Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[NecroLord]

I talk about the issues you will encounter in making a new game based on someone else's game IP.

Didn't he already make a video on this subject?

 

[Tyranicon]

>implying devs give a shit

I would assume at least some do, given the nature of working in video games.

You don't go into this field because of the pay and benefits.

And giving a shit means you'd want feedback from adults, which you won't be getting from YouTube, Steam forums, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Have you seen those places? Disgusting.

 

[Roguey]

Too bad he doesn't go into detail about what that guy got wrong.

I'd guess the game he was pitching was a straight-forward shooter/action title. Alas, Activision not even interested in that (but good for Arcanum).

 

[NecroLord]

Too bad he doesn't go into detail about what that guy got wrong.

I'd guess the game he was pitching was a straight-forward shooter/action title. Alas, Activision not even interested in that (but good for Arcanum).

Does Tim look like he can pull off a stellar shooter in the vein of Doom, Quake, Blood, and so on?
Not to me he doesn't.
He is at his best when doing rpgs.

 

[Roguey]

Does Tim look like he can pull off a stellar shooter in the vein of Doom, Quake, Blood, and so on?

Tim wasn't the one making the pitch.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about a screenplay I co-wrote for Star Trek The Next Generation. It was not accepted.

 

[NecroLord]

I talk about a screenplay I co-wrote for Star Trek The Next Generation. It was not accepted.

Not gay and boring enough to be accepted for TNG.
Really kind of a stale and boring show compared to the Original Series.
DS9 was in the middle. Had both action and character development.


Would've Tim been able to make a good Star Trek game?

 

[NecroLord]

Star Trek game made with the Fallout SPECIAL system.
Yeah, it could've worked.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/f...ight-have-something-to-do-with-why-it-failed/

Fallout's Tim Cain spent 6 years working on defunct MMO WildStar, twice as long as any other game, and thinks that might have something to do with why it failed​

"Games had shifted."

Of all the MMOs that fell by the wayside, pushed into the dirt by the relentless popularity of World of Warcraft, Carbine's WildStar stings the most. A fast-paced sci-fi romp exploding with colour and character, and a setting brimming with potential, its development team boasted not only WoW vets, but legendary RPG designer Tim Cain.

"When I started, I think there were only nine or 10 people working there," Cain says. "Almost all of them had worked on WoW, or some other really good stuff. And it was such an interesting team, because there was so much potential … We had some really, really great people there. And it's hard to make lightning strike twice. It's hard to capture it in a bottle. We could have done it, I can say that."

WildStar's development kicked off way back in 2005, but it didn't launch until 2014, after Cain had already left the studio. A mere four years later, it was cancelled. It took more than twice as long to develop. Even though Cain left before the game was finished, it's still the longest he's ever spent working on a game. Double the length of any other project, he says.

"That was kind of the style of the designers, they wanted to test a lot of things. And it seemed like we had an endless runway. But we didn't. What's interesting is, I spent three years as the programming director, and then three years as the design director, and that was six years. And until that time, the longest I had ever spent on a game was three and a half on Fallout."

Of course, MMOs are a more complex prospect than singleplayer RPGs, even considering the rather elaborate ones that Cain often works on. But nine years of development is still an incredibly long time, and comes with some massive risks.

"I remember going to my boss, going, ‘This is not gonna be done for at least another year or two.’ And it wasn't, for three more years," he recalls. "They worked on it for a total of nine years, when WildStar finally came out. And that itself causes problems, because games had shifted. What people wanted had changed. Other competitors had come out and showed what you could do. You can make a target and build towards it, but if you take so long, that target's gonna move."

Cain never ended up playing WildStar, as he was busy working on South Park: The Stick of Truth over at Obsidian when it launched. "I remember hearing WildStar came out, and I heard all these great things about it. Then I started hearing people go, ‘Well, it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this.’ I think part of it was there was so much competition … There was a lot of cannibalism going on."

To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we'd seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.

The competition had also grown steeper. AreaNet had released not just Guild Wars, but also followed it up with Guild Wars 2, there was Funcom's Age of Conan, a trio of MMOs from Cryptic (Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, Champions Online), BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sony's DC Universe Online, Square Enix's Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Online.

