the mobs were FF 9 enemies, but cmon....

{Aurum Vale Extreme} {Can I have it?}

Just kidding, I'd rather chew my arm off.