Where do you stand on content from game A turning up in Game A: 2 The sequel? I really do not know where I stand myself. Generally, I don’t care. if it turned out that the tree models in Company of heroes 2 were the same tree models from COH 1, I wouldn’t mind. Ditto some of the sound effects. A tiger tank gun sounds the same as it did when the original game was released, and sound playback technology is the same now as it was then.
But what about the same music? Is that ok? I suspect not. And some of the same text somewhere? hmmmmm
I ask this because I built democracy 3 on top of the data for Democracy 2. With the exception of the new events, dilemmas and voter groups and policies, existing data is currently being carried straight over to the new game. obviously it might be re-balanced, but I’m not sure I need to re-write from scratch the descriptions of all policies or voter groups. That seems silly.
I *have* totally binned all the sound effects, and got brand new ones, because I think that makes things sound newer and fresher. All of the policy icons are the same, but totally re-done in 4X the resolution so it’s all much crisper. That was definitely worth doing.
but I do worry that somewhere, someone will rant on reddit that D3 is a rip-off because the description for income tax is the same as Democracy 2, and thus the game is just a ‘re-skin’. Obviously it isn’t, the underlying sim was dramatically redesigned and works very differently, but you can’t tell that without stepping through all the source code. Am I wrong to panic about a tiny percentage of pedants who might feel that way? or do you expect sequels to games to be done completely from the ground up in terms of data and artwork?