Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Zeriel]

I went back and forth on it for a while of, maybe he's just being polite and he isn't really as stupid as he presents himself in interviews and talks nowadays, but after this nonsense I think it's fair to say of Tim: "What a fucking retard."

At least he had a productive youth.

 

[Zeriel]

so deadnaming is when you bring up someone's professional past who used to be relevant

Yeah I actually had this experience when people were talking about the actress who transitioned using her new name and I had no fucking clue who they were talking about for a while. You can't refer to public figures who are famous as their old name as the new name, especially when their popularity nosedives off a cliff after transitioning and they do no new work. You might as well refer to Jesus Christ as Flozzlegurp the Majestic and then be offended when people have no idea who you are talking about. Like most left-wing activism, it's societal and linguistic sabotage, bombing away cognitive clarity and leaving nothing but confusion and ruin in its wake.

 

[Bohrain]

I like having some form of weapon durability. It's a way to incentivize wider equipment use throughout the game if done right. You keep iron/steel weapons around for a long while in most Fire Emblems and Daggerfall because constantly using the more expensive ones bankrupts you. Fallout 3/NV repair system gives an incentive to pick up lower tier weapons for both repair and loot when they are abundant, since a fully repaired shittier weapon is usually worth more per inventory weight than a sole barely intact higher tier weapon. And then there's the limited uses vs strength aspect that Souls games used for bleed weapons and such.
But I do not see much benefit in armor durability mechanics. Weapon wearing down screws your damage output, but picking up a shittier spare vs backing out completely is something I consider instead of just hitting quickload. Weapon durability also tends to always happen purely from player input. But armor or shield breaking down has never not been frustrating to me in games. It tends to happen from enemy input, emergency replacement gear tends to be too heavy to be kept around and chest pieces in particular tend to be the single most expensive piece of equipment so it's expensive. It's simply something you wish never happens as opposed to something you want to strategize around for. And god forbid if an environmental hazard requires armor with particular resistance, which then breaks down. If armor durability is there just as a money sink, then invent better ones, because this one absolutely sucks.
In general, I think durability is a good mechanic particularly in games where you control a single character and player input has more impact than dice rolls. For example I don't see much point in regular arrows/bolts being finite in IE games, where you can't manually aim individual shots.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about how I would remake Fallout today...including defining what I mean by "remake".

 

[Roguey]

He'd add procedural generation for the overworld map like Arcanum.

He'd improve UI and AI.

Redo the art in higher detail.

Add creature respawning to the world in all the locations.

Increase the level cap....? But in a normal game of Fallout you would have to relentlessly grind to even hit it. Sniper is a level 18 perk but in my playthrough when I went around killing every enemy, I only just barely made it to level 15 before reaching the Master. Although I guess this is what that creature respawning is for (later in the video he confirms this).

More reactivity, including changes to maps during play.

Fixing the end slides and adding more.

Massive mechanics pass. For attributes, charisma should do more, and intelligence wouldn't affect the number of skill points. Skill pass: combining doctor and first aid (Sawyer beaming), gambling either made more useful or rolled into something else. Doing what Fallout 2 did and make the Friendly Foe perk an inherent part of the interface. Traits pass: Nerf Gifted (pick two or three attributes to raise up instead of +1 to all seven).

Fixing the bugs of course.

As flawed as Fallout is, I'm glad he'll likely never be able to do this.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Add creature respawning to the world in all the locations.

You didn't understand him. Those respawns are not part of some grinding gameplay loop. They are meant to convey changes to locations based on player actions, like having radscorpions spawn in the city after the player killed everyone.

He also mentioned fixing unfinished quests.

 

[Roguey]

Add creature respawning to the world in all the locations.

You didn't understand him. Those respawns are not part of some grinding gameplay loop. They are meant to convey changes to locations based on player actions, like having radscorpions spawn in the city after the player killed everyone.

He also mentioned fixing unfinished quests.

It's that and grinding given what he said later about how you'd reach the new level cap.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The creature respawn sounded like a really good idea. You wipe out a village and maybe something like raiders have taken over the town later. You kill all the raiders and the wilderness takes the town back and it’s full of Radscorpions or something. Sounds good. Also, as noted by him in the video, this is already in the game in some places; he just wants it to be a universal thing throughout the game.

Nothing he bring up that he’s change is bad. And in fact, he’s playing it pretty save with what he brings up. Basically the video is him saying: I want to fix the problems Fallout had, I want to implement things we could only do selectively more universally, and I want to push the reactive of the world beyond what we did in Arcanum.

He doesn’t even get into things that could be seen a contentious. Like if he’d keep combat as is, or if he’d make it more like Tactics, or if he’d do it more in the mold of something like the new XCOM games, or if he’d implement a combat system more along the lines of what they created for Temple of Element Evil and just do away with the grid system.

