Why are so many Amnesia custom stories so similar?

[Streetboat]

I am new to playing Amnesia custom stories but so far I have downloaded and played through around 100 of them. This has taken me several months to do. One thing I have noticed is how similar many of them are. Lots of them have this same formula:

1. Starts off in the same typical bedroom with a door that is usually locked for some strange reason.
2. Then you move to the hallways of the same typical house on a search for keys and tinderboxes. Tinderboxes are always a sign that the story is going down to the cellar, as usual.
3. Then it moves down to a typical underground/cellar/basement/prison area where you spend most of your time with the monsters.

Why do so many of these custom stories follow the same pattern?

I also play a pc game called Thief where fans of the game have created some AMAZING fan missions using the engine that created the original Thief game. These missions are all so extremely different. But with Amnesia, it doesn't seem that way unless it's a full mod with it's own bat or exe. file.

Just wondering. I've never tried to create a custom story so I don't know how limited the software is for creating custom stories. Has anyone else here wondered why these custom stories are so similar?

Because that's what the (default) models allow.
A creepy story starts out as fairly safe. This is where you use the mansion tilesets.
From there, you can either go with the castle or cellar tilesets, and then end up with the dungeon/caverns tileset.
It's a game engine that is about puzzles and exploring with a lantern, so you start at the safest possible room - the bedroom - and from there you explore your way down into dark dungeons. What varies on the way, is usually the journal entries, that tells a little horror novella on the way. Those entries are the actual stars of the show. For instance, you can simply tell any HP Lovecraft story while the player is walking around the mansion, and he will feel that it's relevant to the setting he's in.

There are so many things you can do with a limited tileset that can end up being perfectly unique. Also, effective storytelling relies less on notes with novellas and more on subtle clues and ambiguity. A note simply tells a story; there is no extra effort involved in figuring out what is going on, and it breaks the flow of the game. If the story is note-less, then paying attention to certain details can reveal to you an entirely different story than the person next to you.

Sure, you can vomit up the same tilesets in the same order as other stories and blame it on the limited assets, but that just means you're not being imaginative in your use of those assets. Let's not forget that you can resize and rotate all assets to be placed in unique manners. I've seen people use stock Amnesia tiles in ways that were completely unrecognizable to me, and thus fresh and new.

Examples:



Everything in these images was made using stock Amnesia (and Justine, which is free so it doesn't matter) assets. Any environment can be made, it just takes a little more work.