Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Jedi Master Radek]

I think that the fact Tim has been keeping a detailed notes from development is a blessing for keeping OG Fallout as a part of culture. Historians are always restricted by their sources and Tim writing ensures that when writing about the 90s, Fallout would be referenced often.

 

[Roguey]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

Fallout would have been a better, longer, less buggy game if they didn't spend so much time doing demos. The reason demos became less frequent is opportunity cost which Tim himself outright talks about near the end of the video. He was forced to do these, he didn't want to do them.

 

[Modron]

To be fair I had never heard of Fallout 1 until I played the demo of it included on a PCgamer demo disk and was immediately hooked. It did its job well in my opinion.

 

[PapaPetro]

You just release a continuously updated demo build on Steam

Also Early Access is a form of demo.

aka Eternal Early Access

 

[Harthwain]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

Fallout would have been a better, longer, less buggy game if they didn't spend so much time doing demos. The reason demos became less frequent is opportunity cost which Tim himself outright talks about near the end of the video. He was forced to do these, he didn't want to do them.

I still love demo of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It's a fresh experience compared to the actual game in terms of content.

 

[Volrath]

The decade when Tim Cain made Fallout, Arcanum and TToEE was a "lost decade" for him. The price of your hobby, Codex!

I talk about my lost decade, from 1993 to 2003, where I worked so much that I barely was home and knew almost nothing going on outside of work. Consider this a cautionary tale of work-life imbalance.

Why should I feel sorry for him doing his job?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

It's hard to keep up with Uncle Tim. I take a short break from his channel, come back a week or two later, and he's got 14 new videos! It's a good thing he's the most entertaining, watchable and genuinely informative of the old time game developers with YT channels. I tried to watch Josh Sawyer's YT channel once. I lasted about 5 minutes. I did last 10 minutes with Chris Avellone's channel tho. He was doing a quirky playthrough of Arcanum.

 

[Kedar]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

Fallout would have been a better, longer, less buggy game if they didn't spend so much time doing demos. The reason demos became less frequent is opportunity cost which Tim himself outright talks about near the end of the video. He was forced to do these, he didn't want to do them.

I still love demo of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It's a fresh experience compared to the actual game in terms of content.

Fallout's demo is the same, it's a unique location with an exclusive quest.

 

[Roguey]

Tim liked them, but Leonard didn't care for the costume and set design decisions of the upcoming Fallout show. Tim hopes Fallout will be good, but he's concerned and bracing for all the liberties it'll likely take given the zeitgeist of recent adapations (Foundation, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Witcher, Halo). I imagine it'll probably be as cringe-worthy as the Wasteland pilot script Fargo posted last year.

Tim's a bit late to the party on the games and art subject. Some games are art, some are just entertainment, same as any other medium.

 

[Goral]

I talk about how random encounters worked in Arcanum, which used a very different system than the one in Fallout, which I described in this video: • Fallout Random Encounters

 

[PapaPetro]

Tim's a bit late to the party on the games and art subject. Some games are art, some are just entertainment, same as any other medium.

A lot of people confuse Art and Meta-Art.
Bad Art (which could be literally anything/nothing) is the latter: it's the things that apophatically describe what the thing you're describing is by what it's not in context (thru Negation)*. So we can describe Art by things that aren't Artistic and the notlike (though there can be plenty of overlap like you mentioned e.g. artistic games, comics, tv shows, etc.). "Bad Art" exists so that we know what Art actually means to us throughout time (the definition and our understanding of it (and what it's not) gets more refined over time).
You don't want to fall into a Nominalist gotcha-trap where everything is arbitrarily "Art" or like with Tim here who waffles on his own definition (the "I know it when I see it"-types).


*Sorry if you have to reread this again

 

[Roguey]

Why optimization is so difficult despite being easier on paper than it was in the past:

 

[toucanplay]

A couple of points Tim here resonate with my own experience in programming (although not in the games industry).

