might be that there were multiple versions of the box, but I've got a box for uncharted 1 here and it just talks about the "pulse-pounding blend of exploration, action and adventure" but doesn't really mention Nathan being a normal dude. neither do Uncharted 2 or 3 by the looks of it. It's definitely an issue those games have, don't get me wrong. I'm just wondering where you've seen that
Indiana Jones was an archeologist and he killed like 20 people in Temple of Doom alone. Uncharted doing this is perfectly in line with its goal of aping off of Indiana Jones.
@@mememachine-386 20 vs 1,000? No contest. Nathan’s scrappiness is just played up too much. If the series strived less for photorealism or if enemies and allies acknowledged how much of an actual a one man army he is despite his goofball nature it’d be a whole different story. I’ve only played 1-3 to competition however. So my comments only apply to those games. Got too burned out of the franchise to get far in 4.
I've always thought it was hilarious that in cutscenes the protagonists clearly strive to not be like the bad guys and then they ice dozens of people immediately after 😆 I love it, hearkens back to classic 80 and 90s action movies
Doubt you will see this, but me and my friend have been making games on and off together for most of our lives, starting when we were about 12 or 13. Recently, (we're 26 & 27 years old now) we've taken it a bit more seriously and are pursuing some indie dev, trying to actually make a successful game and hopefully support ourselves off of game development. We've always bonded over our love of the fallout universe - I found your videos about a year ago and since then me and him have been studying them like it's the game dev bible. We're both self-taught - It's easy to teach yourself technical skills, but the information you share on this channel is stuff that I've never been able to find a good source for. Any time we run into an issue that we can't land on a confident solution for, we check to see if you have a video covering something around the topic - And you almost always do. Just wanted to let you know how big of an impact you've had on him and I! And that your channel is, by far, the most underappreciate resource for game developers. You've already had such a massive impact on the game industry from your dev work alone - But I think this channel will be looked back on as the start of something new, and the source of a lot of self-taught game-devs' knowledge and influence. Thanks for all the content, hope you're doing well!
I know what you mean. I have thought about making an RPG for a long time and if I could get anyone in the world to coach me through that process, it would be Cain. Not only do I have access to years of wisdom from one of my favorite game devs but it's also completely free, as if the man were my uncle. 😂 I have learned so much about games through his channel. I don't think I have watched so many videos from a single channel in a very long time and I have started the process, writing my own game document that started with the setting, I'm currently on the story and I will write about the systems after.
My favorite common example of ludonarrative dissonance is when an NPC tells you horror stories about mobs you’ve been killing thoughtlessly for hours. Genuinely love it.
Once in Temple of Elemental Evil had surprising experience: In local bar there was drinking contest. I presumed it's Constitution check. So I chose my Paladin for that. After that contest my Paladin became Fallen Paladin (for breaking his oath) I was shocked: "...Wait. ...They programmed that mechanics too?"😶
I like how Tim doesn't push other interviews he's doing that aren't relevant to the channel. Not promoting 'his brand' or anything, just talking about game design.
I'm going to spoil the ending of Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas in this comment but its ending for me is one of the most beautiful applications of game mechanics supporting the story. The plot boils down to you trying to get into casino vault that is full of gold bars. But once you reach the vault events unfolding in the vault will force you to leave and you'll have only a minute to do so. The best part of this all is that you can only make it in time if you're not over encumbered. But the gold is very heavy. If you'll grab all gold bars from the vault you will simply never make it to the exit in time. It was beautiful moment of gameplay mechanics supporting narrative. When the end cutscene of the DLC hit me with "Finding it was not the hard part. It's letting go" I almost cried. Very memorable, I will never forget that ending.
Actually, you can absolutely get all gold bars and escape by using the game's mechanics. You just have to lure Elijah into coming down to the vault so that you have an alternatively shorter escape route to the elevator, and you have to be very careful with sneak while using the ONE stealth boy that can possibly spawn in the entirety of the dlc. Main Character leaves the way that Elijah comes in, and Elijah gets trapped in the vault. It's definitely one of those save-scum moments for most people I imagine.
@@BradTheAmerican You can also trap a corpse on a force field, stuff it with gold, run around, pick up gold and leave. But that's not the point of given example of mechanics supporting storytelling. This is more of a player subverting an expectations of game designer out of stubbornness. Very fun but most likely unintended.
or you can take all of the 37 gold bars and drop them as singular one from your inventory. Carry it around and take that gold (37) just before you exit the vault. And there you have it, 37 bars in yout pocket.
This is why for better or worse I still appreciate the Reputation mechanics in New Vegas. They weren't perfect, but when they made sense it really tied the role playing experience together very well and made the experience that much more immersive.
The thing that always bothered me about New Vegas' reputation mechanic is that you can suffer a reputation loss for killing someone despite leaving no witnesses to report you. When I was still new to the game, I entered into that one cave that has a single Great Khan member and he was hostile by default for some reason (because I had Boone?) and it ruined my chances at doing anything with the Khans because they all magically knew that I performed the great crime of defending myself against some random guy on the other side of the map.
@@BradTheAmerican That's kind of a general artifact of how these sorts of systems are implemented. Having a set of global flags for various conditions is cheap, but having a set of flags for each NPC to represent their knowledge of those conditions is expensive in terms of memory usage, so usually NPCs have no memory of their own and instead have instant and perfect knowledge of every important event in the world by reading the global flags. In New Vegas, things are complicated because reputation isn't a binary flag, but rather a pair of ranges of fame/infamy values that events can increase. Being caught stealing gives a small amount of infamy, so it takes many acts to reach the rank of "vilified", but if each NPC has its own memory of your deeds, you either need to use a lot of memory to remember every action and the object ID of who or what is done to, or risk either double counting (if two reports of the same event are misinterpreted as reports of two different events) or not counting certain events (if they're misinterpreted as duplicate reports of a different event). They should, however, have compromised and let you kill a single member of any faction without suffering reputation loss as long as there were no other members of that faction around to witness it.
@@BradTheAmerican Yup. When it was bad, it was REALLY bad lol. It was either really good for immersion when it made sense, or really bad when it didn't. Wasn't much middle ground there, especially with the stealing. I gotta say I still appreciate it though because I'm constantly quick saving, so if I screw up I just go back
This reminds me of something Harvey Smith said in a lecture with Warren Spector. Deus Ex had a swimming skill in addition to biomods and items that allowed you to be “the swimming guy,” and Invisible War had just one upgrade that consolidated all of those things. The gameplay was the same, and from a mechanical perspective this was an improvement, because it’s simpler and easier to understand. But it didn’t allow players to create their own fantasy about the character they were playing. You couldn’t plan out what skills to upgrade and which biomods to install anymore, since it’s now a matter of using just one single upgrade.
I can think of games where I am told to brake in to a building, I find a super sneaky way in by going next door and jumping around in to a window. Then I find the missions wont work, you have to go via the front door or nothing happens. That's the kind of thing that relay bugs me, after it happens once you know there's no point looking for options. Also any game where the story says your 'kind' & in gameplay your kill count is massive, at times your doing more damage than the 'bad guy'.
Your sneak example is why I try to get level and quest designers to use a systemic approach (relying on coded mechanics) rather than a scripted approach to their work. Script triggers can be avoided, but mechanics always have your back.
@@635574 Triggers on the target's instead of at points in the building, then you can steal/kill/hack without braking the player emersion. The game had some dialogue/event setup for when you use the front door, by not using the door the mission broke. Id have been happy to skip the forced event, have it as a fun option for the people who do use the front door and the super sneaky people can go in and out without any one noticing. You can even have a shocked NPC event, something like 'wow you got in and out and no one knows'.
That was the experience I had with RDR2. I remember trying to climb on top of a roof during a mission in either Valentine/Rhodes - to get to a good sniping spot - and getting the out of bounds message and subsequent mission failure. It was heartbreaking because it ruined the immersion and reminded me that it was very much an on-rails experience. While Rockstar obviously goes for a thematic experience in their games, I found some of their decisions a bit too restrictive.
Particular in shooters there is often the extreme dissonance between cutscenes and gameplay. I think tomb raider was a good example. In the video scenes you're always totally shocked about a specific 'kiol', a person's death etc. And in the gameplay itself you wade through death like Khorne himself
I love when games do this and more should. I think that's the actual power of storytelling in video games. I'm glad you mentioned Bioshock because not only it's one of my favorite games but I think it's actually a great example of using gameplay for the story. The whole "Would You Kindly" part directly connects to actual gameplay itself and it works perfectly.
One of my favorite examples of story and mechanics supporting each other is the ghost king coming out of the player's back to provide the second block in Shadow of Mordor.
The color pallet is a real one for sure! I remember playing FO4 and feeling that the world was "too alive" and freshy looking for my tastes. I love the amber New Vegas, the arid, barren, unrelenting nature of a desert, painted all over the map. And then there's the impact of going to The Strip the first time, the colorful, bright and well kept nature of the place TOLD you that they were more powerful and wealthy than most. FO4 everything is everywhere, so I don't feel as much of that contrast. The harsh environment wasn't there you know? When I saw the video where Tim tells the story behind the blue vault jumpsuit, it all clicked together. So yeah, color choice is something that can steer playerbases!
They got a lot of criticism about that monochrome color pallette in FO3 and responded to that as they usually do, imho: bouncing in the complete opposite direction. :) I found the yellow and blue and red (all but literally) eye-popping accent colors pretty unbearable myself. Fortunately, it does have mod support, which every game might consider, so there are plenty of ENBs and texture packs to tone those accent colors down a bit. FO4 is not my favorite entry, but the game world itself is as extraordinary as always.
