Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Spukrian]

StrongBelwas​

You're doing good, very good. Please keep up the good work.

But also, please use more paragraphs.

 

[NecroLord]

I like XP from kills for two reasons:

1. I like to explore the world (often ignoring the main quest and sometimes looking for side stuff) and in RPGs this also implies that there will be battles. I want to get XP from those battles otherwise they're just a waste of time with the game telling me to stop exploring and get back on the quest rails.
   • A game could give something else for the combat, but at the end of the day the resource that matters most in RPGs tends to be XP (or whatever equivalent there is for character progression). And while it could, in theory, give some other resource for combat that is also used independently for character progression (e.g. quest completion gives points -XP or whatever- to be used to improve stats, combat gives points to be used for getting perks or improving skills), IMO in practice this all boils down to the same thing and the separation is artificial complexity.
2. I want to be able to create supermen characters if i put the effort (see above about exploring the world). I don't want a character that killed 1000000 NPCs to have the same power as a character that killed 100 NPCs. Raising a character or party from hobos to demigods by murdering everything that breaths is immensely satisfying.
   • BTW, this is not the same as "unlocking every skill, perk, etc" which i do not like as it hampers replayability.

Feargus was the guy who kept demanding that a character design needed to be sexier until they delivered this expecting him to say to tone it down (he did not):

IMO this Feargus guy should start demanding stuff again :-P

XP from killing shit and also from completing quests and succesfully using your skills.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about my thoughts on companions and how they should be designed in computer RPGs.

p.s. in addition to the dog snoring under the desk and a garbage truck going by outside, you can also hear a windows pop-up at four minutes into the video. I was going to edit it out, but I left it in.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Getting a lot of questions about how companions and how they should be used in RPGs, been putting it off because he doesn't have a simple answer. Covers whether or not companions should be in game, how many there should be, if they are controllable, what their involvement is in the questline, etc.
In general, in isometric games, Cain leans towards them being controllable. Didn't do it in Arcanum or Fallout, but found himself liking it after implementing it in ToEE, liked the level of player agency, it's not good if the player dies and feels it wouldn't have happened if someone in the party had just done something else differently. In first person games, for multiple reasons, prefers not to have controllable companions, a good control scheme can be very hard to make. Probably have to implement pause to give orders in real time first person games, it can get complicated.

If you do controllable questions, the next question is if there is a main player in the party. Is there one character that represents the player, or has the whole party become the player. In ToEE, the whole player created party is the main player, as long as one of them is alive the game continues. In other games, there is one player character and companions join them later on. Cain prefers there to be one character that represents you and is special. That character should be special in that when it dies, it's games over, and when dialogue happens, that character (yourself) is doing the talking. Charisma companions can assist you, but you as that character should be the one doing the talking. You may be a chosen one or just happened to fall into a situation, but that character moves the story.

How many companions does Cain prefer to have, both in general and that you can bring into the party? Cain likes 2-4 that can be added into the party, but 3-6 that you can pick from. Likes to have a wide range of companions, but you can't have all of them at once. Likes that you have to choose, doesn't want the player to have 8 different things they have to control at once (Also if you go that high you're probably going to have to go turn based, and Cain generally thinks it is easier to have companions in a turn based game, can do it in RtWP but it's probably going to be the companions running around controlled by AI most of the time.) Gameplay wise, companions should represent mechanic archetypes. You have a good melee guy, a good magic woman, a good charisma guy, etc. You should be able to notice how they can be useful in your party and fill in gaps. Narrative side of things, companions usually come with their own questline. Considers them side quests in the world that explore the world, not the main quest. Doesn't really like companion quests that share the main goals as the player (Such as killing the main villain), feels that is taking away from the player's goals. A companion quest can be used to inform on factions and the setting, good way to deliver lore. Companions can add background lore without feeling heavy handed, but that means there is a tension between companions trying to add narrative/personality and their gameplay needs (The player just needed them because they need a good melee guy.) Make sure narrative doesn't conflict, Cain has to tell narrative people to keep in mind the companion's gameplay needs (Don't write your tough guy melee tank as a soft pacifist raised by monks who gets scared of monsters.)

