Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Butter]

People who are good at games are the outliers. Most people are worse than I am.

@Modron Josh Sawyer's QA stories https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...te-march-expansion-thread.100006/post-4409223 These are people paid to test video games!

Your testers should cover the same range of skill levels as your target demographic. If you want noobs to be able to play your game, you need noob testers.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

A bit late but I love both Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again and The Ink Spot's Maybe. I unironically love those old songs and they are the most enjoyable aspect of modern Fallouts to me. It doesn't surprise me Lynn's song was outside of their budget and I wonder how much it costed them to even get one song at all in the game. Especially since they haven't had licensing problems like other games have. Rockstar spends half of GTA's budget on song licensing alone, for instance.

 

[Modron]

If you want noobs to be able to play your game, you need noob testers.

The danger to catering to noobs is turning your game into a snoozefest for everyone else, granted that is what difficulty levels are for and even the infinity engine games had them.

 

[Butter]

If you want noobs to be able to play your game, you need noob testers.

The danger to catering to noobs is turning your game into a snoozefest for everyone else, granted that is what difficulty levels are for and even the infinity engine games had them.

Agreed. You have to decide as a developer if it's worth catering to all skill levels or not. FromSoft have done well for themselves by not catering to retards and journalists. The Pillars of Eternity games do a good job of catering to all skill levels (Deadifre after some post-launch patching). A lot of AAA games are for scrubs only, and that's a valid choice too.

 

[Sigourn]

The amount of Codexers that feel the need to consistently reiterate to other Codexers that they didn't like The Outer Worlds is astonishing. That game must be more beloved here than anywhere else on the web!

There's a massive hateboner for The Outer Worlds which is perfectly understandable in circles like Reddit, where people hyped it up as a Bethesda-killer and thus Bethesda fanboys jumped to criticism after the game released.

But one would think TOW would have been simply forgotten by the Codex, as it wasn't even a popular game to warrant hate (it's not a Skyrim that determines the direction of the RPG gaming industry).

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Well, I keep forgetting the game even existed. I'm only reminded of it when even when during your seasonal sales it's as expensive as a non discounted AA/AAA game.

 

[Roguey]

Your testers should cover the same range of skill levels as your target demographic. If you want noobs to be able to play your game, you need noob testers.

True but otoh

I can personally test things on Hard, as can Bobby and a few other folks, but most of the other devs cannot. Or rather, they wouldn't really get anywhere. If I listened to them for tuning advice, Hard wouldn't be hard at all.

Straight from Josh Sawyer - the vast majority of Obsidian devs can't even get through it on hard, let alone path of the damned (I beat it on hard).

 

[whocares]

I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod. I will not use 2FA.

 

[PapaPetro]

But it sounds like you needed some special assistance. How hard was it to select all and click on a mob?

I read the manual. But comprehending the effects of all those spells was difficult and I faced my fair share of brickwalls on account of my lack of knowledge. I did complete it though.

I read it too for fun during school, much more interesting that the literature/text-books they were feeding us.
Then again, I was a jock-nerd that would go to Media Play or Borders after school/sports to read old D&D stuff like Monster Manuals or peruse the magic items in Encyclopedia Magica.

That era had some kino manual design full of detailed lore and art and style.
Now they are as bland as reading a guide from Ikea.

 

[Sigourn]

You fokin wot? TOW was supposed to be a Cainarsky comeback. Troika's fourth game.

Now ask yourself who set up those expectations. You can say they did by adding the "from the original creators of Fallout", but that's just a fact and they needed to back this game somehow.

Fuck TOW and fuck you for even suggesting its inoffensively bad.

Oh no. Tell me how TOW ruined the RPG landscape for the next 20 years like Oblivion did. I'll wait.

 

[StrongBelwas]

You fokin wot? TOW was supposed to be a Cainarsky comeback. Troika's fourth game.

I recall The Outer Worlds being advertised as a console action game from the very initial phases of Cain talking about it, before it was even properly announced. A better criticism would be their attempts to market it as a proper New Vegas successor.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

You fokin wot? TOW was supposed to be a Cainarsky comeback. Troika's fourth game.

I recall The Outer Worlds being advertised as a console action game from the very initial phases of Cain talking about it, before it was even properly announced. A better criticism would be their attempts to market it as a proper New Vegas successor.

Every Obsidian game is set up against New Vegas now. People don't realize Josh is probably the only key figure left from that game.

 

[Butter]

Every Obsidian game is set up against New Vegas now. People don't realize Josh is probably the only key figure left from that game.

Almost everyone who had a major role is gone, including literally all the credited writers (I'm pretty sure Sawyer did some uncredited writing). Some of the notable people still there are Scott Everts, Charlie Staples, Brian Menze, Adam Brennecke (not sure how much he contributed), maybe Brandon Adler, maybe Mikey Dowling.

