Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Saint_Proverbius]

If you watch some of his other videos and read (err listen) between his lines, you can feel he didn't even really like how Fallout 2 turned out, specifically with how they've cut his idea with Abbey of Lost Knowledge, the referential humor and so on.

He didn't even want to work on Fallout 2, which has to be a double slap in the face. You're having your arm twisted to work on something because "You're the man" and then your ideas are heavily questioned.

 

[Hobo Elf]

And about two-thirds of his daily YouTube videos. Let's not pretend that Tim Cain doesn't bring out Fallout every time his YouTube stats need a bump. I'm not faulting the guy for doing it, it's what people want to hear him talk about. I mean, you get five minutes of Tim's ear, what are you going to bring up? That's right, Fallout.

I think the problem is that the people who want to hear him talk about Fallout, and lore in general, probably aren't going to like his recent takes on Fallout because of his review of the show.

I think he talks a lot of Fallout because that's what most people are familiar with and want to hear about, as you said. Personally I wish he'd talk more about Arcanum.

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about how and why you need to manage player expectations about your game, starting well before the game comes out. This can be easier for new IPs...and sometimes harder.

I swear he's made a video just like this before.

 

[StrongBelwas]

People form expectations of the game before it is even released. Dog is snoring.

How do you manage player expectations? Until the game ships or is about to ship you use interview. Interviews are a narrow band, they ask you about the game but they also ask you about events in the industry or other games. You want to talk about your game, but you don't have control over editing. You give a long explanation, they pull one sentence out. When you have more control over marketing, marketing costs money and comes near the end of the production cycle. However, lots of people have already formed expectations about your game. They saw a trailer, a small bit of the game, a clip of an interview, and already formed an opinion.

A lot of players will love or hate a game based on how it matches their expectations. Hard to manage the expectations, so people will dislike your games for reasons that aren't what you set out to do. All the best marketing in the world can't stop people from imagining one thing after hearing something else and blaming the developers/publishers when it doesn't match up.

Not to say deceptive marketing doesn't happen, and there are definitely people who are deliberately vague in interviews, but Cain tries to avoid doing that. Cain notes that even when he doesn't say something, people tend to assume.

Talking about the elephant in the room, the often used phrase 'From the creators/makers of...." that some people view as deceptive. This is done to try and create a quick impression of the game, but Cain understands why the phrase feels deceptive, because what does it mean? Same kind of humor, same kind of systems or settings? If it doesn't match, is that deceptive?

Some people say just show a proper trailer of the game instead of a cinematic trailer. Cain can see some of that, but if you are showing a 15 or 30 seconds trailer, people still think that can be deceptive. Put something in, people think the whole game will be like that. Maybe you show a clip of really cool combat, but it's composed of high level spells and moves you don't get for 90% of the game, could be considered deceptive. Maybe you hide something from the trailer to keep it a surprise and people consider the reveal deceptive, like a big dragon fight in a game people assuming was low fantasy.

No matter what you do, people imagine something and you are blamed. Maybe not even 'blamed', they went into the game with the wrong expectations. Goes back to his video about no objectively bad game, talks about someone made a McDonalds comparison to popular game. Cain wouldn't consider McDonalds the best burgers, but they are doing something right because they sell billions. Cain would consider them consistent because he can buy them in two different places and they are both pretty much the same. The price expectations isn't high. What they are selling is consistency and expectation matching with it being fast and convenient. If you want a really good burger, you will go somewhere else, but McDonald's isn't bad, they just set people's expectations to the right level. Cain considers that the thing in games, keep people's expectations in line with what you are making.

In some ways, this is easier with a new IP. Be careful with what you say, and manage what you do with marketing, you can form expectations more in line. But it can also be much harder. Like Cain said, you don't control every quote that pops up in interviews, and you only have a few seconds in your trailer to show people a certain feature, how it shows up, and how it interacts with other features. Cain has seen people read into 15 second trailers all kinds of things Cain doesn't think the trailer was trying to tell you. People hear something in their head , they imagine something or exaggerate that thing, and now expectations are off. Took years and this channel for Cain to realize he couldn't control it really.

