Cut and Paste Environments

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
What a fascinating place this is. Look at all this wonderful architecture. You could walk all the way around the world and never find its like. Except for this part. I've seen this somewhere else before.
—Covetous Shen, lampshading the dungeon design in Diablo III.

Game developers have a limited time to develop their games; some have limitations of budget. Sometimes, though moreso in the past than nowadays, they have limitations forced on them by the particular platform they're developing on. And some game developers are just lazy.

Environments for a game require a great deal of effort, particularly modern levels with 3D models, textures, and shaders. These are expensive and time-consuming to make. It's no surprise that a developer that is being particularly economical would want to try to use that 3D environment as much as possible. In some games, they do this by forcing you to backtrack, typically with Action Adventure games. But in games following this trope, they do it by making a new area that looks very similar if not identical to the other area. This may be done many times. Usually done in places with randomly-generated backgrounds.

Repetitive environments can make navigating the world very confusing. Without having unique landmarks, it is very easy to get lost. And it's very dull to see the same things over and over.

MMORPGs (and other forms of Wide Open Sandboxes for that matter) are big users of this trope, but they mostly do so for reasons of economy. They have a huge world that needs building, and any cost-cutting measures they can find are of value. First-person shooters are also a common victim of this, reusing versions of their single-player maps for multiplayer (or vice-versa, depending on which side the developers are focusing on).

Sometimes called "geomorphic design" after a set of Tabletop RPG dungeon design "tools" sold by TSR in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sub-trope of Fake Longevity. For cut-and-paste Mooks, see Underground Monkey and Palette Swap.

Examples of Cut and Paste Environments include:

Film

  • Done in Cube. Justified since the film took place in a labyrinth of identical cubes, but the filmmakers only had the budget to build one set with five out of the six surfaces. The only difference between each room is the colour and varying traps.
  • In Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, toward the beginning of the movie, just after the robots attack Manhattan, Sky Captain lands at his base and drives his plane into a huge hangar. At the top of the doors of the hangar are these huge windows of 8x10 panes. In every window, some of the panes are broken. In every window, it's exactly the same panes that are broken.
  • Early in Inception, Ariadne and Cobb test out the creation of a dreamworld, at one point folding several city blocks like a sheet of paper. It soon becomes apparent that the dream city consists mostly of the same building copied over and over over again.
    • One of the key concepts for an Architect in the dream world is to make the entire environment closed and repetitive, but in such a way as to not arouse suspicion. This is so that the dreamer will believe he or she is still awake and will feel like they're free to wander around, despite being in a closed environment.

Live-Action TV

  • A rare Live Action TV example occurs in Caprica. As Zoe-A and Philomon travel in the Virtual World, Zoe-A makes note of the repeated objects and discusses the possibilities of a generative software to independently create environments and objects. The idea is that a program that takes the basic pattern of an object (a tree in this example) but build over it would prevent Cut and Paste environments.
  • Due to the limited flexibility in sets, most levels and rooms of starships/bases/etc are the same set lit differently or filmed from another angle.
    • Very noticeable in Star Trek, especially Voyager - their science/robotics/engineering labs all look the same, and they are. They are also the sickbay with no beds and blue lighting panels instead of yellow.
  • Mighty Morphin Power Rangers does this, but it's most of the time just recycling sentai footage.
  • In the Doctor Who serial The Invasion, the same set is used for two different offices belonging to Tobias Vaughn, the only difference being the view out of the window. Lampshaded by the Doctor.
    • Whenever the Doctor and friends are traveling through the TARDIS' corridors (especially during the '80s era), it's the Console Room's walls rearranged.

