Cut And Paste Environments / Video Games

Individual titles:

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• 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.
• Pick a quest in Anarchy Online, ANY QUEST: 150% of the time the rooms will look dead similar, right down to the kitchen sink.
• Aversion: The Baldur's Gate games are 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.
  • However, the series has a large number of houses you could break into, and most of them use the exact same layout.
• DICE is infamous for reusing buildings across multiple maps in its Battlefield series.
• 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.
• On of the post game areas you can visit in Blast Corps is the Moon. After earning enough gold medals, you can unlock other planets to do bonus missions on (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Neptune). All the other planets you can play on have the same rocky texture and starry skybox as the Moon, only with the colors changed.
• Blood II: The Chosen reuses three separate maps three separate times. Two of the three are at least an attempt at emulating a Hub Level, chapter 1 including three trips through an urban area just off of some tenements and chapter 3 making you pass through a specific area of the CabalCo offices three times, though at least in chapter 1 the reuse is so blatant that the first pass through the level even has the end-of-level triggers for later visits - with noclip, it's possible to pass through some vents at the back of a laundromat and skip from the second level all the way to the end of the chapter, 9 levels later. Chapter 2 reuses levels purely for padding, as the first and seventh levels are both near-identical reuses of the very first level on a subway train, modified only to change the enemy layout; the second time even ends the same way, with your train crashing into another one.
• The Bureau: XCOM Declassified: The team visit an awful lot of similar looking farms on the side missions for some highly contrived reasons (a nuclear missile hidden under a farm comes to mind). The alien environments also look very similar.
• 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.
• This has been an element of modern 3D Castlevania games.
  • Among the 2D games, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is a pretty big offender. Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin also, to some degree.
  • The Inverted Castle in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the regular castle but upside down with different music, enemies and bosses and almost no story. However, some rooms were definitely designed to work both right side up and upside down, and some layouts are different.
    • Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance has a Castle A and B, with exactly the same layout in both, just different graphics and enemies.
  • Castlevania: Curse of Darkness uses obvious Cut-and-Paste Environments in the Tower of Infinity (50 levels of the same room with different Mooks), the Tower of Evermore (the same thing but harder), and Dracula's Castle (which is required). It's also pretty obvious in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.
• Every single stage in Cho Ren Sha68k uses the same parallax background, with the only variation being in Stage 0 when the background turns a glowing, menacing red. The version 1.10 update released in 2023 drops this to add unique background tiles to each stage.
• It was 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. Office buildings all had the same basic room and hallway components, and in some cases they weren't even randomized; warehouse interiors were also suspiciously uniform, right down to the big multi-level room at the end of one map branch where you usually found the villain boss for the mission. Similarly, there was 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, did nothing to avert this. Almost any map in the game could be chosen, including the potential for a random pick from a certain size and type, but the maps themselves could not be altered in any way; only the enemies and objectives inside could be edited.
  • Oranbega, the lost city hidden beneath Paragon City, was a confusing magical labyrinth that you would visit frequently. In the Rogue Isles, Oranbega didn't exist. Instead, the ruins of the lost city of Mu are located there. Predictably, they were exactly the same. Some players didn't even distinguish between the two.
• Colossal Cave Adventure: You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
• The Conduit plays this trope straight. While many of the earlier levels are repetitive, the player can also use the ASE to show a path to the next waypoint.
  • Lampshaded at one point in the sequel when Michael Ford starts complaining about the similarities of the corridors in a later level. Prometheus then proceeds to note that architects and level designers for video games tend to do this to save money.
• Crisis Core has 300 side missions and a grand total of about eight or nine actual areas, reused over and over and over again.
• 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.
• The Dark Cloud games are very similar to NetHack. The 3D sections are identical, but you never play a level with the same layout twice because the levels are randomized.
• One of the installments of the Dark Tales series, The Bells, reuses a few scenes from previous installments. There's only one in the main game - the police laboratory, which is the same as the interior of the police department seen in The Oval Portrait - but the psychiatric hospital in the bonus chapter reuses scenes from Metzengerstein and The Pit and the Pendulum. They're easy to miss unless you're a long-time player.
• Darius:
  • Every stage in the original Darius, its PC Engine ports, and Darius R.
  • Another Chronicle's Chronicle Mode and Chronicle Saviours's CS Mode have you flying across hundreds or thousands of different star systems, but they just reuse the same 30 or so base stages over and over with occasional variations.
• 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.
• 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. However, Diablo III constructs each dungeon from a handful of very large architectural complexes, to the point that a veteran player can see a hallway and recognize whether it leads anywhere interesting. The page quote is a lampshade on this. Also, each dungeon has its entrance and exit in the same relative locations.
