14:35 That's a brilliant insight. I call it "Disengage". That said, here's an insight I have learned over many years: the phrase "I don't care" usually goes over poorly, even though almost everyone uses it the same way and "should" understand that "I don't care" is not "bad". There is a simple solution: change "care" to "mind". The phrase "I don't mind" is softer. It can sound a bit odd in some circumstances, but it is communicatively functional. "Where should we go for dinner?" "I don't care" sounds harsher than "Where should we go for dinner?" "I don't mind", even though it sounds a bit weird.
Can I just say, what a breath of fresh air this channel has been! Not just because it's nice to listen to a veteran game developer saying it straight (heh) about his past projects, but also because these cozy, almost quaint, channels feel very rare on TH-cam! Thanks for keeping up with posting videos, Tim!
I don't remember who it's from, but there's a quote I really like: "the worst thing that can happen to a game designer is be part of a successful game, because they might start to think they had something to do with it"
Thanks for sharing. I have worked over 15 years in the industry as an artist (started in QA and my last job was as Lead Artist), and your part about people always shifting blame to others and never taking accountability for the failures of the project really resonated with me (I have seen it while doing interviews the most). In the same way that when you offer feedback or critique someone's work, they act defensively and gives you the "well it is meant to look like that on purpose" or "It's just my style". My advice to any aspiring artists, is to never, ever act defensive, instead take the feedback with a thank you, and try to really understand their point of view. The day you stop accepting creative feedback is the day you stop growing as an individual.
I love this video, examining failure is something I think about a lot. I also think it's extremely common that people don't know why they were successful if they're the pioneers of something. What I learned was being truly good at something requires studying it more, even if you love it and people tell you you're awesome at it. Otherwise it results in spending 100% of the time just creating things, but 0% studying the craft. It'd be like thinking you could code an inventory system just because you've written a lot of if-else statements before, or that you're good at sketching horses without a horse reference just because you've sketched a lot of humans. I thought I was great at writing short stories just because I knew how to do "yes and" subtly (I did a lot of improv and D&D growing up), but writing long-form stories was extremely tiring. I never bothered with "beginning, middle, end" outlines, thinking they stifled creativity. Never knew the nuances of writing techniques like "Setup and Payoff". All that would've helped massively. It probably felt easier doing quests in Fallout or Arcanum, because they're lots of little stories in an already well-established universes you can explain in one sentence ("A post-apocalyptic retrofuture 50's", "Magick & Technology with orcs and elves"). And once everyone's agreed on the main overarching stories, you can be creative as you want. You rarely need to add new quests that effect parts of the storyline or other quests, and when you do, it's easiest to keep it small scale and change just some little parts of it to make the game feel more open-ended. I think also the games were products of their time: you are free to do all this with no fully mocapped actor or voice lines needed, just write dialog and have sprites move around.
Arcanum has the best manual of any game I've ever seen. Including the block sliding on an inclined plane and how it was effected by magic was absolutely genius!
I'm a little late to the party here, but to be honest the bugs were one of the things that attracted me to fallout in the first place (I started at 3 and worked my way back). Full crashes aren't fun, but I find it incredibly entertaining when a game glitches in a way that is not game-breaking. Part of the reason I love Bethesda is for their backwards-flying dragons, inhuman character model glitches, and ragdoll physics gone wrong. you can say that it's objectively bad, but if it worked perfectly as intended I'd like them less. I love games that let me do more, that allow me to interact with the world in ways that make sense, and of course anything that in-depth is going to get some wires crossed, and when they do cross it's usually pretty funny.
Really looking forward to the Arcanum video you teased in this (related to the subject of "not everybody has the same vision of the game" aside). I was one of your beta testers for that. Really loved the community and the development of that title.
At the end of all these videos, I find myself saying aloud "thanks Tim" -- not even "thanks, Tim Cain"; only "Tim". That's a testament to how much these videos are helping people. So, thank you, Tim, for all of it.
Yup. Being okay with failure is a hard lesson to learn cause we’re taught to only desire success and to avoid failure at all costs even though it’s impossible to avoid failing sometimes. It’s okay to mess up if you learn from it and take that knowledge forward.
I think this might be one of my favourite videos from you. What you said at the end is very quotable too. Helps keep you grounded in what you're doing and helps you pay attention to your successes and failures. Especially the failures.
Regarding the sense of ownership of decisions in a project, David Fincher communicated it well in that ultimately you take authorial credit for everything including failures. It eliminates members of a team wanting to be involved in a fair weather fashion - the risk being the potential loss of great direction from those who do have a strong ego.
Hey! I started playing Outer Worlds this week and it's so good! Combat is fun, I love the popping colors, Parvati is written so fcking well! Loving it already and I'm still in the first few quests. And I'm gonna overthrow space capitalism or die trying!
Remember that you can kill anyone. Not saying you will, but if there’s a character you really don’t like, there’s nothing stopping you. No “essential NPCs” here :p
Lots of good lessons here. At their heart, video games are art, and art is by definition subjective. As you mentioned, this will make some people cranky because they believe that their opinions are facts. It 'feels' better if you believe you are defending an objective fact in a disagreement. I am right, and you are wrong. No 'feelings' about it. This position will kill creativity, and thus, will kill art. Working in a team to accomplish anything can be hard. Working in a team that creates art is almost immune to any attempt to objectively define any part of the process. It works, or it doesn't. The word that is used in my field of art (music) is chemistry. You can't fake chemistry. You have it, or you don't. You can't make a plan for it. There are times you will have FABULOUS artistic chemistry with people you might not think that you even LIKE very much, and times that you can't create with people you love and respect. Thus, the beauty of a team (or a band). Treasure those people you can create with. Protect them. Reward them generously. Do all you can to stick together. Chemistry actively avoids attempts to duplicate it with 'replaceable' 'plug & play' pieces. Keep doing what you are doing. In this guy's opinion, you've made a TON of great stuff (yes, ToEE is great) and The Outer Worlds is one of the BEST and most COMPLETE games to come out over the last decade, and right up there (in my opinion) as one of the best you've been involved in making. Rock on. Create art. Have fun. :)
Hey Tim, Thanks for your work. I've enjoyed Fallout and Fallout 2 a ton even though I was an infant on release. I'm not a dev or any other related field but I appreciate your stories on team management and trying to be a good leader at work.
