Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Jedi Master Radek]

It amazes me how shapes proponents seem to think an average person is some kind of total troglodyte, who can't comprehend the abstract meaning of numbers. In reality most people tend to put numeric ratings on everything, they rate everything as x out of 10, they overuse numeric ratings. Constraining character building options just to appeal to people who hate character building or are more excited by the fact that something moves on the screen rather than what it represent is why we got the decline period past 2005.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

It's corporatism in general. I see the same approach in my industry. I am assuming it occurs in every industry. Most companies (and middle managers) just copy whatever everyone else is doing and assume it is the perfect way to do things... because everyone else is doing it! Nevermind that that's not how any highly profitable company got highly profitable in the first place.

Don't demand too much from the monkey brain.

 

[ds]

Telemetry with explicit opt in is creepy as fuck. Imagine buying a toaster and suddenly there is someone standing in your kitchen clicking a counter every time you use it and notes what kind of toppings you eat your toast with. At least laws are finally (slowly) catching up to shit like this that the tech industry likes to do.

And its not like telemetry actually leads to better software. All it gives you are statistics and those can be used to justify about any change, like removing the restore function from backup software because its rarely used.

 

[ds]

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

Same situation in Fallout 2.
You only get your hands on a Plasma Rifle later in the game (if you manage to gain access to the Sierra Army Depot), from a Super Mutant in the Military Base (one of the more difficult areas in the game, really tough battles await here), or from Navarro, which is an Enclave base (need I say more?).
The godly Pulse Rifle is in the BOS bunker in San Francisco, but you don't get access to it until you steal the Vertibird plans from Navarro for Matt, the BOS member guarding the bunker.

And that makes them feel special rather than just being another weapon type. Feels good when you finally get to vaporize suckers after having tagged the skill at the start of the game and put some points into it in anticipation of finding one.

 

[NecroLord]

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

Same situation in Fallout 2.
You only get your hands on a Plasma Rifle later in the game (if you manage to gain access to the Sierra Army Depot), from a Super Mutant in the Military Base (one of the more difficult areas in the game, really tough battles await here), or from Navarro, which is an Enclave base (need I say more?).
The godly Pulse Rifle is in the BOS bunker in San Francisco, but you don't get access to it until you steal the Vertibird plans from Navarro for Matt, the BOS member guarding the bunker.

And that makes them feel special rather than just being another weapon type. Feels good when you finally get to vaporize suckers after having tagged the skill at the start of the game and put some points into it in anticipation of finding one.

Absolutely.
Until that point, I suppose the Laser Pistols you get in New Reno will do. You can upgrade them into the Magneto Laser Pistols, who have the "Weapon Penetrate" perk.
Oh, there's also a Plasma Pistol in the Toxic Caves, but the real star there is the BOZAR!

 

[Glop_dweller]

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

Underused? Do you mean underused like the Traps skill?

Well here is the thing... How many people booby-trap their house, or lay mines in their back yard? There is one or two(?) traps in the film Book of Eli; no energy weapons at all.
How many people in here (right now) can hunt with a boomerang? If you have that skill and find a simple (or tricked out) boomarang—you are one of the very few, and it's a guarantee that in a post apoc setting (especially outside of Australia),
that you will not be looting boomerangs from every other violent encounter with the locals. It would be absurd to find a trap in every house, every apartment building, even just once every town. And it is the same for high-tech energy weapons———especially in a setting that (mostly) eschews aught but vacuum tube tech. Having an energy weapon skill is like having a Katana skill (or the Traps skill). It comes at significant cost, but enables your PC to be an expert where most everyone else is not.

*Also though... the early game was set in destitute/primitive environs; low level characters too. I'd only expect energy weapons near the military base, the Glow, or —maybe— with one of the caravans.

 

[NecroLord]

Having an energy weapon skill is like having a Katana skill

Katanas are underpowered.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Katanas are underpowered.

So are fencing foils... but not in the hands of an expert...

 

[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.