Tims wardrope would warrant a video of its own. Take a look at aaall the thumbnails , there are so many really cool shirts, jackets and pullovers I started to immediatly recognize if I know a video by the fact if I know the shirt haha
The Witcher has also done the transferable save file, they've just also added an option to set your world for people that didn't have a save file/lost their save file/play on console.
I think the point was that something like ME and practically all prominent games before the Witcher didn't ask you, they had one canon already picked and assumed it if you didn't have the save file. So that would be two separate ways to do it.
“Now bear in mind I’ve only made one sequel… so far in my career - and that was Fallout 2.” I know you can’t discuss OW2 for any number of reasons, but I’m very interested to see how the things you talked about in this video apply to the transition from Outer Worlds 1 to 2 and 2’s overall expansion(hopefully) of that universe kinda like how FO2 did for 1.
Something about these videos is magical. Hearing about one of your favorite games from someone so deeply involved in everything about it, is just incredible. Who'd have thought we'd be listening to such candid and transparent thoughts about so many topics like these
@@ekzarsusMan, I remember playing Invisible War, and a certain character who had died in my playthrough of Deus Ex was alive. I was confused, because I had no idea that character could even be saved!
@@lonneansekishoku8288 I like the Warp in the West, but I don't like the tendency for people to leap to a Dragon Break or Warp for every single little lore inconsistency.
Something I find very cute and enjoyable about the Life Is Strange comics is that they always emphasize at the start that there are many possible timelines and that those stories take place in one particular timeline with some specific conditions.
Personally I love Bethesda's Warp in the West that made all endings canonical simultaneously. It really provided the universe with a sense of dreamlikeness which is a sort of hidden theme in the lore of the games. You have these events like the Warp and the disappearance of the Dwemer that are just just barely incomprehensible and it gives the series a very unique feel. When you get into Elder Scrolls lore it just feels like the true understanding is just beyond your grasp. The Warp in the West was a very clever idea for their series. Obviously that's not something that could fit every game.
my guess is Daggerfall going into Morrowind. DF had about 8-10 endings, and Bethesda didn't want to pick one going into MW, so they made up some insane BS to combine all of them without any of them happening as stated in DF. It's a mess lol@@TinKelp
There is a fifth option, which is what Bethesda did with Daggerfall - all the endings happened simultaneously, even those that are contradictory, with the implication that something mystical and time-breaking happened. In the Elder Scrolls universe this is called the "Warp in the West". It's part of a recurring theme in those games that the ability of the player to choose what to do in the world is a kind of mystic power in itself.
I liked this too, it does require you to have a very fantastical setting and also it helped that the next game was set as almost as far away from Daggerfall as it is possible to get on the published world map so you didn't really need to properly engage with what the Warp in the West actually meant too hard.
I really like that in Elder Scrolls. There are those elements of the lore that really make that universe mysterious, unpredictable, and bizarre and the Warp in the West really is a lynchpin in that ironically.
Deus Ex: Invisible War did something close to that. It's been so long since I last played but I believe the three possible endings from the first game were: J.C. merges his consciousness with the Helios AI and rules mankind himself, J.C. restores the Illuminati to power so they can rule, or J.C. destroys the Internet so nobody rules on a global scale. Invisible War reveals that J.C. merged with Helios, the merging process ended up destroying the Internet in the process, and the Illuminati ended up being able to weather this and were able to rebuild anyway.
I like what Firaxis did with their XCOM games, where the canonical ending of the first is that you lost the linear story and had a gameover, which leads into the second.
I hate what Firaxis did with Xcom. The first problem is that the "base defense failure" being canonical is that it's not internally consistent with Xcom 2 since everyone dies, including Central/Bradford who returns as a major character in Xcom 2. The second problem with the premature ending is that the the rest of the game is null and void. There's just no point in finishing the game since Xcom 2 undermines its narrative; the psionic character's noble self-sacrifice is now a nothing burger that never happened. If I read a book sequel that told me that the second half of the previous book didn't happen, then I'd ask why the previous book full of erroneous details was still in print and considered part of the same universe. As of right now, the mental gymnastics I use to rationalize the first game's existence is that everything after the base defense is part of the Commander's dream simulations. "It was just a dream" isn't a compelling story trope though.
I like the idea they lost but the timeskip and starting over with a couple people felt like a screw you. I love xcom 2 but the time skip was a middle finger
Forget Mass Effects, Dragon Ages did that too and in a lot more elaborate way. So since the game crossed console generations, you exported your save game to a web tool. It then allowed you to look over all of your choices to see what your state of the game is. If you didn't play the previous ones, the tool allowed you to fine tune the state yourself. And it then siphoned it into the new game through EA account. It was pretty great.
