I continue to play Lemmings. During the “Tricky” set of levels, occasionally, Levels start to repeat. Well, only on first sight. The level layout is the same there as in the very first level in Lemmings:
While the level layout is the same, the Lemming abilities differ – while you have diggers in the first level, that teaches you how to use the abilities. This second time, it’s less about learning the ability, but being crafty enough to use the explosion ability with the exact timing, so that the Lemmings explode a whole into the ground. Same level, varying difficulty, different player skillset required – double the fun.
This made a lot of sense for Lemmings – in the era back then, disk space was scarce and expensive, and if you can reuse graphics, logic and art a number of times and prolonging the gaming fun, that’s a win.
It’s a good concept for games – I am surprised it’s not as widely used as it could be.
I could imagine players look at this with delight, as it brings up the feeling familiarity: “I have seen this before, nice!” At least that worked for me that way. I was excited to see why that level came up again and what was different. A mixture of familiarity and anticipation of what’s new.
At least Lemmings lives from the creativity that players must exercise in bringing their green-haired friends to safer spaces. Showing the same level once again with a few changed conditions triggers a whole new thinking process in the player – double the fun!
Similarly, as players progress in between the first and later playthroughs of level siblings, players go through an evolution of learning, acquiring additional solving patterns, ideas of how to treat levels. Reusing the same levels in different variations may cause the player to feel positive about themselves and the learning curve they went through with the game.
In any case, if you’re the developer of the game, clearly you gain from reusing the level by prolonged gameplay while leveraging most if not all assets that make up the level. When disk space is scarce, that’s what you need.
The concept was used in a few games since – but far fewer than I would imagine it would happen. Not sure if it’s treated as “bad game design” to reuse some levels or if there’s some common excitement around “creating something new” for DLCs, next versions of games, or generally avoiding “overdo” as to not piss off the gaming audience.
It was certainly done in a few games – I experienced this playing “The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild”. The map and a number of assets were reused in different ways in the DLCs you could purchase for the game – for one, there was the Master Mode, letting you experience the whole game once more, but with elevated difficulty fighting monsters and bosses. For the later DLC, the boss fights were re-used in a more complex, harder variation.
Something similar happened with Claire and Leon in Resident Evil 2. The two characters meet early in the game, but then you get to play with one of the characters. There’s varying playthroughs offered to you, once you completed the game once. Most of the level assets are the same, with some extra content, but the puzzles and the location of items differs. The different perspectives and addition story that one can explore playing multiple times certainly are a plus and – from my perspective – were absolutely worthwhile the extra development and weren’t at all annoying.
I suppose it’s all about balancing and managing that there’s an added benefit, and not “just” additional, forced playtime with assets already known.
FRICKELSOFT 