The courage and presence of mid to analyze and learn from one's own failure is all too rare in general. Wish they teach you this in school instead of just giving participation trophies left and right.
Really enjoying this channel and the content. I’ve always enjoyed watching your older talks and interviews since becoming a classic Fallout fan. Always excited to see what new topics and discussions you share, esp with the classic Fallout guys. It’s really neat to get into the weeds on that game and others. Appreciate your contribution to games and your insight/experience. Hope you have a good one! (Btw I think Fallout 1 is hands down the best entry in the series, and my personal favorite. Nothing beats it’s tone and mood. So dark, so dire, it’s perfect. Well done Tim, can’t wait to see what projects you have coming in the future.)
I'm so grateful for these videos you've been uploading. As someone studying illustration, I'm finding myself looking for knowledge I can extrapolate and apply to my own practice. Recovering from major surgery and these videos have been great company :-)
Absolutely loving all your stuff. Thought i'd leave a comment at this point when i have been watching a plethora of your videos! I don't have as many years under my belt in the industry as you do but when i was ever invited to talk as an alumni to new game dev students i used to give a talk about all my failures and what i learned from them and there has been plenty of them :D
Games take a long time to make and are expensive, it's hard to fail a couple times to learn from it. I've failed at designing software systems, though, which I then had to redo. Cost much less and maybe learned more than just how to do that system better. Thank you for sharing!
Personally i would say a game as a product, at least in a public debate is a product of craft, thus it's fair to judge it as a whole. In a same way that you could buy a brand new ferrari with a wonky engine, when it runs it's the best car ever - except it rarely runs. If someone has an use case of only using it to drive to a church every sunday then yeah, it may work well for them specifically but it would still objectively be a bad car as a whole. In terms of games i think the technical state works like multiplier, if i were to ship the best game ever which doesn't boot at all, then even if the possible subjective entertainment score is over 9 million, it still gets multiplied by a zero, thus the final score is predictable. People have different use cases and "pain threshold" but looking from outside there are aspects which can be objectively quantified.
Not to blow smoke but I also thought of Temple as a great game, but I agree that the dialogue is weak. But maybe from having played so many tabletop games like Shadowrun, DnD, Rifts etc. I always thought of the dialogue as sort of placeholder for your own imagination. This is terribly short sighted but having a turn based 3.5 system was just so great to me. Maybe especially from working as a nurse but I rather learn wrong than perform right ignorantly. Within parameters of course and hopefully not on a living person. Doing something right and not knowing why it's right is just a setup for disaster. Love all the insight you provide here.
It felt like The Outer Worlds was made for me! I loved it from the moment I bought it, and played it through twice without a break, and I've played it again since then, and am just replaying New Vegas, and then I'll play it again. Don't play it with lots of different builds or anything - I just play as good a person as the game allows me to be. Loved peacemaking on Monarch - my proudest moment in the game! It helped that I thought Sanjar was a fantastic character. Before I retired, I had an assistant who supported/mocked me in just the same way Celia did with Sanjar, so their relationship was very recognisable ;-) But... I didn't care for the colour pallet - too much magenta for my taste. And I didn't like the armours available - everyone seemed to wear strips of cloth like sarongs, and I never saw the point of that. I just had my team in hooded long coats, and for myself, I wore as near to cowboy clothes as I could find. (I'm feeling better in FNV now I have Joshua Graham's armour - goes well with a cowboy hat and sunglasses!) As you say, it is all a matter of taste. Still love the game!
If a crash-prone game is enjoyable in spite of that extremely disruptive problem, it means it is really, really good. I would say that proves a game is objectively good, as opposed to objectively bad. Some people have very narrow perspectives and lose sight of what is actually fun in games, and life itself. They let technicalities ruin a good time that they would otherwise enjoy if they did something as simple as save their game more often. Nobody ever said, "Wow, do you remember how fun the stability of that game was?"
Thanks for the videos Tim, if you can please show at least a glance of some of your notebooks, I also take daily notes of everything and I would love to just have a quick peek of that.
About the “bad game” argument. We can say that a good game that crashes a lot is a good game, but good game doesn’t necessarily mean good product. When I see a good game (especially AAA pricey games) that has stability issues, predatory micro transactions, poor optimization… for me that is a bad product and I will not spend money on something like that. And the bottom line is that a game is often judged by how well it sold.
Its weird, I loved Temple of Elemental Evil, specially the village. It had such a vibe, brought me back to playing Baldurs Gate 1. The animations, the music, the combat was really fun too. Not so much the temple itself, but the open areas were so beautiful.
Learning from failure is such a hard concept to use. I know that failure is the best teacher, but it’s still really difficult to put myself into situations where failure is a significant possibility. The first step is always the hardest.
In regards to people who insist that their subjective opinion is objective, I think it is never about the objective truth. "Subjective opinion" is seen as less valid, and so they just want to be labeled "objective." I would usually have to triple assure them that their opinion is "valid and no one can take away" for them to get over it. lol
I’m convinced that learning is only possible after a failure. You need to be wrong to adopt new behavior by learning, else there is no learning involved whatsoever.
Hah! I use that exact phrase to explain peoples' behaviors. "Everyone is the hero in their own story." It's a very good thought experiment to understand some of the dumbest shit I've seen people do. :)
What one person's nitpick can be another person's deal-breaker, but for that person who's deal-breaker it is, they might not even notice it in another game When I really enjoy a game, I don't even notice the things that bother me to no end in other games It's pretty interesting
I love when games have specific narrative and dialogue for failure states that are more interesting than the success state. inXile's torment had a bunch of that. Dumb dialogue always felt like success at being dumb though haha
An important corollary to "everyone is the hero to their own stories" is that we tend to define other people by the bad things they do but we provide excuses to ourselves when we do them. If someone bumps me without apologizing, he's an asshole. He was born an asshole and he'll die an asshole. But if I do it, it was an outlier. I had a bad idea, I didn't see him, I've grown since then, and so on.
You can learn and personally grow up almost only from negative experience, not from positive. I aways wrote and said about that, but with culture of toxic positivity in society this is a topic which people do not want to discuss. It is rarely discussed, like topics of suicide or pretty common wishes to not exist at all, for example, and other essential problematics. Anyway, good talk, Tim. All the best.
