Development Info Tim Cain at Reboot Develop 2017 - Building a Better RPG: Seven Mistakes to Avoid

[Fairfax]

Not that well.

Sales were considered strong by everyone involved, which is why it got a more expensive sequel.

 

[Black]

MRY , meet me in shoutbox at 3:00 am GMT in 37 weeks.

Sorry but shoutbox is already reserved for that time, ask Crispy.

 

[Lurker King]

Some players, don't want to keep playing gimped characters.

And that’s why you want to make the first fights hard, not easy. You will know right from the beginning whether your build is good or not.

At chargen, most cRPGs don't show enough information on game start for an informed decision. Without this info, players only learn by playing a gimped build - the trial-and-error problem.

This is a part of the experience, not a problem. Besides, I notice that some players complain about this because they want the perfect build.

So how does a player know a game's "playstyle logic" on chargen? How attribute-scrutinizing and penny-pinching should a player be? They can't know.

Unless a developer keeps repeating the same rules in each new game, you have to learn from scratch.

It is true that if you've been around the block enough time you know that the long-term goal is to overcome some final boss and that the obstacles are things like popamole fights and dialogues that can be won by picking the option with the highest diplomacy requirement. But that is to say, character creation "works" only when the gameplay is stupidly predictable and bland.

But the player doesn’t know in advance what will happen to him in race games, platform games, arcade games, etc. He fails and reload, or start from the beginning if he has no lives. I don’t understand why things should be any different with cRPGs.

 

[Lurker King]

why would you challenge MRY, the man's a lawyer

Fixed.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Wow, long thread. I will admit I don't have time to read it all, but let me say this. I think there has been a misunderstanding of my talk. I never said I don't like complex systems, just that I don't like the presentation of so much complexity in the first few minutes of the game, like in character creation. We lost a lot of potential players to that. That isn't hypothetical. I have emails and reviews to back me up.

But by removing complexity at character creation, you're alienating your old audience. And don't get me wrong here, I certainly don't think that, just because you've made some hardcore games 20 years ago, you're obliged to continue doing them in exact same way, forever and ever until the end of time. You guys do whatever puts bread on the table, and we get that.

But you have to realize that, at least for those of us who remember the good old days, complexity at character creation is integral part of the experience. You make a cup of coffee, you launch a game and you spend 3 hours at character screen, just trying different things. Without that the games just aren't the same, man. It's like platformer without jumping or a racing game without cars. When Pillars came out, the running joke in my gaming circle was about who wasted more hours in character creation.

So while there's certainly plenty of aspects of the old games that can be smoothed out a bit, I think that drastically simplifying character creation will have a heavy price to pay. And if the price is some day-one copies from grumpy oldschool gamers, well who cares. But what if the price is your soul?

 

[Vault Dweller]

Not that well.

Sales were considered strong by everyone involved, which is why it got a more expensive sequel.

Subject to interpretation. Hitman sold half a mil, but got a sequel too. The sequel sold almost 4 mil, which resulted in two more sequels selling 2 mil each. Deus Ex sold 1 mil, which seemed to be more of a "strong promise" rather than strong sales, got a sequel and even though the sequel sold more than the original, which in your interpretation is strong sales, it put the franchise on hold for the next 8 years which indicates that it wasn't a strong seller.

What's unclear here is what exactly "million units" refers to. Sold in the first year? Sold at full price? Sold since release? If sold since release, that's very low no matter how you look at it.

Edit: According to this discussion, which cites old PC Data info, Deus Ex sold 91,000 in 2001, so that 1 mil is probably the overall sales.

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112657

 

[SausageInYourFace]

But you have to realize that, at least for those of us who remember the good old days, complexity at character creation is integral part of the experience.

Like the time you did a little quiz in Ultima 4 and just started playing? And the time you went with the premade party in Might & Magic III and just started playing? And the time when you just started playing Gothic 1 without any input whatsoever?

I sure too remember ye olden days when no complex character creation was an integral part of the exp- wait, wha~

 

[Lurker King]

complexity at character creation is integral part of the experience.

Alongside with resource management, character building is basically the only meanigful challenge that cRPGs can provide. It is not easy to process all the information and it takes time to consider every possible strategy, combination, etc. It's a lot of information. It is a pain in the ass for a player who is not used to this, but it is very rewarding once you get the hang of it. Besides, if you remove this to avoid frustrating players, you are just moving the problem from one place to another. If the combat or any other gameplay element is challenging, the player will feel underwhelmed.

