Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Butter]

Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Why do you need telemetry to notice that? Are there even energy weapons to be found in the early game outside a random encounter?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Packets are sent to a game server to be analyzed.
Started using telemetry at Wildstar.
Hard to get a proper telemetry team.
Telemetry server is a computer at the office/data center.
Game connects to server at start of game, confirms it can connect, then begins sending the information.
Twain Martin was a database master at both Obsidian and Carbine, very good at SQL.
Packet is a timestamped location marked chunk of data.
Mostly discrete in game events, player takes damage, uses ability. Player takes this much damage from this much trap at this point in the map.
Some events are nondiscrete, such as player movement. Player is always moving, you don't really want packets of every instance of the player stopping and starting.
Some events are discrete but not technically considered game events, like the player saving or loading, or changing game options.
The data can be analyzed in lots of different ways. Look at what individual players did, but generally you conglomerate them.
Tim Cain tried to get the heat maps color coded in a way he can see with his colorblindness. Most important parts of heat maps where were do they spend the most time, and where are they going to you didn't plan for them to get to.
Can also use heat maps for places with frequent deaths, or where people save the game, or where they quit (maybe ragequit) the game.
Cain heard an anecdotal story from one of the Tomb Raider games where they noticed a lot of player death and ragequits at a sequence where there was supposed to be an easy jump. A curve in the level area would cause players to jump too soon instead of advancing further to see the safe point to jump.
Take note if players of a certain class are dying more often to some bosses than other classes. Can also go through the whole game and see if certain classes had higher death rates( Or in, skill-based games, do certain archetypes die more often than other builds.)
Basically telemetry lets you see if players are playing the game like you expected. You have to decide what your expectations were, which changes how you respond to the data.
Telemetry is particularly important for big games because even as the game director Cain doesn't really know all the content in the game.
Used Telemetry in Pillars to track which skills were being used, and noticed some of them were overly used and others were frontloaded at the start and then fell out of favor.
Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Here's my own summary.
The first five minutes are wasted on an explanation for retards of what telemetry is. Cain is starting to fall in love with his own talking and this bodes badly for future videos.

Then he finally gives examples of telemetry. "You can make a heatmap of where in the world is more dangerous". And do what with that? He doesn't explain. Given nu-RPG tendencies, I'd guess he'd either make the world map homogenously dangerous to make it as boring as possible, or put a ton of warnings around the dangerous zone so that even a retard would know not to go there. Whatever happened to randomly walking towards Navarro and getting gibbed by some crazy power armor dudes? Then finally reaching it by save-scamming like crazy and getting your mind blown with it all? This was fun.

Another example "you get data of where people quit, because they probably ragequit". Everyone quit around Defiance Bay -- not because of some rage, but out of sheer boredom. You don't need telemetry for that, achievements will do it.

Another example "are the death rates of all your different classes the same?" Why the fuck would you want to make it the same? They're classes precisely to play differently.

"Are players playing the game how you expected them to?"... Did chess inventors expect people to play the way it's being played? Or did they just create rules to allow UNEXPECTED variability that creates fun?

Homogenous safe design has completely rotten his brain. He's the exemplar of decline.

PS watching the vid at 1.5 speed makes it so hard to watch his mimicry. He makes faces all the time like a psycho with bulging eyes, a sign of a deranged mind.

In short, he convinced me not to use telemetry.

 

[Artyoan]

I agree. That would be interesting info but I don't see it as all that useful except for some rare scenarios of finding unintended behavior that could actually result in severe balance issues or sequence breaking. He didn't say what the issue was with players finding their way to that cave on the mountain. Just that it was unintended.

But classes not dying in the same way or certain areas being considerably more dangerous isn't bad. Most of his examples would be little more than noise to me. Just general feedback from forums and reviews would likely cover almost everything those statistics would reveal. If people aren't making a certain jump in Tomb Raider and are rage quitting, that will be readily obvious following any discussion online. I'm also not sure if making an adjustment, or adding a railing as he said, is that wise of a decision there.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I'm also not sure if making an adjustment, or adding a railing as he said, is that wise of a decision there.

The only adjustment I'd make is spawn a spooky skeleton who laughs his ass off at everyone who fails the jump. If I wanted to go meta.