• 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.
• Doom takes advantage of this for the secret level of its third episode. When you enter it, by all means it appears to be an exact copy of the first level of the episode, up until you hit the original exit switch and the walls lower to reveal an open area with a Cyberdemon. You then have to go back through to the start of the level, with walls lowered to reveal new monsters in every room, to find a new hallway in the beginning room leading to the key to exit the level.
• 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.
• The bonus dungeons in Dragon Quest VI and Dragon Quest VII cut and paste from other dungeons in those games.
• Drakengard:
  • The world 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.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins is top-notch when it comes to unique one-of-a-kind environments. One place in particular however that copy-and-pastes environments is Denerim when you're clearing out the city's backstreet encounters. There's quite a few backyard encounters when you roam around Denerim, but only two maps are ever used for these fights. One encounter the map will have a thief ambush waiting for your arrival. The next time you return, the map will have a special black vial lying about that summons a powerful Revenant wanting to kill you.
    • Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening had something similar, but its reused environments are the world encounters, which Origins beforehand was very good at. So many times in Awakening, you'll be fighting your way through the same flaming forest, or clearing out the same farm overrun of darkspawn.
  • Present to an extreme level in Dragon Age II, where the wastelands around Lothering, the city of Kirkwall, and the final Deep Roads dungeon of Act 1 are the only areas with a unique map. There are no original environments after Dragon Age II's Act 1, the closest being Hawke's new Hightown estate. Even Sebastian's supposedly unique graveyard cave for his personal Act 2 quest is just a retextured mineshaft cave, if you look close enough at its map layout. 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.
• Dynasty Wars repeats the stage in the mountains where you travel uphill on horseback, at least thrice in the game.
• The Elder Scrolls has shifted all around this trope since its inception. To note:
  • Arena and Daggerfall each cover a massive area, but rely exclusively on these (going hand in hand with Randomly Generated Levels) to fill out their absolutely massive game worlds.
  • Morrowind shifts to the opposite end of the spectrum, being entirely hand-built but also being much smaller in scale. That said, cut and pasting is still popular in the dungeons.
  • Oblivion leans back toward it, with areas outside of towns and especially with Oblivion Gates. (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 Déjà Vu.) The regular dungeons are also examples, though less blatant; they were procedurally generated before release.
  • Skyrim skews away from it again, going back to a mostly hand-built world with hand-built (though not necessarily unique) dungeons, much like Morrowind before it. For example, once you've visited one Nordic ruin, you've visited them all. Only the layout really changes.
• Elite Dangerous suffers from the only functional differences between solar systems being the type of government and the number of space stations and asteroid belts there are; you have 400 billion Procedural Generation, realistic star systems that are almost all completely identical. However, planetary landing (planned for an Expansion Pack) should avert this, with different planets having different environments and resources.
• Etrian Odyssey Nexus: Despite being a Megamix Game reusing many levels from past entries, its unique dungeons that separate sectors are the four Shrines, all of which have the same tileset and theme. They're also significantly longer — each Shrine barring the first is five floors long as opposed to three in recurring dungeons, so sixteen floors of the same thing can get old. The final dungeon offers little deviation other than a palette swap and the backing of a choir, so this can amount to twenty-one floors of the same thing! The postgame dungeon is a slight improvement over this as its music is distinct but the tileset is yet another palette swap.
• 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 even more noticeable. Prior to Trinity, there were 3 station interiors per race. Afterwards, there was one station interior per race.
• Fatal Frame III reuses several environments from the previous two games, including the Fish Tank room from Himuro Mansion, and the front of the Osaka house from All God's Village.
• Fallout 3: The subways which the player must use to navigate conveniently placed piles of rubble suffer from this. There's also the occasional reuse of building interiors or layouts.
  • Earlier titles in the series use the same handful of maps for all random encounters. Almost all caves share the same walls and are only distinguished by their layout.
  • Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas use Cut-and-Paste Environments surprisingly often, 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 then there's the wasteland itself.
  • Fallout: New Vegas directly reuses a few building layouts from its predecessor. For example, the Securitron Deconstruction Plant, X-2 Transmitter Array, and train tunnels in Old World Blues are near-exact copies of the Robot Repair Center, Satcomm Array NW-05a, and subway/utility tunnels, respectively, the Mysterious Cave's layout is identical to Broc Flower Cave from the FNV base game, and Hidden Valley Bunker reuses architecture from Raven Rock. In the main game, the REPCONN basement appears to copy parts of Vault 101 (such as the GOAT room) and the Jefferson Memorial basement. House Resort and the Jacobstown lodge also have the same interior layout.
