Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[HeatEXTEND]

it's going to stay around as a WoW killer

Whoah!?

(not)

oh....

 

[Infinitron]

I found my notes on my Editors Day presentation of Arcanum in April 2000, and I tried to recreate it here.

 

[Infinitron]

Here's a little something for the holidays.

 

[Lyric Suite]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...th-what-they-are-and-a-ton-of-people-like-it/

Fallout's original designer is fine with the direction of the modern games: 'They're both what they are, and a ton of people like it'​

"I'm the last person to want to yuck other people's yums."

Bethesda's tenure as the ruler of Fallout's Wasteland has brought with it massive changes: the first-person perspective, FPS combat, base building, its transformation into a survival MMO. Since Fallout 3, the series has gone off in a bunch of different directions, most of them distinct from the original vision of Fallout's creators.

Tim Cain—who initially got the ball rolling and served as the first Fallout's sole designer until he brought in fellow Interplay developers Leonard Boyarsky, Chris Taylor and Jason D. Anderson—wouldn't have taken Fallout down this route. Indeed, back in the late '90s, after he left Interplay, he pushed back on the concept of multiplayer spin-off.

"Fallout wasn't designed to have other players," he said when Interplay picked his brain on the subject. And while Fallout Online would never materialise, instead culminating in a legal battle between Interplay and new owner Bethesda, you can certainly see some of its DNA in Fallout 76.

Despite the significant changes that have occurred since Cain bid farewell to the series, though, he doesn't think its transformation is a bad thing. "We were going in a different direction," he says. "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."

Fallout 1 and 2 were critical and commercial successes, hugely influential, and enduringly popular, but the series has only grown more powerful since Bethesda took the reins. We'll likely have to wait until the next decade until we get another Fallout, but in the meantime, Bethesda continues to expand Fallout 76, and we're getting a second season of Amazon's Fallout TV show.

"I mean, how many people played Fallout 3 and 4? Way more than 1 and 2 put together," says Cain. "You could almost argue it's fundamentally a different game. It's a very different game with the same veneer of the old one, and it obviously appeals to a ton of people. I'm the last person to want to yuck other people's yums. So I'm like, if you like this, play it, love it. Post videos of Let's Plays and have fun with it."

He doesn't understand why some players just want to dunk on the modern direction, either. "The opposite of that is what I don't get," he says. "When people post hour-long videos about why they hate a game. And I'm like, ‘Why aren't you just off playing a game you like? Why are you doing this? The masses are playing it, they don't need to know why you don't like it.’ But game playing is so personal and subjective that I don't even think there's a bad game out there. I just think there's bad games for you, and bad games for me, and maybe even bad games for 80% [of people]. But if you go to Steam, I defy you to find a game for which 100% of the reviews are negative."

The critic in me wants to argue, but I suspect I'd be a lot happier if I spent less time complaining about how far Fallout has deviated from the games I loved so much in the '90s.

Getting sick of older devs always cucking for the new shit, but i also like how sometimes there's a limit to how far they will go, like when Cain felt the need to point out Fallout was about war, not capitalism.

That said, i'm not entirely sure who he is referring to here, since has far as i've seen there's actually no critique of nu-Fallout out there unless it's fringe places like the Codex.

The only hour long critique of Fallout 3 i've seen for instance was from that Codexian lefty guy. Unless there's been a new trend of people shitting on nu-Fallout i haven't seen, who Cain talking about?

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about what it costs (in time and money) to make your game moddable by your players.

 

[ds]

Too many games do things like encrypting/obfuscating archives that take additional time to implement compared to the modding friendly alternative to just not doing that. It also doesn't take extra effort to not disable loading loose files not packed in to archives in release builds when that functionality is already available in dev builds. Sorry, but it's not just about cost.

But the most important thing to make a game moddable is to make it good enough for people to want to spend time modding it. Most games fail at that. If the will is there, any other hurdle can be overcome. Nothing is really hard coded if you have access to a debugger and reverse engineering tools.

And the best thing game developers can do for moddability is to "just" release the source code (or even just parts of it if they don't own all of it). This isn't free either but has the highest potential in long term use - just look at what people have done with Id's engines.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about good design lessons from the board game WizWar.

 

[Quillon]

god damn he got off from "a lot of good reviews", explains how's blind to any criticism about TOW.

also the best looking parts of the game from stellar bay is barely in the game ffs

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about mentoring, which is getting advice from someone older, wiser, and/or more experienced than you, and how I wish I had had a mentor earlier in my life.

 

[Alienman]

Why not both?

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about changes, and how they always happen, and you can't stop that. And that's OK.

 

[Old Hans]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...th-what-they-are-and-a-ton-of-people-like-it/

Fallout's original designer is fine with the direction of the modern games: 'They're both what they are, and a ton of people like it'​

"I'm the last person to want to yuck other people's yums."