@@lrinfi 100%! The game itself its pretty good indeed, clocked a good amount of hours in it, but I wasn't sucked into the ambience like in the forementioned NV
I've been really thinking about this and about the fantasy we make on our mind about what the game would look, battling against starting a game with a genre or a camera perspective in my head. For example, if we think to tell the story of a journalist, maybe really makes no sense to start with a template of space, to spend most of your time traversing a three-dimensional map to get to perform the fantasy of uncovering a plot. The idea of the epic climax falls short when you don't make up to moment-to-moment gameplay. Maybe we try by default to gimmick Earth's many fronts. When we break down the fantasy of the game we make in our minds into steps, the resistance of the emotion we're trying to capture is revealed by what you do in those steps that make up that epic sample of space-time we imagine of the game. They should be consistent with your story, too. It's always a joy to have your perspective, Tim. Thanks, as always.
What I always found useful and I've been doing it since I remember - in my D&D campaigns, I make the world interact with it self. People farm, gather stuff, transport it, trade, there are caravans organisations and as I'm working on a system in a next city, story starts forming around the mechanics and it's extremely satisfying when we play the story thats grounded in the world mechanics rather than having an isolated dungeon somewhere.
Miyazaki at Fromsoftware has said he does this in interviews. Where they start with a theme and build mechanics that fit within it. Or the opposite starting with a mechanic and allowing themes to naturally emerge from them. He took a lot of inspiration from Ico. Which is probably even all these years later still the best ive seen meaningful mechanics implemented
in the original campaign of Neverwinter Nights, I started as a chaotic neutral character, but because I would always threaten people in order to get extra money at the end of quests, I ended up as full chaotic evil, no matter how much good I did to the world in the quests themselves. In the game ending, that lizard woman said I was a terrible person and I did everything for myself and blah blah blah.
My favourite "color palette" example is a platformer called "Semblance". It's one of the best games I have ever played, people who played it loved it, but no-one ever does on their own because they just look at the color palette and go "Meh, looks good, but I'm not going to play it". Ironically I saw the creators' talk where they said that they chose it because they don't see anyone else use it.
lol I don't know if you read these, but I just finished Outer Worlds. I knew you worked on it but didn't know you directed it. Anyway, I loved it. I think it's top 5 for me. The marketing really did you guys a disservice. I've played it twice, and this time, I loved it. I can only contribute that to the marketing and my mindset. Idk I was a different person when that game came out
I just beat Death Stranding, and its a very good example of this. Even simple things like doing big jumps, or walking over signs, reinforces your connection to BB. Or dying and appearing in The Seam.
I love love love the idea of how you approached wanting a party to have alignments that make sense, I feel that is something I can use in writing myself! Thanks Tim!
I've had interesting discussions in recent months in the TTRPG space about this. One of the mechanics in my TTRPG is that, whenever a player fails a roll to which their passion was applied, they get a demerit check, which is the inverse of an experience check. If you don't turn the demerit check back into an experience check, that particular passion runs the risk of going down, so in most cases, a player will try to regain the experience check. There is a second mechanic called "linked passion"; this mechanic says that two passions treat each other's demerit checks as experience checks. In other words; if you fail doing one thing that you're passionate about, you have two choices; become disheartened and escape into a different passion, or face your feelings and potentially gain passion. This simulating how people can end up inversely linking things in their mind and double down on some other intense feeling in order to not confront your disheartened they are about the time they failed.
I never understood the bioshock example. I've heard it before and I actually think they should have made the game even harder for saving the little sisters but I liked that I assumed I wasn't getting a mechanical benefit for saving them. This really reinforced the story through game mechanics. I felt the world was bad enough and the one thing I had agency over made me feel better every time I saved them. The fact I wasn't getting a bonus to make me stronger was really interesting to me.
Not only were the little sisters really nice to you when you sparred them in Bioshock, but they also left gifts and extra stuff for you to find through out the levels. My impression has always been that you get more by saving them.
Yeah I disagree with Tim on this one, I believe that the "thing" about at least the first game was asking will you succumb to being no better than a splicer or choose to keep that humanity and there was only dissonance with the story if you kind of let it be dissonant.
Hi Tim! Thanks for being you. Fallout was one of the first things I installed on the first PC I built for college. I’m about to turn 40 and discovering a passion for software development. Your channel is a huge inspiration on so many levels!
Hi Tim. I love your videos. I got my first job after college as a manager about a year ago. I love hearing stories about your time as a manager while creating games, and having to make tough decisions. I would love to hear some of your takeaways about managing other people
Using mechanics for storytelling is one reason why ICO is still one of my favorite games of all time. Ironically Bioshock Infinite has ludonarative dissonance in one central aspect which ICO prevents. There the story says save the girl but the girl is invincible and the enemies are more after you than her. It's the same story in ICO and mechanically the right way around. With the handholding mechanic, which is a dedicated button it brings it closer to that fantasy and even spoiler subverts that at the end. At so many places it tells you little stories via gameplay and you learn everything about the castle, the enemies, the villain via gameplay and behaviour, almost nothing is spelled out. Overall I think it's a perfect game.
An example of ludonarrative dissonance in a game: The first of those Tomb Raider reboots from about 12 years ago. The island everyone winds up on has this feeling of being deserted, man vs nature and all that. But at several points in the game, dozens of cannon fodder guys stream out of doors like they're getting out of a clown car so Lara Croft can mow them down. The game pretends to be a survival/exploration platformer with untrustworthy other humans on the island, but it's just an Uncharted clone right down to murdering waves of random dudes. Where I find that extra stupid is early on in cutscenes, there's this tension of Lara having to hunt a deer vs fight off some wolves that might try to take the carcass from her. And the original Tomb Raider has primarily animals/monsters as enemies, so it would've fit with the series and with the story to have the game focus more on that. But nah, the game has the same boring flow as Uncharted, where you get a platforming sequence that's borderline automatic, then an arena where dozens of bad guys stream out of areas so you can kill em all.
This is my most profound gamplay-based storytelling experience: I was playing Fallout. I found the water chip in Necropolis. I intended to repair their water system, but wasn't able to at the moment. I took the chip and intended to return later to fix it. I forgot about it. Next time I visited Necropolis, all the ghouls were wiped out. I was like "Oh shit, this is my fault!" I'll never forget this moment.
After learning that Mr Cain made Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum, both games that I sadly had bought boxed copies of but never got around to playing (that 'life' thing kept me too busy) way back in the day, I was SO happy to find both games on GoG and bought them instantly. Now I just gotta find time away from 'life' once again to finally give them both a try before I turn any greyer and balder!
Hey Tim I have a question: If you were to start all over, say you're about 18 right now, what would you do with a career 2.0? Would you take the same route and work in AAA, would you try to direct games or choose to be a lead, would you go fully inde as a solo dev and collaborate as needed?
Given the massive power of tools these days and the availability of purchaseable assets...I'd probably go indie. I would at least TRY it. Solo developers and small teams can make such amazing games these days.
1:53 "radiation is bad, its deadly and all over the place." Anakin: "I hate [radiation]. It's course and hard and gets everywhere." Sorry, that's just what entered my head when you said that. Though it would give Anakin a better reaspn to hate tatooine if it was radioactive.
One recent game where the ludonarrative dissonance was very apparent to me, but I don't think I've seen many people discuss, was Mass Effect: Andromeda. All of the characters who came on the journey with the player character from the Milky Way to the Andromeda galaxy were, supposedly, people who had signed up to be settlers and start a whole new life and found a new civilization in a new galaxy. Then some things go wrong at the beginning, and the situation is admittedly pretty bad, and tons of these explorers immediately peace out and become ruthless bandits and warlords overnight, complete with bases, weapons, and smuggling networks. Then the player character, who is also supposed to be an explorer, spends the entire game killing all of them, without any qualms about it. It bothered me the whole time I was playing the game, and every time you were forced to fight enemies who were bandits, and therefore also the player characters former colleagues on this venture, I thought to myself: well that's another settler dead; there are only a finite number of people who came on this journey and we're constantly being forced to kill half of them. Surely this won't have any adverse effects on the success of colonization effort.
Hey Tim, I've had a blast replaying your games with all of the context you've provided. I'm also a huge fan of the commentary playthroughs in Portal 2 and Braid Anniversary Edition. I believe a commentary playthrough of Fallout or Outer Worlds would be awesome and something fans would love! Do you feel there is a demand for this and do you think we'll see more of this in the future? I hope so!
Dawn of War II Chaos Rising, a RTS wih some RPG mechanics, had a corruption meter for each character.. Each mission had a hard secondary objective that reduced corrupution and an easy secondary objective that corrupted. Corruption added some skills, and there was holy and cursed items. It also changed the second to last boss. All the narration was done through the main gameplay loop.
I think the lack of gameplay urgency for plot-urgency is one factor for ludonarrative dissonance. You must save the princess before the dark warlock completes the ritual. By the way, farmer Joe lost his 12 chickens, can you help him? Fallout did it right with the countdown for the water chip (and later, the mutants). This also happens at a more micro-level. Stealing is wrong, but even someone playing a Paladin might see himself looting bodies and searching crates for some coins or other valuables.
Would you be able to talk about your involvement in Stonekeep and your thoughts on the game? It’s one of my favorites, felt like it flew under the radar for most. I’m a developer in a different industry and really enjoy your videos, thank you so much for making them!