• Fate/Grand Order often uses these for its Visual Novel-esque cutscenes' backgrounds and battle backgrounds. Why yes, that exact same hallway architecture from 15th-century France also existed in the 1st-century Roman Empire.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses has about three dozen distinct combat maps, most of which get reused in different routes with different enemy unit placement. In most cases, this is justified by the battles taking place in the same location, both in-gameplay and in-story, but some reuses are much less graceful. Paralogues in particular are prone to recycling maps from the main storylines, or taking place on generic levels otherwise only used for sidequests.^note In fact, the only paralogue with an completely unique map seems to be Leonie and Linhard's "Legend of the Lake", which is the only time in the entire game we see Lake Teutates. Most notable cases are:
  • Both Lorenz and Ignatz/Raphael's paralogues feature exactly the same fortification overlooking identical creeks, despite supposedly taking place in Gloucester and Myrddin, respectively. That said, since the two territories share a border, this inconsistency could be explained away if the map is situated exactly on said border.
  • Hanneman and Manuela's paralogue takes place on the generic "Mountains" map, which, both in its sidequest variant and in Dedue's paralogue, is located within the territory of House Kleiman, formerly known as Duscur. In-story, H&M's paralogue takes place to the west of the Sealed Forest, right next to Garrech Mach, half a continent away from the Duscur Peninsula.
  • Marianne's paralogue uses the exact same forest map as Bernadetta/Petra's (except that Marianne's is fogged) — only the former takes place in the Alliance territory of House Edmund, while the latter is supposedly set in Petra's homeland of Brigid, half a continent and a sea away from Edmund.
  • Perhaps the most egregious example are the Sylvain, Felix, and Annette/Gilbert's paralogues, which all feature the generic "Kingdom" map, despite the dialogue telling us that they take place in the domains of Houses Gautier, Fraldarius, and Dominic, respectively. This only makes sense if the entire Holy Kingdom of Faerghus practices some serious Soviet-style city planning.
  • Claude's paralogue gets an honorable mention, as it takes place on the generic "Sreng Desert" map. Apparently, the lonesome ruin at its center has served as Saint Macuil the Windcaller's hideout the whole time, and we must have been too busy fighting generic bandits to spot him the last seven billion times we've been here.
• First Encounter Assault Recon frequently reuses room layouts, with the only differences being the placement of objects; this can possibly be explained by way of about half or more of the game taking place in an office building. F.E.A.R. 2 in turn reuses only-slightly-modified subway areas from Condemned: Criminal Origins, while the SCU headquarters in one level of Condemned 2: Bloodshot bears more than a passing resemblance to the aforementioned Armacham offices.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy XIII uses cut-and-paste environments liberally 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's original release had enormous expanses of land that re-use some assets to fill out the space, supposedly due to limitations imposed by the PlayStation 3 (even though the original release never came out for that system). While all MMOs do this to some extent, much ado was made about this game's usage of the trope as it sometimes recycled entire topographical features. Most infamous was the forest area, the Black Shroud, which was an impossible-to-navigate maze with identical corridors leading into identical clearings with identical stream crossings. When the game got rebooted in 2013, almost every single geographical location was split into four to six distinct zones, which each got a makeover and look unique to each other.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia makes this a minor plot point when various characters from different worlds are surprised at how familiar their new surroundings are. The gods Materia and Spiritus looked at all the worlds they summoned their heroes from and used those as a template for their new world so it would seem more comfortable and familiar—hence all the ruins, shiny cities, and lava caves.
• Fuel blatantly uses cut-and-paste environments, having objects repeated several times in a small area.

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• 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.
• In Granblue Fantasy, the Fate Episodes feature near-identical background art. It stretches disbelief to imagine that one character would stand in the very same spot that another character stood in another episode, or why some houses have similar interiors.
• 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^note 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, fast food joints, weapons shops^note most of the time; one shop is larger than the others, and tattoo parlors are all identical and 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 only a handful of building interiors depending on what kind of building you are breaking into.
• In Grand Theft Auto IV, the platform levels of underground subway stations, fast food joints, a clothing chain, two gun stores, bowling alleys, and a multitude of apartment corridors share common interiors.
• 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.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved:
    • The entire second half of the game is you going through the first half backwards.
    • "Assault on the Control Room"; besides the outdoor portions, it's all identical rooms and bridges.
    • Penny Arcade made light of this.
  • Halo 2 as a whole likes to feature many rooms exactly two times. You also go through at least 3 or 4 large identical bridges.