 

[jungl]

I enjoyed fallout tactics more then both arcanum and bloodlines and the studio that made that has even less games to their name.

God bless brian fargo for making the good games happen.

 

[Roguey]

Almost everyone who had a major role is gone, including literally all the credited writers (I'm pretty sure Sawyer did some uncredited writing). Some of the notable people still there are Scott Everts, Charlie Staples, Brian Menze, Adam Brennecke (not sure how much he contributed), maybe Brandon Adler, maybe Mikey Dowling.

He's been pretty open about what he specifically wrote, but yeah, everyone else who contributed writing has been gone for a long while.

 

[Maldoror]

The amount of Codexers that feel the need to consistently reiterate to other Codexers that they didn't like The Outer Worlds is astonishing. That game must be more beloved here than anywhere else on the web!

There's a massive hateboner for The Outer Worlds which is perfectly understandable in circles like Reddit, where people hyped it up as a Bethesda-killer and thus Bethesda fanboys jumped to criticism after the game released.

But one would think TOW would have been simply forgotten by the Codex, as it wasn't even a popular game to warrant hate (it's not a Skyrim that determines the direction of the RPG gaming industry).

You fokin wot? TOW was supposed to be a Cainarsky comeback. Troika's fourth game.

Lol. I cannot even fathom seeing the trailer for The Outer Worlds and thinking that it was going to resemble a Troika game.
How ignorant do you have to be to think that two developers could just magically transform Obsidian into Troika? Obsidian is full of young, inexperienced first-time devs whose first RPGs were Oblivion, and a handful of experienced and talented devs. Did you not realise that the majority of their writers and quest/area designers joined AFTER Pillars of Eternity? Obsidian was completely gutted after they nearly went bankrupt post New Vegas.

In any case, if you had watched or read even a handful of pre-launch interviews, it would have been apparent that The Outer Worlds was going to be a small, console based FPS RPG - because that's exactly what they kept pitching it as.

And it was a good game for what it was. Oh, and the backgrounds were supposed to be more expansive. Gutted due to budget.

 

[Axioms]

I wanna see Tim Cain's take on Robert Kurvitz since he made a video saying game dev leads are all jerks during crunch or w/e.

 

[Harthwain]

Arcanum was a hardcore computer role playing game, not some dumb first person shooter.

Strawman. Nobody talked about any first-person shooter here. But if you want to talk about "hardcore computer role playing games":

Baldur's Gate 1 manual - 51 96 pages (~20 pages of spell lists). 1998.
Baldur's Gate 2 manual - 266 pages (~150 pages is a list of spells, by the way). 2000.
Fallout 1 manual - 121 pages. 1997.
Fallout 2 manual - 166 pages. 1998.
Morrowind manual - 52 pages. 2002.
Icewind Dale 1 manual - 161 pages (~50 pages of spell lists). 2000.
Icewind Dale 2 manual - 152 pages (~50 pages of spell lists). 2002.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines manual - 64 pages. 2004.

You don't need to read manuals for D&D or D&D-derived games if you're already familiar with the system. Anyone new to D&D had to read the manual for Baldur's Gate (or any first D&D game they play).

I was playing games without reading the manual first since DOS games. I was new to DnD and didn't read the manual to play Baldur's Gate (or Icewind Dale. Or Fallout, etc.). I read it later for the little bits of lore it had (which was nicely done in-character).

So I think I had a plenty of experience in "hardcore computer role playing games" before coming to Arcanum, and still I needed to do some digging to make a character that was decently-enough combat-oriented to deal with the wolves (same thing for Fallout 2, by the way). Because you can't really gauge what stats are "good enough" without some actual testing. Somehow I didn't have this problem in literally ANY other cRPG I played before and I played ALL of them.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Videogame manuals were like foreplay. Anyone who didnt read them was seriously missing out on a fun part of the experience.

 

[Roguey]

Arcanum was a hardcore computer role playing game, not some dumb first person shooter.

Strawman. Nobody talked about any first-person shooter here. But if you want to talk about "hardcore computer role playing games":

Baldur's Gate 1 manual - 51 pages. 1998.
Baldur's Gate 2 manual - 266 pages (~150 pages is a list of spells, by the way). 2000.
Fallout 1 manual - 121 pages. 1997.
Fallout 2 manual - 166 pages. 1998.
Morrowind manual - 52 pages. 2002.
Icewind Dale 1 manual - 161 pages (~50 pages of spell lists). 2000.
Icewind Dale 2 manual - 152 pages (~50 pages of spell lists). 2002.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines manual - 64 pages. 2004.

