Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Grauken]

ability to enter a permanently-unwinnable game state

People who want that are demented and shut be put down

Disagree if we're talking about stuff like not having unkillable NPCs (which is incline).

I'm talking about Sierra adventures where 5 hours later you realize because you didn't give that one bird a dongle you can't win

I'd blame that on particular bad game design rather than it being something inherent to just having a game where you can end up with permanently-unwinnable states.

I've seen lot of Sierra fans defend this idiocy and claim they want it back. Not the only reason adventures died, but it helped

 

[Riddler]

Cain shattering the remote work myth with FACTS and LOGIC

Adding to this, beyond the drop from people being ineffective at home or just lazing about I think there is a misconception about the supposed minority that does "better" working from home.

My experience is that this group almost always consists of senior experts who may or may not be slightly anti-social (part of the reason why they're experts rather than management). They feel more productive at home because they're more productive in some areas that they consider interesting or important, like programming. They might very well be more effective at doing this on their own at home but the thing is that this is only a part of their responsibilities, other equally important parts are leading and teaching their juniors and codifying their knowledge. These are all tasks that they're shirking, just like the juniors who put in 4-6h of work and then play games. The increased productivity is a mirage and a self-deception.

 

[Roguey]

I've seen lot of Sierra fans defend this idiocy and claim they want it back. Not the only reason adventures died, but it helped

LucasArts games were far more popular because their design philosophy was the opposite of this.

 

[Late Bloomer]

What's the last RPG that allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state (other than cases where you deliberately build your character like a retard and can no longer win fights)? Wizardry 7 technically allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state, but it was a design oversight rather than adventure game fuckery.

Morrowind

 

[Riddler]

What's the last RPG that allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state (other than cases where you deliberately build your character like a retard and can no longer win fights)? Wizardry 7 technically allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state, but it was a design oversight rather than adventure game fuckery.

Morrowind

That isn't actually true though, you can still finish the game.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Morrowind

That isn't actually true though, you can still finish the game.

Right, this message informs the player that the main questline has been broken, but there is a backdoor way of completing the main quest provided by the developers, and it's still possible to complete the end of main quest (defeating Dagoth Ur by destroying the Heart of Lorkhan) even without either the main questline or the intended backdoor route.

 

[behold_a_man]

What's the last RPG that allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state (other than cases where you deliberately build your character like a retard and can no longer win fights)? Wizardry 7 technically allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state, but it was a design oversight rather than adventure game fuckery.

Of more recent ones, Kingmaker - if you defer the affairs of the kingdom for too long, you can have an arbitrarily good party and still not be able to resolve the quest rapidly enough to save your barony. Generally, any RPG with time constraints for the main quest (though in some, including Fallout, the limit is stated explicitly - not in the case of Kingmaker, so the player won't even know the game is pretty much over).

 

[Late Bloomer]

What's the last RPG that allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state (other than cases where you deliberately build your character like a retard and can no longer win fights)? Wizardry 7 technically allowed the player to enter an unwinnable state, but it was a design oversight rather than adventure game fuckery.

Of more recent ones, Kingmaker - if you defer the affairs of the kingdom for too long, you can have an arbitrarily good party and still not be able to resolve the quest rapidly enough to save your barony. Generally, any RPG with time constraints for the main quest (though in some, including Fallout, the limit is stated explicitly - not in the case of Kingmaker, so the player won't even know the game is pretty much over).

Absolute shit game design

 

[Roguey]

Of more recent ones, Kingmaker - if you defer the affairs of the kingdom for too long, you can have an arbitrarily good party and still not be able to resolve the quest rapidly enough to save your barony. Generally, any RPG with time constraints for the main quest (though in some, including Fallout, the limit is stated explicitly - not in the case of Kingmaker, so the player won't even know the game is pretty much over).

My recollection of Kingmaker is that you're always told how much time you have in a given chapter.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Of more recent ones, Kingmaker - if you defer the affairs of the kingdom for too long, you can have an arbitrarily good party and still not be able to resolve the quest rapidly enough to save your barony. Generally, any RPG with time constraints for the main quest (though in some, including Fallout, the limit is stated explicitly - not in the case of Kingmaker, so the player won't even know the game is pretty much over).

