Double Ogre
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
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- 765
I've been rereading some old articles related to Troika and found a few interesting bits in an interview with Tim Cain by Electric Playground.
EP: Let's get right back to the basics. How did the idea for Arcanum come about?
TC: Well, it's funny. The way it worked was... we were talking about what we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to do an RPG. I said I wanted to do a fantasy RPG, which I think surprised Leonard and Jason [Anderson] a bit because when we worked on Fallout, I said, "We're not doing a fantasy RPG. I will entertain ideas for anything except fantasy, because there are too many fantasy games on the shelves." But when we were done with Fallout, I was kind of tired of that genre. I didn't want to do Fallout 2.
I really wanted to do a fantasy RPG because I thought, "Well, I've earned the right to do a fantasy game." I know there's a bunch on the shelves, but that's really what everyone's prime RPG is in their minds. And I wanted to do one. Leonard didn't want to do one. Most of the RPGs you play are technologically 14th Century. You don't really have machines of any kind, but you do have some metallurgy and stuff like that. And Leonard's idea was to move it up to the 18th Century. And I said, "That's going to be weird because we're going to have technology and we're going to have magick, and I'm not sure how to get it together." It was Jason's idea to have the Magick/Tech aptitude scale, and have magick and tech actually be diametrically opposed. It kinda grew out of all that. It took a few weeks of us talking until we were all happy with how it sounded like it would work. Then we started writing. Jason started working on interfaces, I started working on the system design, Leonard started working on the background system and environment. That's pretty much how we got started.
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EP: Not that I'm ask you to slag off the competition or anything like that, but what's your impression of RPGs today?
TC: I find a lot of the times that I'm playing RPGs I feel forced to play a certain way. I liked Planescape: Torment a lot, but the biggest complaint I gave Chris Avellone, even before it shipped, was I really hate the fact that you're giving me just one person, and I can't play anything else. But of course, the power that give him was that the story was incredibly intense. Of course, I couldn't play it any other way. I was the Nameless One and I was going to progress to the end, and everybody was pretty much going to discover the same thing.
That's the other thing. I feel that a lot of RPGs...The way I played, if I talked to someone else, they had the exact same experience. And that's what I loved about Fallout . I often found people would be coming to their friends, "Yeah, I played Fallout last night. I found this crashed flying saucer and I got this really cool weapon and it let me go into this base and then I found this, this, this..." [And the friend says] "What are you talking about? I never saw that. I never had that encounter. I never had that follower. How do you get that follower? He won't join me." That's the kind of experience I want in an RPG, and I don't see it as much.
Someone just asked me recently why I don't like what they call the "Eastern-style" of RPG, like Final Fantasy . And I think that was one of my biggest complaints. I feel too constrained. To be given a character and play it the way the designers expected me to play through.