People will make assumptions on your game, it's going to be a subset that makes wrong assumptions no matter what, up to you to make that subset as small as possible. Cain's advice is to pick a few things about the game and double down on them in every interview. This game is X, keep repeating it. Arcanum is industrial revolution in Tolkien's world, bam. Basically like an elevator pitch, people will still misunderstand. Literally nothing you can do, but you can at least try and make people not feel like they were deceived, just incorrect.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

I'm not sure he belongs in a list along side Peter Molyneux and the rest of them.

It's true that some of the personalities listed are scummier than the others, but what unites them is not their affinity for trading reputation for backer's pledges, but rather the fact that once upon a time, they did things, and now they don't.
Simple as that.
It's good that John went back to his old stomping grounds, even better that he managed to do something there, but it doesn't get him off the list - that's like saying that Braben doesn't belong there because he's got his Raspberry Pi side gig.

After a while, you are forced to judge creators by the fruits of their labors - or lack thereof.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

It's good that John went back to his old stomping grounds, even better that he managed to do something there, but it doesn't get him off the list - that's like saying that Braben doesn't belong there because he's got his Raspberry Pi side gig.

What put him on the list in the first place? Diakatana? It was ambitious for it's time, a little bit too much so honestly. Then there was the poor marketting advertisement. Still no where near what the others have done.

 

[Bad Sector]

I always found the response to Daikatana to be overblown - it feels like most of it comes from backlash to hype and people parroting what they read on magazines rather than from their own experience (especially considering the very low sales it had and that a lot of criticism was addressed in the first patch the game got). Yes it has a bunch of issues and Ion Storm tried to bite way more they could chew (and - Romero aside - with an inexperienced development team), but i remember playing the game a few years after it came out, expecting to experience some sort of gaming disaster but ended up finding it... fine. The worst thing i remember about the game was the atrocious voice acting and cringeworthy dialog in the medieval levels.

 

[Wesp5]

I liked Daikatana too, as far as I remember it was the first game where companions actually picked up their own weapons and ammo! Sadly it started with an ugly sewer level, who's idea was that?

 

[Bulo]

I talk about current and past industry changes, which frequently lead to layoffs and job displacement. These are terrible things to live through...and it's never going to stop happening.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Lot of things going on, lots of layoffs, concerns about AI taking jobs, to be clear, it is bad to lose your job, Cain has lost it in the past, not what Cain intends the video to be about. Cain wants to talk about pundits and industry people saying the industry is collapsing.

One of the advantage of getting old is Cain now has a perspective on these things. References his Terrible Time to be in Games video, after 40 years Cain has seen a lot. Industry is not collapsing, jobs are going to be available, there will always be a boom-bust cycle. One year you have lots of opportunities can get $50,000 just by jumping to another job, a few years later you and your friends have all been laid off. Terrible to lose your job, but industry is not collapsing and this has happened before. Console market collapse in 1983, but Cain wants to give an example of one that happened while he was making games. Saw it happening at his time at Interplay and into Troika. Art during that period of 90s to early 2000s went from 100% 2D to nearly 100% 3D. Cain saw what happened to those jobs and those artists. Artists responded in different ways. Some artists adapted, either learning 3D, or they recognized that 2D art would still be needed in 3D games for UI icons or textures. Always going to be need for 2D artists, even just for print ads. However, what was weird for Cain to watch was some people's reaction. Some people just got really mad. Some of them got angry at the 3D artists, saying they were overpaid and not really good artists. They said it was just a fad and when it was over people who learned 3D art would be fools. Some people ranted at the companies, asking why they were getting rid of the 2D artists. Companies didn't get rid of everyone, but steadily the supply of 2D artists exceeded the demand. Some of them would eventually quit, some of them moved to companies that still did 2D games, others just quit the industry entirely.