As a side, knows a lot of people watching the channel are really into romancing companions, Cain never got into that. Finds it a weird add on in many games (you spend 90% of the time with companions adventuring, then go back to camp and they have the hots for you) , also for it to work regardless of player character choice you need the male companions hitting on you, the female companions hitting on you, all the different races hitting on you, and it makes the world feel full of horny people. If that's not how he feels the world should be, he doesn't want it to be reflected in the companions. Maybe, if you really wanna do it, make 1 or 2 really horny companions that are down for everyone and the rest of the party is a bit surprised by them.
Next, playing without companions. Plenty of people don't like playing of companions, find them annoying or interrupting. Has the same rule for companions as he does for side quests, main quest shouldn't require any of them, should be able to finish it without picking up any companions or maybe even talking to any of them. If you want to play without companions, you shouldn't feel like you are getting a lesser experience. Players should run into companions that feel complementary to their skill set, but not feel like they have to do it. Cain tends not to like games that require you to recruit a companion, even for a brief time.

Very hard to balance a game where you can have no companions or a lot of them. Made the companion limit two in Outer Worlds because if they had made it three or four it would have been hard to balance it between a solo player and someone walking around with a party of five. If you want to force the player to recruit companions, and they're guaranteed to leave an area with a certain amount of companions, that's something else.

 

[Roguey]

Throwing some light shade on Avowed eh.

In party-based games with resurrection/raise dead spells I find it very exasperating when the game immediately ends when the main character dies in combat, but I suppose that could lead to problems if any given player doesn't have any immediate means to resurrect. At least the Baldur's Gate games provided a narrative excuse for it (you don't get your Bhaal essence back on resurrection and your keeping it is important to the plot).

 

[Butter]

Throwing some light shade on Avowed eh.

In party-based games with resurrection/raise dead spells I find it very exasperating when the game immediately ends when the main character dies in combat, but I suppose that could lead to problems if any given player doesn't have any immediate means to resurrect. At least the Baldur's Gate games provided a narrative excuse for it (you don't get your Bhaal essence back on resurrection and your keeping it is important to the plot).

Baldur's Gate games once again demonstrating poor design principles. Either the "main character" should be the only one you control, or the story should account for you potentially losing your Bhaal essence.

 

[__scribbles__]

I speculate on the future of games…or at least, the future I’d like to see.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Likes to watch a channel called Stories of Old, they were talking about how movies have gone through a bunch of phases (Modern, Postmodern, Metamodern etc.) The understanding he got was that a modern movie had characters with distinct and unchanging values that go through an event, postmodern is more like a twist on tropes, metamodern flew over Cain's head but seemed to be about using elements that post modern used such as tropes and fourth wall breaking to tell the story more deeply.
Not focused on better graphics in this video, they already have very realistic visuals, the lighting may look great now, but is the game more fun?
Doesn't think VR or multiplayer with a lot of people is the future, the future is Interaction. It's what games have that other mediums don't, and it's players interacting with the systems of the game.
Likes seeing video clips of people having funny interaction with game systems.
Would like to see games where now that you can write the systems in a deeper, richer way, the game has far more interaction.
Loves the idea that in the future RPGs will have quests that ask you to do something but have no scripted/coded means of doing it, all solutions emerge from the system mechanics. You are told to kill a guy, yeah you can just walk in and kill him, but what if you snuck into his house while he was out and poisoned all the food? You just walk out of town and sometime later get a message saying he is dead. He's done stuff sort of like this, but it was always expected ahead of time and used scripting, this would just emerge from the mechanics of NPCs eating in their house and the player being able to poison.
AI could help with the ability to go beyond dialogue choices, the return of features such as Fallout's button to ask about anything, LLM's trained with a particularly NPC's knowledge could respond with voice and animation.
Could find unique places and items that are procedurally generated, things your friends would never see. Knows some people really don't like this, maybe reserve it to new game plus.
Could see developers using AI generated content, vetting it, and then placing the curated set into the game. More dungeons, more quests. AI generates a lot, you go through and vet them, fix some, and then add them to the game. Sees it as a tool to give people more stuff to interact with.
Thinks Magic battles and interactions with the environment/other spells could go a lot further. Has played a few games that tried this out, but you can tell it was pre planned/designed and specced for. Works for some things (Throw lightning bolt on wet surface, it becomes chain lightning) but also doesn't work for other things (Throw fireball on wet area, enemies take the normal amount of damage.) Instead of being painstakingly coded, Cain thinks it will just be establishing a set of rules you set. i.e, a spell makes things wet, wet things take more electrical damage and arc damage to nearby wet things. Wet things freeze when they get cold and move slower, surfaces become slippery as they get wet. Wet things take more damage from fire, fire dries surfaces, wet surfaces dry eventually. These systems could lead to interesting emergent gameplay (One mage freezing a jet of water another casts) , none of which was coded specifically by you, just a set of the game's base rules.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, Cain can't say for sure what is going to happen. When Cain goes back to old RPGs, and they are trying to do the same thing, but their list of actions/interactions is smaller, will think about wishing it was a more modern game where he had more interactions (Break down door, bribe guard instead of having to kill him.) Sees a broader set of interactions in modern games, wants to take that to the next level and make systemic interactions as like the physics of the game, things cause other things to change traits, those traits are how the world works.
That's what he would like to see as the future and the baseline of what most games support, not sure that's where it's going but it's an interesting idea he had after watching Stories of Old.