• Hellgate: London was criticised for this: with the exception of several unique levels, most of the game's randomised levels are repetitions of about 10 basic tilesets, with identical sewers/streets/dried-out riverbeds/building basements. Perhaps London really is that boring.
• Used extensively in the original Heroes of Jin Yong, with amount of unique environments countable on one hand, the same interior design is used for taverns, temples, mansions and all that. There's also the underground cave which is blatantly remodeled into a winter-themed stage, but with the brown parts repainted white and grey. Fixed in its 2022 remake, which did a much better job with level designs.
• Hyperdimension Neptunia definitely abuses 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 have a budget, due to somehow outselling the aforementioned games by far.
• ICO has two levels entitled "Symmetry (pt. 1)" and "Symmetry (pt. 2)". As the names might suggest, they are the exact same level, with the second flipped symmetrically. And not only that, but "Symmetry (pt. 2)" requires the player to complete the exact same series of puzzles as in "Symmetry (pt. 1)" all over again.
• 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 PS2 Inuyasha RPG pushes this to its illogical limits. Travel through various areas consists 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.
• Jak 3 is this in the way that Haven City shares almost all of the layout, landmarks, models and textures to its appearance in Jak II, except for the added destruction. Justifiable for the sake of continuity, and doing so makes an actual emotional impact on players as they see a place they are so familiar with in ruins.
• Kileak recycles graphics for various environments in both games. The same tiles, corridors, and everything else is reused for several levels.
• 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.
• Knuckles Chaotix features five acts in each zone unlike how other Sonic games have two or three. Nearly every act in a zone features the same general structure, with few changes in layout and object design. For example, you'll always find the hidden corridors in Botanic Base and the miniboss in Amazing Arena in the same region of each act; and Techno Tower's whole point is that every level is the same building under construction. Add to that the lack of interesting setpieces, gadgets, and hazards to play around with and the result is a game often criticized for being repetitive. Of note is that the level order is decided on a roulette, in an attempt to mask this trope.
• In Kung Fu Chivalry, only the first and last stages, along with the boss arenas, have unique scenery, the rest of the levels all have the same copypasted brick & stone castle/temple/crypt aesthetic.
• Left 4 Dead has the finale of The Sacrifice campaign looking exactly like the finale map used in The Passing campaign for Left 4 Dead 2 with some of the back alleys and streets being blocked off in the former.
• The 3D The Legend of 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 is a fairly interesting pastiche of other dungeons and their puzzles, but The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's Savage Labyrinth and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Cave of Ordeals consist of fifty nearly identical chambers packed with wave after wave of enemies (and WW requires 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.
  • Once you start to explore the Great Sea in The Wind Waker, the same interiors start showing up over and over again. The Savage Labyrinth at least has some effort put into it - two other plot coupons from the same quest are found in identical areas, just with a slightly different set of monsters. And are we really expected to believe those identical ship graveyards formed naturally?
  • Hyrule Field and other areas in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are filled with holes that lead to identical underground caves.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
    • The Sheikah Shrines. Each and every one of the entrances is the exact same stone cave with ornamental Tron Lines. Furthermore, the "shrines" themselves are vast underground Magitek puzzle chambers with a minimalist angular architecture. While the layout is different in each shrine (aside from the numerous "tests of strength" which host the exact same battle against the exact same robot in the exact same arena), their walls, railings, platforms, doors, torches, and everything else look exactly alike. This is at least justified by the backstory: the Shrines were built in the distant past using highly advanced Lost Technology, so some degree of industrialized standardization was likely in effect.
    • There are a mind-boggling 900 Korok puzzles in the overworld, but they fall into a relatively small number of categories^note put the apple in the empty slot, pick all but one apple from one of three trees so they match, Magnesis the block to the right spot so two arrangements of cubes match, Magnesis the iron ball into a hollow stump, stand next to the pinwheel and shoot floating targets, throw a rock into a circle of stones, place a rock into the missing slot in a stone pattern (usually just a small circle), push a big rock down a hill into a hole, look under the rock (quite a lot of rock-themed ones), melt a block of ice, jump into a circle of plants in the water, go from the stump with a leaf on it to a glowing ring before time runs out and many of these are identical to others in the same category. Some Koroks aren't even hidden, you just have to run up to the weird glowing thing zooming around and press A, or climb a tree to get to it. This is forgivable, though, since there are, again, 900 of them, and they need to be easy to recognize so that 100% Completion-types have any chance of finding them all.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: On top of the Shrines of Light and the Korok puzzles having the same kinds of standardization as their Breath of the Wild counterparts, there's also the various caves, which almost all have the same rock textures and plants even if they're supposed to be in regions that are far apart.