When Fallout 1 was released in 1997 I was 7 years old. However, I did not play it or even know it existed until 2014 when GOG gave it away for free. I am here to say, I am the sole reason for that game's success. Everything that is Fallout and its positive reception and revenue and marketability? All me. No need to thank me.
I might have mentioned this before but I didn't find characters or writing in ToEE bad, it was good enough at least :D the game combat though was pretty hard though. Otherwise, that's a very valuable topic you brought up in this video, thank you.
Speaking of great games that you would play despite their shortcomings. I first played Arcanum when I was young and inexperienced with computers on a rather middle ground Celeron something that was initially used in some office before ending up in our home. Every single tile of the ground in the game had two black triangles covering 95% of its bottom half and every big facade art piece had the same black rectangle around it, so from the height of my current experience I can at least guess that it had something to do with video drivers not handling transparency properly. And I also remember my friend who was the only one in our friend group experienced with computers back then suggesting that it was an audio card problem. Which we then bough and it did not fix the problem. In fact, we could not even install it because the computer did not have the slot for it. Adding -no3d to the executable probably could have fixed it... But yeah. I have still played alot of Arcanum on that machine despite the graphics and (at least for some part of it) the lack of any sound.
Hey Tim, just wanted to post a comment saying that while I know you don't consider yourself a gifted dialogue writer, you're an extremely good story-teller. You, of course know that many content creators use edits and cuts in their videos, meanwhile you do a single-take almost 19 minute video and convey an easily followed, interesting stories regularly. Give yourself some props for that!
I actually really enjoyed Temple besides the bugs. I think I've liked every game you have worked on Tim. Can't say that about like... MOST people in game Dev.
Let's be real here, crashes and bugs have not stopped amazing games, especially new groundbreaking games that are unique. I've played and seen others playing buggy, crashy games, like dayz, pubg, tarkov, Mount & Blade... Crashing NEVER means a game is bad or good. It just means it's broken/unfinished
I admit I never got around to playing Temple of Elemental Evil because I was only 9 when it came out, and I don't know if retroactively the critic scores have improved, but right now on Metacritic it's at 71 with a 78 user score. That's pretty good! Clearly other people liked it too!
Learning from a mistake is an important thing in life for sure. As for objectivity it reminds me of a tv series i once watched (cant remember but may have been the good wife) where the judge wants the lawyers to add the line "in my opinion" after every statement they make. Ofc it is in their opinion who else? Fallout is a great game. Arcanum is a great game. If noone else likes Arcanum it doesnt matter to me. I love playing it. I love the world. The dialogue. The skills, stats. If the whole world loved outer worlds i still dont like it. It doesnt matter if everyone else think it is better than sliced bread. We can say if Fallout created an IP that has entertained millions or not. But that doesnt make me love Fallout more or less. If I had to pick the best settings in all of entertainment id pick Fallout and Arcanum (with Fallout being nr 1 just a tiny bit above). In my opinon. Or is it objective absolute truth? Maybe. Yeah probably....no wait im only human so I guess i cant share the opinions of billions of people. Luckily only i have to be entertained when i play so what they think doesnt matter one bit.
I'd argue some of the charm Arcanum might come from that "too many cooks" turmoil. That game blew my mind for player choice, if my epitaph required a top 5 it would be in it. It sounds like it was very tumultuous, but very potentially instructive.
I think it was just Temple that was too niche, if it were a setting LOTR, for example, it would have much more attention And of course, if it came out initially in the state to which it is now brought with patches and modifications
It's about the team, David Brevik commented about it wisely years ago, back when Diablo 3 was released and perceived to be a disappointment, he was asked about what made Diablo 1 and 2 especial, he said: they had a lot of luck that that particular team came together and worked on these games and only years later he would recognize how magical and rare that was. So "you are only as good as the last game you made" as director is kinda of a useless, overly simplified way of seeing things executives adopt. The myth of "great leader" is true in these cases. Unless you are an indie solo developer and made 100% of your game you can't really answer for the magic of that game.
To support this theory, David Brevik himself, I think just 2 or years ago released a new indie game made 100% solo (the guy is a beast), the name is "It Lurks Bellow" and he was a bit disappointed with the game sales. Although I liked the game, the Diablo magic is not there. There is so much that goes into a game to make it what it is, and when everything is right, the code, the art, the SEs, the music, then you have a great game.
Good day Mr.Cain. Has you ever heard or even see mods for Fallout, like Sonora or Fallout of Nevada? What's your opinion about them? Will you play it in your free time?
Tbf.. ik skyrim (cant remember if oblivion morrowind did it too) still gives you experience in lockpicking even if you break the pick. Cant really think of other examples atm tho
"Everyone's the hero of their own story." Not sure development studios and publishers have noticed that the "Hero's Journey" storyform is not quite as popular in the West as it once was. In respect to video games, most RPGs are structured around the Hero's Journey form of storytelling, placing the player in the shoes of the hero, of course, and so many players just don't want that. They want their character to be an oridinary citizen living in Cyrodiil or Skyrim or the 'Outer Worlds' or Middle Earth...well, you get the idea. Ergo, partially why alternate start mods and the like are so popular. What if my character doesn't want to be the Dragonborn? What if s/he just wants to camp out in the woods and practice an arcane art or something? Development studios are struggling with that change in public attitudes, I think. Well, if we don't make the player or their character the hero of the story, how does the player or character fit into the story? That kind of thing. That's why "the Lone Wanderer" worked so incredibly well. From Software has come up with a unique solution. Well, your character, regardless of class, is the "Chosen Undead" or the "Tarnished" or some other Everyman character, so go out there and...do...whatever. :) Maybe not ideal, but if it works for From's games, y'okay.
@@gageriddle1681 good point. Skyrim did have a couple of instances where failure contributed but not all skills had similar treatment. Personally I would like to see advancement systems that requires both success and failure to advance (some table top RPGs do that).
With Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, and with them being the current license holder, do you think that you may have a chance to work on either a sequel or remake of Arcanum?
There's no such thing as a "bad game"? There have to be *some* objectively bad games out there, which may include some game-breaking bugs. They may even sell quite well, people will buy anything.