As a TTRPG designer (or wannabe, since I still work on my first system) I have to concur. That is the reason why I think universal systems usually fall flat, since their mechanisms do not carry any narrative weight.
@austin0_bandit05 if you watch Rhykker he says "hey folks it's Rhykker." People always say "hey Rhykker it's folks." Rhykker does Diablo news as well as game news in general.
Hey Tim! I was curious about how you decide to approach a story from a stepwise process - apologies if you've already talked about this elsewhere on the channel. Do you start with a setting? A character? A cool plot hook? What gets prioritized in the very beginning & how do you decide where to branch off from there? Thank you for the absolute goldmine of a channel! An absolutely vital collection of masterclasses for anyone working in the space.
Vampyr did follow this kind of thinking. You can go full on vampire and make the mechanics easier or go for an extra challenge, changing how the game ends, but doesn't stop the player from finishing the storyline.
Have you ever experienced the opposite case that you really liked? When a piece of story/narrative is made around a game mechanic? In KCD it's mentioned at the beginning that the favorite drink of the protagonist is "Saviour schnapps" which is how you learn the saving mechanism (you need to have at least 1 of those in your inventory, otherwise you can save only on exit). I suppose a lot of comedy and parody games also do this kind of thing, since this makes them kind of "self-aware".
Hey Tim, hope your having a good day. I'd like to ask a question, why do games no longer use objectives as a difficulty setting like Thief did. Personally I find it a better & more immersive way to do things instead of adding a million HP to everything, because the difficulty is now intertwined with the story and the game mechanics. Yet nowadays it seems very few games adopt that type of design.
If you mean games with quests that have a lot of optional objectives (or objectives with different ways to complete), the answer is money. The time involved to design, create, and test all of those options is a lot longer (and hence more expensive) than just putting a lot of hit points on a boss.
This is indeed quite important. I create a space combat/exploration game. My goal is to have a certain composition of things that create a coherent feeling. For example only kinetic weaponry, traveling through space is limited by fuel, ammo is required and finite, space ships can be customized to be better or worse when on travel for longer periods of time, and no energy weapons, no shields. Armor is relevant and requires different tactics to handle. This is meant to create the feeling that when you start to move out, you are set a certain way, and have to handle things with what you have. Combat is kinetic and for larger ships lengthy, ships are supposed to blast each other like mad, and from a distance where the enemy is well visible. Enemies do not just spawn out of nowhere, and if an enemy arrives, it's because he flew over from his previous location. Resources and items have to be transported by somebody from one place to another. The world is globally a single universe. It's supposed to convey a realistic and futuristic feeling, in which players can alter the world. On the other side death is not punishing - you just lose your cargo. Ammo and FTL fuel is free to restock in stations (both act as stat-based resources). When you log out, you are phase-shifted and thus invulnerable. Relatively early you can build a small space station that is your home. And all players have PSI that enhances their ships, and thus combat against NPCs. These are the compromises I have to do in order to improve gameplay. I may not even put much emphasis on PvP, because coop PvE might be much more enjoyable. Meaning you can literally not attack other players, because PvP piracy may overall be bad for the game. Sitting with your buddy in the same ship will grant some passive boosts and allow him to do copilot activities (abilities). Or you both each have a ship. Or your buddy is docked in your ship and is launched on combat. I believe this game is based on all of its part to function in tandem in order to be "whole." Right now I am working on the networking part, and I am 90% done. The level of optimization is crazy, but should ensure I can host tens of thousands of players, or scale up easily as needed.
I'm glad you brought up ludonarrative dissonance. The example that always comes to my mind is Mass Effect, which is what first brought the concept to my attention. In the first ME game, the lore tells you that the personal force fields (or shields) that surround most characters only protect from fast-moving projectiles such as those from standard small arms, meanwhile things like melee attacks and heat and acid and explosives ignore said shields and damage you directly. The lore even gives an example for why "slow" stuff does not get deflected by these shields: so that people can sit down without flinging their chairs across the room. This was consistent with the gameplay. But this was entirely dropped from the gameplay in the sequels even though the lore still said that's how shields worked. I always thought that was a bummer, not just from the jarring discrepancy, but also because it took away an element of gameplay choice. In ME1, there was a trade-off between choosing armor upgrades that gave you extra shields VS extra damage resistance because more shields might be better overall but it had absolutely no affect on certain enemies. To me it always felt like dumbing down the gameplay so that the player didn't have to think about certain things, but thinking is part of the fun!
Mass Effect mention compels me to bring up that the original game built weapon overheat into lore and then 2 dropped it in favour a more action approach (players like reloading I guess). As much I have enjoyed all those games, I'm probably gonna always be a lil salty about some of the design decisions made with 2 lol.
@@HelFrostKara Being salty about thermal clips is my default setting. They justified it in-universe with nonsensical "geth math", even though ME1 already had frictionless materials which turned overheating into a physical impossibility at later levels. The heat sinks were stated to be able to fire thousands of rounds before needing replacement, but the ME2 change turned ammo into a logistical nightmare. Nobody would wanna take their one-shot sniper rifle and also carry 30 extra blocks of ammo for 30 shots when they could just carry one magazine beforehand. The change to reloading was apparently because they (either BioWare or EA) wanted to be more like Gears Of War and other popular cover shooters.
@@BradTheAmerican The overheat also feels more of RPG thing which I would have liked to see them build on that system. With overheat you maybe able to build a character around sniping (you know like an RPG) where as with thermal clips, well now it's a power weapon with limited use.
I think a lot about mechanics-as-lore -- when you create mechanics, at especially certain kinds of mechanics, you are defining how the world works. As much as a love the series, this is one problem I have with the Elder Scrolls series; how magic, and especially enchanting, works varies between the games, leaving the sense the setting as a whole lacks a consistent reality (and not just in the officially declared ways relating to timelines).
That is why the security update of getting rid of omnigel in ME2 being cannon is so cool. Also the weapons started using thermal clips I guess someone in the game commented about it too.
I don't feel the same way about the Little Sisters in Bioshock, I personally never even thought about consuming them because yes, you get more adam but what is the point? I didn't know they would leave gifts behind but knowing that I saved them was enough reward for me personally. I personally love how the mechanics of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 reinforce their respective universe and I really, really miss them in the modern iterations like Elden Ring. Arx Fatalis is another game I loved even if the magic mechanic was yank, it is still a game I love deeply. I bought Arcanum a long time ago and I plan on playing it once I'm done clearing my backlog, the hype is real!
Hey Uncle Tim, Who is your favorite Batman? Who is your celebrity crush? Could you whip together a couch co-op game? What's your favorite chocolate recipe? Who framed Rodger Rabbit?
The funniest thing in red dead redemption 2 is how I killed hundreds of people and then before I finished the story I just started greeting random strangers and that made my honor go up and got the good guy ending
The part about the color palette is the main reason why my wife hates watching me play Fallout - and part 4 is not even as bad as 3. So I totally get it.
I’ve seen the video where you talk about small game mechanics that you really love, is there any mechanics you see in games that immediately turn you off or away from a game?
Oof Tim, this video came at the bad time, so now I have to rant. I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 right now and the gameplay is textbook definition of ludo-narative dissonance. The story is cool, the world is beautiful and the gameplay is hellova fun, but they simply don't mesh. Just a couple of days ago I did a big quest (not going to spoil which, those who know know) where I was helping a character escape the city. They faint near the end and we have to carry them the last stretch of the road to the ship which will lead them away. At the very entrance we meet another character who points a gun at me and demands I give them the character I'm helping. If I refuse they shoot me in the head. The only way to finish the quest is for me to shoot them to death in a dialogue decision. So what's the problem? I TANKED A MOTHER FUCKING ATTACK CHOPPER'S BARRAGE JUST 5 MINS AGO IN THIS SAME QUEST! That person's pistol shot would barely scratch my hp! Not only that, I have cyber implant that in practice slows time for everyone but me, so I can easily drop the person I'm carrying and disable the enemy without killing them. But the dev team decided they wanted an epic showdown and forced my hand, which really pissed me off and soured my enjoyment of the game (let me point out this quest wasn't the only example of devs taking control of my character for the sake of story, it was just the most egregious). Rant over.
A lot of games with relatively tanky player or massive stat scaling avoid doing any shit liek that or have a superweapon for that purpose. Its really jarring when they could not think of a better solution than "small guns are lethal in cutscenes"
When you talk about ludonarrative dissonance I recently played fallout 4 (yes, because of the show) and thought it was funny how gung ho the BoS are with their stance on synths, but here I am now a sentinel in their order while romancing a synth, my mentor that I convinced the elder to spare a synth, and a synth child that will never grow up acting as my son. I know you could say that I made those choices myself, but the fact that they don't care and it isn't really reflected in the world either (pretty sure Danse is kill on sight afterwards though, so there is that.) just takes me out of caring for any kind of roleplay decision. Then my character just ends up as a weirdo two-faced psychopath. But hey, that's probably just a me issue.
I will say to add-on, Fallout additionally had the Pip-Boy, which was brilliant in retrospect. It simultaneous was a in universe object that also acted as your UI. While that conceptually isn’t groundbreaking TODAY, for the time fallout came out I would argue that was QUITE groundbreaking. Then Bethesda took it and ran with it making it an INENGINE on your wrist device. One of the really REALLY good things they did. Only thing better about it would be if the game world was moving at real time when using your pip-boy, but then being real time not turn based, that would quickly turn into a horror game like dead space. I especially love how they blended your original fallout pipboy 2000, to create the fallout 76 pipboy 2000 Mk VI. I don’t know if you’ve seen that one but it pays heavy homage to the original pipboy.
