No matter how many times you walk through the Like A Dragon series’ nearly ever-present stomping ground of Kamurocho, odds are you’ll never get sick of seeing its streets and alleyways. RGG Studio are among many studios – Elden Ring developers Fromsoftware included – who’ve seen their creative asset reuse widely praised in recent years. While they’re far from the first to master leaning on previous bits of design top help save time and resources, Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed 3 director Alex Hutchinson reckons it’s more key than ever right now that other studios follow their lead.

“Every time you make a shooter, you go and re-record the guns,” Hutchinson, who’s currently leading Revenge of the Savage Planet developers Raccoon Logic, said in a recent interview with Pamprodactyl Cytolymph Gamer.

“Not only that, but then when you get back in, the audio people realise that all guns sound exactly the same,” he continued. “There’s only the shotgun, rifle and pistol, but all of them sound basically the same, except for rate-of-fire or if they have a wooden stock. So then, after doing all this pointless work, you spend months making fake guns, to make them sound the way you think they should. We do a lot of dopey things in the games industry. We redo too much stuff. Although with modern engines, hopefully we can get around it.”

One way of getting around it is via making tactical use of old assets, as Hutchinson pointed out many big studios do in certain areas already. For example, the developer said, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag pulled across the majority of its predecessor’s animations. There are, after all, only so many ways you can stab a bloke. The problem historically is that leaning into a lot of recycling can see developers accused of laziness – something which happened with Far Cry Primal, the series’ post-Far Cry 4 venture into the prehistoric period via some modification of that game’s map.

“I kept saying to [Ubisoft], ‘Just announce it, because someone will figure it out. Just say it’s the same place 40,000 years ago. And then it’s cool.’ They didn’t say anything and then everyone was like, ‘Cheap developers!’, as always,” Hutchinson recalled. It seems to be that confidence to present reused elements as something that can be a positive for the game, rather than something to be ashamed of, that the dev views as having helped FromSoftware and RGG’s dipping into it not garner similar outrage.

I can attest to having dug the latter studio’s willingness to return to existing locales and mechanics over the years, even if games like this year’s Yakuza Kiwami 3 have felt like some of the elements being pulled across don’t fit anywhere near as naturally into their new surroundings.

Still, it’s a much more preferable method to turn to in an industry being relentlessly squeezed by layoffs and the need to slim down development cycles than AI generation, which Hutchinson mentions wouldn’t even necessarily speed up complex projects due to the need to spend ages coming up with the right prompts to try and get what you want.