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Interview RPG Codex Retrospective Interview: Tim Cain on Fallout, Troika and RPG Design

Repressed Homosexual
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Prerendered backgrounds don't work, there is too much disconnect between the characters and the environment. I completed all of KOTC, but necer went farther than 20 minutes into toee for that reason. It looks bad and awkward and it's always unpleasant to scroll.
 

LeStryfe79

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What's the matter, Roguey? Were there not enough spiky shoulder pads and dragons in ToEE for you? Most of that game was low level encounter design if I recall corectly. Don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting sick of extreme baddies, and have gravitated toward more grounded fare as of late.
 

kaizoku

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I was proud of the game and happy that people were so passionate about [Fallout], but I realized it wasn't mine anymore and never would be.
YOU MONSTERS!
You took his baby from him!

I did enjoy both Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I know that surprised some of my fans, who wanted me to hate the games and rail against their design choices
and why didn't you Tim! Why? WHYYYY!?

So then the question is, why didn't we get any offers we liked? Especially since all of our games turned a profit?
I didn't knew about this!
Only makes me RAGE HARDERRRRR :mob:

Yes, we had great plans for that engine. For the sequel to The Temple of Elemental Evil, Troika proposed using the super-module GDQ: Queen of the Spiders, which consists of seven modules from the popular Giants and Drow series, plus the special Q-series module that completed the adventure. In fact, we were going to let the players bring their characters over from ToEE directly into the QoS, so they could simply continue playing with the same group of characters. Alternatively, we had suggested using the engine to create the long-awaited Baldur's Gate 3, and Obsidian had also expressed interest in licensing the engine to make D&D licensed games. Unfortunately, Atari never followed up on any of these proposals.
:rage:


I've played games that are mostly cut scenes interspersed with some activity, and I always thought to myself, if I wanted to watch a movie, I would have watched movie. Games are interactive at their core, in a way that books and movies are not.
remember this one kids

The best question a developer can ask when making a new system or adapting an existing one is this: what is feeling I want this game to evoke.
and this one too :smug: /emotional engagement



What about his KS (at obsidian)?
What about Arcanum 2?

:'(


fuck South Park The Dildo of Truth that will eat him for another 6 months



Tim... come back to us... We miss you.
 

sea

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Tim Cain is and always will be a bro. Lots of nice little details about Interplay, Troika and the Temple engine in there. Thanks again for the great and in-depth interview.
 

Cynic

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Yes, we had great plans for that engine. For the sequel to The Temple of Elemental Evil, Troika proposed using the super-module GDQ: Queen of the Spiders, which consists of seven modules from the popular Giants and Drow series, plus the special Q-series module that completed the adventure. In fact, we were going to let the players bring their characters over from ToEE directly into the QoS, so they could simply continue playing with the same group of characters. Alternatively, we had suggested using the engine to create the long-awaited Baldur's Gate 3, and Obsidian had also expressed interest in licensing the engine to make D&D licensed games. Unfortunately, Atari never followed up on any of these proposals.

Fuck you Atari, seriously fuck you. This would have been the greatest shit ever and I will never forget my internet rage over this. NEVER!
 

maverick

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Alternatively, we had suggested using the engine to create the long-awaited Baldur's Gate 3, and Obsidian had also expressed interest in licensing the engine to make D&D licensed games.
Do want!!!
 

tuluse

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Prerendered backgrounds don't work, there is too much disconnect between the characters and the environment. I completed all of KOTC, but necer went farther than 20 minutes into toee for that reason. It looks bad and awkward and it's always unpleasant to scroll.
Baldur's Gate 2 is beautiful, so you're wrong.
 

Tramboi

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The guy is a coder AND a game designer. He understands games and technical constrainsts : these kind of guys could save the "industry".
Sadly even they have to publicly admire FO3 .

Tm, beg money on KS, you'll get 100 bucks from me.
 

DemonKing

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My goal was to recreate the Temple of Elemental Evil module in a 3.5 game engine, and at that, I think we succeeded. But I like I said, I wish we had created our own source material.

Sums up my feelings about TOEE too - great engine but why one earth did they not create something original rather than slavishly try to recreate a pretty ordinary PNP module?​
 

POOPERSCOOPER

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I really thought this was a good interview, covered a wide range of topics and didn't limit itself to one small subject like most interviews.