What Cain wants to talk about is if jobs were lost when games went from 2D from 3D. Yes and no. As a percentage of jobs in the industry, yes they were lost. Fewer 2D artists in the industry today, but the total number of 2D artist jobs is now bigger because the game industry has gotten so big that now even if a team hires less 2D artists, they still need Textures artists and UI artists. Probably more 2D artists in the industry in 2024 then there were in 1994. Whenever there are new processes/technologies/methods, they will invalidate some jobs but also create new ones.

Cain brings up a story he remembers from his childhood. When he was a kid, two doors down, there was an older retired man they knew pretty well because he owned some land and would cut down Christmas trees. Cain and his brother would pick the tree while the older man spoke with their mother. From those conversations, Cain could gather he was some sort of metal worker. 1987, after Cain went back home to spend his last free Summer when the college job offer fell through. Cain went into the backyard and dug up a place where they used to have rabbit cages and planted a garden. Cain was hoeing, tilling, planting seeds and watering. Next door neighbor, Mr Foster, would sometimes come with Mr Burgess(The Christmas tree man) would sometimes talk to Cain over the fence and give him good gardening advice. They would tell him some stories, and Cain would hear that Burgess came to Alexandria in the 1920s to be a blacksmith's apprentice. His job was making horseshoes, and as automobiles appeared that job became less relevant. You would think there goes that job, but he knew how to work metal, so he moved over into working in a metal shop. To Cain, that is a good example. This kind of thing is never going to stop, you will learn base skills that teach you more than one job, but some job opportunities would fade away. Cain was hearing this story from an 80 year old man about it happening when he was a teenager and the lesson is still relevant.

What is interesting about this now is Cain has a relative who hates electric vehicles. Cain bought one, loves it. EV car is very helpful for his errands, but it has a 140 mile range. If he wants to go any further than 70 miles around his house, he needs to plan out charging stations, and it takes 40 minutes to charge if he can't find the rare stations that do it faster. Cain's relative told him she suspects the government will try and force her to dispose of her internal combustion car. Cain told her things are changing and they always have, she said not like this, and he reminded her of Mr Burgess having it live through cars displacing horses, and said he never heard her complain about that because it didn't inconvenience her personally.

Now there is a new generation facing displacement. Every generation grows up and wants all progress to stop or slow down to the point it no longer negatively effects them. Not going to happen. You can complain, you can unionize (Cain doesn't necessarily have a problem with this one and thinks it could help), but it won't stop the march of progress. Always have to roll with it, adapt and learn new skills in the industry. Adapt and stay in the industry, or switch to another industry your current skills work for. Industry change won't stop, you can be concerned about it, but you have to adapt to it as it won't stop.

 

[Diggfinger]

Wow, people here on the Codex are fast....



In bed, that is

 

[Nano]

Sorry for calling you a faggot and sellout, Tim.

Please start doing shirtless videos, Tim.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

What is interesting about this now is Cain has a relative who hates electric vehicles. Cain bought one, loves it. EV car is very helpful for his errands, but it has a 140 mile range. If he wants to go any further than 70 miles around his house, he needs to plan out charging stations, and it takes 40 minutes to charge if he can't find the rare stations that do it faster. Cain's relative told him she suspects the government will try and force her to dispose of her internal combustion car. Cain told her things are changing and they always have, she said not like this, and he reminded her of Mr Burgess having it live through cars displacing horses, and said he never heard her complain about that because it didn't inconvenience her personally.

The correct answer is that this is why the Second Amendment exists, and she's probably a fucking idiot for still living in California. Also, the government didn't have to force people to ditch their horse and buggy because cars were better than a horse and buggy. People switched over because cars didn't need a pasture to graze, don't get spooked by loud noises and attempt to run away while ignoring the driver, and so on.

Sometimes I question Tim's intelligence.

 

[NecroLord]

Sometimes I question Tim's intelligence.

He does have Intelligence 4 in some cases...