• In Lemmings, about a third of the game is reused levels. (Technically, though, most such levels are reused before they're used the first time; this is also a Justified Trope, as typically the earliest version of the level exists to teach you the mechanic you need to use, and further iterations add extra complications and difficulty.)
• Limbo of the Lost offers a very literal interpretation of this trope: Nearly every single one of the game's pre-rendered 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.
• 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.
• The Lord of the Rings Online largely avoided this trope. While some building interiors and exteriors were re-used, the environments for the different zones were largely unique. To the point that the snowy mountain environment in the Blue Mountains was distinct from the snowy mountain environment of the Misty Mountains. The wide variety of terrain made exploring the different areas more worthwhile.
• The Magic Circle, being a meta-commentary on game development, invokes this trope near the end. You have to demonstrate your own design skills by creating a level from a set of pre-built layouts.
• 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 bit jarring.
• Mass Effect:
  • 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. Even the underground bunkers all share the same orange rock wall colour. The uncharted planets meanwhile are all made up of amazingly similar hilly terrain, the only difference being that each planet has a slightly different color scheme. This is because all the terrain is determined by the height value of points on the terrain; the look of the terrain itself is determined by how steep it is. This leaves very little opportunity to have distinctive environments.
  • Mass Effect 2 is better about this; most of the main story missions are in completely unique environments, except when it makes sense not to be (for instance, the two recruitment missions on Omega obviously share some architectural similarities). Sidequests received somewhat less love but are still dramatically improved, and feel like actual unique missions as opposed to "go here and shoot everyone".
  • Mass Effect 3, having mostly done away with sidequests that feature environments (DLC notwithstanding), has completely unique terrain and architecture in all of its missions. Even the DLC multiplayer maps, 5 out of 7 of which share visual styles with different single-player maps, have unique layouts. (The six multiplayer maps that shipped with the game are identical to the six sidequest maps in single player, but these are explicitly the same locations.)
• Utilized in Massive Chalice. Most maps only have a few unique pieces with liberal use of rotation, size variation and combination to give the impression of different pieces. One map only has two "hero" pieces, i.e big set pieces making up the border/pants of the level.
• Mega Man Star Force uses Cut-and-Paste Environments heavily. Almost 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. In Star Force 3, even the boss areas even look the same!
• Mega Man Battle Network 1: The whole Internet looks the same. Every area. Even the "scary" WWW-controlled areas. This makes it rather easy to walk into the Undernet without knowing it until you suddenly get curbstomped by a scary-powerful group of viruses. Later games use more unique maps.
• This is one common complaint about Mighty No. 9. Many of the levels have the same "industrial" trappings, with some flavor dashed on top of them (such as fire or water sections).
• While Miitopia tends to use unique backgrounds for its different regions, it still occasionally uses some recycled environments. The most glaring example is the post-game dungeon Uncharted Galados which reuses the same assets than the Realm of the Fay.
• Mirror's Edge is made of this trope. Every rooftop is made of the same elements in different combinations.
• Monster Girl Quest uses stock backgrounds, so every house, castle etc. looks alike. In contrast, its sequel Monster Girl Quest! Paradox RPG uses original maps. However, the Labyrinth of Chaos in Paradox reuses maps from elsewhere in the game, arranged in a random order and with different enemies and treasures.
• The First-Person Shooter 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.
• In Mystery Quest for the NES, the third and fourth castles reuse the designs of the first and second, respectively, just with different enemies, color palettes, and item placement. Averted in the original Famicom Disk System version, Hao-kun no Fushigi na Tabi, where all six of the castles had unique layouts, the last two being the basis for the castles in the NES version.

N-T

• NetHack and other Roguelikes are either a major subversion of this, or the purest example: the entire game is constructed out of ASCII characters. And almost every dungeon level is randomized, giving a ridiculous number of possibilities. You will not play the same game twice. Unless the game decides to fill your Maze of Menace with bones files.
• Neverwinter Nights features innumerable room interiors that are 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 (from the same developer) averts this, despite using a modified version of the NWN engine.
• The revamped version of O Game gives planets in different positions different Palette Swaps, but every planet in an equivalent position has the same background.
• 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.
• Parasite Eve plays this out with its Bonus Dungeon, the Chrysler Building. Although each floor, except every 10th is randomized in layout, every hall and storage room are all identical. Every single floor uses the same exact decor for the walls and floors.
• PAYDAY 2 reuses some maps and/or its assets many times. The bank heist has five levels dedicated to it and they all use the exact same layout. The Ukrainian Job is a copied version of Jewelry Store with different assets used to make the level slightly different.