Mr Cain, do you have any thoughts to share on breadth vs. depth in worldbuilding or other elements of game design, if you haven't got a video on it already? Thank you for your wisedom.
It’s funny, this was my main complaint with Outer Worlds. The idea that the food is bad so society will collapse failed to land effectively for me. If you’re starving, you die in days - not years. Luckily the flaw mechanic solved this in my 2nd playthrough. I always get a food addiction now. In my head cannon, the food problem is a lack of needed micronutrients like iron and vitamins. Makes it way more immersive
Ludonarrative concerns are probably my biggest personal obsession within design. I know that my absolute favorite positive example from the last several years is Prey (rest in peace, Arkane Austin), but what are some of everyone else's favorite positive examples from the last several years?
there is no underwater breathing mechanic in a huge underwater area in one certain game and everyone is happy about it, because it gives the player the feeling of water being welcoming and loving like a mother, instead of a being a threat and anxiety inducing. using mechanics for storytelling is cool , but only if it is needed by the setting and the feeling you are trying to emphasize.
6:00, Tim I would disagree here. Bioshock kind of wastes the system of "will you save the cute little girl or violently kill her for marginal benefit?" since overall, saving all of them nets you much more powerful boons in the end. Also the game isn't terribly difficult, so you really have to go out of your way to pick the "selfish" path. anyway, great vid.
Hi Tim This is something that I think 'Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons' did particularly well... it managed to tie the controls into the narrative _and_ gameplay in a way I find truly brilliant, although it's impossible to talk about it without spoiling the game. On a related note, how do you feel about the use of controlers and m/kb on PC? Do you ever wish you could go back and change the controls for a game to make them more accesible or facilitate different ways of playing? Do you think game controls have reached their 'final form'?
I liked The Glow, but I kinda wish that the Rad-X drug wasn't so effective. You could just pop two doses of Rad-X and get enough radiation resistance to breeze through The Glow. But i'm a game mechanics masochist that enjoys really hard and deadly challenges in games so I may not be of the same mindset as the majority audience. 😄
I've been put off by colour palettes but not necessarily bc of story reasons, simply bc the I found it comfortable to look at. Mostly if a game appears too orange, oddly, like Far Cry 2 and (initally) Doom (2016) (but eventually I powered through that bc it is fun).
As Tim mentioned the color palette influencing some players' enjoyment of a game, an aspect I noticed late in my video-game player "history" came to mind. That's the fact that I objectively get quite a lot more enjoyment from games set in the bright outdoors than I do from mainly dark dungeon/indoor featuring titles. This thing happens to me in "shades of gray" too, when the same game set in a tropical weather environment is a lot more pleasurable to me than it'd be in a northern/icy-weather setting (beloved Assassins' Creed Black Flag VS the hated Assassins' Creed Rogue is a clear example of this for me). It's for this phenomenon that I cannot force myself to even try out acclaimed classics like Bloodborne or the Diablo series' games. I think this is pretty weird for gamers, who typically spend most of their free time indoor, often in the dark, watching a video screen. I was wondering how many other video game players are affected by this sort of "virtual meteoropathy". Thanks for your videos! BTW TH-cam guys: please go back to comments in the big space and video thumbnails on the right side! The comments' section is a part of the video experience, you're supposed to know that VERY well. ... Edit: Thanks TH-cam guys!
I never liked tunnels in games, as a kid I used to get lost all the time. Now I know my problem was art in the level, when everything looks the same it's confusing. I need landmarks or differentiation to understand where I am in any map, I think Prey (2017) did well in making the space station easy to navigate (a space station is just a big tunnel relay).
i really dislike snowy maps in games, but I enjoyed Ori Will O Wisp's snow level cuz it had a beautiful contrasting orange sunset background so everything just popped, compared to typical monochrome snowy levels. though weirdly I actually enjoy monochrome grey/brown ish ruins and dungeon aesthetics a lot especially if they're super misty, it's just the snowy places I usually end up disliking. Bloodborne is a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece tho you should definitely give that a go if you can
I actually prefer AC Rogue over Black Flag, but not by much. I still have my issues with that frachise as a whole. Winter scenarios feels slightly less inhospitable than very hot summers to me.
@@diewott1337 Did I just met my nemesis? (LOL!) ... You seem to be affected in the opposite way, but at least I'm not the only one who is influenced by the in-game climate situation.
Hi Tim, I'd like to hear your thoughts about creativity and how it relates to making games and where does it come from and where does it fit in the dev process + thoughts in general. You must have met a lot of creative people in your time I expect you'd have some thoughts to share on it. If you ever make a video on that subject, name it simply Creativity so that it has a higher chance to show up when people type the word in. I like your videos and more people should watch them, many of your vids are interesting even beyond gamedev, the ones I enjoyed the most (on average) were those where you talked about more general experiences or insights. Thanks for reading if you did and sorry for the length, time is precious.
Bioshock little sisters is a bad example, because the choice and consequences are consistent with the narrative. It's harder to balance all the mechanics and outcomes while still being consistent to the world building. That's why Fallout 1 worked, and why New Vegas is a bit weird in its world design sometimes, it tries to fit every skill in when it doesn't make sense. One of the best examples of ludo narrative dissonance is the Tomb Raider series, Lara narratively struggling with taking lives, but in gameplay being the goddess of death.
Hey Tim, would love to see what you’re thoughts are on the fallout Fixt mod and all the improvements and changes it makes to the game, curious to see what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you wish they’d have done instead of something they did do or is it a pretty faithful rendition of your vision of fallout. Thanks Tim stay safe, stay kind. Love hearing all your stories mate. Love from Australia. 🇦🇺 ✌🏻
Hi Tim 👋 I want to know whats the difference from a gamedev perspective of developing a first person view game vs third person view game What are it's advantages vs disadvantages and what made you choose first person only for outer worlds Thanks for answering 😊
I’m guessing the color palette mention seems like kind of a jab at the Xbox 360 era of games, most games had a very specific color palette to them, lot of grays, browns, oranges…
Hey Tim. Can you turn on "super thanks"? Whenever I listen to one of these videos, I think "I'd pay for content like this!" and then I find out that I can't!
I appreciate the sentiment! I have never heard of “super thanks”, but I will look into it. As long as it’s 100% optional and not something that TH-cam will nag my viewers about, I’ll turn it on. Thank you!
I use TH-cam on my phone and the super thanks is completely optional (just one of the buttons above the comments) and the platform does not in any way tell me to do it. Not sure if it's that way for everyone, though.
Hey Tim I listened to Gabe Newell on creating Half Life, he said one of the most important parts of making a game is making the player feel like their choices have transient effects. To what degree should this ideology be pursued?
Im not arguing with Tim but in BioShock I never considered killing the little sisters on my first playthrough even though it seemed (though doesn't really) like you got a worse outcome. It literally never crossed my mind at any point that i would do it just because it made me more powerful. Maybe because in the long term it doesn't actually matter it didn't feel like I'd made a "good" or "bad" choice. I just didn't want to kill kids. I totally accept the ludonarrative dissonance of the game now I'm older and have played it more than once and thought about it more. At the time though I don't remember picking any option that gave me something better for doing something "bad". Maybe that's the point I guess.
I'll never forget the back of the box of Uncharted 1
"Just a normal dude"
Kills 1,000 people for treasure
might be that there were multiple versions of the box, but I've got a box for uncharted 1 here and it just talks about the "pulse-pounding blend of exploration, action and adventure" but doesn't really mention Nathan being a normal dude. neither do Uncharted 2 or 3 by the looks of it. It's definitely an issue those games have, don't get me wrong. I'm just wondering where you've seen that
@@susseratal In US box is says:
“One Ordinary Man…
One Extraordinary Adventure”
Indiana Jones was an archeologist and he killed like 20 people in Temple of Doom alone. Uncharted doing this is perfectly in line with its goal of aping off of Indiana Jones.
@@mememachine-386 20 vs 1,000? No contest.
Nathan’s scrappiness is just played up too much. If the series strived less for photorealism or if enemies and allies acknowledged how much of an actual a one man army he is despite his goofball nature it’d be a whole different story.
I’ve only played 1-3 to competition however. So my comments only apply to those games. Got too burned out of the franchise to get far in 4.
I've always thought it was hilarious that in cutscenes the protagonists clearly strive to not be like the bad guys and then they ice dozens of people immediately after 😆 I love it, hearkens back to classic 80 and 90s action movies
I usually use them to fix my car but this seems way more creative
Heh!
lol
"Use mechanic on video game" could definitely be a solution to a puzzle in a LucasArts-style adventure game.
(Like the monkey wrench puzzle.)
Doubt you will see this, but me and my friend have been making games on and off together for most of our lives, starting when we were about 12 or 13. Recently, (we're 26 & 27 years old now) we've taken it a bit more seriously and are pursuing some indie dev, trying to actually make a successful game and hopefully support ourselves off of game development.
We've always bonded over our love of the fallout universe - I found your videos about a year ago and since then me and him have been studying them like it's the game dev bible. We're both self-taught - It's easy to teach yourself technical skills, but the information you share on this channel is stuff that I've never been able to find a good source for.