I think the DA Keep is a nice concept, but it would be a lot more convenient and future-proof if it were included with the game in the options somewhere. The website won't be around forever. And it's annoying to have to launch a website on a browser every time you want to start a new game of Inquisition (some of us play too much Dragon Age). I just stopped using the Keep altogether and no longer play the series as a continuous trilogy with a consistent world state. I just play 1 and 2 back-to-back, with DAI being the almost-standalone "other" if I'm in the mood.
@@xyhmo I think control makes plenty of sense. You become a galactic police force that fixes everything, with reapers as your own personal military to defend against any threat. What if there are more reapers outside the Milky Way who wouldn't have been affected by the Crucible's space magic? it wouldn't make sense that the reapers put all of their eggs into one basket by invading with every single reaper ship when they know that the Crucible plans exist. The destroy ending ultimately undermines the whole Quarian-Geth peace plot, and is vaguely noted by Star Child to destroy even "part synthetics" like Shepard. So does everyone with a pacemaker or other implant just die? Are computers in general wiped out? Now millions of people are stranded to starve in the Sol System after the relays are destroyed and galactic civilization is sent into a dark age?
Option #3 was done, IIRC, on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire and I found it a nice way to close the gap between original and sequel since most of the time you either have a true canonical ending like in Tiberian Dawn to Sun (option #2), or the games may be on the same setting but with little connection between themselves, like in Harebrained's Shadowrun trilogy.
Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire also had Option #4. You could import your save from Pillars 1 and start from there with all the choices you have made in the first game. I must say that this is my favourite option. But Option #3 is a good subtitute if the games are too far away in time and importing a save from the previous game is technically impossible.
Thing I really loved about C&C is the Nod and Soviet campaigns felt like fun "what if?" scenarios, they could go a bit wild with them because they didn't have to worry about walking it back in a sequel. You can have Nod conquer the world and Kane become basically Jesus because you don't have to write around that in the sequel to un-destroy the GDI lol
Hi Tim, Just wanted to quickly say that your work has been instrumental in the way I view cRPGs and my tastes in story telling at a whole. I'm getting super into making mods for fallout 4 right now and I use that quote about 'not wanting to build a bigger gun' all the time when discussing what fallout is to me. Keep up the good work ^_^
it is interesting that Tim said he worked on Pillars of Eternity and Pillars 2 imports Pillars 1 save file and sets the word state based on Pillars 1 decisions and he did not even mention it
The Fallout 2 manual also says that Ian died in Junktown and Dogmeat was fried by a laser grid. I suppose how canonical that is depends on how you feel about manuals.
What if the vault dweller wasnt honest? What if the vault dweller actually wanted to join the mutants and murdered Ian? However the vault dweller found out that masters plan wasnt going to work (sterile). What if the vault dweller pillaged Arroyo and used it for fun? And got murdered? Or left? Just because someone writes something down doesnt mean it is true.
Well it's the first option: Ian died in Necropolis (that's the city in manual, not Junktown), where the clash with supermutants is probable unless afaik charisma build. And dogmeat most times died in base for those force fields. They're the most probable options, such as rescuing Tandi from the raiders
@@fredrik3880 What if the vault dweller was actually Frank Horrigan the whole time and spun this wild story of a hero destroying the master's army when the whole time he was actually the bad guy and he drove around in a big monster truck with spiked wheels?
Great video! I can think of another that might be useful: basing a conical ending on the systems you want in the sequel. Say for example the Mass effect devs want to explore the impact of the ending where synthetic life and biological life merged, and how that would affect the mechanics. Maybe hacking is more important because now everything is synthetic. Maybe electrical damage has a different status effect and you can play around with stage hazards. Or maybe your telemetry tells you that a majority of players really enjoyed a style of play that meshes well with this theme so choosing the synthesis is a convenient way to give them what they want.
I can't believe this is happening! Free education at the highest level! Thank you Tim! I played fallout 2 right after I finished fallout 1 and I think the "Look for the commonalities" method worked great. I saved Tandi and felt great about it, and seeing her as the leader of NCR was amazing! My ending made perfect sense, but I know any other ending would have either. Using player's save file is also a good option, but! I'm a programmer and I know how difficult it is to implement that :D BioWare tried it in Dragon Age too, they tried to make dragon age origins save file usable in dragon age inquisition, but it was so buggy that they ended up making a tool to just create a save file from important events in DA:O and DA2
Well it's obvious Tandi survived cause she gives you a lot of xp for saving her, also means Vault Dweller had >4 INT due to the fact he didn't just go poof poof shady sands more like gravy sands
Let's talk Camera, Perspective, Control for party-based RPGs If you had to do a new one (Arcanum 2, Fallout 2 2, Baldur's Gate 3 (non-Larian)) how would you approach perspective & camera? I'm asking because I feel that there was something special about both iso perspective but also the non-3d sprites that made the games special.
