History Main / CutAndPasteEnvironments

** Both Fallout 3 and ''[[{{Fallout}} New Vegas]]'' suffer from this trope alot 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 level-opened kind and the wasteland itself seems to just be the same dirt texture and rocks repeated, broken up occasionally by an important location.

-->God, fuck! Where am I supposed to be going?! Every place I go to looks exactly like every place else!!\\

* {{Anarchy Online}}. Pick a quest, ANY QUEST: 150% of the time the rooms will look dead similar, right down to the kitchen sink.

* The revamped version of ''[=OGame=]'' gives planets in different positions different {{Pallet Swap}}s but every planet in an equivalent position has the same background.

* The Adaman Sea level towards the end of TombRaider: 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 DarkCloud 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.

** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] in [[VideoGameRemake 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.

* InfinityTheQuestForEarth 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.

* SimCity takes this to a large scale level with it's building tilesets.

* 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.

** {{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 {{shoutout}}, 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 [[{{Unwinnable}} 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 revamped version of [=Ogame=] gives planets in different positions different {{Pallet Swap}}s but every planet in an equivalent position has the same background.

* 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.

* Codemasters' [[CodemastersFuel 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.

* 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.

** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] in [[VideoGameRemake 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.

* Celadon Hotel in ''[=~Pokémon~=] Red'', ''Blue'' and ''Yellow'' is a slightly modified Pokémon Centre. You can even stand where the PC would be in a regular Pokémon Centre and use it...even though it doesn't exist! Possibly [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] when you talk to the receptionist and she says "Pokémon? No, this is a hotel."
** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] in [[VideoGameRemake FireRed]]'' [[VideoGameRemake and]] ''[[VideoGameRemake LeafGreen]]''; the hotel looks the same but the Pokémon centres have a new layout. However, this means that the receptionist's line no longer makes sense.

* Sega employs this trope liberally for the post-millenial PhantasyStar 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 [[DittoFighter reskins of previous content]], especially [[PaletteSwap 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).

** {{Spelunky}} uses large blocks of level formations, which are slotted together and adjusted by pathfinding software to prevent/minimise [[{{Unwinnable}} inescapeable]] 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.

** Worse than Library: Assault on the Control Room. Even worse is that the Two Betrayals mission in turn is a near-total copy-and-paste of AOTCR.
*** Two Betrayals occurs in exactly the same place, just several hours later.

** 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 CivilWar.
* Dull and uninspired design has been the major failing point of both modern 3D ''{{Castlevania}}'' games.

** All the barber shops, fast food joints, weapons shops, 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. The only exception is the barber shop near CJ's home since he done haircuts for CJ and his friends according to the storyline.
*** Probably {{justified}} with the fast food joints, at least. And there ''is'' one weapon shop that is bigger than all the others, in the center of the city. Apparently is the main one or the central or somesuch.
* This editor recalls spending ''hours'' trying to navigate the caves from the SNES version of ''TheLordOfTheRings Vol. 1''. The task was made extra-difficult thanks to the caves being mostly a set of repeating tiles, as well as to the fact that ''every single cave in the game looked exactly the same''. The forests looked pretty similar too. (Hell, even the ''characters'' looked alike -- the hobbits all had the same sprite!)

** ''SuperMarioBros.'' 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.
*** Not to mention WORLD 4-4 and [[spoiler: 7-4]] that actually loop if the player takes the wrong path.
** ''TheLegendOfZelda'' 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.

