Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Butter]

Pretty reasonable takes.

 

[ciox]

At the end Tim realized that it's possible for him to go back to the old system where you had to spend more points in the later ranks. If he gets around to that, ideally he'll find that it's comparatively bad, and he should have figured out a third option.

I'm curious, what do you think a third option could look like?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

From what I've seen, Otter Worlds only manages the simple part.

FWIW I thought the system in TOW was quite cool and definitely opens up a lot of build-fuckery if you make an effort to figure it out. It's just that nobody ever bothers because game is braindead easy even on Supernova

 

[Roguey]

I'm curious, what do you think a third option could look like?

Getting rid of "xp per hit" would help solve the "leveling too fast" problem. I think the entire thing could use an overhaul.

 

[Wesp5]

I'm curious, what do you think a third option could look like?

Getting rid of "xp per hit" would help solve the "leveling too fast" problem. I think the entire thing could use an overhaul.

You mean like Bloodlines does it ?

 

[Roguey]

Pretty reasonable takes.

Sawyer-haters seething that he ultimately agrees with him regarding collapsing skills and adding weak early-game energy weapons.

Tim completely overlooks fixing both the AP ammo bug that made it indistinguishable from regular ammo (which Fallout 2 did) and changing the formula so that they're not outright worse than regular ammo in all situations (which 2 did not do).

Also a bit strange how he didn't say anything about how the implementation of steal and sneak aren't fun and could use some changes.

 

[Butter]

Sawyer-haters seething that he ultimately agrees with him regarding collapsing skills and adding weak early-game energy weapons.

I guess I wasn't paying attention during that part. Fuck this decline enabler.

 

[ciox]

The more you watch that the more you feel like he never touched Fallout 2 after 1998.
And people wonder if he's tried the fixup mods..

 

[Zanthia]

He had to pull himself back from saying the traits should have been balanced and not fun. Like he remembered at the last moment that it was a single player game.

I don't see why he thinks easy difficulty should have turned off critical failures for the player and enemies. If it's going to be easy, why not go the full way? Plus, I think seeing them happen would have either encouraged people to try a higher difficulty or be really happy that they were playing on easy, so it's win-win. Easy difficulty is always kind of inherently boring, but that's no reason to make it totally flat, too.

I like that doctor is separate to first aid, even though it's annoying. Healing yourself (and your party) like that should be a significant investment. But I definitely wish he'd implemented the FO2 changes to companion control earlier.

 

[Harthwain]

He had to pull himself back from saying the traits should have been balanced and not fun. Like he remembered at the last moment that it was a single player game.

And here I was, thinking that Fallout's traits were great example how to make impactful changes to a character... I guess it was a fluke.

 

[Roguey]

I like that doctor is separate to first aid, even though it's annoying. Healing yourself (and your party) like that should be a significant investment. But I definitely wish he'd implemented the FO2 changes to companion control earlier.

It works fine in the first game because it's balanced by time. With Fallout 2, it doesn't make sense for them to be separate skills. Of course Tim is also against the time limit.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

And here I was, thinking that Fallout's traits were great example how to make impactful changes to a character... I guess it was a fluke.

IIRC it was Fargo who suggested mid-development that traits and perks be about advantage/disadvantage rather than just incremental stat increases.

 

[Butter]

He had to pull himself back from saying the traits should have been balanced and not fun. Like he remembered at the last moment that it was a single player game.

And here I was, thinking that Fallout's traits were great example how to make impactful changes to a character... I guess it was a fluke.

Balanced doesn't have to mean low-impact. If you gave Gifted more of a drawback to offset how powerful it is, it wouldn't be lower impact as a consequence.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

traits should have been balanced

What spending time around Sawyer does to MF'er. Balancitis is an an airborne patogen.

 

[Zeriel]

2) The fact that OW team failed to do their references justice also tangentially reinforces my original argument that with Fallout they accidentally stumbled into a unified vision for the project because everyone already spoke the same language.

I will add that when they were doing Fallout they had fun with it. The Outer Worlds is more like a job.

