Content reuse

When a game is being created, it usually has a limited budget for content creation. One way of tackle this limitation is to reuse the content so that it appears more than once in the game, and even frequently on the same level. Some games have pushed this so far that they reuse entire levels, and create stories that makes the player character return to a previously visited place.

There is nothing inherently wrong with content reuse, but apart from making the game more repetitive, there are some more serious problems that can occur if the designers are not careful. When a human comes to a new place, he or she unconsciously starts to form a map in his or her mind. This is true for players of computer games too. In real life, unlike computer games, nothing ever repeats itself perfectly, despite the best intentions of the architects. When humans try to form their maps, they start by looking for large, easily spotted differences, and as time progress, they learn less and less significant features that makes their maps more detailed and reliable. The smaller the feature, the longer the time spent before it is discovered. Computer games that rely heavily on content reuse in their architecture can easily create environments that are very difficult for humans to map and navigate. Many games with this kind of level design does not suffer from the problem because they use funnel the player in a direction, uses a bread crumb trail of enemies or even direction arrows to help the player find their way. Games also frequently features a map that the player can read to find his or her way. As reading a map is probably not part of the core gameplay for most games, being forced to do so should be counted as a flaw in the level design. Even worse are games that forces the player to run back and forth in a level to pick something up in one end in order to bring it to another end. If games that rely on this kind of "problem solving" has repetitive architecture (Legacy of Kain - Defiance is a school book example of this, a game that also lacks a map), you create a very difficult situation for the player. Running is seldom entertaining, and if you target the segment of the games market that find running entertaining, then you should make a running simulator. Otherwise, minimize the time that the player spends running in empty corridors, and make sure that they run a very small risk of getting lost. Halo used arrows in the floor of their tutorial level, it can be viewed as very crude but it is non-the-less efficient.