Tim is talking about stuff we see all the time on TH-cam and elsewhere. Someone will say to themselves, "I can't stand playing a game that doesn't run at 120 FPS on Ultra settings, ergo you shouldn't be able to stand it, either." That kind of thing. I do think an objective consensus can be arrived at for things like specific design decisions that development studios might want to pay attention to. For example, actual player critiques of Elden Ring have pointed out that some of the boss designs "just weren't fun" or were "boring" because they made the player stand around and wait for a boss to complete an extremely long combo chain before they could sidle in for even a single hit, especially if playing a melee build. They provided reasons why From might want to take that into consideration when designing bosses for future titles. If I were Hidetaka Miyazaki and even longtime Soulsborne fans are saying that, I would certainly think it should be, especially if they're trying to reach a wider audience. From's games demand (and perhaps even teach) patience, but if you have a family or work/school tomorrow or are dealing with pressing real life issues, maybe you don't have the time or patience to spare. I haven't finished Elden Ring; I've no desire to finish Elden Ring; and I will never finish Elden Ring because it's late-game balance issues are just not something I want to deal with, but I wouldn't go around saying it's a terrible game because it isn't.
There should be a supercut for people who watch these videos for educational reasons and not for chill video to play while doing something else reasons. Cutting the repetitions between videos for example.
The crashing points reminds me of my experiences when Cyberpunk launched. Oddly didn't have too many game breaking crashes and saved the game alot and loved playing it thoroughly multiple times. Yet the outrage was loud indeed as we all know. Also thank you for all the videos you make. I love watching them all!
The thing you're saying about good and bad rings true for me. I had a lot of fun with BF5 and Cyberpunk 2077. In fact, I thought cyberpunk 2077 was amazing, even at release. All of my friends panned it and didn't buy UT though simply because it was said to be buggy.
I did not enjoy most of Cyberpunk on release. Not because "bugs bad", but because the gameplay and open world felt incomplete, I was satisfied neither by the action nor RPG aspects, and a lot of the bugs did take the fun out of the gameplay and wrecked immersion. But I'll never say someone is *wrong* for enjoying the game or saying "it's a good game"
As a developer, I have to disagree with you on the crashing bit, Tim. I get what you're trying to say: That the rest of the game 'without' the crashing can still be good, and you're right. But that isn't what games are. Unless you make them purely for yourself, games are a 'product'. They are a combined experience for an end user. If a game crashes "a lot," which is to say "too much," then the experience is constantly being interrupted and reset. The more slow-burn or repetitive a game is, the worse this is every time you have to reset, right up to the extreme of bricking entire saves. It doesn't matter if the final boss battle is the most masterful, tear-jerking, cinematic extravaganza in the universe: If the experience has been start-stop-start-stop-reset-start-stop, then most people are going to give up and never experience it anyway. The player experience is everything, and if it's constantly interrupted, that interruption 'is' the experience. It ruins progress, it ruins immersion, and most of all it wastes precious time in our short lives. As a 'product' it will be panned as a failure. I'd suggest being more discriminating with how you discuss games as an art form vs. games as a product. People who still buy into buggy games are either admiring the niche artistic points or are hapless consumers, but by and large such games are failures for a reason.
Well said. It's essentially no different than what Ursula Leguin was saying in her acceptance speech at the 2014 National Books Awards here in the States. We need people "who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art." Even, and perhaps even especially, in the video game industry given how popular video games have become.
I would rephrase what he's trying to say from "The rest of the game 'without' the crashing can still be good" to: "The rest of the game crashing can The sum of all of its features, concepts, implementations and design can still shine through - even with the crashing that often impacts the experience. To go with the product-centric perspective, a product can fail in one axis of quality but excel in others. The end result isn't always that the product is labelled as "just bad", it's a mixed bag with some good aspects and others bad. There are degrees to it. I agree that if a game repeatedly and very often halts the experience, it would be a WAY worse product, even to the point where it's unplayable. But not all crashing is made equal. Some games are fast to boot up again, and maybe the crashing is less frequent and people can overall still enjoy the game (people would still label it as 'a lot' of crashing). Is a crashing game a failure if people still buy it, play it and enjoy the overall experience for a few hours at a time? I also think it's hard to separate the artform vs the product, as people want to buy a well-crafted experience. A game can not crash at all and excel technically, but if the gameplay is poorly designed and it's not fun, that won't be good for the product either. It's the culmination of a lot of factors that should go into the thought process of whether or not it's a good product, and that includes more artistic measures such as the design.
Hey Tim 👋 Hope all is well! Not sure if youve talked about it before, but could you please talk about your interactions and conversations with Bethesda when they were first asking you about making a FO3? I'm really interested in hearing about that! Take care Tim! 😁
14:35 That's a brilliant insight. I call it "Disengage".
That said, here's an insight I have learned over many years: the phrase "I don't care" usually goes over poorly, even though almost everyone uses it the same way and "should" understand that "I don't care" is not "bad".
There is a simple solution: change "care" to "mind". The phrase "I don't mind" is softer. It can sound a bit odd in some circumstances, but it is communicatively functional.
"Where should we go for dinner?" "I don't care" sounds harsher than "Where should we go for dinner?" "I don't mind", even though it sounds a bit weird.
Can I just say, what a breath of fresh air this channel has been! Not just because it's nice to listen to a veteran game developer saying it straight (heh) about his past projects, but also because these cozy, almost quaint, channels feel very rare on TH-cam! Thanks for keeping up with posting videos, Tim!
Yeah it is good fun to hear all these stories
I don't remember who it's from, but there's a quote I really like: "the worst thing that can happen to a game designer is be part of a successful game, because they might start to think they had something to do with it"
I tell my daughter all the time to never fear failing at something. I learned everything I know from failing at things.
"Success is a reward, but failure is a teacher"
-I don't remember where I heard that, but yeah.
Thanks for sharing.
I have worked over 15 years in the industry as an artist (started in QA and my last job was as Lead Artist), and your part about people always shifting blame to others and never taking accountability for the failures of the project really resonated with me (I have seen it while doing interviews the most).