  • The developers responded to the criticisms about the trope being used and are improving on it slowly. Day 1 of Big Oil was just a copy and paste of map used in day 1 of Rats, but it was later changed to have a different outdoor area and the house itself was expanded upon. The Armored Heist has five different levels dedicated to it and they all use assets and areas already present in the game, but they are laid out in a way that makes the levels look and feel like new maps.
  • A peek in the game's files reveal that almost every asset used in the first game is present in the second game, implying that the sequel would have had a LOT more recycled content. While the sequel does reuse some assets from the first game, the majority of the assets are Dummied Out. However, some of the textures used as reflections on certain objects are reflections from levels used in the first game, making them stand out completely.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3 falls victim to this in Tartarus dungeon, with each area made up of a small selection of blocks placed in a randomized configuration every time you enter the area.
  • Persona 5: Most of the Mementos dungeon is a set of blocks of warped subway tunnels stuck together by random generation. The rest of the game however, and the bottom of Mementos, is custom made.
• Sega employs cut-and-paste environments liberally for the post-millennial Phantasy Star games: Phantasy Star Online, Phantasy Star Universe, Phantasy Star Portable and Phantasy Star Zero. The first Phantasy Star Online told its 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 animations!) The add-ons/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 add-ons (that is to say, it had a lot of reskinned areas, enemies, and bosses—just with different behavior flags).
• Phantom Doctrine: Storyline missions (e.g. the raid on the restaurant in Hong Kong) have unique building models, but non-story missions take place in a relatively small number of buildings, with minor variations in enemy and loot placement.
• The original PlanetSide had only a few base types at release, most of which were visually very similar except for the layout of rooms. At most, the only difference between a base on one continent and the same type of base across the continent (or on a different one) would be the placement of defensive pillboxes outside and the courtyard's ground texture. Tactics for taking a base almost never varied unless it was in a special position, such as Cyssor's Gunuku Dropship Center, which was isolated on a small island. The Expansion Pack added Ancient Vanu facilities in the caverns which, while limited to only three base designs, had significantly more variety due to the chaotic terrain of the Caverns. Too bad nobody played there.
• PlanetSide 2, particularly at release; all bases were copy-pasted and there were only about 5 base types and with less than a half dozen independent building designs. Later updates made bases more unique and with unique rooms, such as the underground bases on Amerish, though surface facilities still frequently suffer from having identical buildings.
• 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. This dungeon is 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.
• Pokémon:
  • Celadon Hotel in Pokémon Red and Blue (and Yellow) is a slightly modified Pokémon Center. In Red and Blue you can even stand where the PC would be in a regular Pokémon Center and use it, even though it doesn't exist! Lampshaded when you talk to the receptionist and she says "Pokémon? No, this is a hotel." FireRed/LeafGreen averts this by redesigning the Pokémon Centers while leaving the hotel's layout alone, though 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. Though it's only natural 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 makes the identical interiors and exteriors of Pokémon Centers and Pokémon Marts even more noticeable.
  • The Pokémon series is a big offender when it comes to the buildings' interiors. Here's a list of areas that use all the same map:
    • Pokémon Centers are all identical.
    • The same goes for Poké Marts.
    • Each town has a generic map that is used as the interiors of most of its houses.
    • Guardhouses use one of two maps depending on whether they're horizontal or vertical in relation with the camera.
  • Pokémon X and Y follow the same formula as the previous installments... with the exception of one unique case regarding the Looker Side Quest after completing the game. To explain, Looker's side-story will eventually bring the player to returning to Lysandre Labs underneath Lumiose City, granting the player access to a secret floor of the labs... except that this floor is the exact same layout as the lab's spin-tile floor, even to the point of keeping the same side-room entrances, but blocking them off with poster boards. Why this never got a unique floor is anyone's guess.
• Quake II reuses every single of their SP levels for multiplayer. This was before the Deathmatch-specific levels even came in. The same deal with Quake. By the time of Quake III: Arena, the focus was entirely on multiplayer, with no SP to talk about, and Quake IV directly averts this by separating the SP and MP components into completely separated games.
• In Ravensword: Shadowlands, there's quite a few buildings in the game, but only a couple interior designs, meaning that you'll be seeing the same locations a lot when entering buildings (right down to the furniture and the items on them being in the exact same spots).
• Receiver 2 justifies this, mentioning that the level design is because it was the last vestige of the world that your Mindtech was able to protect, the result being the protected bits just repeat with little architectural sense and only minor changes such as a ladder not being present, or a doorway being blocked.
• Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles has the train and mansion chapters ported directly from the games they appeared in (namely Resident Evil 0 and the 2002 version of Resident Evil), as well as portions of Raccoon City from Resident Evil: Outbreak.