In that decade, the heyday of MMOs had come and gone, and players were starting to coalesce around the mainstays. Carbine couldn't have predicted the shape the genre would take, of course, but that's also why incredibly long development periods are such a gargantuan risk. Unless you're able to peer into the future, you're kinda just winging it.

 

[S.torch]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/f...ey-didnt-sell-well-you-should-have-bought-it/

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain hasn't made sequels to his other cult classic RPGs because they didn't sell well: 'You should have bought it'​

"Sometimes gamers need to put their money where their mouth is."

Tim Cain's storied career includes a bunch of what are likely some of your favourite RPGs, including the first two Fallouts and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Some of the games he worked on became huge mainstream successes, while others—particularly the games developed by his RPG studio, Troika—became cult classics. And people are always asking him why he never made follow-ups to the latter.

"People regularly tell me, 'Why don't you make another game like Bloodlines,' or, 'Why don't you make a sequel to Arcanum?'" he says. "They're like, 'You made a cult classic.' And I'm like, 'The problem is the cult part.' They didn't sell well enough for a publisher to go, 'Oh yeah, we definitely gotta jump on a sequel to that.' So it's weird to hear people say to me, in some cases decades later, 'You should have done another one.' It's like, 'You should have bought it.'"

Because of the enduring love for Bloodlines, it's easy to forget what a disaster it was. It ultimately resulted in the death of Troika, which Cain co-founded with Jason Anderson and Leonard Boyarsky in 1998. Of the three games released by Troika between '98 and '05, when it closed its doors, Bloodlines was the least successful. The three founders had no choice but to end the studio, having let go of every employee by December '04. It just wasn't able to secure any deals with publishers.

This was long before the huge indie game development boom and Kickstarter, and Troika's elaborate RPGs needed the funding publishers provided. And it was just a risky proposition. Its games often reviewed well and got a passionate following, but uneven sales and a reputation for releasing games that featured a lack of polish and lots of bugs must have given the major publishers of the time some doubts.

"I hate to put things so mechanically," Cain continues, "but sometimes gamers need to put their money where their mouth is. If they don't like a game, they shouldn't buy it. If they love a game, they should buy it, and then they're going to get more of what they want." He's adamant that he's not blaming gamers, though. "I just think the only way to get more of what you want is to buy the things you want and not buy the things you don't want. Because ultimately, that's all that people are hearing. If a game comes out and sells a million copies, it'll probably get a sequel. If a game comes out and sells 50,000 copies, it's not getting a sequel."

It's a miracle that Bloodlines 2 eventually did turn into a tangible project—albeit over a decade later, and without the involvement of the former Troika team. But publisher Paradox largely seems to be regretting taking the risk. It's seen a slew of delays since it was first given a release window of 2021, is on its second developer, and has pretty much inspired the publisher to never make an RPG ever again.

Publishers love funding sequels, so when a game doesn't get one, there's usually a good reason for it, and normally it's simply because the original wasn't popular enough—even if, as was the case with both Arcanum and Bloodlines, they were brilliant.

Didn't Obsidian survive using nostalgia bait? Seems quite dishonest to throw shit at fans saying they didn't support enough.

 

[Max Damage]

It doesn't matter what he thinks or says on this topic after we got Pillows and The Outer Bores as follow-up to New Vegas, nu-Obsidian has no more drive or talent left, they ended up where they are through their own choices, and so did many studios that were more successful and talented than them. Namedropping Bloodlines 2 is also lol, it's not even out yet, and you have to be delusional if you think it'll come out any good. If Troika was successful in this timeline somehow, it would still turn to shit down the line, and so would Bloodlines 2 either way. See what happened to Bioware, they embraced the decline much sooner than Obsidian.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about the nine classes for Wildstar that I designed in the first 90 days in my position as Design Director on the game.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...was-extremely-wary-of-turning-it-into-an-mmo/

'Fallout wasn't designed to have other players': Fallout co-creator Tim Cain was extremely wary of turning it into an MMO​

Long before Fallout 76, we almost had Fallout Online, but Cain had serious doubts.

Fallout 76 was not the first attempt to splice the retro post-apocalypse with an MMO. Years before, Fallout's original owner, Interplay, had taken a crack at it. This was actually after Bethesda had purchased the rights to the series, but the two companies came to an arrangement: one that would ultimately devolve into a lawsuit, an out-of-court settlement and the cancellation of Fallout Online.