 

[Harthwain]

I always found the response to Daikatana to be overblown - it feels like most of it comes from backlash to hype and people parroting what they read on magazines rather than from their own experience (especially considering the very low sales it had and that a lot of criticism was addressed in the first patch the game got). Yes it has a bunch of issues and Ion Storm tried to bite way more they could chew (and - Romero aside - with an inexperienced development team), but i remember playing the game a few years after it came out, expecting to experience some sort of gaming disaster but ended up finding it... fine. The worst thing i remember about the game was the atrocious voice acting and cringeworthy dialog in the medieval levels.

I don't know, this looks pretty bad for me:



Double that by the fact it wasn't an era where there were "Day 0-1 Patches", so playing it "a few years after it came out" is likely to create a different response than the release one did. Also, it being "fine" isn't really enough for the game, considering who supposedly stood behind its development. An average game is still a disappointment when you expect something extraordinary.

 

[Sweeper]

He does have Intelligence 4 in some cases...

 

[Wesp5]

An average game is still a disappointment when you expect something extraordinary.

You are right about that. If Romero hadn't been so loud about it, Daikatana might have gotten a chance! Makes me think about The Outer Worlds for some reason ...

 

[Perkel]

I always found the response to Daikatana to be overblown - it feels like most of it comes from backlash to hype and people parroting what they read on magazines rather than from their own experience (especially considering the very low sales it had and that a lot of criticism was addressed in the first patch the game got). Yes it has a bunch of issues and Ion Storm tried to bite way more they could chew (and - Romero aside - with an inexperienced development team), but i remember playing the game a few years after it came out, expecting to experience some sort of gaming disaster but ended up finding it... fine. The worst thing i remember about the game was the atrocious voice acting and cringeworthy dialog in the medieval levels.

Yeah i liked it. Especially the gibs were awesome.

 

[Bad Sector]

Double that by the fact it wasn't an era where there were "Day 0-1 Patches", so playing it "a few years after it came out" is likely to create a different response than the release one did. Also, it being "fine" isn't really enough for the game, considering who supposedly stood behind its development. An average game is still a disappointment when you expect something extraordinary.

The original reviews for the game might have been correct since, after all, that is what they played, but as i wrote they were already heavily influenced by the game's marketing and expectations - i.e. they weren't reviewing purely the game itself, but were affected by the game's marketing and who was at the head of the studio behind it.

However my comment wasn't about what people back when Daikatana came out wrote, but what people write since then (and with all the hindsight that comes with it). The first patch was released pretty soon after the game was out. The game had very low sales, meaning that few people actually played it. Both of these tell me that most people didn't play the game and parrot whatever someone else wrote (it isn't like gamers are immune to doing that) - someone else in this case being the at the time heavily influential gaming magazines that had only played the pre-patched version.

I mean, i still see people to this day complaining that the game's save system is based on gems when the very first patch of the game added a normal save system.

And TBH personally i find the game perfectly fine in that i'd rather play Daikatana than many of the FPS games that followed it. The game's worst aspects from a design perspective (after the patches) is some unbalanced difficulty spikes at weird places and a misplaced focus on quantity over quality. From the perspective of someone in the year 2000 who has only played the best the FPS game genre has to offer and has only seen an incline in what FPS games are and can do, yes, Daikatana is far from great especially when it comes from one of the developers behind the game that defined the genre. But from the perspective of someone who has played a bunch of FPS games since then and back in early 2000s didn't knew or cared who Romero was to pay attention to the hype, Daikatana's reputation did not match the experience of actually playing the game itself.

Makes me think about The Outer Worlds for some reason ...

Well, that is why i see The Outer Worlds as a dissapointment. A game made by some of the creators of Fallout, one of my favorite worlds/IP and one of my favorite RPGs with some great mechanical and narrative C&C, the creators of another of my favorite RPGs (VtMB) that show they have the chops ot make FPRPGS again with great mechanical and narrative C&C and the studio that made my favorite RPG, New Vegas and had a history at great writing in RPGs - the expectations were sky high.