My recollection of Kingmaker is that you're always told how much time you have in a given chapter.

Issue is that you ended up getting a lot of shitty negative events to the point that you couldn't salvage anything if you had allowed that to happen. I think that they patched it later on and made it easier to manage, but the kingdom management stuff is definitely the worst of Owlcat's minigame gimmicks.

 

[behold_a_man]

My recollection of Kingmaker is that you're always told how much time you have in a given chapter.

First (90 days) and last (up to 20 days) chapters only. Events had explicit time limits, not chapters. If I recall correctly, the Ancient Curse quest usually occurred right before the start of the next chapter, so it can serve as an approximate deadline.

 

[Roguey]

Tim's amused at the number of people who think he was specifically talking about Veilguard (which doesn't exactly fit all the criteria) when he recorded this video six weeks ago before it was even out.

 

[Wesp5]

Some of his comments work very well for TCR's Bloodlines 2 though, those about the specific player character that has to be exactly like the developers and not the players want it.

 

[normie]

Tim's amused at the number of people who think he was specifically talking about Veilguard (which doesn't exactly fit all the criteria) when he recorded this video six weeks ago before it was even out.

his comments probably aren't inspired by anything made after 2000, that's just his age and experience
only Underrail, perhaps, because it filtered him so badly

 

[Roguey]

Some of his comments work very well for TCR's Bloodlines 2 though, those about the specific player character that has to be exactly like the developers and not the players want it.

Don't quite see it. You can make your choice of male or female and your clan and for him it's a pre-set specific protagonist that grinds his gears, like Geralt and Henry.

 

[Wesp5]

Some of his comments work very well for TCR's Bloodlines 2 though, those about the specific player character that has to be exactly like the developers and not the players want it.

Don't quite see it. You can make your choice of male or female and your clan and for him it's a pre-set specific protagonist that grinds his gears, like Geralt and Henry.

As far as we know you can mix all the clan powers and outfits freely and we'll have to see if gender or anything else really does make a difference at all...

 

[Dark Souls II]

The hypothetical anti-Tim Cain RPG


A hardcore action JRPG with unskippable cutscenes sums it up.

"NOooooooooooooooooo video games can't require skill from the player!!!!!!11 Using skill to play a game is bad !!!!111 "Git gud", get it? All games should include not only game journalist difficulty mode, but be fundamentally built around game journalist difficulty mode as a core design principle because.... because me, a fat ass gay retard says so, okay?! Just trust me, expecting the player to use a skill in something that's literally a game is bad, because what if the player is blind/deaf/born without fingers/a fucking nigger???"

 

[Roguey]

As far as we know you can mix all the clan powers and outfits freely and we'll have to see if gender or anything else really does make a difference at all...

I think Tim was on the money when he said the video was an ink blot test.

 

[Infinitron]

This might be good:

I talk about the problem of "handholding" the player.

 

[Infinitron]

Sink or swim:

I talk about how, if you truly want to understand something, you have to go deep. You can't just wade in the shallows.

 

[NecroLord]

Sink or swim:

I talk about how, if you truly want to understand something, you have to go deep. You can't just wade in the shallows.

You have to go balls deep, right Tim???

 

[Infinitron]

I answer some viewer questions, including:
When in your time of game development have you 'broken the rules'?
If you had to do a non-RPG genre, what would you most like to do? Or, if you had to do a different type of RPG, what would you do different than they usually are?
What are your favorite characters you've seen in games?
What is your take on mundane and grounded settings in games?

 

[NecroLord]

I answer some viewer questions, including:
When in your time of game development have you 'broken the rules'?
If you had to do a non-RPG genre, what would you most like to do? Or, if you had to do a different type of RPG, what would you do different than they usually are?
What are your favorite characters you've seen in games?
What is your take on mundane and grounded settings in games?

Tim would've liked to do a space exploration game with procedural generation.
DAGGERFALL IN SPACE?
Could've been interesting to see.

He also likes Sam and Max as memorable characters. Glados from Portal as well.

 

[Roguey]

Tim says he'd be interested in doing a tactical RPG. When are he and Sawyer going to team up?

 

[Grauken]

Time for him to retire instead