 

[Butter]

Better use of telemetry: You realize nobody is picking your bard class, and you either need to fire your entire QA team for being retards or you need to buff bards.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about pacifism in games and how I supported it with minimal extra development costs.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Pacifist playthroughs shouldn't take too much work to implement.
Obviously, loves pacifist playthroughs.
Being able to play Fallout 1 pacifist was accidental, discovered by a QA tester. Went further in supporting it after they discovered it. Another player tried to kill everyone and was really upset when he found some people seemed to be marked unkillable, such as the overseer, so they made sure he could be killed at the end.
Afterwards, pacifist gameplay was always considered during development. Couldn't always control if a pacifist playthrough was possible in works involving other's IP like Bloodlines and ToEE.
Loves supporting player driven character activity, you are behaving in a way because you want to, not because the game makes you play like that or it is the optimal way to build the character.
The most memorable characters for Cain in TTRPG and MMORPG were unusual restraints made by friends, such as a vegan octogenarian mage in WoW or an illusionist that loudly announced when he was casting illusions in D&D.
Likes XP coming from quests because it leads to the game not judging you for how you solve quests, just that you solve it.
Some people want to experience the narrative of the game without dealing with the combat, Cain has a level designer friend that would just turn every game to easy so he could explore the levels and the story. Cain thinks pacifism playthroughs can give people like this a way to experience the game without turning down difficulty.
Pacifism should not be difficult to implement as long as you consider it at the start of development.
On all the main story quests, Cain has a rule that there has to be fight-sneak-talk routes. Talk could mean someone fighting for you or provoking them into fighting each other, sneak could mean going to a computer and ordering the security robots to attack the guards. Just need to make sure that if the talk or the sneak option involves getting someone hurt, the other one is peaceful.
Cain didn't really like the robot final fight in outer worlds but feels it doesn't violate his pacifism rule.
Side quests, all bets are off. Feel free to not include a pacifist option.
Random Encounters can be handled in a pacifism playthrough by running away or adding a perk that lets them avoid random encounters/make certain creatures friendly or bribable. Having to pay off enemies to avoid violence is just choices and consequences.

 

[Roguey]

Being able to play Fallout 1 pacifist was accidental

Too bad Arcanum made being a pacifist annoying. It actually is possible to complete ToEE without killing anybody (I've done it), but there's not much game there. Still, an amusing thing to do and I'm glad it's supported. I'm against mandatory combat crawls in games that support ways to get through them that don't involve combat.

Cain didn't really like the robot final fight in outer worlds but feels it doesn't violate his pacifism rule.

? I used my speech skills and never had to fight a robot. I convinced her I was right and she opened the other door.

Random Encounters can be handled in a pacifism playthrough by running away

Ah, Andhaira made an infamous thread about this.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Create a world where all technology is scarce, require telemetry to figure out that players sneer at pocket space lazers.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about social conflict resolution in games, and how to make it more interesting than a simple one-off skill roll in a dialog.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Doesn't really like being able to just walk up the final boss and speech 100 them.(I'm pretty sure Outer World did this, so I wonder how he felt about this.)
Doesn't like speech minigames and feels making dialogue psudeo-combat voids the point of a peaceful playthrough. Mentions the Oblivion minigame without calling it Oblivion (Doesn't seem to quite remember), really did not like it.
Likes making speech characters back up their claims with evidence, ideal solution for him would be a combination of speech skills and the player finding evidence for their claims in game through exploration and interactions with others. If you didn't have what it took, you'd see a greyed out dialogue choice that had something like [Speech 75, Evidence] and have to get yourself out of the conversation and come back.
You wouldn't go up to the Dark Overlord and Speech 100 him, you'd go through the game world gathering evidence to find he isn't who he says he is and then Speech 100.
Evidence gathering should take about as much time as the combat path and be mostly reliant on speech skills (maybe a bit of stealth/lockpick.)

 

[Roguey]

Tim talks trash about Fallout 3's Eden speech check.

Doesn't really like being able to just walk up the final boss and speech 100 them (I'm pretty sure Outer World did this, so I wonder how he felt about this.)

Like New Vegas, that required multiple checks for a solid coherent argument. Arcanum's the one where you just say "hey knock if off."

Also Planescape Torment. Though these two are better written than Bethesda. I guess it's also technically true that you provide evidence in all these scenarios, but it's something you pick up on the critical path, you can't exactly miss it.

I see someone in the comments fell for the in-game propaganda about Lanius. People are ultimately still people in Sawyerville.

