» Thu May 17, 2012 11:04 am
If this is true it's certainly not shocking. References to past games in a developers current game are pretty normal actually. I've mostly seen this in Ubisoft games, but other developers have done this too over the years. In the end, it's easier to copy/paste certain semi-standard portions of a game engine over rather than create entirely new files from scratch. It normally doesn't effect the "new" game in a negative way though.
As an aside, the worst offense I've seen of the old developer copy/paste was with Rayman Raving Rabbids on PC. The development team literally used the same Installshield project from their prior King Kong game as they did for Rayman. Therefore, if you had King Kong installed on your system, the Rayman installer actually thought it was an update for the former (you'd get the modify/repair/remove prompt). If you proceeded through with the installation, you wound up with a mish-mash of Rayman and King Kong files in the installation folder and of course, a game that simply wouldn't run. You literally could not have both games installed on your system at the same time. Despite quite a few complaints and an acknowledgement from the developer, Ubisoft never fixed this either.
Makes a couple stray "Fallout" references in Skyrim seem pretty tame by comparison, doesn't it?