Video Games

  • Infamously, the Library level in Halo: Combat Evolved.
    • One might say that the entire campaign would qualify, what with basically having to play the first half of the game over again after the library.
    • In the original Halo, pretty much every interior level consisted of completely identical rooms one right after the other, with fresh enemies being the only sign that you are not in the same room you just came from.
    • Worse than Library: Assault on the Control Room.
    • Sacred Icon, the sequel to The Library.
    • Halo 2 likes to feature many rooms exactly two times.
    • And those large bridges too. You go through at least 3 or 4 identical bridges.
    • Penny Arcade made light of this.
  • Anarchy Online. Pick a quest, ANY QUEST: 150% of the time the rooms will look dead similar, right down to the kitchen sink.
  • It is a running joke among players of the MMORPG City of Heroes that only one architect designed all the buildings in Paragon City, and he was either insane or on serious drugs (or Bergholt Stuttley Johnson ). Office buildings all have the same basic room and hallway components, and in some cases they aren't even randomized; warehouse interiors are also suspiciously uniform, right down to the big multi-level room at the end of one map branch where you usually find the villain boss for the mission. Similarly, there is a large but limited number of texture maps for building exteriors.
    • Issue 14, which introduced player-created content in the form of the 'Mission Architect' system, does nothing to avert this. Almost any map currently in the game can be chosen, including the potential for a random pick from a certain size and type, but the maps themselves cannot be altered in any way; only the enemies and objectives inside can be edited.
    • Oranbega, the lost city hidden beneath Paragon City, is a confusing magical labyrinth you will be visiting frequently. In the Rogue Isles, Oranbega doesn't exist. Instead, the ruins of the lost city of Mu are located there. Predictably, they're exactly the same. Some players don't even distinguish between the two. Somewhat justified in that the Oranbegans and Mu were two sides of an ancient Civil War.
  • DICE is infamous for reusing buildings across multiple maps in its Battlefield series.
  • Also by DICE, Mirror's Edge is made of this trope. Every rooftop is made of the same elements in different combinations.
  • This has been an element of both modern 3D Castlevania games.
    • Among the 2D games, Order of Ecclesia is a pretty big offender. Portrait of Ruin also, to some degree.
    • And of course there's the Inverted Castle in Symphony Of The Night, which is the regular castle but upside down with different music, enemies and bosses and almost no story.
      • Harmony of Dissonance is worse about this, having a Castle A and B, with EXACTLY the same layout in both, just different graphics and enemies.
    • This problem shows up most glaringly in three places in Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. The Tower of Infinity (50 levels of the same room with different Mooks, the Tower of Evermore, which is the same thing but harder, and most damningly, Dracula's Castle (which of course is required). It's also pretty obvious in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.
  • Being a Wide Open Sandbox, this is common practice in the Grand Theft Auto series, albeit not to the degree that it's very glaring to your average player. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas however is the biggest offender with regards to interiors.
    • Barber shops,[1] fast food joints,[2] weapons shops,[3] and tattoo parlors are all identical and even use the same workers, so it gets a bit jarring to see a guy that sells guns in San Andreas can also pop up in every other county that sells guns.
    • During the burglary missions there are also only a handful of building interiors depending on what kind of building you are breaking into.
    • Even as recently as Grand Theft Auto IV, platform levels of underground subway stations, fast food joints, a clothing chain, two gun stores, bowling alleys, and a multitude of apartment corridors still share common interiors.
  • Happens in the SNES version of The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1. The caves are mostly composed of a set of repeating tiles, resulting in caves looking very much the same. The forests also suffer from this.
  • Games on 8-bit Nintendo systems had to fit huge worlds into tiny cartridges, and they pulled it off by repeating parts of the map.
    • Super Mario Bros.. for NES (40 KB) used repeating patterns two to four screens wide for decorative backgrounds such as hills and clouds. It also reused about two models for castle exteriors (small and large). On top of that, 5 entire levels were reused, as well as World 4-4 and 7-4 which would actually loop if the player takes the wrong path.
      • Additionally, they used the exact same sprite for the clouds and bushes the only difference being the clouds were white where as the bushes were green.
      • Super Mario Bros the Lost Levels had more unique level layouts, except for World C, which was a complete copy-and-paste of World 7.