Bethesda's tenure as the ruler of Fallout's Wasteland has brought with it massive changes: the first-person perspective, FPS combat, base building, its transformation into a survival MMO. Since Fallout 3, the series has gone off in a bunch of different directions, most of them distinct from the original vision of Fallout's creators.

Tim Cain—who initially got the ball rolling and served as the first Fallout's sole designer until he brought in fellow Interplay developers Leonard Boyarsky, Chris Taylor and Jason D. Anderson—wouldn't have taken Fallout down this route. Indeed, back in the late '90s, after he left Interplay, he pushed back on the concept of multiplayer spin-off.

"Fallout wasn't designed to have other players," he said when Interplay picked his brain on the subject. And while Fallout Online would never materialise, instead culminating in a legal battle between Interplay and new owner Bethesda, you can certainly see some of its DNA in Fallout 76.

Despite the significant changes that have occurred since Cain bid farewell to the series, though, he doesn't think its transformation is a bad thing. "We were going in a different direction," he says. "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."

Fallout 1 and 2 were critical and commercial successes, hugely influential, and enduringly popular, but the series has only grown more powerful since Bethesda took the reins. We'll likely have to wait until the next decade until we get another Fallout, but in the meantime, Bethesda continues to expand Fallout 76, and we're getting a second season of Amazon's Fallout TV show.

"I mean, how many people played Fallout 3 and 4? Way more than 1 and 2 put together," says Cain. "You could almost argue it's fundamentally a different game. It's a very different game with the same veneer of the old one, and it obviously appeals to a ton of people. I'm the last person to want to yuck other people's yums. So I'm like, if you like this, play it, love it. Post videos of Let's Plays and have fun with it."

He doesn't understand why some players just want to dunk on the modern direction, either. "The opposite of that is what I don't get," he says. "When people post hour-long videos about why they hate a game. And I'm like, ‘Why aren't you just off playing a game you like? Why are you doing this? The masses are playing it, they don't need to know why you don't like it.’ But game playing is so personal and subjective that I don't even think there's a bad game out there. I just think there's bad games for you, and bad games for me, and maybe even bad games for 80% [of people]. But if you go to Steam, I defy you to find a game for which 100% of the reviews are negative."

The critic in me wants to argue, but I suspect I'd be a lot happier if I spent less time complaining about how far Fallout has deviated from the games I loved so much in the '90s.

He really needs to get the over it, instead of constantly pretending he doesn't care and bottling up all his resentment and anger. Serenity now. Insanity later

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about why so many AAA RPGs expect and often require the player to do combat.

 

[0sacred]

I hope fantasy games will keep on being about combat as long as the world is populated by monsters. Now historical RPG's, they seem silly if there's too much combat (Darklands comes to mind). I don't know how KCD measures up here but I've got a hunch it also has too much combat for its own good.

 

[Roguey]

I hope fantasy games will keep on being about combat as long as the world is populated by monsters. Now historical RPG's, they seem silly if there's too much combat (Darklands comes to mind). I don't know how KCD measures up here but I've got a hunch it also has too much combat for its own good.

My KCD endgame stats

It's not a power fantasy, it's a medieval peasant-to-knight simulator. You have difficulty fighting groups, and in the big set piece battles you're fighting alongside an army.

 

[0sacred]

It's not a power fantasy, it's a medieval peasant-to-knight simulator. You have difficulty fighting groups

that doesn't really tell me anything about the frequency of combat encounters

 

[Roguey]

It's not a power fantasy, it's a medieval peasant-to-knight simulator. You have difficulty fighting groups

that doesn't really tell me anything about the frequency of combat encounters

A dozens of hours long game where the number of people you can kill/knock out is around 50 isn't one with frequent combat.

 

[Sweeper]

It's not a power fantasy

>killed 45 people in melee combat

 

[Roguey]

>killed 45 people in melee combat

That's incredibly low by action game standards.

 

[Sweeper]

>killed 45 people in melee combat

That's incredibly low by action game standards.

It is, but KCD is still a power fantasy, just much less so than other games.
A 1v3 fight ends only one way.

 

[Dark Souls II]

2 niggers and 1 woman on the team that made Fallout 1 & 2... no wonder the games sucked.

 

[0sacred]

It also got smaug (8:50) so that's 3 niggers

 

[Roguey]

Avellone put T-Ray in Fallout 2, a female PC can have sex with him to get your car back and some free improvements.

Sharon Shellman went with them to Troika, he drops that she's Jason Anderson's wife.

 

[gurugeorge]

2 niggers and 1 woman on the team that made Fallout 1 & 2... no wonder the games sucked.

I don't think we Fascists would expect there to be no niggers or women at all involved with things, one would expect a few, because there are always outliers (just like there are dumb Whites, dumb Jews and dumb East Asians).

It's just a question of relative percentages, hiring on representayshun and not on merit, etc., etc., blah.

 

[Melcar]

2 niggers and 1 woman on the team that made Fallout 1 & 2... no wonder the games sucked.

Maybe they were exceptional niggers and women. Not many of those around.