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Both the act and accusation of asset reuse is controversial in games, but Elden Ring Nightreign's director thinks it helps the studio's games get made more efficiently.
You might have heard of the term asset flip or asset reuse before. It essentially means a developer put an existing animation, character model, or texture from one game into another - Majora's Mask is a pretty famous example since it remixed a lot of material from Ocarina of Time, just as Tears of the Kingdom did with Breath of the Wild.
But gamers sometimes take issue with the practice. Elden Ring's base game even came under fire from some fans for how it recycled stuff from previous FromSoftware hits, even when it did so in a creative, actually cool way.
When asked about the reusing assets in co-op spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign, director Junya Ishizaki told GamesRadar that the entire idea around the new game was to "completely reform the gameplay loop and the game design" of The Lands Between.
"And using Elden Ring as a base for this, for the world and for the elements present, we were able to divert power from that aspect to concentrate more on developing these gameplay ideas and this brand-new structure," Ishizaki added. Essentially, Nightreign takes place in the same world as the first Elden Ring, of course, so the focus was more on reframing the act of actually playing the game, not on arbitrarily rebuilding the map.
"Of course, asset reuse as a term and as an option in developing games is sometimes under a little bit of contention, a little bit of concern, but we do see it as an efficient way to build these games," he continued. "And we don't consider it a straight one-to-one copy-paste. It actually takes a little bit more than that. Particularly in the case of Nightreign, I think you will see these similar assets, but you will see them in ways that contribute to the gameplay and that have been reworked to fit the gameplay of Nightreign in ways that are maybe a little difficult to determine at first glance."
At a time when big-budget game development can sometimes be unsustainable, smartly reusing assets where it makes sense doesn't seem like much of a problem. The entire Yakuza/Like a Dragon series is built on the very idea, and it probably means you don't need to wait 10 years for a sequel to a game you like, either.