* ''TheElderScrolls: Oblivion'' has you visit the planes of Oblivion, unsurprisingly. There are 90 gates to Oblivion, but only 7 distinct maps. There's slight variation in the layout of the central towers, but not enough to shake the feelings of deja vu you'll get.
** Oblivion is not the worst offender. ''Daggerfall'' covered an area larger than Great Britain, and since the developers certainly weren't going to actually design all that area, most of it was randomly generated, and looked more or less the same.
*** Even worse was the fact that Daggerfall had dungeons who were literally CopyAndPasteEnvironments. The random dungeons were made by the computer by assembling sections of the main quest's dungeons. This caused you to walk around a dungeon with the walls and floor suddenly changing color, and meeting certain rooms repeatedly across different dungeons.
**** Not to mention that the algorithms involved produced levels that resembled "mating octopi" according to at least one review and completing quests involving dungeons consisted of either a) only completing quests where you find the item in the first room, b) spent hours combing the dungeon for the MacGuffin (which didn't look any different than the rest of the dungeon trash, or c) used the cheat codes provided with the patch (largely because the developers realized the game was unplayable without such codes) to cycle through the potential quest item locations.
*** Despite all this, fans will [[NostalgiaFilter brag about how big Daggerfall is]] - ignoring how one can easily cut at ''least'' 60-80% of the landmass without missing anything.

* ''MassEffect'' 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 gets pretty bothersome in some areas, who consist only of one big room, two smaller rooms, one linked by a staircase and a balcony. How much work would it take to build something else of a similar size?
** Don't forget the uncharted planets. Uncharted planets are all made up amazingly similar hilly terrain, the only difference being that each planet had a slightly different color scheme.
** This is not unique to ''MassEffect'' for Bioware games. ''NeverwinterNights'' 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, ''KnightsOfTheOldRepublic'' averted this, despite using a modified version of the NWN engine.
*** Interestingly, their earlier ''[[BaldursGate 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.

* The [[SoBadItsHorrible terrible]] AdventureGame ''Limbo of the Lost'' offers a very literal interpretation of this trope: Nearly every single one of the game's prerendered background scenes is [[{{Plagiarism}} copied straight from elsewhere]], sometimes with some dreadful tweaking to try and cover it up, or placement of props that, once again, are reused. What's worse, the game re-uses the same environments often, sometimes even in the exact same angles, which makes navigating its game world very exasperating.

** Or maybe it is just ''randomly generated''?
*** Obviously, but what makes it this trope is that it's generated from a limited number of static prefabs for each texture-set. Even though each maze is generated on entry every time you play the game, you know exactly what rooms you'll see and where the exits are from them.

* ''{{Fallout}} 3'', Christ , ''Fallout 3''! The game's design decision to separate DC into sections using conveniently placed piles of rubble forces you to spend about half of the main quest inside of those bloody subways.
** Justified- they're Metro subways, of course they're going to look the same. Less justified are the (admittedly rare) similar interiors, but you have to really really look for them. There's two or three shops that all look the same and are on disparate sections of the map. Same goes for houses all with the same layout- albeit with different content inside. Huge suburbs with houses all built at once tend to resemble one another. However, the worst example of this trope, used liberally in Oblivion and Morrowind- identical naturally forming caves- is non-existent in Fallout 3.
** Earlier titles 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.

* ''TheConduit'' both plays this trope straight and subverts it. 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 [[SwissArmyWeapon ASE]] to show a path to the next waypoint.

*** ''{{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.

* In ''TheGodfather'', 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.

* ''{{Fallout}} 3'', Christ , ''Fallout 3''! The game's design decision to separate DC into sections using conveniently placed piles of rubble forces you to spend about half of the main quest inside of those bloody subways.

Environments for a game require a great deal of effort, particularly nowadays 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. 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.

** Sacred Icon, the sequel to The Library. And much of Quarantine Zone, especially the outdoor areas.

** ''[[MegaManStarForce MegaMan Star Force 3]]'' was worse: all the boss areas looked the same.

* Quite annoying in ''{{Final Fantasy X-2}}'' where the new dungeons in the game were mostly a cave with a a different tint every now and then. It got to a repetitive level when Via Infinito looked like the dungeon under Bevelle [[spoiler:where one would fight Baralai the first time]], with only a few randomised floor layouts copied and pasted over 100 floors.