And then the game was released and i was dissapointed in pretty much every front.

But FWIW i never considered TOW to be a bad or awful game, just a meh game that simply didn't meet what i expected from it. It can be entertaining, like fastfood fries can sate your hunger - but you wont see any developer aspiring to make a game like The Outer Worlds, pretty much like you wont see any chef aspiring to make fastfood fries. Hopefully at least, who knows, humanity is vast :-P.

 

[StrongBelwas]

I talk about the single most important thing you can do to hone your skills and get a job in the game industry: make a demo.

Cain has mentioned this in many other videos, but he still asked after a year how to get a job in the industry. His answer is always the same, make a demo. Self taught, going to school, how do you learn best how to do X? If the answer isn't money, make a demo. Will wrap all of this together in a neat little story.

Cain is the last of five kids, the first 3 are all 2 years apart then there is a 6 year gap and then two more kids two years apart. When they were young, they used to try and figure out which one is mom's favorite. Couldn't figure it out, mom loved all of them equally, but they were all very different kids. Athlete kid, cheerleader kid, architect kid, game kid (Cain.) Mom loved them all and loved encouraging their hobbies, but they would sit around and debate who was the favorite. Kid 1 would argue as the first kid they got all the love and best jeans. Kid 2 would question Kid 1's taste in jeans. Kid 3 would say they are the neglected middle child and refuse to enter the conversation. Kid 4 would wait for Cain to say he was the most loved because he was the one they achieved perfection and decided to stop with, and respond that you don't know you've reached the top of the mountain until you start down the other side. Cain disagrees and thinks they did achieve perfection with him, but that has a lot of applicability to what Cain is talking about, you have to actually make things and use your skills to find where your strengths are and what your maximum is. Cain's video on learning from failure was important because his failures let him hone in on what he is good. It wasn't clear if he was good at writing after Fallout's intro, Cain would only realize his difficulties with long form writing on ToEE. Temple of Elemental Evil isn't winning any writing awards like Outer Worlds did, and he didn't write that.

On the idea of going to school vs. being self taught, regardless of what you do, you should make a demo. It's ok to skip school if you are motivated enough to make the foundation of knowledge you can build your skills on. You also have to be good at self evaluation and see your flaws. If you think everything you do is great, either you are a genius or missing something. School is good for evaluation. Have to learn how to learn, and school can help with that by putting you in a conducive environment. Maybe you had a bad school environment, than self teaching is good. What Cain is getting at, you have got to learn some skills and then apply them. Have to learn by doing, have to actually do something, can't just think about it or read about it. When you do it, you can see how hard it is, what you are good at or bad at. Making a demo is a good solution for ideas, wanting to get in the industry, learn a engine or language.

People tell Cain they worry about job interviews, lots of tough questions to answer. Making a demo makes those questions a lot easier to answer. if someone asks you what language or engine you prefer, you can point to your experience making those demos and what you learned from that. A very common interview question is the most difficult feature you implemented. You can talk about that if you made a demo, with a real example. Maybe you wanted your demo to have dynamic lighting, and the engine implemented it oddly. Good odds someone in your interview had that same kind of experience.

You can try to get better at some of the things you are bad at, and for some of them you will and then can put them in the bucket of things you are good at. Some things you will never get good at, and that is fine, put it in the bucket of things you are bad at. You can still talk about it. Cain knows he is the right guy for short form lore text that needs to be funny, not the guy for long form dialogue between two characters. Cain knows that, and can point to good and bad examples.

TL;DR : Making a demo and actually using your skills, you will learn where your mountaintop is, what your strength is. Having a demo you can show people more than anything will help in interviews and getting into the industry.

 

[Daedalos]

Marketing for TOW definitely fucked up somewhere along.

MOST people myself included, expected a spiritual successor to New Vegas 2, or a game in vein of old school fallout. I mean even Fallout vs Firefly was a stretch in terms of the setting/world building/story, wasn't it?