    • The Legend of Zelda for NES (128 KB) encoded each map screen as a list of 16 vertical columns as tall as the screen, causing some areas to look familiar. The dungeons were comprised of combinations of only a handful of room layouts, with only the doors, enemies, treasures, and so on being different.
    • The original Metroid (128 KB) had a lot of rooms and areas that looked alike, making navigation hell. Interestingly, this was more to make use of limited cartridge space than lazy level design.
    • Super Mario Land for Game Boy (64 KB) reused 20 by 16 meter screens of map data mercilessly.
    • Adventure Island used almost the exact same template for each level: a flatland stage, an athletic stage, a cave stage, and a boss stage. Repeat seven more times for the whole game. Most egregious is the boss stages, which are almost exact clones of each other, save for the positioning of the monsters.
      • Same for Wonder Boy, although the SMS version had a few exclusive stages with different environments, such as a waterfall and a gauntlet of erupting volcanoes.
    • Deadly Towers has every dungeon room looking approximately the same, which is made worse by the dungeons being pointlessly vast.
  • In Planescape: Torment you can go into an area called the Rubicon where Modrons (beings of pure law) are trying to study dungeon crawls. Because they are beings of law they created a dungeon area of almost completely identical rooms (the only difference being which exits are open and how many creatures are present). The only unique rooms are the control center, a boss fight room and a room where you can pick up a character.
    • The dungeon's pretty much a magnanimous dig at dungeon crawls in general, with the enemies being Card-Carrying Villain constructs that dutifully play their role as opponents and an "Evil Wizard Construct" who spouts stereotypical bad-guy tough talk.
  • Smuggler's Run has three settings, one of which is the exact same as an earlier one, but covered in snow.
  • MMORPG World of Warcraft is a big user of this trope; at least with buildings. While the actual geography for most areas is unique, the buildings, caves, and "doodads" that get placed there obviously come from a standardized set of models that get a Palette Swap from one zone to the next. Justified in two counts: the aforementioned economy of design, and the fact that the game is based on the Warcraft RTS franchise and deliberately copies the look and feel of the buildings of each race. Indeed, it's really easy to tell who built a given area just by looking at the architecture.
    • Another interesting thing is that it reuses many of the Warcraft 3 icons for spells and actions.
  • Final Fantasy XIII was especially bad about this during Chapter 10, forcing the player to go through identical looking rooms several times, fight the first boss of the level, then go through even more identical looking rooms before reaching the second boss in the chapter.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has enormous expanses of land that re-use some assets to fill out the space, supposedly due to limitations imposed by the Play Station 3. While all MMOs do this to some extent, much ado has been made about this game's usage of the trope as it sometimes recycled entire topographical features. The development team has responded to the criticism, and with a complete game rebuild due for November 2012, all zones will be split into 3-4 smaller zones with more variety and landmarks.
  • The world of Drakengard is composed of bleak landscape after bleak landscape after bleak landscape, with biome differences (forests ARE different from deserts, after all) to tell you where you are. Every building you enter in the game has an annoying tendency to have all its rooms look alike, with some notable exceptions.
    • There's a flying base and an ocean base. They not only use the exact same interior layout, but they have the same exterior model as well.
  • The Elder Scrolls: Arena, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim all use this trope to varying degrees (The third game is one of the genre's few exceptions,).
    • The first two use these for non-plot dungeons, and the sheer quantity of dungeons and random dungeon choice for quest assignments effectively create Randomly Generated Levels.
    • Oblivion is by far one of the worst offenders in existance, lacking the scale of its predecessors and makes no effort to stop the dungeon parts from looking very distinct despite the frequency they are reused. This is particularly true when you visit the planes of Oblivion: There are 90 gates to Oblivion, and you are expected to close all of them, but only 7 distinct maps, with only a few more variants for the central tower in each.
    • Skyrim is not nearly as bad as its predecessor, but still terrible at times. The worst example is towns that aren't load gated. Not only does every single one share the same poll of buildings (1 smithy design, 1 inn design ect.), these often share the same layout in relation to each other.