 

[Roguey]

Given Tim's fondness for imsim design and procedural generation, Weird West surely must have been one of his favorite games in recent times.

 

[Quillon]

future of gayms: tim starts describing dos1-2/bg3

 

[Butter]

Bold of Tim to hope that games are going to improve.

 

[Alienman]

One thing that gets me thinking that games like Fallout and such are just flukes was a thing Tim mentioned in an earlier video. I think he said he wasn't involved in the looks of the game at all, and that is very baffling to me - being the brain behind the setting. Because he was the brain right? I just have a hard time understanding not having any input on how it will look if it's your brainchild. But maybe that's just me. This makes me think that the creation of Fallout was even more scatter-esque than I initially thought. Luck was cranked out to 10, so to speak.

 

[Roguey]

One thing that gets me thinking that games like Fallout and such are just flukes was a thing Tim mentioned in an earlier video. I think he said he wasn't involved in the looks of the game at all, and that is very baffling to me - being the brain behind the setting. Because he was the brain right? I just have a hard time understanding not having any input on how it will look if it's your brainchild. But maybe that's just me. This makes me think that the creation of Fallout was even more scatter-esque than I initially thought. Luck was cranked out to 10, so to speak.

Any given director can just trust their art director to do a good job.

 

[Alienman]

One thing that gets me thinking that games like Fallout and such are just flukes was a thing Tim mentioned in an earlier video. I think he said he wasn't involved in the looks of the game at all, and that is very baffling to me - being the brain behind the setting. Because he was the brain right? I just have a hard time understanding not having any input on how it will look if it's your brainchild. But maybe that's just me. This makes me think that the creation of Fallout was even more scatter-esque than I initially thought. Luck was cranked out to 10, so to speak.

Any given director can just trust their art director to do a good job.

Sure, but that seems to be part of bigger modern AAA development, not this tight unit of devs making something they wanted to make.

 

[Roguey]

Sure, but that seems to be part of bigger modern AAA development, not this tight unit of devs making something they wanted to make.

Doesn't matter what the size of the team is. When Ken Levine was making Bioshock Infinite he was a wasteful perfectionist when it came to art because he cares a lot about it. Someone who admits they're not an art expert and has no strong feelings about it will delegate that responsibility to a person more qualified.

 

[Wesp5]

Any given director can just trust their art director to do a good job.

Sure, but that seems to be part of bigger modern AAA development, not this tight unit of devs making something they wanted to make.

I guess he and Leonard were just a good team in that regard. The art styles of Bloodlines and The Outer Worlds are fine too, except that the latter is a little too colorful for my taste .

 

[Alienman]

Sure, but that seems to be part of bigger modern AAA development, not this tight unit of devs making something they wanted to make.

Doesn't matter what the size of the team is. When Ken Levine was making Bioshock Infinite he was a wasteful perfectionist when it came to art because he cares a lot about it. Someone who admits they're not an art expert and has no strong feelings about it will delegate that responsibility to a person more qualified.

I understand that, but it comes off as Tim had no vision at all. I find this particular thing an oddity when you are creating a setting.

 

[Roguey]

I understand that, but it comes off as Tim had no vision at all. I find this particular thing an oddity when you are creating a setting.

A vision doesn't have to include every aspect of it. He wanted a post-apocalyptic setting and wasn't all that concerned about what it would look like.

 

[Bad Sector]

You are told to kill a guy, yeah you can just walk in and kill him, but what if you snuck into his house while he was out and poisoned all the food? You just walk out of town and sometime later get a message saying he is dead. He's done stuff sort of like this, but it was always expected ahead of time and used scripting, this would just emerge from the mechanics of NPCs eating in their house and the player being able to poison.