Hey Tim, do you think cRPG systems still need to evolve away from their pen-and-paper origins, or is it better to stay faithfull to the tabletop ways? I feel like computer RPGs are quite different from the physical games, and we can go so much further with their design, yet I'm not even sure it's posible to come up with a better novel system from the ground up. For example, I don't really like how games often force you to fill in your character sheet at the very start of the game, before even explaining how it works. What if the game didn't devote any attention to sneaking, or I find out I don't really enjoy the combat, but my starting points are already spent and so I feel like I wasted them? Also, how do you effectively communicate to the player that X extra points in this skill bring such and such improvement in Y, so he understands whether he wants to upgrade it by 10 or 15 points? Do you really need a general level for the player, or maybe it's better to track each skill separately, and give points that can be spent only on a certain skill / group of skills, so that the player's improvement comes as a result of his actions, rather than just letting him spend some points on any random skill every time he reaches an arbitrary milestone? Seems like a there has to be a better way that plays to the strengths of the cRPG specifically (i.e. we can track so much more stuff, do way more complex calculations), yet a lot of RPGs feel that it's better to just tweak the basic formula. Sorry if I missed the vid where you spoke about this Lots of love and thanks a lot for the great videos, they are always great food for thought!❤
Tim can you share with us which modern RPGs are your favorites and why? I would love to hear you talk about Witcher, Mass Effect, Deus Ex etc and things you like/dislike about them and which mechanics you would like to incorporate into your own game.
The witcher series isn't perfect, and is actually a pretty good example of why their method is difficult to implement. In the first game, you can save the princess of Temeria and marry her off to Radovid, which would completely end any conflict in the north. In addition, there's characters you can kill in the first and second game that will magically show up as alive in the 3rd.
There’s one other way to do it, which is to not pick any one ending and instead provide mutually exclusive evidence suggesting different endings. The example I’m thinking of is Fable 2. In that game, it never tells you exactly what happened in the first game. Now, in the first game, the player has choice to kill an NPC and receive a specific unique item or to save that NPC and never obtain that item. In the second game, the only thing that the in-game characters know for sure is that the player character obtained that item. Yet at the same time the NPC that you had to kill is alive and playing a role in Fable 2’s story. This should theoretically lead to an “everything happened ambiguity”. How well it actually works is an exercise for the reader.
KOTOR II had a whole section where you got to answer questions about KOTOR I to set what went down. Well, the whole game had a lot of that going on for the main plot/protagonist (and I don't think the protagonist had "amnesia" either). One of my favorite ways to handle it (the Mass Effect save files are cool, but it's hard to remember all the choices several years later when the sequel comes out).
Witcher 3 and Mass Effect both have save loading, but Mass Effect had a much better system for it. Also in regards to Witcher 3, you can only choose events from Witcher 2, and of those it doesn't really effect much (one character shows up as a cameo for a one off quest, which is all I can remember of the crossover). It depends on how grand the ending is in my opinion. You can't possibly code and write every ending, so instead its just a pop quiz on what characters, towns, factions, or even ideologies are around. Usually any of the choses have little weight (I'm fairly certain that Mass Effect's saves are similar to the Witcher 3 quiz, but with slightly more impact on cutscenes/quests. I might be biased, but Fallout 1's canon ending was pretty perfect. It's vague enough that my Vault Dweller could have been chaotic, lawful, or even just pure neutral, and it wouldn't effect Fallout 2's story at all. Great video as always Tim! If I were to give small advice, some visuals would go a long way. They don't have to be obnoxious or even take over the screen. You could just have a picture of whatever game you're talking about in the corner. The only negative would be blocking out your massive collection for a little bit.
Fallout 2 is a weird one for me, because people get hung up on the canonicity of the events the Vault Dweller took in canon, but nobody ever really brings up that essentially your character is "hijacked" to set up the events of the sequel. Like founding a primitive tribe in Arroyo when you could end the game big brain tech warrior, or an anti-social thief. I know in Fallout 2, in NCR some developers weren't happy that the statue of the Vault Dweller was male because they felt it removed player agency, but idk they already did that before the game even started.
Dragon Age did a combo (same company as Mass Effect). You import your save game, but Alternatively they made a tapestry of the story so far where you can go from scratch, or import your save, and edit every event.