The concept, though, goes much further back. Bethesda acquired Fallout in 2007, but Interplay founder Brian Fargo had been mulling over the idea since the late '90s. He pitched it to Black Isle Studios, but founder Feargus Urquhart, now CEO of Obsidian, rejected the idea. An MMO just didn't seem very Fallout. Tim Cain, Fallout's co-creator, felt the same way.

After the Black Isle rejection, Interplay's online division, Engage, started working on Fallout Online. Cain had left Interplay by this point, but the company still wanted to pick his brain. "I remember several meetings with them," he recalls, "where I basically was like, 'I'm super cautious about this, and for multiple reasons.'" One of those reasons was the fact that that acronym would spell out "fool". But his biggest concern was that a game with lots of players did not fit Fallout's themes.

"I said, 'We've designed a game where you're going out in the Wasteland by yourself … And you want to convert it to a game where you come out of your Vault and there's 1,000 other blue and yellow vault-suited people running around. You realize that's a very, very different setting and game and kind of player? And you want to switch it from story-driven to mission-driven.'"

While Fallout had a party system, there's a big difference between travelling with some characters and existing in a world populated by other players. We're used to the idea of being one hero among many now, but this was when the MMO was a nascent genre.

Cain wanted to make sure Interplay understood the risks. "They were like, 'You're being very negative.' And I used to repeatedly go, 'I'm not saying don't do this. I'm saying you have your work cut out for you, and you're making decisions that are making your work harder. So don't get mad at me."

Interplay suggested making the instances smaller (an idea Bethesda ended up running with for Fallout 76), but Cain countered that the exact number of players wasn't really the issue. "I'm like, 'I'm just telling you, Fallout wasn't designed to have other players. The Vault Dweller felt special, felt like the weight of the future of the Vault depended on them. You just can't throw in a dozen others, 100 others, 1,000 others, and think it'll be fine.' I think Fallout 76 feels very different [from] Fallout 3 or 4, for no other reason than you're playing with 1,000 other people."

Fallout 76 arguably makes more sense with its focus on rebuilding civilisation, though, because as Cain notes, "they laid the groundwork for that in Fallout 4 with the settlement building". It was already heading that way before the survival MMO was even announced.

"I often tell people that once a couple games come out in a series, you can see the direction it's going," says Cain. "So Fallout 3 came out, and then Fallout 4 came out, and now you have an idea of the line it's following, and Fallout 76 is along that line. With Fallout 1 and 2, that was a different vector. We were going in a different direction. I'm not saying it's bad. People immediately want to go, 'Well, that's bad, right?' No, they're both what they are. And a ton of people like it."

Surprisingly, I'm one of those people. I was not convinced when it was announced, and thought it was dire at launch, but Fallout 76 eventually converted me. I still consider Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas not just the greatest games in the series, but two of the best RPGs ever made, and Bethesda's direction isn't quite as interesting, but I have had a lot of fun rebuilding Appalachia. It might not be one of my favourite Fallout games, but it's absolutely one of my favourite multiplayer survival romps.

What I'd really love, though, is another singleplayer Fallout that's in line with the original vision laid out by Cain and fellow Fallout creator Leonard Boyarsky. A man can dream.

 

[Butter]

Optimistic of Cain to think that there are a thousand people to play 76 with.

 

[Orange Clock]

Tim answered a question of mine in the comments.

I have a related question - is there a particular reason why Aradesh speaks with an accent but Tandi doesn't? Wondering what the thought process was here, even if the explanation is just as simple as inconsistent voice direction.

I think it's just an oversight, just like the "date" of Shady Sands foundation.
The way I explained that date issue to myself was that it wasn't Shady Sands initially. So it can be both true that Aradesh's ancestor founded it according to the game and that Shady Sands was founded only 20 years before the events of the game according to the "bible".

I have no notes about Aradesh and I didn't write him, but @zhulikkulik's explanation makes sense. One of the starting characters for Fallout was a woman with a Russian name who was the daughter of a Russian consulate who made it into a Vault when the war broke out. Would she speak with a Russian accent like her parents? Maybe.