 

[Mustawd]

But you have to realize that, at least for those of us who remember the good old days, complexity at character creation is integral part of the experience.

Like the time you did a little quiz in Ultima 4 and just started playing? And the time you went with the premade party in Might & Magic III and just started playing? And the time when you just started playing Gothic 1 without any input whatsoever?

I sure too remember ye olden days when no complex character creation was an integral part of the exp- wait, wha~

Or the time you spent 2 days making characters in ROA?

 

[Fairfax]

Not that well.

Sales were considered strong by everyone involved, which is why it got a more expensive sequel.

Subject to interpretation. Hitman sold half a mil, but got a sequel too. The sequel sold almost 4 mil, which resulted in two more sequels selling 2 mil each. Deus Ex sold 1 mil, which seemed to be more of a "strong promise" rather than strong sales, got a sequel and even though the sequel sold more than the original, which in your interpretation is strong sales, it put the franchise on hold for the next 8 years which indicates that it wasn't a strong seller.

What's unclear here is what exactly "million units" refers to. Sold in the first year? Sold at full price? Sold since release? If sold since release, that's very low no matter how you look at it.

Eidos considered sales strong enough that they doubled the team size (or more, would have to check) and gave them 3.5 years to release the sequel. There was a hiatus because (a) IW underperformed (b) Eidos ran into financial trouble (c) Ion Storm was closed in 2005. Also, the hiatus was not that long, since Eidos Montreal started to work on Deus Ex 3 in early 2007.

 

[Lurker King]

It’s interesting that Roxor made a whole editorial to explain why the left ruined the writers. He should write another one to explain how the left ruined the gamers.

 

[Roguey]

Subject to interpretation.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131523/postmortem_ion_storms_deus_ex.php

Deus Ex shipped in June 2000. Sales were, and continue to be, strong, worldwide. Critical response (with one or two notable exceptions) has been positive. We've already won several "best of year" awards in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. Needless to say it's gratifying when people appreciate your work.

Additionally we can guess the budget from the number of employees and time it took to make

Number of Full-Time Developers: Approx. 20: 1 of me, 3 programmers, 6 designers, 7 artists, 1 writer, 1 associate producer, 1 tech

Number of Contractors: Approx. 6: 2 writers, 4 testers

Development Time: 6 months of preproduction and 28 months of production

That's roughly a big Kickstarter team and schedule. Selling mill-yuns and mill-yuns of copies was unnecessary.

 

[Latmey]

Alright, so he has some ideas that aren't great. If he wants to try them out on his own game though, that's fine with me.

What I'm not so fine with is framing these things as "mistakes" that need to be avoided by others developers. It's one thing to keep the ideas to himself and try them on his own project, but to attempt to influence other game makers with this speech, especially when he hasn't even released a game with this design philosophy implemented? That fucking sucks.

 

[Zeriel]

Fair, but I can still see why developers would want accessibility. From Tim Cain's perspective, he probably has seen several studios die for this very reason. Business is business

Of course is a business, but the point is (1) whether they can make a sustainable model without compromising their characters; (2) why they assume that they current business model (medium studio with bigger payroll) is the only model; (3) why they are avoiding the responsibility to develop a new generation of players that can appreciate genuine cRPGs; (4) why they are even more afraid of risk now that they have more experience, better and cheaper technology to make games, and better and cheaper means to ship games (steam, GOG, etc.).

It seems that most professional developers took the easy route without blinking with the excuse that this is a fact of life. The result of this indulgent and fearful attitude is that this will be a fact of life. I don't know who is more cynical: the publishers or the developers.

I do not disagree with you, but look at the trends: multiple RPG developers either closed or were cannibalized by the likes of EA; the completion rates on even the easier RPGs is terrible; the testers for QA are fucking retarded; and developers that did choose accessibility survived.

Ultimately, I think it comes back to your first point, what does a sustainable RPG company make these days?

You're probably right, catering to chess players is utopical albeit philosophically awesome.
then i guess we can agree with Tim Cain, that a visualization of character management, as long as it somehow, and a BIG somehow, retains the complexity of Special system, is the way to go to cater to many players, making sustainable business?