In the same way that when you offer feedback or critique someone's work, they act defensively and gives you the "well it is meant to look like that on purpose" or "It's just my style". My advice to any aspiring artists, is to never, ever act defensive, instead take the feedback with a thank you, and try to really understand their point of view.
The day you stop accepting creative feedback is the day you stop growing as an individual.
I love this video, examining failure is something I think about a lot. I also think it's extremely common that people don't know why they were successful if they're the pioneers of something. What I learned was being truly good at something requires studying it more, even if you love it and people tell you you're awesome at it. Otherwise it results in spending 100% of the time just creating things, but 0% studying the craft. It'd be like thinking you could code an inventory system just because you've written a lot of if-else statements before, or that you're good at sketching horses without a horse reference just because you've sketched a lot of humans.
I thought I was great at writing short stories just because I knew how to do "yes and" subtly (I did a lot of improv and D&D growing up), but writing long-form stories was extremely tiring. I never bothered with "beginning, middle, end" outlines, thinking they stifled creativity. Never knew the nuances of writing techniques like "Setup and Payoff". All that would've helped massively.
It probably felt easier doing quests in Fallout or Arcanum, because they're lots of little stories in an already well-established universes you can explain in one sentence ("A post-apocalyptic retrofuture 50's", "Magick & Technology with orcs and elves"). And once everyone's agreed on the main overarching stories, you can be creative as you want. You rarely need to add new quests that effect parts of the storyline or other quests, and when you do, it's easiest to keep it small scale and change just some little parts of it to make the game feel more open-ended. I think also the games were products of their time: you are free to do all this with no fully mocapped actor or voice lines needed, just write dialog and have sprites move around.
Thank you for your contributions to the world! ❤
Arcanum has the best manual of any game I've ever seen. Including the block sliding on an inclined plane and how it was effected by magic was absolutely genius!
I'm a little late to the party here, but to be honest the bugs were one of the things that attracted me to fallout in the first place (I started at 3 and worked my way back). Full crashes aren't fun, but I find it incredibly entertaining when a game glitches in a way that is not game-breaking. Part of the reason I love Bethesda is for their backwards-flying dragons, inhuman character model glitches, and ragdoll physics gone wrong. you can say that it's objectively bad, but if it worked perfectly as intended I'd like them less. I love games that let me do more, that allow me to interact with the world in ways that make sense, and of course anything that in-depth is going to get some wires crossed, and when they do cross it's usually pretty funny.
There is no easier way to be misunderstood than to say carefully and accurately what you are thinking.
Kinda talk like that hits me right where I live. Thanks for that.
Such an honest representation of your journey of growth and self-discovery Tim. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
Really looking forward to the Arcanum video you teased in this (related to the subject of "not everybody has the same vision of the game" aside).
I was one of your beta testers for that. Really loved the community and the development of that title.
Your channel continues to be outstanding. Thanks so much for doing these, Tim!
At the end of all these videos, I find myself saying aloud "thanks Tim" -- not even "thanks, Tim Cain"; only "Tim". That's a testament to how much these videos are helping people.
So, thank you, Tim, for all of it.
Thanks for all this sharing Tim!
This is talk pretty human and lovely
I love Temple too, Tim, thanks so much for making it.
Yup. Being okay with failure is a hard lesson to learn cause we’re taught to only desire success and to avoid failure at all costs even though it’s impossible to avoid failing sometimes. It’s okay to mess up if you learn from it and take that knowledge forward.
I'm baffled people not realizing they are contradicting themselves when arguing taste is subjective..
I think this might be one of my favourite videos from you. What you said at the end is very quotable too. Helps keep you grounded in what you're doing and helps you pay attention to your successes and failures. Especially the failures.
the love i have for you and your channel is immense. these daily videos always make my day brighter, and are endlessly rewatchable for me. :)
Regarding the sense of ownership of decisions in a project, David Fincher communicated it well in that ultimately you take authorial credit for everything including failures. It eliminates members of a team wanting to be involved in a fair weather fashion - the risk being the potential loss of great direction from those who do have a strong ego.
Hey! I started playing Outer Worlds this week and it's so good! Combat is fun, I love the popping colors, Parvati is written so fcking well! Loving it already and I'm still in the first few quests. And I'm gonna overthrow space capitalism or die trying!
Remember that you can kill anyone. Not saying you will, but if there’s a character you really don’t like, there’s nothing stopping you. No “essential NPCs” here :p
Lots of good lessons here.
At their heart, video games are art, and art is by definition subjective.
As you mentioned, this will make some people cranky because they believe that their opinions are facts. It 'feels' better if you believe you are defending an objective fact in a disagreement. I am right, and you are wrong. No 'feelings' about it. This position will kill creativity, and thus, will kill art.
Working in a team to accomplish anything can be hard. Working in a team that creates art is almost immune to any attempt to objectively define any part of the process. It works, or it doesn't. The word that is used in my field of art (music) is chemistry.
You can't fake chemistry. You have it, or you don't. You can't make a plan for it. There are times you will have FABULOUS artistic chemistry with people you might not think that you even LIKE very much, and times that you can't create with people you love and respect.
Thus, the beauty of a team (or a band). Treasure those people you can create with. Protect them. Reward them generously. Do all you can to stick together. Chemistry actively avoids attempts to duplicate it with 'replaceable' 'plug & play' pieces.
Keep doing what you are doing. In this guy's opinion, you've made a TON of great stuff (yes, ToEE is great) and The Outer Worlds is one of the BEST and most COMPLETE games to come out over the last decade, and right up there (in my opinion) as one of the best you've been involved in making.
Rock on. Create art. Have fun. :)
Reminds me of the quote. Good decision making comes from expirience, expirience comes from bad decision making.
Hey Tim,
Thanks for your work. I've enjoyed Fallout and Fallout 2 a ton even though I was an infant on release.
I'm not a dev or any other related field but I appreciate your stories on team management and trying to be a good leader at work.
Well, I love you no matter what Tim
The courage and presence of mid to analyze and learn from one's own failure is all too rare in general.
Wish they teach you this in school instead of just giving participation trophies left and right.
I love Temple too, Tim. It's pure DnD in PC format.