In regards to one of Cain's responses that mentioned the newspapers in Arcanum, I sensed he was being a bit hurt that no reviewers talked about it and how he should have cut it etc. I thought the newspapers were one of the shining aspects of the game and really represented what the game was about, no games today do as a good of a job showing the players choices shown through out the game. I think the people who enjoyed Arcanum would say the exact same thing and not to make such decisions based on reviews only because the reviewer didn't mention it.
 

Rivmusique

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We really needed to learn how to edit, because we would spend a lot of man-hours putting a feature into a game that hardly any of the players would ultimately care about. For example, Arcanum had newspapers that reported on major incidents that were caused by the player, but I don't remember a single review mentioning that.

I care! I cared!

This kind of depth is one of the reasons why those games are so exceptional..
With you on this, I don't think the incompetence of 'reviewers' should be too much of an influence on game design.

Thanks for the article Bee, great read.
 

ironyuri

Guest
Prerendered backgrounds don't work, there is too much disconnect between the characters and the environment. I completed all of KOTC, but necer went farther than 20 minutes into toee for that reason. It looks bad and awkward and it's always unpleasant to scroll.

Whenever this faggot posts outside of GD or Politics, he says stupid shit like this. Whenever he posts in GD or Politics, he says stupid shit. Affix the bow of shame.
 
Repressed Homosexual
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Prerendered backgrounds don't work, there is too much disconnect between the characters and the environment. I completed all of KOTC, but necer went farther than 20 minutes into toee for that reason. It looks bad and awkward and it's always unpleasant to scroll.
Baldur's Gate 2 is beautiful, so you're wrong.

I mostly meant 2D backdrops with polygonal 3D characters, but prerendered backgrounds are most of the time quite a pain as well because you're never sure of what you can select in the environment, or up to where you can go. I always spend my time pixel hunting.
 
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I really thought this was a good interview, covered a wide range of topics and didn't limit itself to one small subject like most interviews.

In regards to one of Cain's responses that mentioned the newspapers in Arcanum, I sensed he was being a bit hurt that no reviewers talked about it and how he should have cut it etc. I thought the newspapers were one of the shining aspects of the game and really represented what the game was about, no games today do as a good of a job showing the players choices shown through out the game. I think the people who enjoyed Arcanum would say the exact same thing and not to make such decisions based on reviews only because the reviewer didn't mention it.
It seemed funny to me he wanted to cut that and spend more time on the RT combat and multiplayer... both of which probably should have been cut.
 

ironyuri

Guest
Small nitpick:

Tim said:
and suddenly it was AAA game.

This sentence needs an "an". Sad sentence, by the way

It needs an "a". AAA starts with a T.

sentence needs to be entirely rephrased for modern award winning writing accuracy:

"And make it a AAA game, they did."

tumblr_m1tb7bkeu91qldq4e.gif
 

Ismaul

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Great interview! I'm actually surprised by the frankness of the answers. Sad about the untapped potential of the ToEE engine.

We really needed to learn how to edit, because we would spend a lot of man-hours putting a feature into a game that hardly any of the players would ultimately care about. For example, Arcanum had newspapers that reported on major incidents that were caused by the player, but I don't remember a single review mentioning that.

I care! I cared!
Me too.
Tarant wouldn't be the same without the newspaper. It was its life, an indicator of a dynamic world, and really brought forward the feeling of the industrial revolution. Also a great way to show the effects of your actions, and that the world is reactive rather than waiting for you to clear some level without consequence. I actually really wanted more of it while playing.
 

ironyuri

Guest
Great interview! I'm actually surprised by the frankness of the answers. Sad about the untapped potential of the ToEE engine.

We really needed to learn how to edit, because we would spend a lot of man-hours putting a feature into a game that hardly any of the players would ultimately care about. For example, Arcanum had newspapers that reported on major incidents that were caused by the player, but I don't remember a single review mentioning that.

I care! I cared!
Me too.
Tarant wouldn't be the same without the newspaper. It was its life, an indicator of a dynamic world, and really brought forward the feeling of the industrial revolution. Also a great way to show the effects of your actions, and that the world is reactive rather than waiting for you to clear some level without consequence. I actually really wanted more of it while playing.