Any time we run into an issue that we can't land on a confident solution for, we check to see if you have a video covering something around the topic - And you almost always do. Just wanted to let you know how big of an impact you've had on him and I! And that your channel is, by far, the most underappreciate resource for game developers.
You've already had such a massive impact on the game industry from your dev work alone - But I think this channel will be looked back on as the start of something new, and the source of a lot of self-taught game-devs' knowledge and influence.
Thanks for all the content, hope you're doing well!
I know what you mean. I have thought about making an RPG for a long time and if I could get anyone in the world to coach me through that process, it would be Cain. Not only do I have access to years of wisdom from one of my favorite game devs but it's also completely free, as if the man were my uncle. 😂
I have learned so much about games through his channel. I don't think I have watched so many videos from a single channel in a very long time and I have started the process, writing my own game document that started with the setting, I'm currently on the story and I will write about the systems after.
My favorite common example of ludonarrative dissonance is when an NPC tells you horror stories about mobs you’ve been killing thoughtlessly for hours. Genuinely love it.
Once in Temple of Elemental Evil had surprising experience:
In local bar there was drinking contest. I presumed it's Constitution check. So I chose my Paladin for that.
After that contest my Paladin became Fallen Paladin (for breaking his oath)
I was shocked: "...Wait. ...They programmed that mechanics too?"😶
I like how Tim doesn't push other interviews he's doing that aren't relevant to the channel.
Not promoting 'his brand' or anything, just talking about game design.
I'm going to spoil the ending of Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas in this comment but its ending for me is one of the most beautiful applications of game mechanics supporting the story.
The plot boils down to you trying to get into casino vault that is full of gold bars.
But once you reach the vault events unfolding in the vault will force you to leave and you'll have only a minute to do so. The best part of this all is that you can only make it in time if you're not over encumbered. But the gold is very heavy. If you'll grab all gold bars from the vault you will simply never make it to the exit in time. It was beautiful moment of gameplay mechanics supporting narrative. When the end cutscene of the DLC hit me with "Finding it was not the hard part. It's letting go" I almost cried.
Very memorable, I will never forget that ending.
Actually, you can absolutely get all gold bars and escape by using the game's mechanics. You just have to lure Elijah into coming down to the vault so that you have an alternatively shorter escape route to the elevator, and you have to be very careful with sneak while using the ONE stealth boy that can possibly spawn in the entirety of the dlc. Main Character leaves the way that Elijah comes in, and Elijah gets trapped in the vault. It's definitely one of those save-scum moments for most people I imagine.
@@BradTheAmerican You can also trap a corpse on a force field, stuff it with gold, run around, pick up gold and leave. But that's not the point of given example of mechanics supporting storytelling. This is more of a player subverting an expectations of game designer out of stubbornness. Very fun but most likely unintended.
or you can take all of the 37 gold bars and drop them as singular one from your inventory. Carry it around and take that gold (37) just before you exit the vault.
And there you have it, 37 bars in yout pocket.
This is why for better or worse I still appreciate the Reputation mechanics in New Vegas. They weren't perfect, but when they made sense it really tied the role playing experience together very well and made the experience that much more immersive.
The thing that always bothered me about New Vegas' reputation mechanic is that you can suffer a reputation loss for killing someone despite leaving no witnesses to report you. When I was still new to the game, I entered into that one cave that has a single Great Khan member and he was hostile by default for some reason (because I had Boone?) and it ruined my chances at doing anything with the Khans because they all magically knew that I performed the great crime of defending myself against some random guy on the other side of the map.
@@BradTheAmerican That's kind of a general artifact of how these sorts of systems are implemented. Having a set of global flags for various conditions is cheap, but having a set of flags for each NPC to represent their knowledge of those conditions is expensive in terms of memory usage, so usually NPCs have no memory of their own and instead have instant and perfect knowledge of every important event in the world by reading the global flags. In New Vegas, things are complicated because reputation isn't a binary flag, but rather a pair of ranges of fame/infamy values that events can increase. Being caught stealing gives a small amount of infamy, so it takes many acts to reach the rank of "vilified", but if each NPC has its own memory of your deeds, you either need to use a lot of memory to remember every action and the object ID of who or what is done to, or risk either double counting (if two reports of the same event are misinterpreted as reports of two different events) or not counting certain events (if they're misinterpreted as duplicate reports of a different event). They should, however, have compromised and let you kill a single member of any faction without suffering reputation loss as long as there were no other members of that faction around to witness it.
@@BradTheAmerican Yup. When it was bad, it was REALLY bad lol.
It was either really good for immersion when it made sense, or really bad when it didn't. Wasn't much middle ground there, especially with the stealing.
I gotta say I still appreciate it though because I'm constantly quick saving, so if I screw up I just go back
This reminds me of something Harvey Smith said in a lecture with Warren Spector. Deus Ex had a swimming skill in addition to biomods and items that allowed you to be “the swimming guy,” and Invisible War had just one upgrade that consolidated all of those things. The gameplay was the same, and from a mechanical perspective this was an improvement, because it’s simpler and easier to understand. But it didn’t allow players to create their own fantasy about the character they were playing. You couldn’t plan out what skills to upgrade and which biomods to install anymore, since it’s now a matter of using just one single upgrade.
I can think of games where I am told to brake in to a building, I find a super sneaky way in by going next door and jumping around in to a window. Then I find the missions wont work, you have to go via the front door or nothing happens. That's the kind of thing that relay bugs me, after it happens once you know there's no point looking for options.
Also any game where the story says your 'kind' & in gameplay your kill count is massive, at times your doing more damage than the 'bad guy'.
Your sneak example is why I try to get level and quest designers to use a systemic approach (relying on coded mechanics) rather than a scripted approach to their work. Script triggers can be avoided, but mechanics always have your back.
@@CainOnGameslike a stealth system vs a forced sequence that only works when entering from one side?
@@635574 Triggers on the target's instead of at points in the building, then you can steal/kill/hack without braking the player emersion.
The game had some dialogue/event setup for when you use the front door, by not using the door the mission broke. Id have been happy to skip the forced event, have it as a fun option for the people who do use the front door and the super sneaky people can go in and out without any one noticing. You can even have a shocked NPC event, something like 'wow you got in and out and no one knows'.
That was the experience I had with RDR2. I remember trying to climb on top of a roof during a mission in either Valentine/Rhodes - to get to a good sniping spot - and getting the out of bounds message and subsequent mission failure. It was heartbreaking because it ruined the immersion and reminded me that it was very much an on-rails experience. While Rockstar obviously goes for a thematic experience in their games, I found some of their decisions a bit too restrictive.
Particular in shooters there is often the extreme dissonance between cutscenes and gameplay. I think tomb raider was a good example. In the video scenes you're always totally shocked about a specific 'kiol', a person's death etc. And in the gameplay itself you wade through death like Khorne himself
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was an excellent example of mechanics directly supporting the storytelling.
I love when games do this and more should. I think that's the actual power of storytelling in video games.
I'm glad you mentioned Bioshock because not only it's one of my favorite games but I think it's actually a great example of using gameplay for the story. The whole "Would You Kindly" part directly connects to actual gameplay itself and it works perfectly.
The prime example I always say when talking about this is "Papers, Please", its truly brilliant.
One of my favorite examples of story and mechanics supporting each other is the ghost king coming out of the player's back to provide the second block in Shadow of Mordor.
The color pallet is a real one for sure! I remember playing FO4 and feeling that the world was "too alive" and freshy looking for my tastes. I love the amber New Vegas, the arid, barren, unrelenting nature of a desert, painted all over the map. And then there's the impact of going to The Strip the first time, the colorful, bright and well kept nature of the place TOLD you that they were more powerful and wealthy than most.
FO4 everything is everywhere, so I don't feel as much of that contrast. The harsh environment wasn't there you know?
When I saw the video where Tim tells the story behind the blue vault jumpsuit, it all clicked together. So yeah, color choice is something that can steer playerbases!
They got a lot of criticism about that monochrome color pallette in FO3 and responded to that as they usually do, imho: bouncing in the complete opposite direction. :) I found the yellow and blue and red (all but literally) eye-popping accent colors pretty unbearable myself. Fortunately, it does have mod support, which every game might consider, so there are plenty of ENBs and texture packs to tone those accent colors down a bit. FO4 is not my favorite entry, but the game world itself is as extraordinary as always.
@@lrinfi 100%! The game itself its pretty good indeed, clocked a good amount of hours in it, but I wasn't sucked into the ambience like in the forementioned NV
I've been really thinking about this and about the fantasy we make on our mind about what the game would look, battling against starting a game with a genre or a camera perspective in my head.
For example, if we think to tell the story of a journalist, maybe really makes no sense to start with a template of space, to spend most of your time traversing a three-dimensional map to get to perform the fantasy of uncovering a plot. The idea of the epic climax falls short when you don't make up to moment-to-moment gameplay.
Maybe we try by default to gimmick Earth's many fronts. When we break down the fantasy of the game we make in our minds into steps, the resistance of the emotion we're trying to capture is revealed by what you do in those steps that make up that epic sample of space-time we imagine of the game. They should be consistent with your story, too.
It's always a joy to have your perspective, Tim. Thanks, as always.
What I always found useful and I've been doing it since I remember - in my D&D campaigns, I make the world interact with it self. People farm, gather stuff, transport it, trade, there are caravans organisations and as I'm working on a system in a next city, story starts forming around the mechanics and it's extremely satisfying when we play the story thats grounded in the world mechanics rather than having an isolated dungeon somewhere.