It is interesting that he brings up wanting to do a better version of the procedural generated overworld map like Arcanum only because he does have a video from not too long ago (can’t be too long ago, the channel is still pretty new) where he talks about that fully open world not really being something they need. I think he said he may have even cut it today...I can’t really remember. I don’t even know how this can be marked as decline. This aspect of Arcanum is completely avoidable if you don’t want to engage with it, and it’d likely work the same way if he was doing a Fallout remake. The more interesting part of this I think is the talk of more random encounters by way of ruins (and caves) you can come across in the wasteland that act as dungeons.

 

[0sacred]

-snip-

IOW, he doesn't have it in him anymore.

In the video where talked about his retirement, he already said he couldn't take the stress anymore, meaning He's Too Old For This Shit.

There's a difference between slapping together some prototypes in a few hours and developing a whole game on a budget. So it's time to give up on Tim and enjoy his industry insights without getting my hopes up

 

[Harthwain]

I don’t even know how this can be marked as decline.

Having an open world is better than not having it. Granted, exploring Arcanum/Fallout world via map is not the same as doing it in first-person, but still.

 

[Eirinjas]

He's married to another dude in a dress, btw.

 

[Kamaz]

I don’t even know how this can be marked as decline.

Having an open world is better than not having it. Granted, exploring Arcanum/Fallout world via map is not the same as doing it in first-person, but still.

If your open world is procedurally (read: randomly) generated, it acts as a filler. Do you really need padding and fillers in your RPGs? Look at the Starfield.

And, just subjectively, I never really liked or used the interconnected Arcanum map, using the travel map just like in Fallout.

Focus > size.

 

[Nano]

He's married to another dude in a dress, btw.

When did Robert ever wear a dress?

 

[Roguey]

When did Robert ever wear a dress?

He's referring to Burger Becky being married to Jennell Jaquays.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about the process of taking a feature from an idea to a shipped implementation.

 

[Harthwain]

If your open world is procedurally (read: randomly) generated, it acts as a filler. Do you really need padding and fillers in your RPGs? Look at the Starfield.

You can use procedural generation in a smart way. For example: make locations swap places each time you start a new run (and have more than X, so you can always find fresh encounters, instead of making it one-playthrough deal). It is also possible to generate contents of bioms (or rooms), without changing the general layout of the map. So you are still encouraged to explore, just can't rely on memory to know exactly what you will find where.

 

[Tyranicon]

At some point devs are going to realize that AI will do procgen way better than they ever could. And five minutes later, their bosses will realize that they don't need human devs anymore.

 

[Grauken]

At some point devs are going to realize that AI will do procgen way better than they ever could. And five minutes later, their bosses will realize that they don't need human devs anymore.

Thankfully only a couple of years later Skynet will kill those bosses

 

[deama]

At some point devs are going to realize that AI will do procgen way better than they ever could. And five minutes later, their bosses will realize that they don't need human devs anymore.

We're almost there! I can't wait!

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I don’t even know how this can be marked as decline.

Having an open world is better than not having it. Granted, exploring Arcanum/Fallout world via map is not the same as doing it in first-person, but still.

If your open world is procedurally (read: randomly) generated, it acts as a filler. Do you really need padding and fillers in your RPGs? Look at the Starfield.

And, just subjectively, I never really liked or used the interconnected Arcanum map, using the travel map just like in Fallout.

Focus > size.

Arcanum is exactly why being pissy about it is stupid. In Arcanum it’s there, but it can also be completely ignored and you can use the map to travel just like in Fallout. Tim wants to do a better version of the procedurally generated open world map from Arcanum. Being like “oh, decline” on something you’d never have to engage with if you don’t want to is just stupid. Even if it wasn’t something you ever wanted to fuck around with, it could still theoretically give you more varied locations for random encounters.

Personally, I don’t think it’s need. Although I do like the part about “Ruins” acting as dungeons that you can come across like random encounters. But it seems like something Tim Cain is interested in trying again, and wants to make better than the version in Arcanum. Kind of just seems win win to me. If he was able to make a Fallout remake, and he did it, and it turned out good; that could be interesting. If he did it and it just kind of turned out to be something you wanted to skip for whatever reason, you’d be able to just skip it like in Arcanum and travel like original Fallout always let you travel anyways.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

With open world maps, learning all the intricacies of the map and finding ways to exploit them is half the fun in repeated runs.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about game development skills I failed to hone, even after many decades.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, didn't have the skills to make geometric shapes into skills.

 

[Nano]

His smile is so adorable. I hope Robert tells him that.

 

[Roguey]

Tim admits he's bad at scope control (at least until The Outer Worlds), balancing, writing dialogue, and contract negotiation, no surprises there. He also mentions things he's good at but hates doing: HR and accounting.