Planescape Torment did this great where the story is YOUR Nameless One's story, and the locations and people are apart of your story. The Lady of Pain, the ruler of Sigil is herself a side background character in your story.
It doesn't bother me much as it still proves the player made a impact in the world. Reminds me of WoW where the player takes down the bosses but all the npc leaders are still doing stuff.
Really curious to hear your take on game option menus from programmer's perspective. Any interesting or non-obvious things you've included over the years or wanted to include but for some reason weren't able to? I enjoy presenting a volume slider with a reference sound scene on first launch. With the main purpose of letting a player increase volume from zero to a comfortable level without the game being initially too loud. Publishers veto this quite often though.
Regarding just picking one ending, worth mentioning that a way to do it - especially now that achievements and many other things about a game are tracked online - is to see what most people did. I’ve heard that’s how the new X-COM chose their canonical ending.
Btw if i remember well good old Lord British allowed import of savegames from ultima IV and V into ultima V and VI but i can't remember if it could change something else than the character sheets
Hey tim! Do you still have any character’s design and concept arts for fallout? I saw some old concept art for the game and it looks really cool, maybe you can post a video about it.
I like how some situations can make sense of it, like TES 2 (I believe it was 2 anyways) they say because of the time distortion that was essentially happening, ALL of the endings were canon, as they all "happened". Another thing would be to do what Robert Jordan did in Wheel of Time (book series). Sometimes he shows what someone did, and later on you see how others who weren't there receive the knowledge of it, and it's normally absolutely INCORRECT on how it went down. So huge sections of people think something happened or was went about in a completely incorrect way. Other times you don't see an event at all but "hear" about it, and when those happen, you find yourself thinking, "It probably didn't happen that way". I bring this up because major events can always be canonically true, but HOW they went down, can always be up for debate in future games, and you could always work in different portions of people thinking it happened a certain way, or some thinking it NEVER happened. It would be a fun way to acknowledge choices, while never giving a definitive answer.
When it comes to a sequel to a story with many endings I try to see what the story tells me about the protagonist. For instance, in New Vegas, the courier seems to be the kinda person to "go the extra mile" so any solution that seems like a long shot or has some major blockage to achieving the best/most "valuable" outcome, they went for it. So the Vault 34 residents are most likely alive and mostly well, Jacobstown is bustling with slightly less psychotic night kin and heck there might just be a wig wearing super mutant traveling with her robot companion (I like to think she became the new radio host after Mr. New Vegas eventually shut down).
as much as I think Mass Effect is a flawed series, the ability to port your save through the whole trilogy strikes me as the best overall solution to this. It's very satisfying as a player to see the results of decisions in the previous games manifest in the sequels.
Love your videos, thanks. I play and enjoy games that you discuss (Outer Worlds!) and your videos are motivating me to find more, such as Fallout 2. May I make a suggestion? Remove the moving props from your background. In the language of theater, they "upstage" you. On most videos, there is a swirling ball that is very distracting. On a few videos filmed in the dark, there have been too many lights, too busy, in the background. I suggest that you settle your background down to only non-moving, non-distracting visuals. It will be easier to be immersed in the spoken content of the videos.
1It's always valuable to see an actual Creator talk about this stuff, even though you didn't create it all by yourself 100% and probably not 100% of all ideas were only from you and also you just could change as a preson through years and have simply different PoV on it all (for example "Star Wars" vs "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Special Edition" ) compared when the "ritual" was started and finished first time (ie with game's release). Nevertheless, it is Your train of thoughts and your mind that influenced a lot of it. Your particular way of thinking from and thinking through, which is unique on itself (as can be VERY vividly seen by, for example, comparing Action Comics #1 and McClure and Superman #1 origin of Superman vs More Fun Comics 101 origin, which wasn't written by one of co-creators of Superman, at least not directly, even though, it Wasn't really That weird shift considering More natural evolution of the core lore betwixt 1933 and 1938, but still if you see it you Will know something isn't right), which will never be replicated by anyone, at best honored and emulated.
probably the best way I've seen a sequel deal with canon through games was with Pillars of Eternity which would either import your previous game's data or asked questions about your previous game's choices.
You can jump ahead in time and start with new status quo. Whatever ending chosen in previous game is reset to 0 (or close to 0) due to some huge event between 1 & 2. (alien invasion, magic meltdown, etc etc)
I'd argue there's a 5th way but I can't think of any great examples outside of Zelda & even then it's not a great fit but if your story only has a few lines of diverging you can make separate timeliness for each different ending. Much like how there's the adult, child, and Ganon timelines in Zelda based off of the ending of Ocarina of Time.