• 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.
• The Romancing SaGa PS2 Remake uses 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.
• Saints Row does this for its various shops. Taken to an extreme in The Third, where there are about three unique clothing shops in Steelport - every other one in the city is a Planet Saints.
• SSI Gold Box RPG Secret of the Silver Blades uses this extensively, along with some engine tricks, to create huge, sprawling areas; within a few minutes of exploration a player will see the same basic room layouts over and over again.
• 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 two parts that look exactly the same, in fact, even the landmarks are the same.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) abuses this trope not only in the fact that almost every level is part of all three hedgehogs' stories, but that the levels themselves will often reuse certain rooms within them with no changes except very minor ones in enemy placement. Sometimes immediately after you left the room it was copied from, even.
• Done on purpose in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. Sector Grus is built out of parts of the first four sectors: Antlia, Bootes, Carina, and Delphinus. This is because Maya, the ruler of the sector, is deliberately forcing the team to revisit their worst moments and deepest fears... and since they've spent the entire game in a Death World, those all revolve around the previous areas.
• SimCity takes this to a large-scale level with its building tilesets.
  • Even in SimCity 4, where lots can 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 building right next to each other.
  • As for the games before SimCity 3000, the buildings all face the same direction.
  • SimCity (2013) has a somewhat limited range of building models within the same wealth/density/zone group, and buildings are likely to be clustered within those categories, but they have randomized variations in their texture selection. Consequently, it's not uncommon to see a row of houses that all look the same except for the paint, which in fairness is not uncommon in real life either. A patch added variations in the heights of skyscrapers so that they weren't all at the same level, which looked unrealistic.
• Smugglers Run has three settings, one of which is the exact same as an earlier one, but covered in snow.
• Something Else: The fourth part of the Space Hideout is based on Forest of Illusion 2, but the enemies are replaced with Thwomps and the water physics have been removed.
• In Stampede Run, there are several set arrangements of obstacles that are frequently reused.
• Star Ocean (at least the original SFC version) has only two designs for its ports, one that faces west and one that faces east (with the Sylvalant port looking like every other east-facing port, but with snowfall). There's also the Seven Star Ruins Bonus Dungeon, which is 30 floors of descending through mostly the same caverns with the only differences being in puzzles and treasure.
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has a uniquely justified version. Whipple village and one small village later in the game have the exact same layout - the game's big plot twist revealing the world itself is a giant online game means that actually makes sense in a meta way.
• 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 level generation in Streets of Rogue uses literal cut-and-paste environments. Each piece of a level, from intricate buildings to the empty areas between them, is a premade "chunk", and every level is thrown together by the copying and pasting these chunks into different configurations. A few minor details, like windows, might be randomized, but for the most part, each location will essentially be the same every time it shows up. Even something as simple as moving the door of a building requires saving that as a new chunk (although thanks to the powerful level editor, players are able to significantly offset the potential tedium of the system).
• Super Mario Galaxy has Goldleaf Galaxy, which has a main planet that is simply a color-swapped, mirrored Honeyhive Galaxy.
• 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).

U-Z

• The Valhalla Plains and the Treant Forest from Tales of Phantasia are constructed from a limited selection of maps that are interconnected to form bigger mazes. Treant Forest in particular has a lake with the same shape appearing in five different locations.
• Ultima VI constructs its "cave" dungeons from geomorphs. This wouldn't be so noticeable if most of the dungeons weren't part of a single ginormous world-spanning cave, so one wrong turn can leave you unbelievably lost.
• Valheim's dungeons are randomly generated from the same bits of tunnels for each type of dungeon. So while the scenery will look the same (and sometimes you can find the exact same arrangement of walls, terrain and obstacles in the same dungeon), the map isn't.
• 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.
• Warframe uses tile-based randomly generated levels (with about a dozen tilesets). It can lead to oddities like walking through what appears to be the same room half a dozen times. Corpus tilesets are the biggest offender; the Corpus Ship and Corpus Outpost tilesets share many identical tiles. It makes a certain amount of sense considering the Corpus rely heavily on mass-manufacturing.
• Wario Land:
  • In Wario Land II, both Wario's Castle and Syrup's Castle have the same tileset for their environments, just with different color palettes.
  • Wario Land: Shake It! uses cut-and-paste environments for the secret levels, often without even a colour change (and those that do use them have changes such as, in one case, going from having a dark blue sky to a red sky). Kind of saddening, considering Wario Land 4 used a completely different background per level.
• The tons of abandoned buildings in Wasteland.