(with a proviso never to get metaphorical on you codexers again)

My main concern when I see developers like Tim Cain swallowing the accessibility pill ("It's for your own good, Mr. Anderson"), is that they assume that it's a guarantee of success. Chasing the mainstream doesn't mean you will automatically succeed. In fact, the industry is strewn with the corpses of naive companies who eschewed their barely profitable but stable niche in pursuit of big bucks success making a me-too action hybrid, which failed horrifically. They forget the truism of big business: yeah, there are big winners, but few of them. Why should someone play a game that is halfway between Fallout and The Witcher 3, when they could play The Witcher 3? This goes both ways. Watering down your core conceit drives away your hardcore fans, and there is a good chance you won't water it down enough to please the mainstream (who anyway are probably more interested in production values, i.e piles of money, which you simply don't have).

I think Tim Cain should be very worried about his current path when he looks at the history of Obsidian. It tried the console hybrid game for years, barely limping along from one cancelled contract to another. The project that saved the company? An old school isometric revival relying on their hardcore fans, which they had almost forgotten they had. Obsidian is lucky those folks were still around. You keep trying to pursue the mainstream and not managing and one day you may find those old, gullible idiots are no longer there to finance your next "it's accessible, but not dumbed down, honest!" project.

My final takeaway? If you can manage to SUCCEED in the mainstream market, sure, go for it. Fuck your fans and float in a sea of money. I'd do that too. But if there's a significant chance your "accessible" game WON'T be a hit with all the dorito-munching proles, think very carefully before you leap.

I would use Iron Towers as an example. Iron Towers made a great game (which I still need to finish), but would you call that a good business model? Could other studios have adopted that same strategy and survived? Would Iron Tower have survived if not for VD's efforts to fund it with his own money? Plus, how long did it take to develop AoD? I am not trying to take a jab at VD or AoD by these statements. I just think its a success story among a pile of bad news and dead studios.

I'd say it's a good business model for a very small "studio" with low overheads. It's not a good business model for a small company like inXile and it's definitely not an option for a company like Obsidian. When you're responsible for 50-100 people, your first priority is to make sure they all stay employed after your game is released, which makes accessibility a very important factor.

So either stay small and do whatever the fuck you want or grow big and do what the market wants (and the market isn't going to start craving hardcore RPGs anytime soon).

Just thought I'd tag this post with that reminder that Obsidian was saved not by accessible products that compromise, but by a Kickstarter game that most of them thought would be a failure. We really need to stop lionizing Obsidian's business practices. As business people, they are at best... middle-tier. Not completely incompetent, but they would have gone bankrupt (by their own admission) if they kept pursuing the philosophy we see being touted here as appropriate for their size.

 

[Roguey]

Obsidian's best selling game is Fallout New Vegas.

 

[Lurker King]

Obsidian was always starving for a new contract and it was always making sequels because that is what they could get. They never had any problems in streamlining to please the wider audience and they never had close to decent character building, combat systems or resource management. We could stomach all that because some of their games were better written than the average, had lots of C&C, didn’t have much competition in the genre and they could use the excuse that they were being held down by the publisher. Now that we are more demanding because we have other games to play they not only they keep repeating the same pattern, but they are worse in the writing and C&C department. In fact, they can’t hide behind the publisher excuse. And for some strange reason players here still think that they can change their minds and stop making streamlined games with deep character building. Never gonna happen.

 

[Black Angel]

Obsidian's best selling game is Fallout New Vegas.

But does that game even managed to keep the company to actually stay relevant in the business, though? They were torn apart because of release-day's bugs, and even though there appearing people who wanted them to have another go at a NV-like game for Fallout 4, there also appears people who would defend Bethesda to death from the new audience they gained from Fallout 4.

 

[Roguey]

But does that game even managed to keep the company to actually stay relevant in the business, though?

Yes. I believe Anthony Davis said so himself here.

They were torn apart because of release-day's bugs, and even though there appearing people who wanted them to have another go at a NV-like game for Fallout 4, there also appears people who would defend Bethesda to death from the new audience they gained from Fallout 4.