  • Sega employs this trope liberally for the post-millennial Phantasy Star games: Phantasy Star Online, Phantasy Star Universe, Phantasy Star Portable, and Phantasy Star Zero. Phantasy Star Online is the worst offender, tropewise: The first PSO game told an entire story, with side stories, optional missions and all, in the same four reused maps. (This isn't even counting how many of the enemies encountered were reskins that used the same character "skeleton" and animatons!) The addon/sequels to PSO often included reskins of previous content, especially bosses and enemies. Phantasy Star Universe and Portable tried to add variety to layouts of the same area, but it's still based on the same concept—and despite having more content to begin with than the first Phantasy Star Online, it was more or less the same as PSO with all its addons (that is to say, it's got a lot of reskinned areas, enemies, and bosses—just with different behavior flags).
  • Mass Effect re-uses the same room design for mines, and for planetary outposts. The sole variation is in the placement of crates used for cover. And even then, a lot of outposts have the crates piled in the exact same manner. This also affects the uncharted planets, which are all made up amazingly similar hilly terrain, the only difference being that each planet had a slightly different color scheme.
    • Justified in that standardized, prefabricated outposts and dwellings would be completely reasonable to expect in the realm of interstellar travel and colonization, especially as it's strongly implied that most of the Systems Alliance's industrial concerns are handled by a small oligopoly.
    • This is not unique to Mass Effect for Bioware games. Neverwinter Nights was built on this; there were innumerable room interiors that were all the same except for some minor set dressing like tables and detritus. Indeed, that's how NWN levels are built; they're like 3D tilemaps. Oddly, Knights of the Old Republic averted this, despite using a modified version of the NWN engine. Interestingly, their earlier Baldur's Gate series games were rather different, with each outdoor environment and the vast majority of the dungeon environments being hand-drawn, with certain stock elements included where necessary (doors and trees in the main). Quite an achievement given the sheer size, number and detail of the maps that had to be created.
    • Also present in Dragon Age II, where the wastelands around Lothering and the final dungeon of Act I are the only areas with a unique map. Somewhat justified in that the game is framed around Varric telling the story of the Champion of Kirkwall to Cassandra Pentaghast and that he's more likely to focus on what Hawke did than on the details of where.
    • The two pieces of post-release Downloadable Content both take steps to address this issue, as both are set outside of Kirkwall and feature entirely unique areas.
  • Nethack and other Rogue variants are either a major subversion of this, or the purest example: the entire game is constructed out of ASCII characters.
  • Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards does this with the layouts for the first level of Pop Star and the first level of Ripple Star. In this case, the intent is to provide Book Ends of a sort.
  • There is some Truth in Television to this. Ever go to an office high-rise? Endless cubicles like they were a texture in MS Paint, besides the fact that the floors of most skyscrapers tend to have identical floor plans. And look at the buildings themselves. Once people figured out that glass boxes with a central core are both sturdy and roomy, they started turning up everywhere.
  • The Adventure Game Limbo of the Lost offers a very literal interpretation of this trope: Nearly every single one of the game's prerendered background scenes is copied straight from elsewhere, sometimes with some tweaking to try and cover it up, or placement of props that, once again, are reused.
  • In The Godfather, New York City only has a few different types of shops and bars and then repeats the same floor plan over and over again so even if you had never been to a building before you already knew the way around.
  • Hellgate: London was criticised for this: with the exception of several unique levels, most of the game's randomised levels were repetitions of about 10 basic tilesets, with identical sewers/streets/dried-out riverbeds/building basements. Perhaps London really is that boring.
  • The 3D Zelda games have all had an enormous Bonus Dungeon with some of the toughest battles in the game. The Gerudo's Training Ground in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a fairly interesting pastiche of other dungeons and their puzzles, but The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker‍'‍s Savage Labyrith and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess‍'‍ Cave of Ordeals consist of fifty nearly identical chambers packed with wave after wave of enemies (even worse, WW required you to fight through 31 rooms for a mandatory Plot Coupon!). TWW, TP, and OoT also feature a number of caverns with identical chambers full of puzzles.
