Allow me to explain:
Taking the “Crafting Survival” genre as a prime example, why do they all have the same feeling of being cheap, amateurish, and janky af? There is just this certain something about how every single one feels to play. The differences tends to be more in the grind, progression, and aesthetics while the game feel is exactly the same. The way your character moves, the way combat feels cheesy and unbound, the often minimalisticly artistic UI (like it’s just a 50% transparent box with text/icons on it), and almost always riddled with bugs.
Even the big budget ones made by giant, long-lived developers tend to feel exactly the same as the independently made-by-one-dude-in-a-garage games. They might have better visuals, but everything else feels cheap and just to the point of functionality.
The weirdest part of this, to me, is that Minecraft doesn’t feel like this and it is basically the grandfather of the genre. It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal that feels like a janky ARMA module made by someone who just learned how to code. With so many developers making so many games in this genre, you’d think at least one of them would make one that feels more “luxurious.” I lament not being able to put into words exactly what I mean; it’s really something that can only be described through comparison and experience. But I have to believe others who have played games like Rust, Ark, Valheim, etc know what I mean.
IMHO:
It feels like that, because that’s what it is. There were a few awesome titles in the genre and as soon as AAA (and some cheap ass pseudo indie developers) realize people love them, they try to jump on the train by ripping off the successful game.
They don’t want to create something original, they just want a piece of the pie, and that’s what shows.
You can see the same shit happening in deck building rogue likes. E. g. Slay the spire and Balatro were creative and new but also obviously not made to just grab some cash. Meanwhile the market is now flooded with tons of similar working and / or looking games that are just boring rip offs. Not a single original thought went into these games.
I guess the crafting survival genre is just one of the bigger “me too” bandwagons, which is why all of them feel cheap. Tho even the original breakout hits feel like that because they actually were made by amateurs. If we could see the source code, I wonder how often we’d see the same systems just straight up copied and pasted from another game. 🤔
Extremely unlikely they used the literal same code unless it was from a template or asset pack.
That’s also probably intentional because people tend to like the familiar ‘tropes’ and if you go out of your way to do it in a weird way, that design may be burned at the stake in the reviews/feedback.
Familiarity is okay. Similar systems and gameplay are expected to be copied. But why also copy the awful parts?
Don’t get me started on the survival genre where 99% thrown into it are nothing more than just games with superficial survival elements. I’m going to stop myself right here before I write a whole essay on survival games. I’ll talk about crafting instead.
I think the issue why most crafting games feel the same is because crafting, as the process of putting things together, isn’t particularly fun especially when done in repetitions. I imagine most people don’t enjoy putting together IKEA furniture, but even the ones who do probably won’t find it enjoyable when you’re putting together the same piece of furniture for the 10th time. That would be in game crafting in a nutshell. You’ll be repeating the same moves over and over and over until all that is left of the crafting process is tedium. Factor in that for developers that would mean making a minigame within a game and it becomes pretty apparent while developers prefer to not implement the process of crafting into games. So what can developers do to replace the process? There are two options. You give players the tools to automate crafting and that’s how you get the factory builder games. The other option is to rip out the entire process and you get “in menu crafting”, which is what 99% of not factory builder crafting games use. Since crafting boils down to 1) find materials 2) craft the thing and you remove step 2 all you have left is step 1 and that again is not something you can do in a particularly interesting way. That leads to almost all crafting systems feeling the same.
I don’t think developers are copy pasting the systems, I think there’s just not a lot of design space unless you tip your toes into tedium.
For me there are two different kinds of cheap: There’s no budget but creative use of tools cheap. I’ve seen some awesome results coming from this.
And then there’s “I wanted to publish fast and maximize profit” cheap. Never seen something good coming from this.
And also reusing stuff is totally fine, if it’s actually the right fit. Some titles still feel different to me. E.g. Don’t starve (together) wasn’t that early to the survival craft party and I also think it’s not a very outstanding title as in being innovative gameplay wise but I just love it.
It has a very specific charm and it just makes me feel like this game wasn’t created to earn as much money as possible but to make an idea come true.
Or when I think of the early Harvest Moon Games that look quite boring and repetitive compared to newer comparable titles. They still have some appeal to me. They feel authentic.
While the newer games feel more sloppish and generic like a joke that was told a thousand times already. They look even worse compared to titles like Stardew Valley that actually tried to develop the existing ideas of the genre slightly further instead of just regenerating them in different styles. While it still relys heavily on existing ideas and mechanics and extends them.
It kind of boils down to the question whether the developer / author / whoever ideated the whole thing had to add anything of their own at all or if it’s just a remix of existing things.
I mean, you can even sell the same game over and over by just changing the number on the title… looking at you fifa