• I've noticed an unfortunate trend in my own field that's like what he had to say about less experienced devs not digging into the assembly code. People will say "you don't have to know the details of XYZ", or are willing to trust black box packages/libraries/models and skipping reading the source documentation/papers/simpler versions.
• Companies never allocate enough time to code optimization/iteration/clean-up/documentation/etc. even if this saves time and money later. As soon as a project meets the minimum threshold for viability, it gets pushed out and you're put on something else. That might be fine for the short term, but it's guaranteed to cause problems later.

It's actually terrifying how much coding know-how/skill will be lost in the coming decades.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Deterministic vs Random Skill Checks? Big Teams vs Small Teams? First Person vs. Isometric? Complex vs. Simple Mechanics? The answer to all of these is 'it depends'.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Alienman]

Thank God, I was expecting a human in a suit, like that guy from New York.

 

[Roguey]

Tim says he will never go back to randomized skill checks. Save scummers ruined it for everyone.

 

[toucanplay]

Tim says he will never go back to randomized skill checks. Save scummers ruined it for everyone.

Are we sure it's that, and not all those times people argued with him over randomness?

Going back through some of Tim's prior videos, I found one issue I disagree with him about: his preference for RPGs where you make one character as your avatar in the game world, with the idea being that it encourages replaying the game to have a different experience. I agree, in theory, but those games have to be "worth" playing through another time.

Not only are there all those other games to play, or other things you could be doing, but a lot of times the game itself can be a problem. If you've played a game before, it can be easier to get through stuff that challenged you the first time. On the other hand, you know all the things about it that bothered you, either because it's objectively bad design, or because it's personally aggravating.

One example for me is Tunic: it's not an RPG, but it's a game I really wanted to like. Except interact and roll are assigned to the same button, and those features can't be separated via remapping. You might think it killing me in one early boss fight was why I hate this, but it's not. It's rolling like an idiot every time I try climbing a ladder, because I press the button before the context can switch. I'm not in danger of dying or losing progress, but whenever I think about the game, it's all I can think about because it's such a stupid, unnecessary problem for the game to have.

An example from an RPG is Pillars 2. One incredibly small thing that aggravates me about this game is that you can get a ring that's supposed to stop you getting drunk, but it's flat-out useless in a drinking competition you come across later. I've tried playing this game multiple times, and every time I come across the ring or the drinking competition, it bothers me again.

 

[scytheavatar]

Tim says he will never go back to randomized skill checks. Save scummers ruined it for everyone.

I mean, can you argue with him? Like what exactly does randomized skill checks add compared to fix skill checks?

 

[Butter]

Tim says he will never go back to randomized skill checks. Save scummers ruined it for everyone.

I mean, can you argue with him? Like what exactly does randomized skill checks add compared to fix skill checks?

Uncertainty. The possibility that you might have to try something different when plan A falls through.

 

[Roguey]

Uncertainty. The possibility that you might have to try something different when plan A falls through.

As Cain (and Sawyer) noted, most people just reload until they succeed.

I mean, can you argue with him? Like what exactly does randomized skill checks add compared to fix skill checks?

The ability to succeed on every check with a generalist character by reloading every time you fail.

 

[Butter]

As Cain (and Sawyer) noted, most people just reload until they succeed.

Correct, which is why those mechanics don't belong together. Players will optimize the fun out of a game, and the designer has to account for that. %-based skill checks work in a game with limited saves.

 

[Infinitron]

I answer questions about Arcanum's AI and how it works.

 

[Roguey]

I imagine most people didn't mess around with dragging bodies because that's really only applicable if you're killing innocent people in towns. In a combat area, none of that matters.

 

[Wesp5]

I imagine most people didn't mess around with dragging bodies because that's really only applicable if you're killing innocent people in towns. In a combat area, none of that matters.

Troika had also planned this feature for Bloodlines, we found a context icon for it, but it was never implemented because it really wasn't needed there as well.