No wonder people get upset from unmet expectations, because people literally thought Boyarsky and Cains dream project was coming together after all these years "apart" from eachother since Troika and Fallout 1+2 doing other shit.. ... and I guess it kind of was.

It just had a AA budget, scope and time, if even that, which was a big shame, because the game ultimately felt very undercooked in several areas.

Keep in mind tho, the game sold very well, and still holds very high praise/review scores everywhere.

TOW 2 will be amazing tho, rite guys? ... ;x

 

[Wesp5]

It just had a AA budget, scope and time, if even that, which was a big shame, because the game ultimately felt very undercooked in several areas.

The main problem for me with TOW is that they had no writer like Avallone or Mitsoda to create a great story and memorable characters.

 

[Roguey]

Pretty amused at Cain downplaying his own writing compared to Nebula-, NAVGTR-, and GLAAD-award winning The Outer Worlds.

 

[Bad Sector]

Marketing for TOW definitely fucked up somewhere along. MOST people myself included, expected a spiritual successor to New Vegas 2, or a game in vein of old school fallout. I mean even Fallout vs Firefly was a stretch in terms of the setting/world building/story, wasn't it?

FWIW i didn't follow much of the game's marketing - or really any game's marketing. I just saw who is heading it and what company was behind it.

Which, ok, Obsidian did took advantage of with the whole "from the creators of Fallout and the company behind New Vegas" line (or something like that), but come on, even just by that what more do you want to have some expectations? And if you know what just "the creators of Fallout" have also worked on (Troika) these expectations can only go up.

It just had a AA budget, scope and time, if even that, which was a big shame, because the game ultimately felt very undercooked in several areas.

IMO the game's budget was fine. The issues i had weren't due to having a AA budget, but due to uninteresting overall writing (worldbuilding, characters, quests, etc) on top of overly simplistic mechanics with some good ideas (flaw system) falling flat on their face because the mechanics they depended on just weren't interesting enough (e.g. flaw system giving you perks when most perks felt pointless - when i first played the game, at around half of it whenever i got a new level i just couldn't decide which perk to get because all felt useless so i just picked random ones).

I don't think having a bigger budget would help with the above - initially you may think that spending more time on the game (and thus spending/needing more money) might help, but consider that Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky (among others in Obsidian) have made much better games in that timeframe - or less - and they are supposedly experienced enough to not waste time in chasing design dead ends like someone without experience might do. And the game was released in a more polished state than most games these days (i got version 1.0 of the game with my GPU and i don't remember encountering any bugs), so they certainly took their time making it.

A bigger budget would give you more polished visuals, animations, etc but at least IMO those weren't much of an issue (aesthetic design choices aside, but that is highly subjective - and similar aesthetics could be done with both a higher budget and a lower one anyway).

I think TOW is simply the game Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky just felt like making at that point in time, even if it wasn't the game i wanted to play. It kinda reminds me of Richard "Levelord" Gray who after working on big titles like Duke Nukem 3D, the first Quake Expansion, SiN, Heavy Metal FAKK2, Star Trek Elite Force 2 and SiN Episodes, he decided to retire and make casual hidden object games.

The main problem for me with TOW is that they had no writer like Avallone or Mitsoda to create a great story and memorable characters.

They had Tim Cain. He may not make the best dialog (i guess) out there, but he can make nice worlds and come up with decent stories. But AFAICT he didn't do any writing for the game.

 

[Daedalos]

High profile writers aren't exactly cheap, unless you personally know one, and get friends discount and benefits... if Avellone had still been with Obsidian, maybe. But imagine any competent writer like Avellone or others would command quite a high salary to begin with.
A salary a AA budget game isn't especially keen on hiring.

But yea, writing, story and worldbuilding was definitely lackluster in TOW, part of the reason ppl expected new vegas level writing and beyond, but didnt get it. so yea.

Also, Tim Cain is a technical dude at heart, hes a programmer and somewhat designer and worldbuilder. he cant do much else, let alone write or make art. so thers that. he said that himself countless times.