 

[NecroLord]

Tim talks trash about Fallout 3's Eden speech check.

Doesn't really like being able to just walk up the final boss and speech 100 them (I'm pretty sure Outer World did this, so I wonder how he felt about this.)

Like New Vegas, that required multiple checks for a solid coherent argument. Arcanum's the one where you just say "hey knock if off."

Also Planescape Torment. Though these two are better written than Bethesda. I guess it's also technically true that you provide evidence in all these scenarios, but it's something you pick up on the critical path, you can't exactly miss it.

I see someone in the comments fell for the in-game propaganda about Lanius. People are ultimately still people in Sawyerville.

Requirements for getting Kerghan to abandon his malevolent plan of destroying all life on Arcanum are pretty steep...

Spoiler

20 Charisma, MAX Persuasion skill (with no penalties, so if you chose a background which lowers your Persuasion, it won't work), Virgil and Arronax in your party and, of course, the right dialogue choices

 

[StrongBelwas]

Best thing about a villain is to have a believable goal they can achieve, but also justifiable, something you could be convinced is a good thing, maybe the player can be swayed to join the villain.
Villain should be trying to make the world better, at least from their point of view.
Villain should be telegraphed (The player should hear about the villain, learn what they are doing, see the result of their actions upon the world.) Villain should not be a surprise that pops up at the end.
Uncertain that the villain should be encountered before the end though, this usually leads to the villain being invincible and getting away, and Cain doesn't like that. If the villain appears early, account for the player killing the villain early. Another option is the villain contacting the protagonist via videocalls or intermediaries that talk on the villain's behalf.
Fallout had a great villain in the Master, you hear about mutants, then you encounter mutants, then you learn they are hunting vaults, and then you encounter the Lieutenant, who will mention the Master has a plan. You can fight him, you can nuke him, but you can also convince him he is wrong. Cain refers him as 'two people in a computer glued together'.
In Arcanum, you learn about Arronax, hear you have to stop him, meet him, then you realize the real villain is Kurghan, who explains his reasoning. Cain obviously thinks he is crazy, but likes that he has a plan, can enact the plan, and thinks it is for the best.
In Outer Worlds, you pick the villain, it's either Phineas or the Board. Think it's interesting that most people think the Board is the villain, and is surprised at that. Says that Phineas forces you into doing what he wants, and his plan is risky and requires a lot more people to eat into the colony's limited food supply, and could lead to the end of the colony. The Board's plan, if it succeeds, still saves everyone. If it fails, it just leads to a part of the population shifting into cryostorage. You decide which one is good and which one is evil, and then you fight them.
Cain thinks Temple of Elemental Evil did a bad job with the villain. Zuggtmoy is poorly telegraphed, if he could go back to it, you would learn there is some big evil inside the temple, talk to the Circle of Eight or study their records. Talk to the elemental temples, maybe join them, maybe even unite them if you have high charisma skills and use them against Zuggtmoy, would have made her surrender option/joining her make more sense.


TL;DR: Bosses are good for encounter fights, villains drive story. Good villains are telegraphed, have a plan, player learns more about them in their travels.

 

[0sacred]

Tim has a ''villain's lair" that looks like a darkroom

 

[NecroLord]

Best thing about a villain is to have a believable goal they can achieve, but also justifiable, something you could be convinced is a good thing, maybe the player can be swayed to join the villain.
Villain should be trying to make the world better, at least from their point of view.
Villain should be telegraphed (The player should hear about the villain, learn what they are doing, see the result of their actions upon the world.) Villain should not be a surprise that pops up at the end.
Uncertain that the villain should be encountered before the end though, this usually leads to the villain being invincible and getting away, and Cain doesn't like that. If the villain appears early, account for the player killing the villain early. Another option is the villain contacting the protagonist via videocalls or intermediaries that talk on the villain's behalf.
Fallout had a great villain in the Master, you hear about mutants, then you encounter mutants, then you learn they are hunting vaults, and then you encounter the Lieutenant, who will mention the Master has a plan. You can fight him, you can nuke him, but you can also convince him he is wrong. Cain refers him as 'two people in a computer glued together'.
In Arcanum, you learn about Arronax, hear you have to stop him, meet him, then you realize the real villain is Kurghan, who explains his reasoning. Cain obviously thinks he is crazy, but likes that he has a plan, can enact the plan, and thinks it is for the best.
In Outer Worlds, you pick the villain, it's either Phineas or the Board. Think it's interesting that most people think the Board is the villain, and is surprised at that. Says that Phineas forces you into doing what he wants, and his plan is risky and requires a lot more people to eat into the colony's limited food supply, and could lead to the end of the colony. The Board's plan, if it succeeds, still saves everyone. If it fails, it just leads to a part of the population shifting into cryostorage. You decide which one is good and which one is evil, and then you fight them.
Cain thinks Temple of Elemental Evil did a bad job with the villain. Zuggtmoy is poorly telegraphed, if he could go back to it, you would learn there is some big evil inside the temple, talk to the Circle of Eight or study their records. Talk to the elemental temples, maybe join them, maybe even unite them if you have high charisma skills and use them against Zuggtmoy, would have made her surrender option/joining her make more sense.