Really enjoying this channel and the content. I’ve always enjoyed watching your older talks and interviews since becoming a classic Fallout fan. Always excited to see what new topics and discussions you share, esp with the classic Fallout guys. It’s really neat to get into the weeds on that game and others. Appreciate your contribution to games and your insight/experience. Hope you have a good one! (Btw I think Fallout 1 is hands down the best entry in the series, and my personal favorite. Nothing beats it’s tone and mood. So dark, so dire, it’s perfect. Well done Tim, can’t wait to see what projects you have coming in the future.)
I'm so grateful for these videos you've been uploading. As someone studying illustration, I'm finding myself looking for knowledge I can extrapolate and apply to my own practice. Recovering from major surgery and these videos have been great company :-)
Absolutely loving all your stuff. Thought i'd leave a comment at this point when i have been watching a plethora of your videos!
I don't have as many years under my belt in the industry as you do but when i was ever invited to talk as an alumni to new game dev students i used to give a talk about all my failures and what i learned from them and there has been plenty of them :D
Games take a long time to make and are expensive, it's hard to fail a couple times to learn from it. I've failed at designing software systems, though, which I then had to redo. Cost much less and maybe learned more than just how to do that system better.
Thank you for sharing!
i found your channel out of luck and i learned a lot from you. you are a true inspiration. i hope to meet you one day and shake your hand
Personally i would say a game as a product, at least in a public debate is a product of craft, thus it's fair to judge it as a whole.
In a same way that you could buy a brand new ferrari with a wonky engine, when it runs it's the best car ever - except it rarely runs. If someone has an use case of only using it to drive to a church every sunday then yeah, it may work well for them specifically but it would still objectively be a bad car as a whole.
In terms of games i think the technical state works like multiplier, if i were to ship the best game ever which doesn't boot at all, then even if the possible subjective entertainment score is over 9 million, it still gets multiplied by a zero, thus the final score is predictable.
People have different use cases and "pain threshold" but looking from outside there are aspects which can be objectively quantified.
In my opinion the hallmark of a truly great game is a game people love despite its flaws.
Not to blow smoke but I also thought of Temple as a great game, but I agree that the dialogue is weak. But maybe from having played so many tabletop games like Shadowrun, DnD, Rifts etc. I always thought of the dialogue as sort of placeholder for your own imagination.
This is terribly short sighted but having a turn based 3.5 system was just so great to me.
Maybe especially from working as a nurse but I rather learn wrong than perform right ignorantly. Within parameters of course and hopefully not on a living person. Doing something right and not knowing why it's right is just a setup for disaster. Love all the insight you provide here.
thank you for this thoughtful video
It felt like The Outer Worlds was made for me! I loved it from the moment I bought it, and played it through twice without a break, and I've played it again since then, and am just replaying New Vegas, and then I'll play it again. Don't play it with lots of different builds or anything - I just play as good a person as the game allows me to be. Loved peacemaking on Monarch - my proudest moment in the game! It helped that I thought Sanjar was a fantastic character. Before I retired, I had an assistant who supported/mocked me in just the same way Celia did with Sanjar, so their relationship was very recognisable ;-)
But... I didn't care for the colour pallet - too much magenta for my taste. And I didn't like the armours available - everyone seemed to wear strips of cloth like sarongs, and I never saw the point of that. I just had my team in hooded long coats, and for myself, I wore as near to cowboy clothes as I could find. (I'm feeling better in FNV now I have Joshua Graham's armour - goes well with a cowboy hat and sunglasses!)
As you say, it is all a matter of taste. Still love the game!
Always look forward to your videos 🙂
If a crash-prone game is enjoyable in spite of that extremely disruptive problem, it means it is really, really good. I would say that proves a game is objectively good, as opposed to objectively bad. Some people have very narrow perspectives and lose sight of what is actually fun in games, and life itself. They let technicalities ruin a good time that they would otherwise enjoy if they did something as simple as save their game more often. Nobody ever said, "Wow, do you remember how fun the stability of that game was?"
Thanks for the videos Tim, if you can please show at least a glance of some of your notebooks, I also take daily notes of everything and I would love to just have a quick peek of that.
About the “bad game” argument. We can say that a good game that crashes a lot is a good game, but good game doesn’t necessarily mean good product. When I see a good game (especially AAA pricey games) that has stability issues, predatory micro transactions, poor optimization… for me that is a bad product and I will not spend money on something like that. And the bottom line is that a game is often judged by how well it sold.
Its weird, I loved Temple of Elemental Evil, specially the village. It had such a vibe, brought me back to playing Baldurs Gate 1. The animations, the music, the combat was really fun too. Not so much the temple itself, but the open areas were so beautiful.
Learning from failure is such a hard concept to use. I know that failure is the best teacher, but it’s still really difficult to put myself into situations where failure is a significant possibility.
The first step is always the hardest.
In regards to people who insist that their subjective opinion is objective, I think it is never about the objective truth.
"Subjective opinion" is seen as less valid, and so they just want to be labeled "objective."
I would usually have to triple assure them that their opinion is "valid and no one can take away" for them to get over it. lol
I’m convinced that learning is only possible after a failure. You need to be wrong to adopt new behavior by learning, else there is no learning involved whatsoever.
Hah! I use that exact phrase to explain peoples' behaviors. "Everyone is the hero in their own story."
It's a very good thought experiment to understand some of the dumbest shit I've seen people do. :)
Honestly, weather's something is objectively good in general and whether it is enjoyable to somebody are just separate topics. They aren't related.
What one person's nitpick can be another person's deal-breaker, but for that person who's deal-breaker it is, they might not even notice it in another game
When I really enjoy a game, I don't even notice the things that bother me to no end in other games
It's pretty interesting
I love when games have specific narrative and dialogue for failure states that are more interesting than the success state. inXile's torment had a bunch of that.
Dumb dialogue always felt like success at being dumb though haha
Love these videos!
I love Arcanum so much and wish you could remake it.
An important corollary to "everyone is the hero to their own stories" is that we tend to define other people by the bad things they do but we provide excuses to ourselves when we do them. If someone bumps me without apologizing, he's an asshole. He was born an asshole and he'll die an asshole. But if I do it, it was an outlier. I had a bad idea, I didn't see him, I've grown since then, and so on.