  • The Adaman Sea level towards the end of Tomb Raider: Underworld is a level that is an almost literal copy-paste of a previous level with different weather conditions, people have even noted that the location of many of the enemies is the same (although the fact you have a BFG at this point at least mercifully means you can breeze through it in a few minutes).
  • The PlayStation 2 Inuyasha RPG pushed this to its illogical limits. Travel through various areas consisted of about 12-15 individual 'screens', copy-pasted around each other to create these areas, with a few "unique" screens in some areas. Underground areas and towns were mostly exempt from this, though.
  • Persona 3 fell victim to this. Averted somewhat as the areas are randomized every time you enter, and justified by the fact that the sole dungeon in the game is one gigantic building.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. Good LORD. There are 300 side missions and a grand total of about eight or nine actual areas, reused over and over and OVER again.
  • The Romancing SaGa PlayStation 2 Remake used this for the Assassin's Guild, it is one big intersection in every room, and the only way to find your way around is following white gems on the floor, the south exit will take you back to the entrance no matter where you are though.
  • Wario Land Shake It used this for the secret levels, often without even a colour change (and those that were had changes such as in one case going from having a dark blue sky to a red sky). Kind of saddening, considering the fourth game used a completely different background per level.
  • Fallout 3: The subways which the player must use to navigate conveniently placed piles of rubble suffer from this. Probably justified, as subway tunnels are not usually known for their visual variety. A less justified example would be the occasional reuse of building interiors or layouts.
    • Earlier titles in the series used basically the same handful of maps for all random encounters. Almost all caves shared the same walls and were only distinguished by their layout.
    • Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas suffer from this trope a lot harder than you think, although Vegas tries harder to subvert it. Almost every interior corridor is yellow/blue or white with dirt marks everywhere, the same filing cabinets and desks are probably used more than any other object, identical metal boxes with nothing in them, doors are almost always wooden with 2 glass panels or the metal lever-opened kind and the wasteland itself seems to just be the same dirt texture and rocks repeated, broken up occasionally by an important location or river.
  • Rogue Galaxy is a particularly painful sufferer of this - every level is about twice as long as it has any right to be, and only uses two or three kinds of texture.
  • EVE Online follows this trope to the letter. Each race has a handful of different station, stargate and planet designs. Agents assign you to a mission randomly picked from a relatively small pool. Also, several NPC factions use ships from one of the major factions, with the only difference being the paint job.
    • The "Trinity" graphics upgrade made it worse. Prior to Trinity, there were 3 station interiors per race. Afterwards, there was one station interior per race.
  • Mega Man Star Force is very guilty of this. Just about every Comp system that doesn't house a major boss or is not in the second scrap yard area will be identical regardless whether the Comp system is designed for a soda machine, a dog house, a statue, etc.
    • MegaMan Star Force 3 was worse: all the boss areas even looked the same.
    • The first Battle Network game was horrible about this. The whole Internet looked the same! Every area! Even the "scary" WWW-controlled areas! Later games were better about this.
  • Averted in Star Wars: Empire at War. Each planet has its own terrain, even those that sorta-kinda reuse the same tilesets have their own little quirks that make them unique.
  • The Dark Cloud games manage to do what Nethack did except less well. The 3D sections are identical, but you never play a level with the same layout twice because the levels are randomized.
  • Every stage in the original Darius, its PC Engine ports, and Darius R.
  • Celadon Hotel in Pokémon Red and Blue (and Yellow) is a slightly modified Pokémon Center. You can even stand where the PC would be in a regular Pokémon Center and use it...even though it doesn't exist! Possibly lampshaded when you talk to the receptionist and she says "Pokémon? No, this is a hotel."
    • Averted in FireRed and LeafGreen; the hotel looks the same but the Pokémon centers have a new layout. However, this means that the receptionist's line no longer makes sense.
    • If you try out level editors for the first two generations, you will discover that most houses that look the same in-game, are in fact the same map with different objects; the player's house in Red/Blue/Yellow is the same map as Copycat's house.
      • Fridge Brilliance: Of course Copycat's home looks like yours. She's a master at, well, copycatting.
    • Most towns have variations on a just a handful of architectures in the first two Generations, with a few buildings giving some diversity such as Silph Co and the radio towers. In Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald (Generation III), they improved on this. However, this made the identical interiors and exteriors of Pokémon Centers and Pokémon Marts even more noticeable.