Miyazaki at Fromsoftware has said he does this in interviews. Where they start with a theme and build mechanics that fit within it. Or the opposite starting with a mechanic and allowing themes to naturally emerge from them.
He took a lot of inspiration from Ico. Which is probably even all these years later still the best ive seen meaningful mechanics implemented
in the original campaign of Neverwinter Nights, I started as a chaotic neutral character, but because I would always threaten people in order to get extra money at the end of quests, I ended up as full chaotic evil, no matter how much good I did to the world in the quests themselves. In the game ending, that lizard woman said I was a terrible person and I did everything for myself and blah blah blah.
Well this explains why i like Arcanum so much.
My favourite "color palette" example is a platformer called "Semblance". It's one of the best games I have ever played, people who played it loved it, but no-one ever does on their own because they just look at the color palette and go "Meh, looks good, but I'm not going to play it". Ironically I saw the creators' talk where they said that they chose it because they don't see anyone else use it.
Keep up the great work!
Thank you very much!
lol I don't know if you read these, but I just finished Outer Worlds. I knew you worked on it but didn't know you directed it. Anyway, I loved it. I think it's top 5 for me. The marketing really did you guys a disservice. I've played it twice, and this time, I loved it. I can only contribute that to the marketing and my mindset. Idk I was a different person when that game came out
I just beat Death Stranding, and its a very good example of this. Even simple things like doing big jumps, or walking over signs, reinforces your connection to BB. Or dying and appearing in The Seam.
I love love love the idea of how you approached wanting a party to have alignments that make sense, I feel that is something I can use in writing myself! Thanks Tim!
Tim's wearing the same shirt as last time to maintain continuity and minimize lore drift
I've had interesting discussions in recent months in the TTRPG space about this.
One of the mechanics in my TTRPG is that, whenever a player fails a roll to which their passion was applied, they get a demerit check, which is the inverse of an experience check. If you don't turn the demerit check back into an experience check, that particular passion runs the risk of going down, so in most cases, a player will try to regain the experience check.
There is a second mechanic called "linked passion"; this mechanic says that two passions treat each other's demerit checks as experience checks. In other words; if you fail doing one thing that you're passionate about, you have two choices; become disheartened and escape into a different passion, or face your feelings and potentially gain passion.
This simulating how people can end up inversely linking things in their mind and double down on some other intense feeling in order to not confront your disheartened they are about the time they failed.
I never understood the bioshock example. I've heard it before and I actually think they should have made the game even harder for saving the little sisters but I liked that I assumed I wasn't getting a mechanical benefit for saving them.
This really reinforced the story through game mechanics. I felt the world was bad enough and the one thing I had agency over made me feel better every time I saved them. The fact I wasn't getting a bonus to make me stronger was really interesting to me.
Ludonarrative dissonance is one of my favorite terms, totalbiscuit used to call it ludonarrative discobiscuits.
Not only were the little sisters really nice to you when you sparred them in Bioshock, but they also left gifts and extra stuff for you to find through out the levels. My impression has always been that you get more by saving them.
Unless you try both playthroughs ypu probably wont know. And avergae people wont even finish it once
I first played when I was a kid and I sacrificed EVERY little sister
Yeah I disagree with Tim on this one, I believe that the "thing" about at least the first game was asking will you succumb to being no better than a splicer or choose to keep that humanity and there was only dissonance with the story if you kind of let it be dissonant.
@@Dr.Mrs.Pancakes You monster!:D
@@hamtown4757 True, will you become a slave to Adam like everybody else, or rise above it.
Another amazing insightful video. Thank you, Tim!
Hi Tim! Thanks for being you. Fallout was one of the first things I installed on the first PC I built for college. I’m about to turn 40 and discovering a passion for software development. Your channel is a huge inspiration on so many levels!
I initially saw the title and thought "why couldn't the guy who fixes your car give story?"
Hi Tim. I love your videos. I got my first job after college as a manager about a year ago. I love hearing stories about your time as a manager while creating games, and having to make tough decisions. I would love to hear some of your takeaways about managing other people
All the games that give you the good ending only when you act a certain way, but they give you a plethora of immoral options, I love that.
Using mechanics for storytelling is one reason why ICO is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Ironically Bioshock Infinite has ludonarative dissonance in one central aspect which ICO prevents. There the story says save the girl but the girl is invincible and the enemies are more after you than her. It's the same story in ICO and mechanically the right way around. With the handholding mechanic, which is a dedicated button it brings it closer to that fantasy and even spoiler subverts that at the end. At so many places it tells you little stories via gameplay and you learn everything about the castle, the enemies, the villain via gameplay and behaviour, almost nothing is spelled out. Overall I think it's a perfect game.
I think bioshock did a fantastic job connecting its atom/plasmid/upgrade system to the setting
Thank you Tim for what you are doing. Your videos are a great source of inspiration.
An example of ludonarrative dissonance in a game: The first of those Tomb Raider reboots from about 12 years ago. The island everyone winds up on has this feeling of being deserted, man vs nature and all that. But at several points in the game, dozens of cannon fodder guys stream out of doors like they're getting out of a clown car so Lara Croft can mow them down. The game pretends to be a survival/exploration platformer with untrustworthy other humans on the island, but it's just an Uncharted clone right down to murdering waves of random dudes.
Where I find that extra stupid is early on in cutscenes, there's this tension of Lara having to hunt a deer vs fight off some wolves that might try to take the carcass from her. And the original Tomb Raider has primarily animals/monsters as enemies, so it would've fit with the series and with the story to have the game focus more on that. But nah, the game has the same boring flow as Uncharted, where you get a platforming sequence that's borderline automatic, then an arena where dozens of bad guys stream out of areas so you can kill em all.
Why do they force these automated sequences in so many games? Its not even better than cinematic but there are no mechanics to learn either.
This is my most profound gamplay-based storytelling experience:
I was playing Fallout. I found the water chip in Necropolis. I intended to repair their water system, but wasn't able to at the moment. I took the chip and intended to return later to fix it. I forgot about it. Next time I visited Necropolis, all the ghouls were wiped out. I was like "Oh shit, this is my fault!" I'll never forget this moment.
Thank you very much for the game making tips.
After learning that Mr Cain made Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum, both games that I sadly had bought boxed copies of but never got around to playing (that 'life' thing kept me too busy) way back in the day, I was SO happy to find both games on GoG and bought them instantly. Now I just gotta find time away from 'life' once again to finally give them both a try before I turn any greyer and balder!
Hey Tim I have a question:
If you were to start all over, say you're about 18 right now, what would you do with a career 2.0? Would you take the same route and work in AAA, would you try to direct games or choose to be a lead, would you go fully inde as a solo dev and collaborate as needed?
Given the massive power of tools these days and the availability of purchaseable assets...I'd probably go indie. I would at least TRY it. Solo developers and small teams can make such amazing games these days.
1:53 "radiation is bad, its deadly and all over the place."
Anakin: "I hate [radiation]. It's course and hard and gets everywhere."
Sorry, that's just what entered my head when you said that. Though it would give Anakin a better reaspn to hate tatooine if it was radioactive.
When he mentions color I remember instantly the piss filter in Deus EX Human Revolution and how good that game looks without it
How bad it looks without it.
One recent game where the ludonarrative dissonance was very apparent to me, but I don't think I've seen many people discuss, was Mass Effect: Andromeda. All of the characters who came on the journey with the player character from the Milky Way to the Andromeda galaxy were, supposedly, people who had signed up to be settlers and start a whole new life and found a new civilization in a new galaxy. Then some things go wrong at the beginning, and the situation is admittedly pretty bad, and tons of these explorers immediately peace out and become ruthless bandits and warlords overnight, complete with bases, weapons, and smuggling networks. Then the player character, who is also supposed to be an explorer, spends the entire game killing all of them, without any qualms about it. It bothered me the whole time I was playing the game, and every time you were forced to fight enemies who were bandits, and therefore also the player characters former colleagues on this venture, I thought to myself: well that's another settler dead; there are only a finite number of people who came on this journey and we're constantly being forced to kill half of them. Surely this won't have any adverse effects on the success of colonization effort.
4:52 Gods, yes, Arcanum was so good. Just reminiscing on these mechanics I'm considering another playthrough.
Hey Tim, I've had a blast replaying your games with all of the context you've provided. I'm also a huge fan of the commentary playthroughs in Portal 2 and Braid Anniversary Edition. I believe a commentary playthrough of Fallout or Outer Worlds would be awesome and something fans would love! Do you feel there is a demand for this and do you think we'll see more of this in the future? I hope so!
Dawn of War II Chaos Rising, a RTS wih some RPG mechanics, had a corruption meter for each character.. Each mission had a hard secondary objective that reduced corrupution and an easy secondary objective that corrupted. Corruption added some skills, and there was holy and cursed items. It also changed the second to last boss. All the narration was done through the main gameplay loop.
I think the lack of gameplay urgency for plot-urgency is one factor for ludonarrative dissonance.
You must save the princess before the dark warlock completes the ritual. By the way, farmer Joe lost his 12 chickens, can you help him? Fallout did it right with the countdown for the water chip (and later, the mutants).
This also happens at a more micro-level. Stealing is wrong, but even someone playing a Paladin might see himself looting bodies and searching crates for some coins or other valuables.
Its so stupid there is no countdown in cyberunk the whole story is about you going to die soon.
Would you be able to talk about your involvement in Stonekeep and your thoughts on the game? It’s one of my favorites, felt like it flew under the radar for most.