You don't need to read manuals for D&D or D&D-derived games if you're already familiar with the system. Anyone new to D&D had to read the manual for Baldur's Gate (or any first D&D game they play).

I was playing games without reading the manual first since DOS games. I was new to DnD and didn't read the manual to play Baldur's Gate (or Icewind Dale. Or Fallout, etc.). I read it later for the little bits of lore it had (which was nicely done in-character).

So I think I had a plenty of experience in "hardcore computer role playing games" before coming to Arcanum, and still I needed to do some digging to make a character that was decently-enough combat-oriented to deal with the wolves (same thing for Fallout 2, by the way). Because you can't really gauge what stats are "good enough" without some actual testing. Somehow I didn't have this problem in literally ANY other cRPG I played before and I played ALL of them.

I no longer understand the argument you're trying to make. Yes, you can play literally any game without reading the manual. With a lot of simple games it won't be a problem. However, with pre-seventh console generation games you were expected to, especially with regard to games that weren't baby-simple, which is why they printed them in the first place (companies don't like spending money for no reason). There's certainly a world of difference between the opening areas and information divulged in 1997-2004 pseudo-isometric RPGs and the ones released since 2013.

It's also true that Arcanum has a very unintuitive UI and character system even compared to older games because Troika sucked.

 

[Maldoror]

Videogame manuals were like foreplay. Anyone who didnt read them was seriously missing out on a fun part of the experience.

Reading the manual for a game you've never played before on the way back from the store, imagining what the game is like because you've never seen it in action (pre YouTube).

 

[toro]

If you want noobs to be able to play your game, you need noob testers.

The danger to catering to noobs is turning your game into a snoozefest for everyone else, granted that is what difficulty levels are for and even the infinity engine games had them.

Agreed. You have to decide as a developer if it's worth catering to all skill levels or not. FromSoft have done well for themselves by not catering to retards and journalists. The Pillars of Eternity games do a good job of catering to all skill levels (Deadifre after some post-launch patching). A lot of AAA games are for scrubs only, and that's a valid choice too.

let's quote a fellow codexer review

This game is such garbage. It does not even remotely compare to the baldurs gate series, planescape or icewind dale.

14 hours in and i just cant seem to care about any of the characters, questlines or the world in general. Where is the immersion? Generic town here with some fetch and carry quest, go talk to this guy, go kill this guy. No mystery, no originality. Its a bit like eating a bowl of uncooked rice, with a fork.

The combat is also bland, emphasizes non-strategic thinking and spellcasting is generally totally useless, except for charmspells...Playing on path of the damned btw...Just get a big fat guy with a sword and sheild and whoop go attack until you win, gratz, now do it again...

Items and the "crafting system" is also terribly unimaginative, oh look you found an unique weapon, guess what? It pretty much the same as any other cookiecutter sword in the game.

And dont get me started on the dialouge, which should be the biggest plus in a gmae like this, but hey it was written by the same guys that write dialouge for the walking dead, or the kardashians.

The game just cant seem to make me care about anything in it. Whereas characters such as Imoen or Minsc, Dakkon or Annah made me feel like they where more real, they actually had motivation and personality, unlike pillars where every NPC is like "oh hey i got this problem you need to help me with it ok"??! "also i have just been standing here waiting for you to come along my entire existance, why did i do this? oh i dont know, the devs put me here"

Maybe im just playing this game wrong or i have gotten spoiled by the nostalgia of past roleplaying.

 

[Yosharian]

Modron Josh Sawyer's QA stories https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...te-march-expansion-thread.100006/post-4409223 These are people paid to test video games!

my expectation really was that players would test the boundaries of northern and eastern routes and either find a way through or make a strategic decision to follow the marker. what i actually saw in the released game was an unending stream of people who would die against deathclaws, cazadores, or super mutants, reload the game, and make the same attempt again in the exact same way. no variation in approach or selected gear, no use of chems or other consumables to raise their stats, no additional scouting for a better view of what was ahead. they would just repeatedly do the exact same thing and die again in the exact same way and eventually get furious.

^ this is the average player

This can't be fucking real, TESTERS are this bad?

He has to be exaggerating

 

[Yosharian]

The amount of Codexers that feel the need to consistently reiterate to other Codexers that they didn't like The Outer Worlds is astonishing. That game must be more beloved here than anywhere else on the web!

The experience of playing that game from start to finish mentally scarred me, the result of this is that I have to inflict this pain on other people by constantly reminding them about it

It's therapy!

 

[Wesp5]

Besides the basics, one learns how to play the game, well, by playing it, and it should be designed in a way that it teaches the player (without handholding).

That's what the tutorial is for and if a game manages to integrate that seemlessly into the story, like Bloodlines, it's even better!