You can learn and personally grow up almost only from negative experience, not from positive. I aways wrote and said about that, but with culture of toxic positivity in society this is a topic which people do not want to discuss. It is rarely discussed, like topics of suicide or pretty common wishes to not exist at all, for example, and other essential problematics. Anyway, good talk, Tim. All the best.
When Fallout 1 was released in 1997 I was 7 years old. However, I did not play it or even know it existed until 2014 when GOG gave it away for free. I am here to say, I am the sole reason for that game's success. Everything that is Fallout and its positive reception and revenue and marketability? All me. No need to thank me.
I might have mentioned this before but I didn't find characters or writing in ToEE bad, it was good enough at least :D the game combat though was pretty hard though. Otherwise, that's a very valuable topic you brought up in this video, thank you.
Great talk!
Speaking of great games that you would play despite their shortcomings. I first played Arcanum when I was young and inexperienced with computers on a rather middle ground Celeron something that was initially used in some office before ending up in our home. Every single tile of the ground in the game had two black triangles covering 95% of its bottom half and every big facade art piece had the same black rectangle around it, so from the height of my current experience I can at least guess that it had something to do with video drivers not handling transparency properly. And I also remember my friend who was the only one in our friend group experienced with computers back then suggesting that it was an audio card problem. Which we then bough and it did not fix the problem. In fact, we could not even install it because the computer did not have the slot for it. Adding -no3d to the executable probably could have fixed it... But yeah. I have still played alot of Arcanum on that machine despite the graphics and (at least for some part of it) the lack of any sound.
Hey Tim, just wanted to post a comment saying that while I know you don't consider yourself a gifted dialogue writer, you're an extremely good story-teller. You, of course know that many content creators use edits and cuts in their videos, meanwhile you do a single-take almost 19 minute video and convey an easily followed, interesting stories regularly. Give yourself some props for that!
I actually really enjoyed Temple besides the bugs. I think I've liked every game you have worked on Tim. Can't say that about like... MOST people in game Dev.
Thank you for your videos, you beast
Let's be real here, crashes and bugs have not stopped amazing games, especially new groundbreaking games that are unique.
I've played and seen others playing buggy, crashy games, like dayz, pubg, tarkov, Mount & Blade...
Crashing NEVER means a game is bad or good. It just means it's broken/unfinished
I admit I never got around to playing Temple of Elemental Evil because I was only 9 when it came out, and I don't know if retroactively the critic scores have improved, but right now on Metacritic it's at 71 with a 78 user score. That's pretty good! Clearly other people liked it too!
Thanks, Tim!
Learning from a mistake is an important thing in life for sure.
As for objectivity it reminds me of a tv series i once watched (cant remember but may have been the good wife) where the judge wants the lawyers to add the line "in my opinion" after every statement they make. Ofc it is in their opinion who else?
Fallout is a great game. Arcanum is a great game. If noone else likes Arcanum it doesnt matter to me. I love playing it. I love the world. The dialogue. The skills, stats.
If the whole world loved outer worlds i still dont like it. It doesnt matter if everyone else think it is better than sliced bread.
We can say if Fallout created an IP that has entertained millions or not. But that doesnt make me love Fallout more or less. If I had to pick the best settings in all of entertainment id pick Fallout and Arcanum (with Fallout being nr 1 just a tiny bit above).
In my opinon. Or is it objective absolute truth? Maybe. Yeah probably....no wait im only human so I guess i cant share the opinions of billions of people. Luckily only i have to be entertained when i play so what they think doesnt matter one bit.
Tim, Just wondering if you could talk about how you came up with power armor and the weaponry used in Fallout, thanks.
I'd argue some of the charm Arcanum might come from that "too many cooks" turmoil. That game blew my mind for player choice, if my epitaph required a top 5 it would be in it. It sounds like it was very tumultuous, but very potentially instructive.
I think it was just Temple that was too niche, if it were a setting LOTR, for example, it would have much more attention
And of course, if it came out initially in the state to which it is now brought with patches and modifications
It's about the team, David Brevik commented about it wisely years ago, back when Diablo 3 was released and perceived to be a disappointment, he was asked about what made Diablo 1 and 2 especial, he said: they had a lot of luck that that particular team came together and worked on these games and only years later he would recognize how magical and rare that was. So "you are only as good as the last game you made" as director is kinda of a useless, overly simplified way of seeing things executives adopt. The myth of "great leader" is true in these cases. Unless you are an indie solo developer and made 100% of your game you can't really answer for the magic of that game.
To support this theory, David Brevik himself, I think just 2 or years ago released a new indie game made 100% solo (the guy is a beast), the name is "It Lurks Bellow" and he was a bit disappointed with the game sales. Although I liked the game, the Diablo magic is not there. There is so much that goes into a game to make it what it is, and when everything is right, the code, the art, the SEs, the music, then you have a great game.
there's a saying about this, think it went something like "Failure is the mother of success" or something.
I will play Temple when I finish a couple others on my list.
Good day Mr.Cain. Has you ever heard or even see mods for Fallout, like Sonora or Fallout of Nevada? What's your opinion about them? Will you play it in your free time?
I dunno Tim about 5he taste thing being entirely subjective. You'd fall into Relativism/Nominalism and everything would be objectively tasteless.
Your comment mus5 be objectively bad because it has a typo in it.
I liked Temple of Elemental evil too
So would you say that people should make more RPG systems where experience is gained from failure (flaws++)?.. 😊 excellent video as always!
Tbf.. ik skyrim (cant remember if oblivion morrowind did it too) still gives you experience in lockpicking even if you break the pick. Cant really think of other examples atm tho
"Everyone's the hero of their own story." Not sure development studios and publishers have noticed that the "Hero's Journey" storyform is not quite as popular in the West as it once was. In respect to video games, most RPGs are structured around the Hero's Journey form of storytelling, placing the player in the shoes of the hero, of course, and so many players just don't want that. They want their character to be an oridinary citizen living in Cyrodiil or Skyrim or the 'Outer Worlds' or Middle Earth...well, you get the idea. Ergo, partially why alternate start mods and the like are so popular. What if my character doesn't want to be the Dragonborn? What if s/he just wants to camp out in the woods and practice an arcane art or something?
Development studios are struggling with that change in public attitudes, I think. Well, if we don't make the player or their character the hero of the story, how does the player or character fit into the story? That kind of thing. That's why "the Lone Wanderer" worked so incredibly well.