The newspaper gave the relationship between the world of Arcanum and the player character a sense of cohesion and consistency, a relationship which is, in most games, dissonant.

Fallout 1 had the same sense of cohesion and consistency, however, less so. If we compare the world of Arcanum as the setting for an rpg in which a player character makes an impact on the world at large, with, for example, more recent RPG outings (I won't gun for the obviously, howlingly inconsistent worlds, such as Fallout 3) exemplified by Risen 2, or perhaps, Divinity II: Ego Draconis, the world and the character's actions do not gel. One would think the player character has had no impact, and that the repercussions of his actions do not affect anyone or anywhere but himself.

In Risen 2 for example, once you begin the fight against Mara, the world state does not change. One would think the Titan of the Sea would try to hamper your journey somehow, or destroy your chances of succeeding ahead of you, or deny you safe port behind you. The war between Tarant and (I've forgotten the name of the town, apologies) which is a war between technology and tradition actually has a visible effect on the game-world and the newspapers telegraph, or punctuate, the player's role in these events.

World cohesion is probably just as important as having solid mechanics, because if your world does not make sense, it will very quickly be forgotten in the name of larping, which creates a situation in which the game developer is not driving a narrative, but leaving it to the player. This leaves us with the likes of Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3, and in response to this problem, Fallout: New Vegas, which drives for a balance between player driven "emergent" (how I despise that term) narrative, and a crafted narrative. In the former category one finds games in which the game world has absolutely no sense of consistency, and in the latter, a world which restrains player agency in favour of presenting a tight narrative within a logically constructed world. The fact that, by and large, the response and reception of the former games was more favourable than the response to the latter example, can be explained in part by developer's trying to make games more cheaply (shoehorn in as much content as possible with as little artisanal-labour required to craft it in line with the rest of the content), and players who are responding to the industry generated norms: sandbox games are sold with favourable reviews and word of mouth (look how much I can do!), as opposed to narrative games which require a greater depth of engagement in a less casual mode of interaction.

Etc etc, I'll stop there, suck my dick and all that.
 

Konjad

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funny thing is that i reinstalled arcanum hour before reading that article yesterday.
 

Roguey

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Man I couldn't give two fucks about the newspapers in Arcanum. Go play Agit Propamole if you love your meaningless cosmetic C&C so much. Core gameplay uber alles.

What's the matter, Roguey? Were there not enough spiky shoulder pads and dragons in ToEE for you? Most of that game was low level encounter design if I recall corectly. Don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting sick of extreme baddies, and have gravitated toward more grounded fare as of late.
I'm a lot more accepting of ToEE than other posters, but it does suffer from an overabundance of pointless trivial fights. The army of bugbears was unnecessary. I don't care about how epic the monsters are or aren't, I care about how interesting they are to kill.
 

ironyuri

Guest
Man I couldn't give two fucks about the newspapers in Arcanum. Go play Agit Propamole if you love your meaningless cosmetic C&C so much. Core gameplay uber alles.

What's the matter, Roguey? Were there not enough spiky shoulder pads and dragons in ToEE for you? Most of that game was low level encounter design if I recall corectly. Don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting sick of extreme baddies, and have gravitated toward more grounded fare as of late.
I'm a lot more accepting of ToEE than other posters, but it does suffer from an overabundance of pointless trivial fights. The army of bugbears was unnecessary. I don't care about how epic the monsters are or aren't, I care about how interesting they are to kill.

You love core gameplay so much? Fallout 3 has everything you need, my faggot friend.

Games are a marriage of narrative and mechanics: narrative encompasses setting, world-design, storyline and characterisation; gameplay encompasses mechanics, player agency and effect on the world, etc.

You can't have one without the other if you're playing an RPG. Unless you want to be playing an incoherent piece of shit. GG Roguey, I'm glad you can into reading so good.
 

Jasede

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We should send the guy a newspaper-styled postcard that says "We cared!".
I know I did too. It's the little things, the details, that make something good great; they are evidence of the love put into the product, flawed as it may otherwise be or not be.
 

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