I’m a developer in a different industry and really enjoy your videos, thank you so much for making them!
Castles (1991) and Stonekeep (1995)
th-cam.com/video/-xkTHqrYr6U/w-d-xo.html
@@CainOnGames Thank you!
Tim out here using the mechanics of shirt-wearing to tie together different videos. Practice what you preach even on the basic levels!
As a TTRPG designer (or wannabe, since I still work on my first system) I have to concur. That is the reason why I think universal systems usually fall flat, since their mechanisms do not carry any narrative weight.
Universal systems only works if they are modular and receive further mechanics for different types games... or you just homebrew it 😂
Hi Tim, it's me everyone.
us
Hi bot, you are a bot
I feel this joke has run its course
@@JC_DentonI think its tradition by now
@austin0_bandit05 if you watch Rhykker he says "hey folks it's Rhykker." People always say "hey Rhykker it's folks."
Rhykker does Diablo news as well as game news in general.
Hey Tim! I was curious about how you decide to approach a story from a stepwise process - apologies if you've already talked about this elsewhere on the channel. Do you start with a setting? A character? A cool plot hook? What gets prioritized in the very beginning & how do you decide where to branch off from there?
Thank you for the absolute goldmine of a channel! An absolutely vital collection of masterclasses for anyone working in the space.
Vampyr did follow this kind of thinking. You can go full on vampire and make the mechanics easier or go for an extra challenge, changing how the game ends, but doesn't stop the player from finishing the storyline.
Have you ever experienced the opposite case that you really liked? When a piece of story/narrative is made around a game mechanic?
In KCD it's mentioned at the beginning that the favorite drink of the protagonist is "Saviour schnapps" which is how you learn the saving mechanism (you need to have at least 1 of those in your inventory, otherwise you can save only on exit). I suppose a lot of comedy and parody games also do this kind of thing, since this makes them kind of "self-aware".
Hey Tim, hope your having a good day. I'd like to ask a question, why do games no longer use objectives as a difficulty setting like Thief did. Personally I find it a better & more immersive way to do things instead of adding a million HP to everything, because the difficulty is now intertwined with the story and the game mechanics. Yet nowadays it seems very few games adopt that type of design.
If you mean games with quests that have a lot of optional objectives (or objectives with different ways to complete), the answer is money. The time involved to design, create, and test all of those options is a lot longer (and hence more expensive) than just putting a lot of hit points on a boss.
That's what I figured, thank you for taking the time to reply!
This is indeed quite important. I create a space combat/exploration game. My goal is to have a certain composition of things that create a coherent feeling. For example only kinetic weaponry, traveling through space is limited by fuel, ammo is required and finite, space ships can be customized to be better or worse when on travel for longer periods of time, and no energy weapons, no shields. Armor is relevant and requires different tactics to handle. This is meant to create the feeling that when you start to move out, you are set a certain way, and have to handle things with what you have. Combat is kinetic and for larger ships lengthy, ships are supposed to blast each other like mad, and from a distance where the enemy is well visible. Enemies do not just spawn out of nowhere, and if an enemy arrives, it's because he flew over from his previous location. Resources and items have to be transported by somebody from one place to another. The world is globally a single universe. It's supposed to convey a realistic and futuristic feeling, in which players can alter the world.
On the other side death is not punishing - you just lose your cargo. Ammo and FTL fuel is free to restock in stations (both act as stat-based resources). When you log out, you are phase-shifted and thus invulnerable. Relatively early you can build a small space station that is your home. And all players have PSI that enhances their ships, and thus combat against NPCs. These are the compromises I have to do in order to improve gameplay.
I may not even put much emphasis on PvP, because coop PvE might be much more enjoyable. Meaning you can literally not attack other players, because PvP piracy may overall be bad for the game. Sitting with your buddy in the same ship will grant some passive boosts and allow him to do copilot activities (abilities). Or you both each have a ship. Or your buddy is docked in your ship and is launched on combat.
I believe this game is based on all of its part to function in tandem in order to be "whole." Right now I am working on the networking part, and I am 90% done. The level of optimization is crazy, but should ensure I can host tens of thousands of players, or scale up easily as needed.
I'm glad you brought up ludonarrative dissonance. The example that always comes to my mind is Mass Effect, which is what first brought the concept to my attention. In the first ME game, the lore tells you that the personal force fields (or shields) that surround most characters only protect from fast-moving projectiles such as those from standard small arms, meanwhile things like melee attacks and heat and acid and explosives ignore said shields and damage you directly. The lore even gives an example for why "slow" stuff does not get deflected by these shields: so that people can sit down without flinging their chairs across the room. This was consistent with the gameplay. But this was entirely dropped from the gameplay in the sequels even though the lore still said that's how shields worked. I always thought that was a bummer, not just from the jarring discrepancy, but also because it took away an element of gameplay choice. In ME1, there was a trade-off between choosing armor upgrades that gave you extra shields VS extra damage resistance because more shields might be better overall but it had absolutely no affect on certain enemies. To me it always felt like dumbing down the gameplay so that the player didn't have to think about certain things, but thinking is part of the fun!
Mass Effect mention compels me to bring up that the original game built weapon overheat into lore and then 2 dropped it in favour a more action approach (players like reloading I guess). As much I have enjoyed all those games, I'm probably gonna always be a lil salty about some of the design decisions made with 2 lol.
@@HelFrostKara Being salty about thermal clips is my default setting. They justified it in-universe with nonsensical "geth math", even though ME1 already had frictionless materials which turned overheating into a physical impossibility at later levels. The heat sinks were stated to be able to fire thousands of rounds before needing replacement, but the ME2 change turned ammo into a logistical nightmare. Nobody would wanna take their one-shot sniper rifle and also carry 30 extra blocks of ammo for 30 shots when they could just carry one magazine beforehand.
The change to reloading was apparently because they (either BioWare or EA) wanted to be more like Gears Of War and other popular cover shooters.
@@BradTheAmerican The overheat also feels more of RPG thing which I would have liked to see them build on that system.
With overheat you maybe able to build a character around sniping (you know like an RPG) where as with thermal clips, well now it's a power weapon with limited use.
That’s actually something I’m focusing on for a platform.
I think a lot about mechanics-as-lore -- when you create mechanics, at especially certain kinds of mechanics, you are defining how the world works. As much as a love the series, this is one problem I have with the Elder Scrolls series; how magic, and especially enchanting, works varies between the games, leaving the sense the setting as a whole lacks a consistent reality (and not just in the officially declared ways relating to timelines).
That is why the security update of getting rid of omnigel in ME2 being cannon is so cool. Also the weapons started using thermal clips I guess someone in the game commented about it too.
literaly the equivalent change for fullmetal alquemist
I don't feel the same way about the Little Sisters in Bioshock, I personally never even thought about consuming them because yes, you get more adam but what is the point? I didn't know they would leave gifts behind but knowing that I saved them was enough reward for me personally.
I personally love how the mechanics of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 reinforce their respective universe and I really, really miss them in the modern iterations like Elden Ring.
Arx Fatalis is another game I loved even if the magic mechanic was yank, it is still a game I love deeply.
I bought Arcanum a long time ago and I plan on playing it once I'm done clearing my backlog, the hype is real!
Hey Uncle Tim,
Who is your favorite Batman?
Who is your celebrity crush?
Could you whip together a couch co-op game?
What's your favorite chocolate recipe?
Who framed Rodger Rabbit?
Hi Tim! How do you feel about puzzles in games, how difficult should they be, how much help should you give as the developer?
The funniest thing in red dead redemption 2 is how I killed hundreds of people and then before I finished the story I just started greeting random strangers and that made my honor go up and got the good guy ending
Hey tim, quick unrelated question, do you know what the lip straps on super mutants were for?
The part about the color palette is the main reason why my wife hates watching me play Fallout - and part 4 is not even as bad as 3. So I totally get it.
Interstate '76
Pathologic
Darkwood
I’ve seen the video where you talk about small game mechanics that you really love, is there any mechanics you see in games that immediately turn you off or away from a game?
Oof Tim, this video came at the bad time, so now I have to rant.
I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 right now and the gameplay is textbook definition of ludo-narative dissonance. The story is cool, the world is beautiful and the gameplay is hellova fun, but they simply don't mesh.
Just a couple of days ago I did a big quest (not going to spoil which, those who know know) where I was helping a character escape the city. They faint near the end and we have to carry them the last stretch of the road to the ship which will lead them away. At the very entrance we meet another character who points a gun at me and demands I give them the character I'm helping. If I refuse they shoot me in the head. The only way to finish the quest is for me to shoot them to death in a dialogue decision.
So what's the problem?
I TANKED A MOTHER FUCKING ATTACK CHOPPER'S BARRAGE JUST 5 MINS AGO IN THIS SAME QUEST! That person's pistol shot would barely scratch my hp! Not only that, I have cyber implant that in practice slows time for everyone but me, so I can easily drop the person I'm carrying and disable the enemy without killing them. But the dev team decided they wanted an epic showdown and forced my hand, which really pissed me off and soured my enjoyment of the game (let me point out this quest wasn't the only example of devs taking control of my character for the sake of story, it was just the most egregious).
Rant over.