I have never known a second-generation immigrant to have an accent like their parents. My siblings and I are second-gen ourselves (you only need one parent to qualify ), we speak like the people around us (and this changed over time; it started out thick and southern like my grandparents and then became more neutral like the people on tv). It seems unlikely to me that Aradesh would have the accent he does unless everyone around him spoke like that, and Tandi speaking the way she does and all the future NCR people speaking the way they do shows that they do not. This is further supporting evidence that Fallout is a middlebrow game made by people with good tastes, not the work of intellectuals. Barring a more in-depth explanation from the fellow who wrote Aradesh, I conclude that he has an accent simply because he thought it would be cool for him to have one. That's all right, but there's a fine line between Black Isle/Troika middlebrow cool and Bethesda lowbrow cool.

Josh Sawyer would have gotten it more-nearly-accurate, this is within his field of expertise.

T’s simple, he and his cozy village are an Indian LARPers

 

[Dishonoredbr]

 

[NecroLord]

Tim using Potence discipline on Leonard.jpg.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I couldn't read all the reviews but I take it NO CODEXIAN REVIEWS! The most important of all reviews.

I did see a new D&D video from him but this 11 min video meh'd me to apathy.

 

[Cheesedragon117]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/f...ight-have-something-to-do-with-why-it-failed/

Fallout's Tim Cain spent 6 years working on defunct MMO WildStar, twice as long as any other game, and thinks that might have something to do with why it failed​

"Games had shifted."

Of all the MMOs that fell by the wayside, pushed into the dirt by the relentless popularity of World of Warcraft, Carbine's WildStar stings the most. A fast-paced sci-fi romp exploding with colour and character, and a setting brimming with potential, its development team boasted not only WoW vets, but legendary RPG designer Tim Cain.

"When I started, I think there were only nine or 10 people working there," Cain says. "Almost all of them had worked on WoW, or some other really good stuff. And it was such an interesting team, because there was so much potential … We had some really, really great people there. And it's hard to make lightning strike twice. It's hard to capture it in a bottle. We could have done it, I can say that."

WildStar's development kicked off way back in 2005, but it didn't launch until 2014, after Cain had already left the studio. A mere four years later, it was cancelled. It took more than twice as long to develop. Even though Cain left before the game was finished, it's still the longest he's ever spent working on a game. Double the length of any other project, he says.

"That was kind of the style of the designers, they wanted to test a lot of things. And it seemed like we had an endless runway. But we didn't. What's interesting is, I spent three years as the programming director, and then three years as the design director, and that was six years. And until that time, the longest I had ever spent on a game was three and a half on Fallout."

Of course, MMOs are a more complex prospect than singleplayer RPGs, even considering the rather elaborate ones that Cain often works on. But nine years of development is still an incredibly long time, and comes with some massive risks.

"I remember going to my boss, going, ‘This is not gonna be done for at least another year or two.’ And it wasn't, for three more years," he recalls. "They worked on it for a total of nine years, when WildStar finally came out. And that itself causes problems, because games had shifted. What people wanted had changed. Other competitors had come out and showed what you could do. You can make a target and build towards it, but if you take so long, that target's gonna move."

Cain never ended up playing WildStar, as he was busy working on South Park: The Stick of Truth over at Obsidian when it launched. "I remember hearing WildStar came out, and I heard all these great things about it. Then I started hearing people go, ‘Well, it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this.’ I think part of it was there was so much competition … There was a lot of cannibalism going on."

To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we'd seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.

The competition had also grown steeper. AreaNet had released not just Guild Wars, but also followed it up with Guild Wars 2, there was Funcom's Age of Conan, a trio of MMOs from Cryptic (Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, Champions Online), BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sony's DC Universe Online, Square Enix's Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Online.

In that decade, the heyday of MMOs had come and gone, and players were starting to coalesce around the mainstays. Carbine couldn't have predicted the shape the genre would take, of course, but that's also why incredibly long development periods are such a gargantuan risk. Unless you're able to peer into the future, you're kinda just winging it.

The sad part is that WildStar was actually pretty damn good for what it was. Unique (at the time) artstyle, irreverent and ribald humor, unique races split between two factions as an Alliance/Horde style rivalry. It had some very fresh gameplay ideas as well. There were no unit-target abilities, everything is a free-aimed AoE attack, creating a Diablo-like gameplay loop of trying to bait as many enemies into your attacks as possible, but in a WoW third-person framework.

It really released at the worst time in a heavily oversaturated market. If they'd got their shit together and dropped it around the 2009 to 2012 era, it could have been a huge hit.