TL;DR: Bosses are good for encounter fights, villains drive story. Good villains are telegraphed, have a plan, player learns more about them in their travels.

Zuggtmoy is interesting.
You can join the Temple, which prematurely ends the game, but where is the fun in that?
Evil must be PURGED for that sweet XP gain!
Seriously. I find it hard not to bring myself to slaughter every denizen of the Temple, even when I rarely play an evil aligned party (mostly Lawful Evil, because that alignment is awesome).

 

[Roguey]

"I don't understand why people think the uncaring, unethical, greedy, lying authoritarians are the evil option."

I understood their issues with Phineas's plan, but also those guys were jerks who could not be trusted to solve the problem based on the declining state of Byzantium and their proven inability to solve the problem even with their complete disregard for ethics. The most likely outcome would be that a handful of people would get to live as princes while everyone else remains frozen until eventually everything breaks and everyone dies.

It's also my understanding that Patel made the Board unambiguously evil in her DLC.

 

[Butter]

His description of Otter Worlds villains makes the whole conflict sound really unengaging and contrived. Two groups agree one what the problem is, and they have somewhat similar solutions in mind, and the obvious synthesis of their plans is apparently just not on the table. Now you have to pick one and go to war over it.

 

[Roguey]

His description of Otter Worlds villains makes the whole conflict sound really unengaging and contrived. Two groups agree one what the problem is, and they have somewhat similar solutions in mind, and the obvious synthesis of their plans is apparently just not on the table. Now you have to pick one and go to war over it.

There's not enough dimethyl sulfoxide available to combine the plans.

 

[NecroLord]

Tim masturbating himself at the thought of how DEEP and HIGH IQ The Outer Worlds setting is, when it clearly is not.

 

[Nano]

Horny warning:

Spoiler

I wonder if Tim ever got sucked off under the table in one of his videos.

 

[Viata]

That is a high level of faggotry. Watches a man talking in a video and what he thinks about is if someone is sucking that man off while recording those videos.

 

[Nano]

That is a high level of faggotry. Watches a man talking in a video and what he thinks about is if someone is sucking that man off while recording those videos.

Only if the guy is cute.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain broke down the things he notices in game and what questions he asked.

Intro could be the cinematic he sees on the Steam page to something he sees pre release like the trailer, or the first cinematic he sees on starting the game.

First question is if he is intrigued, if this is a world he wants to play in. Major turn off is protagonist being a smug jerk or NPCs being snarky. Likes it when the intro makes him want to explore the world, to see what happened to it.

On character creation, asks himself if he knows what he is doing, what kind of archetypes the game supports. If he is being asked to buy attributes or skills, what does that entail. Does not like it when the game is vague and says something like 'makes you shoot better', wants details.

Finds it odd if the game implies there is a diplomatic route but there is only one speech skill, no speech skills, or no perks that modify speech.

Tries to play normally for at least a half hour, then asks himself if he has any idea what he is doing. Is there any indication where the story is going. Within ten minutes, the interface usually has something that annoys him. It's a shame because good interface doesn't go noticed but bad interface instantly causes problems. Doesn't like important information being buried in multiple sub menus, or constant repetition. Menus are often too confusing, character sheet being hidden under a status menu, was playing a game recently where he could not figure out where his XP was, could see it pop up on the HUD when he killed something or completed a quest, but could not figure out where it was until he found it under 3 menus.

Tries to play normally for an hour, then stops to consider if his build feels good and is fun to play. Does it feel like how he envisioned it would play, and would the mechanics work how would they seemed like they would work, and most importantly do the mechanics make sense in the setting (For example, you make a dialogue character, and then the first hour has nobody to talk to.)