Jank aside, isn't this basically Oblivion? :-P

When Ken Levine was making Bioshock Infinite he was a wasteful perfectionist when it came to art because he cares a lot about it.

Though on the other hand, IMO if there is one thing the Kenshock games did right, that was art direction (despite some weird details like the flat vegetable texture or whatever).

 

[Alienman]

I understand that, but it comes off as Tim had no vision at all. I find this particular thing an oddity when you are creating a setting.

A vision doesn't have to include every aspect of it. He wanted a post-apocalyptic setting and wasn't all that concerned about what it would look like.

I guess. Maybe Boyarsky should start a Youtube channel too

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about morality systems in RPGs, often called alignment or karma meters. I talk about how I used to do them, and what my thoughts are now about how they should be implemented.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Back in Fallout, they just did overall reputation, positive rep vs negative rep, done via script and it turned out to be very varied. What one group of people on the team thought was a good thing another group on the team thought it was bad. What was good for one group in the game would be bad for another group in the game, Cain ended up not happy with it, mish mash of different ideas, including the reputation titles.
When it came to Arcanum, Cain wanted to systemize those things, which it turned out they couldn't really do that, so they went for a script command so that quests could or actions were taken the alignment of the player could be changed. They had Good and Evil, up to person scripting quest/action if something was good or evil. Still very subjective, wanted something systemic. Cain wrote that whenever the player kills a good aligned character, it should be an evil action that pushes the player towards evil based on how good the thing you killed was. The other side was more complicated, if you kill an evil creature, it was an good action if it was less good, but if you were more evil it was an evil action. The assumption was good or lesser evil characters were reducing the evil in the world by eliminating more evil creatures, but a more evil character killing lesser evils was reducing the amount of the good in the world. There was a cap on how far the shift could happen, so you couldn't become more evil/good than your target was good/evil via klilling them. This was how they kept it from 1998 until February 2nd, 2001. Cain has a note saying as per Jason Anderson, only allow negative alignment changes from actions, can only become good through quests. The systemic stuff allowed you to get evil, but the good changes do not occur anymore. The reason they did that was a balance issue as they fixed up the world. When you're walking along, you tend to be attacked by evil things. When you are fighting in caves, you are generally being attacked by evil things. When you go into a town mixed with good and evil things, you are rarely attacked. Generally, you were killing a lot more evil things than good things. Very easy to become good and stay good just by running around and killing monsters. Jason brought it up with Cain, they agreed it was becoming too easy, they decided to remove it. Cain was sad because he really wanted a systemic good and evil system, but they learned a lot.
Hard to define good and evil, the team doesn't really agree, philosophers don't really agree. Haven't done meters like that in a while, closest he got was reputation was by faction in Pillars. Good and Evil was played down for Like/Dislike by respective factions. The thieves guild in a game with faction reputation would like you stealing quite a bit, the town you stole things from wouldn't like that at all, and many people uninvolved with the town probably don't care. Seemed to be pretty good at tracking things, and a bonus is that the way work tends to get broken down in games, there is a particular person who made that faction and their quests, there can be a designer who is the final word on what each faction likes/dislikes. Knows many games do this for companions, knows there is some debate about this, but for Cain this at least gives you good feedback and let's you know what will happen in the future if you continue those actions, instead of having consequences to your actions you couldn't foresee. Lack of ability to predict results leads to people looking up everything.
Cain has reached the point in his career he doesn't like morality system at all, and prefers reputation by factions. Every faction (sometimes a companion can be its own faction) can have their own likes/dislikes and reactions towards the player. Once you go down the path of defining a morality, you are going to find situations you can't figure out, situations your team disagrees on, and situations where your players can't understand why certain actions had particular consequences.
TL;DR : Keeping it to faction reputation gets you what you want (the world reacting to the player) while being easy for the players to understand.

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, killing the gnome in Arcanum who tells you that there's nothing you can do about their rape rooms is considered an evil action by the game, which is why that whole system is bunk. No judgment calls, just consequences.

 

[REhorror]

Actually agree with the whole faction reputation and NO morality system thing.

Faction reputation = you do things to please other people/beings, they support you, it makes sense.

Morality system = an invisible god (the game's author) judges you for your actions, it makes no sense.

 

[agris]

A scripted system of factional, local and regional reputations is obviously the way to handle it, assuming you’ve got a proper cRPG and not a “press X to paragon” game