As a tack-on, the game's concept art can be found here for anyone that wants to give it a look. So many cool ideas! Oh well...

 

[gurugeorge]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/f...ight-have-something-to-do-with-why-it-failed/

Fallout's Tim Cain spent 6 years working on defunct MMO WildStar, twice as long as any other game, and thinks that might have something to do with why it failed​

"Games had shifted."

Of all the MMOs that fell by the wayside, pushed into the dirt by the relentless popularity of World of Warcraft, Carbine's WildStar stings the most. A fast-paced sci-fi romp exploding with colour and character, and a setting brimming with potential, its development team boasted not only WoW vets, but legendary RPG designer Tim Cain.

"When I started, I think there were only nine or 10 people working there," Cain says. "Almost all of them had worked on WoW, or some other really good stuff. And it was such an interesting team, because there was so much potential … We had some really, really great people there. And it's hard to make lightning strike twice. It's hard to capture it in a bottle. We could have done it, I can say that."

WildStar's development kicked off way back in 2005, but it didn't launch until 2014, after Cain had already left the studio. A mere four years later, it was cancelled. It took more than twice as long to develop. Even though Cain left before the game was finished, it's still the longest he's ever spent working on a game. Double the length of any other project, he says.

"That was kind of the style of the designers, they wanted to test a lot of things. And it seemed like we had an endless runway. But we didn't. What's interesting is, I spent three years as the programming director, and then three years as the design director, and that was six years. And until that time, the longest I had ever spent on a game was three and a half on Fallout."

Of course, MMOs are a more complex prospect than singleplayer RPGs, even considering the rather elaborate ones that Cain often works on. But nine years of development is still an incredibly long time, and comes with some massive risks.

"I remember going to my boss, going, ‘This is not gonna be done for at least another year or two.’ And it wasn't, for three more years," he recalls. "They worked on it for a total of nine years, when WildStar finally came out. And that itself causes problems, because games had shifted. What people wanted had changed. Other competitors had come out and showed what you could do. You can make a target and build towards it, but if you take so long, that target's gonna move."

Cain never ended up playing WildStar, as he was busy working on South Park: The Stick of Truth over at Obsidian when it launched. "I remember hearing WildStar came out, and I heard all these great things about it. Then I started hearing people go, ‘Well, it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this.’ I think part of it was there was so much competition … There was a lot of cannibalism going on."

To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we'd seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.

The competition had also grown steeper. AreaNet had released not just Guild Wars, but also followed it up with Guild Wars 2, there was Funcom's Age of Conan, a trio of MMOs from Cryptic (Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, Champions Online), BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sony's DC Universe Online, Square Enix's Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Online.

In that decade, the heyday of MMOs had come and gone, and players were starting to coalesce around the mainstays. Carbine couldn't have predicted the shape the genre would take, of course, but that's also why incredibly long development periods are such a gargantuan risk. Unless you're able to peer into the future, you're kinda just winging it.

The sad part is that WildStar was actually pretty damn good for what it was. Unique (at the time) artstyle, irreverent and ribald humor, unique races split between two factions as an Alliance/Horde style rivalry. It had some very fresh gameplay ideas as well. There were no unit-target abilities, everything is a free-aimed AoE attack, creating a Diablo-like gameplay loop of trying to bait as many enemies into your attacks as possible, but in a WoW third-person framework.

It really released at the worst time in a heavily oversaturated market. If they'd got their shit together and dropped it around the 2009 to 2012 era, it could have been a huge hit.

As a tack-on, the game's concept art can be found here for anyone that wants to give it a look. So many cool ideas! Oh well...

Yeah I had a lot of fun with Wildstar, it's a shame the stars didn't align for it.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

What is Wildstar? Do I have to explore YouTube again? <sighs>

 

[dutchwench]

What is Wildstar? Do I have to explore YouTube again? <sighs>

Highly unlikely that Youtube is the prime source for information on a 10 year old (forever 10 years old because it's dead) MMO published by the perfidious SKoreans. It was a fantasy/scifi mix MMO that switched from paid to F2P in less than two years - that's how everyone found out it's going to stay around as a WoW killer (not).

 

[Drakortha]

My last memory of Wildstar was grinding Shades Eve. Good times.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I just watched this talking about private server projects.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about five ways you can make NPCs (and the game itself) believably react to the choices the players are making.