  • The first installment of Die Hard Trilogy for the PlayStation. Most of the floors, with the exception of the Garage, Reception, Ballroom, and Vault, are small variations of six basic designs: Office, Construction, Maintenance, Executive, Computer, and Rooftop.
  • Infinity: The Quest for Earth features procedural generation of terrain. On one hand, this means no one spot on any of the billions of realistically-sized planets is perfectly identical. On the other, it means some planets are bound to look very similar to each other.
  • The Conduit both plays this trope straight. While many of the earlier levels are repetitive (somewhat justified in that they take place in repetitive real-world buildings), the player can also use the ASE to show a path to the next waypoint.
  • During development, one of Bungie's promotional points for Oni was that its buildings were designed by real architects for the player to fight through. The game ended up with a lot of Cut and Paste Environments because that's how real architecture works.
  • SimCity takes this to a large scale level with it's building tilesets.
    • Heck, even in SimCity 4, where lots could come in different shapes and positions, you will still have the same buildings (hence why everyone hates Wren Insurance in that game), in fact, it's very common to have two of the same buildings right next to each other.
    • As for the games before SimCity 4, the buildings all faced the same direction.
  • Some pseudo-random level generators used in a variety of games, from X-COM to Spelunky and even Nethack, use Cut And Paste Level Elements - while the overall shape of the level differs each time, the maps are generated with some sections of level that are always designed in a particular manner:
    • X-COM uses massive tiles which are composites to plant houses and UFOs down, and certain sections of an Alien Base always have the same basic layout.
    • X-COM Apocalypse plays it completely straight way with fully premade levels. For example, every UFO of a given type always crashes into the same landscape regardless of location.
    • Nethack features "Special Levels", where the floor is mostly pregenerated and stored in the game's database. Most of these premade levels are either Quest Levels, part of the Sokoban Shout-Out, or part of the Endgame. Even then, enough random events and monsters make each experience unique.
    • Spelunky uses large blocks of level formations, which are slotted together and adjusted by pathfinding software to prevent/minimise inescapable situations where the player is forced to have bombs or rope on hand. An addition randomising routine makes little changes here and there to keep things interesting, and all items and enemies are always randomly placed, with the exception of Special Level Elements very much like Nethack's.
  • The Diablo series prides itself for its randomly generated dungeons, and apart from a few carefully-constructed areas (boss levels, the last parts of final dungeons, towns etc.) it manages to avoid this trope completely.
  • The Baldur's Gate series had a large number of houses you could break into. And most of them used the exact same layout...
  • The revamped version of OGame gives planets in different positions different Palette Swaps but every planet in an equivalent position has the same background.
  • All the .hack games suffer from this. By trying to simulate an MMO, the games offer you an enormous amount of key word combinations to access new areas, and they will lead you to... not a great variation of areas, mostly a change of enemies.
  • You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  • In Shadow the Hedgehog, there are two levels in which Shadow is transported to his memory in the past, The Doom and Lost Impact. Completing certain missions that don't just involve getting to the goal ring, especially in Lost Impact, is arduous as every room looks very similar and there are not quite enough distinctive features in each area.
    • Central City counts as well. There are tow parts that look exactly the same, in fact, even the landmarks are the same.
  • The FPS Moon very noticeably uses this, but also attempts to justify it. Almost all of the game takes place in alien bases, and since they're all for the same sort of alien and the same purpose, there is no in-game reason for them to vary much. As for the rest of the levels, they're outside—on the Moon, where you can hardly expect varying scenery. One does wonder, though, why the bases have no break rooms, no living quarters, and indeed nothing other than identical machinery, identical checkposts, and the occasional storage unit.
  • Codemasters' FUEL is a great offender, having objects repeated several times in a small area. This, of course, is justified by the game's 14400 square kilometers of environment.
  • Ultima VI constructs its "cave" dungeons from geomorphs. This wouldn't be so bad if most of the dungeons weren't part of a single ginormous world-spanning cave, so one wrong turn can leave you unbelievably lost.
