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.