Looking Back:
This strip makes fun of another one of those things that happens in a lot of video games but we tend to ignore. If you pay attention you'll see that in most games, especially RPGs, NPC sprites or models are often reused multiple times. Unless a character is important enough to have their own unique look (for example a controllable character or a NPC that plays a large roll in the story), you'll probably be seeing several clones of that character scattered throughout the town or world. While it can seem a little cheap, there are some pretty good reasons behind it. Making new models takes a lot of time and in game production time is money. It's rarely worth it to spend a lot of time designing and building a unique model for some random guy in town that the player isn't going to spare a second glance for. Although games that use simple sprites, like Pokémon, don't have quite as good of a reason since those sprites take a lot less time to make. |