One of Cain's clients had him play through several levels of their game, he made a dialogue-focused character, confirmed with the devs you should be able to play it via diplomancer, and then there was an hour long level of nothing but combat encounters and stealth sequences, not one person to talk to. He confirmed with them this was a finished level, which is why they asked him to play through it. Has had this problem with shipped games, including games where he can spend the first hour not using any of his preferred/tagged skills.

Should also be able to determine the pacing of the game from the start. Tutorials longer then 10/15 minutes that are unskippable are a problem. Have characters been introduced, has the villain been hinted at, is the mixture of exploration-combat-dialogue good? Cain considers the start of the game being nothing but one of those to be a red flag. Cain recently played a steam demo of an anticipated game and in the first hour he did nothing but talk to people, 'Yikes'.

Bit more vague, but after the 'first act'/first major chunk of the story, Cain stops himself and honestly considers if he is having fun. This is very often the point he stops playing games. At this point he can safely judge it and all of it's aspects. Cain cares very little about a game's art quality compared to the other aspects, not just due to his color blindness.

Has been burnt by games his friends would say get better later on that didn't. Sometimes he enjoys himself on a visceral level then realizes he doesn't really like it, the combat may be fun but the story is dull.

Asks himself what the designer is trying to get him to do. Usually clear that they want him to be a good guy or go to a certain town or oppose someone. If the villain is doing something Cain agrees with, why should he oppose him.

Cain has played games, implies he even worked on a game once, where he agreed with the villain, wanted to work with him, but did not have the option to do so.

If stealth is the most enjoyable thing to do in the game, but the game is sold on the quality of it's combat, Cain questions the developers' intentions. Some games, the developer seems to push the player to do the non fun things.

Past the first act, Cain looks at the game's progression and considers if it feels like his character is gaining power and knowledge about the world. Are there still challenges, new challenges? Wants to be challenged by threats that make sense, doesn't want to see high level wolves if low level wolves were the starter enemies.

At the final encounter, first thing Cain asks himself if defeating the main villain (By speech or combat or what have you), did it feel satisfying? If the game offers replayability, does Cain feel like playing it again? When Cain replays a game, it's usually because the endgame makes it clear Cain did good but could have done some things better. Being told the ghouls die in Necropolis if you don't fix the water pump is a good example, it makes the player want to try a character that can repair it.

 

[Roguey]

I make a dialogue character and there's literally no one to talk to in the first hour. One of the clients I'm working for
had me play through some levels in a game they're building. I made a dialogue character which seemed like it was perfectly legal and possible and I confirmed with their designers that that was a valid character. I then played an entire level
for over an hour that had no one to talk to and I was shocked. It was all combat and occasionally stealth ways of
getting around those combat encounters. There wasn't a single dialogue and I just went "Is this level finished?" and
they're like "Yeah that's why we had you play it" and I'm like "I have problems" and I've played shipped games like that that for some reason the character I made didn't seem to be using any of his skills, and in the first hour, if I make a
character that doesn't use the skills that I picked as my main skills, in Fallout that would be a tagged skill, something's wrong.

I hope this isn't Bloodlines 2.

Once again affirming that he deeply regrets many of the skills included in Fallout. Gambling, traps, big guns, and energy weapons certainly aren't going to be used in that first hour.

Is there good pacing to it? Meaning sometimes I'm exploring, sometimes I'm fighting, sometimes I'm talking to people. If it all seems to be exploration or it all seems to be talking or it all seems to be combat: bad. I played a demo on Steam recently for a game I was looking forward to and all I did in the first hour of that demo was talk to people. Yikes.

Tim would hate Planescape Torment if it were released today (and possibly hated it on release).

I think pacing is important but I don't necessarily agree with the idea that combat, exploration, and dialogue need to be featured in near-equal amounts at any given point. That kind of artificiality can detract from the experience.

Now I've also played a lot of games where the first act was amazing and then it kind of fell apart after that, but if you can't make the first act good you're probably going to lose me.

Frequently the first act is where I stop.

Larian makes games for the Tim Cains of the world.

I've played a game, possibly even worked on a game, where I've questioned the villain in the sense of "I kind of agree with the villain here, why am I opposing him?" and there was no option to do so.

I wonder, is this about Thaos in Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny before they patched in the option to side with Kyros?