• Wolfenstein 3-D features a little more variety compared to its predecessor. There's at least three levels that are entirely made up of or otherwise reuse nearly identical swastika-shaped mazes, however.
• 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.
  • Another interesting thing is that it reuses many of the Warcraft 3 icons for spells and actions.
  • There is one specific environment copy-and-paste that deserves an honorable mention here; the Obsideon Dragon cave in the WOTLK Dragonblight zone. Yes, it's another cave, but it's not just another palette copy you'd see again and again when your roaming around Azeroth like mentioned above. This cave, is a cutout of about half of one of the games freaking DUNGEONS; specifically, Ragefire Chasm. A graphics update to suit the WOTLK standard is the only major difference between the Obsideon cave and Ragefire.

Groups:

A-Z

• 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) uses repeating patterns three screens wide for decorative backgrounds such as hills and clouds. It also reuses about two models for castle exteriors (small and large). On top of that, 5 entire levels are reused, as well as World 4-4 and 7-4 which will actually loop if the player takes the wrong path, and they use the exact same sprite for the clouds and bushes, the only difference being the clouds are white whereas the bushes are green.
  • Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels has more unique level layouts, except for World C, which is a complete copy-and-paste of World 7.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Legend of Zelda for NES (128 KB) encodes each map screen as a list of 16 vertical columns as tall as the screen, causing some areas to look familiar. The dungeons are comprised of combinations of a very finite number of room layouts, with only the doors, enemies, treasures, and so on being different.
    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link:
    • There are a few room types that get reused in various palaces. One that's notable is a long room with a block structure that usually hides a key in one of the structure's indents.
    • On the way to Darunia, you're expected to go through two maps that are exactly alike, except that the second one has bubbles coming up from the bottom of the screen that are liable to knock you into the water and, predictably, kill you.
  • The original Metroid (128 KB) has a lot of rooms and areas that look alike, making navigation harder. This was, however, crucial in making a fairly large world without running out of cart space. The upshot is that many of the secret area entrances are copy-and-pasted as well, so finding one can make it easier to find others in the same area. Super Metroid lampshaded this by having you encounter the starting point of the original Metroid, only with better graphics.
  • Super Mario Land for Game Boy (64 KB) reuses 20 by 16 tile screens of map data mercilessly.
  • Adventure Island uses almost the exact same template for each level: a flatland stage, an athletic stage, an underground 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.
  • Wonder Boy also recycles the same template for every level, although the SMS version has 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 makes it very easy to get lost - exacerbated by the dungeons being pointlessly vast.
  • Shatterhand has a somewhat unique example: One of the levels has a part where a player rides up an elevator while avoiding gears, enemies and fire. This section is then repeated without the last two threats as a boss arena. The highest parts of these two shafts have even the same gear positions as well as a item box for you to collect.
  • This is especially noticeable in the very first Mega Man, where rooms and corridors are copy/pasted with reckless abandon. It's most noticeable in Wily Castle Stage 2, where barring enemy/item placement, the same exact screen layout is reused nine times - in three sets of three consecutive screens!
• Metal Head uses the same streets, buildings, fences, skies, literally everything in each stage, with some alterations to disguise the recycled assets. The game did try to make some changes in the third mission, reusing the assets while setting the stage at night.
• Some pseudo-random level generators used in a variety of games, from X-COM to Spelunky to 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.
    • XCOM: Enemy Unknown has lots of handmade levels, but they're all loosely based on North American cities, leading to things like a large red suspension bridge in the middle of Birmingham, England and people using large sedans in Japan, which tends toward smaller cars.
  • NetHack features "Special Levels", where the floor is mostly pregenerated and stored in the game's database. Most of these pre-made 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 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.
• Many free, open-source FPS take advantage of the already GPLed^note GPL stands for General Public License, it's a license which allows free, open-source software to be freely used, freely distributed, freely modifiable and requires that any modifications be made freely distributable as well. maps:
  • Aggressor, a GPL map originally made for Quake. It can be found in games such as OpenArena, Nexuiz and Xonotic.
  • Thanks to id Software's release in 2006 of the map sources for all of the original Quake's maps, the aforementioned games and some more use them as multiplayer maps. OA uses all of the Deathmatch maps, including the Dummied Out dm7, while Nexuiz uses only dm6.
  • Other examples of GPL maps used in games are cbctf1 (originally for Nexuiz, later used by OpenArena); dm4ish and dm6ish (both third-party maps for Quake, ported to OA); hydronex (originally for Nexuiz, also used in OA); kaos, spirit3 and oa_rpg3dm2 (originally for Quake III, used in OA), pvomit, shine and, shouse (originally for Quake III, later added to OA via a map pack by their authors and then made official).