A job being a job and a job being fun is often down to who you're doing the job with. When you're doing a shitty job with a band of friends and management doesn't prevent you from just having fun with each other, even that shitty job can be fun. When you're doing a great job with a bunch of zoomers who have no clue what you're talking about, it probably becomes a chore.

It sounds like every job Boyarsky took after Troika underutilized his talents though. Guy must be used to it by now. Blizzard hired him for non-linear storytelling expertise, then decided after all they didn't want to do a branching storyline and player dialogue and assigned him to writing lore tidbits. Classic corporatism.

 

[Goral]

I talk about fun memories of Troika, so that viewers don't get the impression from my other Troika videos that we were constantly stressed there.

Edit:

• He has shown his Troika boxer shorts.
• Initially they worked from their homes.
• Sierra gave them 90 days to deliver a demo.
• They had showers in Troika office so the others had to watch out to not drop the soap when Tim was around.
• Tim Cain was bringing a dog to the office. Disgusting.
• Some of the Arcanum portraits were inspired by a 1910 yearbook.
• Everyday at 4 PM they were watching Chinese soap opera, 2 of the staff members spoke Chince but Mandarin not Cantonese so no one knew what they were saying.
• They were playing Counter-Strike drunk.

Edit 2:

The office had a men's restroom, a women's restroom, a private single restroom, and a private single restroom with a shower. The two private restrooms were lockable.For people who biked to work or who wanted to go out in the evening straight from the office or who had worked over night, that shower was awesome.

 

[Morgoth]

Those were some real dog days.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Instead of talking into a camera he should write blog posts. Only aspie NEETs have the time/inclination to watch 10-20 minutes of vlog a day.

 

[StrongBelwas]

 

[Roguey]

"I'd rather make a bad game than make a bland game."

And yet The Outer Worlds.

"I don't hear anybody wanting to get into the game industry because they want to do gaas, because they want to do microtransactions. That's a way of making money off your game but it's certainly not a reason to make games."

I dunno, here are some really ancient screencaps of devs talking about how much they love dlc on account of the greater job security it provides.

Instead of talking into a camera he should write blog posts. Only aspie NEETs have the time/inclination to watch 10-20 minutes of vlog a day.

Not happening because he's been told he comes across as mean in text.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Tim seems to have failed to understand that nowadays "passion" often is a buzzword corporations use to exploit the workers. "You don't want to work 12 hours a day for pennies? You don't have a passion". It's especially funny to demand passion when AAA game design is handled down from business and marketing departments and is focused on making the blandest product possible to appeal to the biggest number of people.

 

[ciox]

Does DLC even sell that well? It seems mostly a cope unless you've built a massive paypig operation around a big franchise that can support it, but I'll let you correct me.

 

[Butter]

Modern game devs crow about "work/life balance" because they're not passionate because they feel no sense of ownership over the product. If it's a corporate product that hundreds of people are working on, nobody is going to voluntarily work overtime to make it as good as possible.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Meanwhile, Sawyer sneaking back into the office in middle of the night to drool over font ligatures in Penistent.

 

[Warhawk47]

I'm glad he finally addressed what I've been repeating like a broken record, namely art vs. product. Unfortunately he missed the memo on the current environment compared to what he knew. The "starving artist" motif is more literal than ever, and with how unbalanced a lot of people are, plus the ease of working from home, do you really want that proximity and to be that personally invested in... well... insanity? People are complaining about work/life balance because the work/reward ratio is insufficient to sustain life, and communard-style arrangements with daycares and other on-site facilities are not only impractical while remote but undesirable while working with random jerks just as poor, depressed and stressed out as you are. "The company store" is bad enough when you're working for a coal mine and your children are doomed to follow your footsteps underground. To pretend that you're working on something creative when it's neither allowed to be nor is it even really yours, while "the company store" got shut down due to budget cuts... Tim went through his share of hell, but was there ever a point at which the economy totally collapsed around him, his wages frozen and then inflated away, he was laid off, his student debt crushed him, his health collapsed? No. He managed to reach the executive level, which is akin to crawling back onto dry land. The vast majority of developers will never get there as things are now. The ones who want to unionize at massive corporations probably have the only real shot, as well as the occasional savant or struck-gold indy.