From Software has come up with a unique solution. Well, your character, regardless of class, is the "Chosen Undead" or the "Tarnished" or some other Everyman character, so go out there and...do...whatever. :) Maybe not ideal, but if it works for From's games, y'okay.
@@gageriddle1681 good point. Skyrim did have a couple of instances where failure contributed but not all skills had similar treatment.
Personally I would like to see advancement systems that requires both success and failure to advance (some table top RPGs do that).
With Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, and with them being the current license holder, do you think that you may have a chance to work on either a sequel or remake of Arcanum?
A team of creatives all well-greased and bouncing off one another constructively for months? Now that's a Fallout cryptid. I believe!
I have so much crash ptsd from New Vegas that saving every five minutes or so is ingrained in me at a cellular level.
first he wrote fallout, then he started studying, I didn’t understand it.
There's no such thing as a "bad game"? There have to be *some* objectively bad games out there, which may include some game-breaking bugs. They may even sell quite well, people will buy anything.
Tim is talking about stuff we see all the time on TH-cam and elsewhere. Someone will say to themselves, "I can't stand playing a game that doesn't run at 120 FPS on Ultra settings, ergo you shouldn't be able to stand it, either." That kind of thing.
I do think an objective consensus can be arrived at for things like specific design decisions that development studios might want to pay attention to. For example, actual player critiques of Elden Ring have pointed out that some of the boss designs "just weren't fun" or were "boring" because they made the player stand around and wait for a boss to complete an extremely long combo chain before they could sidle in for even a single hit, especially if playing a melee build. They provided reasons why From might want to take that into consideration when designing bosses for future titles. If I were Hidetaka Miyazaki and even longtime Soulsborne fans are saying that, I would certainly think it should be, especially if they're trying to reach a wider audience. From's games demand (and perhaps even teach) patience, but if you have a family or work/school tomorrow or are dealing with pressing real life issues, maybe you don't have the time or patience to spare.
I haven't finished Elden Ring; I've no desire to finish Elden Ring; and I will never finish Elden Ring because it's late-game balance issues are just not something I want to deal with, but I wouldn't go around saying it's a terrible game because it isn't.
Kenshi crashes a lot, hella good game.
There should be a supercut for people who watch these videos for educational reasons and not for chill video to play while doing something else reasons.
Cutting the repetitions between videos for example.
The crashing points reminds me of my experiences when Cyberpunk launched. Oddly didn't have too many game breaking crashes and saved the game alot and loved playing it thoroughly multiple times. Yet the outrage was loud indeed as we all know.
Also thank you for all the videos you make. I love watching them all!
Hi Tim
The thing you're saying about good and bad rings true for me.
I had a lot of fun with BF5 and Cyberpunk 2077. In fact, I thought cyberpunk 2077 was amazing, even at release. All of my friends panned it and didn't buy UT though simply because it was said to be buggy.
I did not enjoy most of Cyberpunk on release. Not because "bugs bad", but because the gameplay and open world felt incomplete, I was satisfied neither by the action nor RPG aspects, and a lot of the bugs did take the fun out of the gameplay and wrecked immersion.
But I'll never say someone is *wrong* for enjoying the game or saying "it's a good game"
What if I told you... the writing in ToEE game wasn't bad
I'd be happy to learn from failures if i had created fallout.
As a developer, I have to disagree with you on the crashing bit, Tim. I get what you're trying to say: That the rest of the game 'without' the crashing can still be good, and you're right. But that isn't what games are. Unless you make them purely for yourself, games are a 'product'. They are a combined experience for an end user. If a game crashes "a lot," which is to say "too much," then the experience is constantly being interrupted and reset. The more slow-burn or repetitive a game is, the worse this is every time you have to reset, right up to the extreme of bricking entire saves. It doesn't matter if the final boss battle is the most masterful, tear-jerking, cinematic extravaganza in the universe: If the experience has been start-stop-start-stop-reset-start-stop, then most people are going to give up and never experience it anyway. The player experience is everything, and if it's constantly interrupted, that interruption 'is' the experience. It ruins progress, it ruins immersion, and most of all it wastes precious time in our short lives. As a 'product' it will be panned as a failure. I'd suggest being more discriminating with how you discuss games as an art form vs. games as a product. People who still buy into buggy games are either admiring the niche artistic points or are hapless consumers, but by and large such games are failures for a reason.
Well said. It's essentially no different than what Ursula Leguin was saying in her acceptance speech at the 2014 National Books Awards here in the States. We need people "who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art." Even, and perhaps even especially, in the video game industry given how popular video games have become.
Ayoo, this what donkey brains be like
I would rephrase what he's trying to say from "The rest of the game 'without' the crashing can still be good" to: "The rest of the game crashing can The sum of all of its features, concepts, implementations and design can still shine through - even with the crashing that often impacts the experience. To go with the product-centric perspective, a product can fail in one axis of quality but excel in others. The end result isn't always that the product is labelled as "just bad", it's a mixed bag with some good aspects and others bad.
There are degrees to it. I agree that if a game repeatedly and very often halts the experience, it would be a WAY worse product, even to the point where it's unplayable. But not all crashing is made equal. Some games are fast to boot up again, and maybe the crashing is less frequent and people can overall still enjoy the game (people would still label it as 'a lot' of crashing). Is a crashing game a failure if people still buy it, play it and enjoy the overall experience for a few hours at a time?
I also think it's hard to separate the artform vs the product, as people want to buy a well-crafted experience. A game can not crash at all and excel technically, but if the gameplay is poorly designed and it's not fun, that won't be good for the product either. It's the culmination of a lot of factors that should go into the thought process of whether or not it's a good product, and that includes more artistic measures such as the design.
I think Tim said and meant what he said. Your interpretation of Game is subjective :)
@Irinfi woo Look at smarty pants who read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Myth 2 Soulblighter Windows Edition” in College English class 😅
Hey Tim 👋 Hope all is well! Not sure if youve talked about it before, but could you please talk about your interactions and conversations with Bethesda when they were first asking you about making a FO3? I'm really interested in hearing about that! Take care Tim! 😁
day 3
Stop bozo.
you gave up quick
we know its you boss