New Vegas: 95% positive http://store.steampowered.com/app/22380/
Fallout 4: 78% positive http://store.steampowered.com/app/377160/

New Vegas owners 4,653,314 ± 61,051 http://steamspy.com/app/22380
Fallout 4 owners 4,134,937 ± 57,589 http://steamspy.com/app/377160

Fallout 4 got there faster, but that's it.

 

[l3loodAngel]

I generally like complicated character creation systems while I'm fiddling around with them -- precisely because they are often the only moment in RPGs where you get to do fun stuff defining your character that goes beyond just incremental advancements within an already set framework. But I don't think complicated character creation systems are "great gameplay" in what I'm calling to Mustawd's chagrin "narrative RPGs" (which is to say, RPGs that are designed to be played start to finish and won on the first character build, often aren't ever played again, and reward mostly through the arc of the story rather than the powering up of the character/party). The reason is that while they entail the kind of resource management decisions and neat choices that could be part of great gameplay, those choices are being made in a vacuum -- the player has no idea what the long-term goal is, or even what the short-term obstacles are. It is true that if you've been around the block enough time you know that the long-term goal is to overcome some final boss and that the obstacles are things like popamole fights and dialogues that can be won by picking the option with the highest diplomacy requirement. But that is to say, character creation "works" only when the gameplay is stupidly predictable and bland.

Lol FO system is NOT complicated. In fact it's so easy to use that anyone can succeed at it in their early teens, without knowing proper English. Just that we are having this conversation it's Pure decline™... If someone being 11-12 can do it without much thought, than your target audience is what: 4-7? You are contributing only decline with your posts...

 

[l3loodAngel]

But does that game even managed to keep the company to actually stay relevant in the business, though?

Yes. I believe Anthony Davis said so himself here.

They were torn apart because of release-day's bugs, and even though there appearing people who wanted them to have another go at a NV-like game for Fallout 4, there also appears people who would defend Bethesda to death from the new audience they gained from Fallout 4.

New Vegas: 95% positive http://store.steampowered.com/app/22380/
Fallout 4: 78% positive http://store.steampowered.com/app/377160/

New Vegas owners 4,653,314 ± 61,051 http://steamspy.com/app/22380
Fallout 4 owners 4,134,937 ± 57,589 http://steamspy.com/app/377160

Fallout 4 got there faster, but that's it.

The difference could be like 30% difference in the selling price, which would make it a Yuge deal.

 

[l3loodAngel]

Obsidian's best selling game is Fallout New Vegas.

Which was not their IP, their engine and not even their core game. It was a mod or a slam dunk project, which they excel at, because than you don't have emphasize on execution (engine, gfx, movement, animations, AI etc.) and can add things they were great at like: Story, characters, C&C, and encounter design.
I have yet to see such success from them with their own game.

 

[Kev Inkline]

MRY vs Mustawd

"The lesser condiment grazes your leg lightly for 0 damage."

 

[Mustawd]

MRY vs Mustawd

"The lesser condiment grazes your leg lightly for 0 damage."

 

[Azarkon]

Obsidian does not have the team size for a mainstream open world CRPG like Witcher 3. They have the team size for sequels to other people's games, with engines already built, and isometric games like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Diablo clones. The last of these has the biggest market, but they're all playing Path of Exile, which is free. I'd say the best chance Obsidian has for a major break out is actually to pick up where they themselves left off with Neverwinter Nights 2, since with the recent revival of pen and paper gaming through online interfaces and video streaming, there is an opportunity for a new, create your own CRPG adventures game system, which cannot be filled by developers doing high end graphics for obvious reasons, and which naturally lends itself to isometric engines. The only company better positioned to do it, in fact, is Bioware, but since Bioware is now full speed ahead on the cinematic mainstream train, Obsidian could make a strategic move to control the whole niche.

Of course, in this case they'd have to secure rights to an existing pen and paper rule set, and a popular one, first.

 

[J_C]

Obsidian's best selling game is Fallout New Vegas.

Which was not their IP, their engine and not even their core game. It was a mod or a slam dunk project, which they excel at, because than you don't have emphasize on execution (engine, gfx, movement, animations, AI etc.) and can add things they were great at like: Story, characters, C&C, and encounter design.
I have yet to see such success from them with their own game.

Highly unlikely until they don't have an IP which is so highly regarded as Fallout. They can make the best game in the world in a new IP, but it won't sell as much as FNV did.