- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 501
Goes back to his Reboot conference talk and references the mistake of forced linearity in some games, references saving Tandi in Fallout 1 and all the solutions.
Very early on, around mid 90s, hard to explain the idea of a pure open ended game to other people at Interplay. These were game industry folk with a a lot more experience than Cain, but what they were trying to do was a bit different than the rest of Interplay. As Cain mentioned before, Stonekeep had a preset character and stats. Cain had to explain to some people you made your own character, the only commonality is the character comes from the Vault, everything else can be changed.
Explaining this to some of the designers on the team was a bit difficult. Some of them had played GURPS with Cain, they got it, but others would say stuff like "What if the player does this, and then I make them do this?" Cain has to tell them to never make the player do anything.
People outside the project really had a rough time, QA asked for walkthroughs at the start, had to tell them it depends on your character. Repeats the story of the guy making the strategy guide having great difficulty with the fact there was no right way to do everything.
Cain has heard, and please inform him if this is true, that some players in some countries did not like Fallout and Cain's later games because there was no right way to play them, they frequently wanted to know what they were supposed to do and how they were supposed to rescue Tandi. Cain does not elaborate on the specific countries. There was no right way to rescue Tandi, if you even wanted to save her, apparently that angered some people.
Cain didn't quite got this, because he never played Tabletop like this, but there are computer RPGs that expect you to play a certain way. Pick the good options, bad options lead to early termination. They don't let you change many things about your character because they are inserting you into a predefined story. Even near the end of Fallout's development, when people took the game home to play it, Cain would get calls from people stuck at certain points not knowing what to do. When Cain tried to ask them about their previous decisions and their character build, they would get annoyed and tell him to just tell them what to do. Cain would explain that depending on your build what is available could change.
Another source of confusion was the game's morality. Cain would explain that the game did not require you to be good, people would interpret this as 'I should be bad'. Cain would explain you would be punishing for being bad, people interpreted this as 'I should be good'. Cain would have to explain that you should play how you want to play, the game will react, and you have to accept the consequences of your actions. Act like a jerk, people won't like you. Some people got it, some people just got in a loop wanting to be told what to do.
Cain feels this depended on people's experience. If you played TTRPG with a good DM that didn't railroad you, you generally understood what Cain was getting at. if your experience was certain cRPGs that told you what to do, you would be confused.
Has it gotten easier to explain nonlinearity ? Yes, a lot. There are a lot more open ended reaction based games, but even in modern times, Cain has had discussion on his most recent games with people who don't seem to get the concept. Worked with a narrative designer in the last few years who got very angry that their very linear idea could not be forced on the player. Leading to discussions where the narrative designer suggested locking the player in a room where the door can't be picked, you can't jump out the window, and not letting them out until they do a thing. If they don't do that thing, he suggests they are stuck in the room forever. Cain had conversations like this several times. Not just with people on the team, someone above Cain in the development production line was very upset that there was work being done that some or most players would never see. Cain had to explain this was just the natural consequence of nonlinear games, a pacifist player is not going to see death animations on most characters, so why have death animations? If people never attack animals/robots, or never interact with some people, that content won't be seen. One producer liked to just shoot everyone he came across, dialogue would be irrelevant to him.
This spilled over into companions on the Outer Worlds. At first, Cain wanted them to chain them into choice and consequence, some companions would only join you with a minimum level of Leadership, and Leadership would determine how many companions you could recruit. Might have also limited it with an associated perk. Really wanted to do it, was talked out of it because of all the work they did on companions that wouldn't be experienced. To this day, feels having big consequences is good. Things are overall a lot better, because a lot of games do it, but sometimes trying to add a feature nobody else does is still hard. Whenever he tries to introduce an idea, first pushback he get is 'What other game does that?" If he can't think of something, that person doesn't want to put it in the game. Cain asked this person how the game was supposed to have a unique hook if he couldn't introduce features never seen before (This person had apparently bugged Cain about the game's hooks) and they could not give him an answer. Another person said that if no other game did something like that, there was probably a good reason for it and it was a bad idea. Has had to reach out to other genres and mediums, such as pointing out a movie that does something.
Doesn't have to justify non linearity in his games anymore, but introducing new ideas is still an uphill battle. There is an assumption that if it isn't done before, it is a bad idea.
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