A lot of games with relatively tanky player or massive stat scaling avoid doing any shit liek that or have a superweapon for that purpose. Its really jarring when they could not think of a better solution than "small guns are lethal in cutscenes"
When you talk about ludonarrative dissonance I recently played fallout 4 (yes, because of the show) and thought it was funny how gung ho the BoS are with their stance on synths, but here I am now a sentinel in their order while romancing a synth, my mentor that I convinced the elder to spare a synth, and a synth child that will never grow up acting as my son. I know you could say that I made those choices myself, but the fact that they don't care and it isn't really reflected in the world either (pretty sure Danse is kill on sight afterwards though, so there is that.) just takes me out of caring for any kind of roleplay decision. Then my character just ends up as a weirdo two-faced psychopath. But hey, that's probably just a me issue.
Kingdom Hearts is amazing at this. In my eyes this is the ultimate narrative device.
(Edit: Also fighting games)
I will say to add-on, Fallout additionally had the Pip-Boy, which was brilliant in retrospect. It simultaneous was a in universe object that also acted as your UI. While that conceptually isn’t groundbreaking TODAY, for the time fallout came out I would argue that was QUITE groundbreaking.
Then Bethesda took it and ran with it making it an INENGINE on your wrist device. One of the really REALLY good things they did. Only thing better about it would be if the game world was moving at real time when using your pip-boy, but then being real time not turn based, that would quickly turn into a horror game like dead space.
I especially love how they blended your original fallout pipboy 2000, to create the fallout 76 pipboy 2000 Mk VI. I don’t know if you’ve seen that one but it pays heavy homage to the original pipboy.
Mr Cain, do you have any thoughts to share on breadth vs. depth in worldbuilding or other elements of game design, if you haven't got a video on it already? Thank you for your wisedom.
i really like inscryption for this
It’s funny, this was my main complaint with Outer Worlds. The idea that the food is bad so society will collapse failed to land effectively for me. If you’re starving, you die in days - not years. Luckily the flaw mechanic solved this in my 2nd playthrough. I always get a food addiction now. In my head cannon, the food problem is a lack of needed micronutrients like iron and vitamins. Makes it way more immersive
Ludonarrative concerns are probably my biggest personal obsession within design. I know that my absolute favorite positive example from the last several years is Prey (rest in peace, Arkane Austin), but what are some of everyone else's favorite positive examples from the last several years?
there is no underwater breathing mechanic in a huge underwater area in one certain game and everyone is happy about it, because it gives the player the feeling of water being welcoming and loving like a mother, instead of a being a threat and anxiety inducing. using mechanics for storytelling is cool , but only if it is needed by the setting and the feeling you are trying to emphasize.
Curious what game this is?
Exploration game I guess? If that was a survivap game that would be pretty out of place. Also depending on how much the diving segment drags out.
@@TapirMaskif I tell you, you won’t take me seriously
There's no planet where a underwater segment is welcoming in my eyes.
6:00, Tim I would disagree here. Bioshock kind of wastes the system of "will you save the cute little girl or violently kill her for marginal benefit?" since overall, saving all of them nets you much more powerful boons in the end. Also the game isn't terribly difficult, so you really have to go out of your way to pick the "selfish" path.
anyway, great vid.
Thanks, Tim!
Dad joke time: Making mechanics do the storytelling is just taking jobs away from the good storytellers!
Hi Tim
This is something that I think 'Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons' did particularly well... it managed to tie the controls into the narrative _and_ gameplay in a way I find truly brilliant, although it's impossible to talk about it without spoiling the game.
On a related note, how do you feel about the use of controlers and m/kb on PC?
Do you ever wish you could go back and change the controls for a game to make them more accesible or facilitate different ways of playing?
Do you think game controls have reached their 'final form'?
I liked The Glow, but I kinda wish that the Rad-X drug wasn't so effective. You could just pop two doses of Rad-X and get enough radiation resistance to breeze through The Glow.
But i'm a game mechanics masochist that enjoys really hard and deadly challenges in games so I may not be of the same mindset as the majority audience. 😄
I've been put off by colour palettes but not necessarily bc of story reasons, simply bc the I found it comfortable to look at. Mostly if a game appears too orange, oddly, like Far Cry 2 and (initally) Doom (2016) (but eventually I powered through that bc it is fun).
I always thought the way Souls games handle death is a brilliant example of this. Sekiro re-interprets it just as well too.
As Tim mentioned the color palette influencing some players' enjoyment of a game, an aspect I noticed late in my video-game player "history" came to mind.
That's the fact that I objectively get quite a lot more enjoyment from games set in the bright outdoors than I do from mainly dark dungeon/indoor featuring titles.
This thing happens to me in "shades of gray" too, when the same game set in a tropical weather environment is a lot more pleasurable to me than it'd be in a northern/icy-weather setting (beloved Assassins' Creed Black Flag VS the hated Assassins' Creed Rogue is a clear example of this for me).
It's for this phenomenon that I cannot force myself to even try out acclaimed classics like Bloodborne or the Diablo series' games.
I think this is pretty weird for gamers, who typically spend most of their free time indoor, often in the dark, watching a video screen.
I was wondering how many other video game players are affected by this sort of "virtual meteoropathy".
Thanks for your videos!
BTW
TH-cam guys: please go back to comments in the big space and video thumbnails on the right side!
The comments' section is a part of the video experience, you're supposed to know that VERY well.
... Edit: Thanks TH-cam guys!
I never liked tunnels in games, as a kid I used to get lost all the time.
Now I know my problem was art in the level, when everything looks the same it's confusing. I need landmarks or differentiation to understand where I am in any map, I think Prey (2017) did well in making the space station easy to navigate (a space station is just a big tunnel relay).
i really dislike snowy maps in games, but I enjoyed Ori Will O Wisp's snow level cuz it had a beautiful contrasting orange sunset background so everything just popped, compared to typical monochrome snowy levels. though weirdly I actually enjoy monochrome grey/brown ish ruins and dungeon aesthetics a lot especially if they're super misty, it's just the snowy places I usually end up disliking.
Bloodborne is a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece tho you should definitely give that a go if you can
I actually prefer AC Rogue over Black Flag, but not by much. I still have my issues with that frachise as a whole. Winter scenarios feels slightly less inhospitable than very hot summers to me.
@@diewott1337
Did I just met my nemesis? (LOL!)
... You seem to be affected in the opposite way,
but at least I'm not the only one who is influenced by the in-game climate situation.
I like games in snowy settings because I enjoy cold weather and it never snows where I live, so it's a kind of escapism
I love you Tim 😭❤
Hi Tim, I'd like to hear your thoughts about creativity and how it relates to making games and where does it come from and where does it fit in the dev process + thoughts in general. You must have met a lot of creative people in your time I expect you'd have some thoughts to share on it. If you ever make a video on that subject, name it simply Creativity so that it has a higher chance to show up when people type the word in.
I like your videos and more people should watch them, many of your vids are interesting even beyond gamedev, the ones I enjoyed the most (on average) were those where you talked about more general experiences or insights.
Thanks for reading if you did and sorry for the length, time is precious.
Bioshock little sisters is a bad example, because the choice and consequences are consistent with the narrative. It's harder to balance all the mechanics and outcomes while still being consistent to the world building. That's why Fallout 1 worked, and why New Vegas is a bit weird in its world design sometimes, it tries to fit every skill in when it doesn't make sense. One of the best examples of ludo narrative dissonance is the Tomb Raider series, Lara narratively struggling with taking lives, but in gameplay being the goddess of death.
Hey Tim, would love to see what you’re thoughts are on the fallout Fixt mod and all the improvements and changes it makes to the game, curious to see what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you wish they’d have done instead of something they did do or is it a pretty faithful rendition of your vision of fallout. Thanks Tim stay safe, stay kind. Love hearing all your stories mate. Love from Australia. 🇦🇺 ✌🏻
Hi Tim 👋
I want to know whats the difference from a gamedev perspective of developing a first person view game vs third person view game
What are it's advantages vs disadvantages and what made you choose first person only for outer worlds
Thanks for answering 😊
I’m guessing the color palette mention seems like kind of a jab at the Xbox 360 era of games, most games had a very specific color palette to them, lot of grays, browns, oranges…
Hi Tim, any opinion on how the Souls games tie their mechanics into the world? It's a very essential part of their design.
Hey Tim. Can you turn on "super thanks"? Whenever I listen to one of these videos, I think "I'd pay for content like this!" and then I find out that I can't!
I appreciate the sentiment! I have never heard of “super thanks”, but I will look into it. As long as it’s 100% optional and not something that TH-cam will nag my viewers about, I’ll turn it on.
Thank you!
I use TH-cam on my phone and the super thanks is completely optional (just one of the buttons above the comments) and the platform does not in any way tell me to do it. Not sure if it's that way for everyone, though.
I didn't even know that feature had a name until now, it's quite optional.
I found the setting and turned it on. Let's see how this goes.
Hey Tim I listened to Gabe Newell on creating Half Life, he said one of the most important parts of making a game is making the player feel like their choices have transient effects. To what degree should this ideology be pursued?
Any thoughts on the game pass format versus buying games individually versus-verusus buying games physically?
See also Soren Johnson’s “Theme is Not Meaning”
Im not arguing with Tim but in BioShock I never considered killing the little sisters on my first playthrough even though it seemed (though doesn't really) like you got a worse outcome. It literally never crossed my mind at any point that i would do it just because it made me more powerful. Maybe because in the long term it doesn't actually matter it didn't feel like I'd made a "good" or "bad" choice. I just didn't want to kill kids. I totally accept the ludonarrative dissonance of the game now I'm older and have played it more than once and thought about it more. At the time though I don't remember picking any option that gave me something better for doing something "bad". Maybe that's the point I guess.