  • The tons of abandoned buildings in Wasteland.
  • In Mafia: City of Lost Heaven, buildings repeat textures. While this is not too much distracting with bricks and such, seeing several "Pete's Restaurant" buildings is a big jarring.
  • Done in Crush Crumble and Chomp. Due to the limitations of personal computers at the time, the game heavily reuses standard icons for most spaces (residential home, skyscraper, bridge, etc.). Even with this limitation, the game loosely attempts to duplicate real-world locations with the setup — for example, the Pentagon is a ring of five "skyscraper" tiles.
  • Done even moreso in the original Castle Wolfenstein games; all of the rooms are built from repeated use of a single "wall" tile, a "stairs" tile, and cut-and-pasted furniture.
  • The bonus dungeons in Dragon Quest VI and Dragon Quest VII cut and paste from other dungeons in those games.
  • While playing Alan Wake, you may get tired of seeing trees due to Alan having to trudge through a thick forest at night in almost every level. Yahtzee even remarked on this, saying that the game repeatedly makes up excuses for you to be doing so.
    • Then again, Washington is very thickly forested in places, especially the western half, and opening shots establish Bright Falls as nestled deep in the mountains.
    • Only in the first three levels. The last three involve fighting through clinic grounds, a large farm, urban terrain, a power plant, and a series of highways, junkyards, and mills.
  • In Bayonetta you go through the same town square at least three times. First time it's normal, second time it's covered in lava, third time it's floating in space. The final boss also uses palette-swapped versions of the same terrain for it's fire and ice forms.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online largely avoids this trope. While some building interiors and exteriors are re-used, the environments for the different zones are largely unique. To the point that the snowy mountain enviroment in the Blue Mountains is distinct from the snowy mountain environment of the Misty Mountains. The wide variety of terrain makes exploring the different areas more worthwhile.
  • Hyperdimension Neptunia definitely abused this trope. You'll see backgrounds from Record of Agarest War, and Trinity Universe and almost every single enemy came from even beyond those series. Luckily, later games actually had a budget, due to somehow outselling the aforementioned games by far.
  • MMORPG Vindictus does this, but in a fairly creative way. All combat is in instanced dungeons, known as "missions," set in specific regions. Each region has a limited number of landscape/room/landmark features. Each time a dungeon is generated, it uses a semi-random selection of available features. Certain missions will invariably have certain features every time, and the boss rooms are always the same for each mission; but there will also be a few randomly-generated features as well. Particularly egregious with The Labyrinth.
    • There are also entire cut-and-paste regions. For example, the Ruins of Sanctity are little more than a Palette Swap of the Perilous Ruins with a few features added. Nearly all higher-level regions are Palette Swap versions of lower-level ones. The only truly unique regions are Ainle, The Sewers, and Ortel Castle.
  • Dead Island has the entire final "dungeon" as this. It's pretty obvious they ran out of time or ideas at the end, and just lopped the same room/hallway combo for the end. There's even the same branching hallways into the same big empty rooms with nothing. Very odd, as the doors to these empty rooms are big and imposing.
  • Saints Row 2 averts this, as even shops of the same type will have different layouts to match their vastly exteriors and each district has wildly different architecture that makes this unfeasible for the overworld. Taken to an extreme in The Third however, where there are about three unique clothing shops in Steelport - every other one in the city is a Planet Saints with the same interior and exterior.
  • Guild Wars did a decent job avoiding this for most of its run with largely unique zones. However, in Eye of the North dungeon design bested their development team. Rooms were often copied in several dungeons with only a few remaining unique to a single dungeon.
  • Monster Girl Quest Paradox has deliberate examples. The interiors of the various Tartarus comprise sections of other maps (which can include deserts, forests, beaches or even futuristic settings), all jumbled together with no sense of harmony. This is likely because these are passageways between different universes. The Labyrinth of Chaos has each floor as an exact copy of an existing map.

Real Life

  • Recently built subdivisions can tend to look like this, often having only 2 or 3 house designs repeated throughout the entire area.
  1. ↑ Except the the barber shop near CJ's home (since according to the storyline the person running that particular one has been cutting CJ's hair for years), and another on the southeast corner of Los Santos
  2. ↑ This one at least may be justifiable
  3. ↑ most of the time; one shop is larger than the others
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