AAA games spend millions building gorgeous open worlds but fail at storytelling. Why not reuse the map for new campaigns? A dev and gamer's take on the debate.
Have you ever played a game where the graphics are mind-blowing, the combat is buttery smooth, but the moment a cutscene starts, you’re mashing the "Skip" button like your life depends on it? Welcome to the AAA gaming curse, and today’s sacrificial lamb is Horizon Forbidden West.
A player on Reddit recently dropped a massive truth bomb: Modern games create these colossal, insanely detailed worlds, pouring millions into assets and physics... but they only use them to tell ONE story.
To summarize the OP's frustration: They were replaying Horizon Forbidden West. The world is gorgeous, robot-dino hunting is a blast, and the fast travel is snappy. But the story and characters? Absolute snooze-fest. It reminded them why they dropped the game the first time.
From a dev perspective, creating the engine, rigging animations, and rendering maps consumes about 90% of the budget and time. So why don’t studios use that exact same world to release different stories tailored to different player tastes? If you run an ice cream shop, why only sell vanilla?
Looking back, GTA 4 nailed this. Rockstar dropped The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and Damned right into the same Liberty City map, and they were absolute bangers.
Naturally, gamers and devs clashed in the comments. Here are the spiciest takes from the frontline:
1. The Asset Recycling Kings: Yakuza and FromSoftware Several users pointed out that the Yakuza series has been surviving off recycling the Kamurocho map for years. Even the god-tier studio FromSoftware is notorious for reusing assets. From Dark Souls 1 to DS2, or literal reskins of bosses across franchises. As long as the gameplay makes you rage quit in a good way, nobody cares if they’ve seen that tree before.
2. The Open World Trap One cynical bro hit the nail on the head: The Open World phenomenon killed traditional sequels. Back in the day, devs would reuse the engine and just write a new campaign. Now? Gamers demand 800 hours of FRESH MAP CONTENT. If a studio reuses a map, they get review-bombed and accused of making a cash-grab "asset flip."
3. Why Roguelikes Get a Pass Someone dropped a high-IQ take: Card games and roguelikes (Slay the Spire) get away with reusing "worlds" because the mechanical systems ARE the world. The player authors the story through their builds and RNG luck. In AAA games, if the map is old, the scripted story has to carry the game—and good writers in the gaming industry are apparently rarer than a zero-ping server.
4. The Sony Sequel Curse One user complained that Sony exclusives usually drop a banger first game, but the sequel’s narrative falls flat. A sharp reply pinpointed the exact moment this started: The TLoU2 backlash. Since then, Sony has been terrified of narrative risks. Instead of intimate, human stories, every sequel has to escalate into "saving the multiverse," ruining the pacing entirely.
Speaking as a dev who has spent hours debugging a character clipping through a wall at 3 AM, building a 3D world from scratch is a nightmare.
Instead of burning millions rendering new rocks, or relying on ai tools to mass-produce barren landscapes, big studios should take that money and hire better writers. Reusing a map isn’t lazy; it’s optimization. Look at Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom—they reused the Breath of the Wild map but gave players a crazy vehicle-building system, and it was a masterpiece. It's all about what you let the player DO in that world.
And to my fellow gamers: Stop demanding bigger maps. Size doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. GG.