Hey Tim, can we get the option for Picture in Picture? I love to listen to your videos in the background while I work but without it it makes it very difficult.
Hey Tim, I have a question that might be hard for you to answer, since that's not the area you worked at: What are the inspirations for the gun designs in TOW? Some of them are easier to trace back to early 1900s but some of them, like the Vermin, have completely eluded me. Thanks in advance!
Hey Tim, question. How come we don’t see devs doing more import saves for endings like BioWare did in Mass Effect? I understand the strain on writing something like that can have. But is it so much that most devs don’t bother going that route altogether?
I'm not sure if today we have any big AAA titles that would or could pull off sequels that are released every 2-3 years. Game development seems to take a lot of time these days and I think why the idea of it worked is that Bioware was able to release these games quite quickly. It also lead to one of the most controversial releases with ME3, a lot of people felt deceived with how choices and consequences lead to unsatisfactory endings, and also a lot of the game seemed to be cut to be sold as paid DLC, like the day 1 Prothean companion DLC, but that's off topic.
I can think of another way. Your sequel is built as an uchronia of the preceding game meaning you make sure than none of the possible endings is the ending serving as history for the sequel 🤪
The easiest (and often used strategy) is to use illusion of choice, have the main story threads merge anyways and have just some unimportant side content have divergent ending. Saves a lot of time and budget.
Joshua Sawyer has a wonderful blog post that touches on this, specifically about Fallout: New Vegas and what a post-Hoover Dam Mojave might look like; and his response has absolutely shaped my way of thinking when it comes to writing and such. I will reply to this comment with an excerpt from that post.
NOTE: ASIDE FROM THIS; THE REMAINDER OF THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY JOSHUA SAWYER I get messages from a lot of creative and curious people asking questions like the one you posed. I think it is better and more productive for these questions to be asked in communities where the ideas can be debated, where you will (hopefully) be forced to defend your opinions and push others to defend theirs. Or don’t ask them at all and just create content - stories in your head, fan fiction, illustrations, whatever - that explore the ideas that you have. Yeah, there are things that we wanted to do for post-Hoover Dam reactivity in Fallout: New Vegas that we didn’t get to do. For someone who’s interested in modding in post-HD reactivity, what they think should happen is infinitely more important than what I wanted to do. It would be contrary to the spirit of creative expression for me to opine on the validity or quality of speculation that pokes past the borders of what I have directly created. I wish that my opinions were just taken at the same value as anyone else’s, but I know that they often are not - and can even be used as cudgels between passionate and disagreeing fans. I prefer to build these worlds, characters, and ideas as they are needed and leave their boundaries blank, open, and as free to individual interpretation as possible. This is one of the reasons why, if the stories of the Mojave Wasteland are never revisited in an official Fallout product, I take great solace in knowing that I will never have to invalidate a single player’s choices by making a “canonical” ending. They’re *yours*, and *right*, forever.
each of these approaches comes with pros and cons: and most of the "cons" boil down to how much and what you are invalidating. -the "broad strokes" (commonalities) what caries over will be vague in that you take that starting point and act like everything else doesn't matter, this approach works best in referential passing because if the player runs into a character that they purposely killed because they wanted them dead in their story (they were in league with the big bad, but the majority of endings they could be redeemed/saved) -"just pick one": this will come down to how many endings you have, and maybe even how difficult some of them are to obtain; a lot of even linear RPGs can still have multiple endings, but they will often make the "canonical" ending the hardest to obtain (you have to save everyone, you have to defeat the secret boss, you have to collect the 13 mega-magoffin to...) meaning that it is only the most dedicated players that will see it, and even if you didn't pick the 100% ending as Canonical, how difficult was that ending to achieve, what portion of your player base actually saw/experienced your "canonical ending" -"let the player choose": you will probably have a broad framework for events that are effected from the previous game, and can easily make things interchangeable (these 2 lines of dialog are delivered by 1 of 5 characters depending on what the player picked, and it is very easy for these choices to end up being superficial. Then in even asking the questions you will probably not be able to ask about all the little nuances (kind of similar to "just Pick one"), and you might not ask about something that the player felt really attached to. If the player didn't play your previous game, they might have No Got Dang Idea what you are even talking about "who is Kadin, and Ashley, well Ashley sounds like a better name, so maybe she survived, Oh what have I done..." -"Let the player import a save": not every player will have played your previous game, there will be people that buy game 3 in your continuity based series, without ever playing the previous 2, so you will have some combination of the other options, and then what if the player picks "no" to importing a save, or lost it, and similar to "Let the player choose" it requires reading that save in (not only do you need to support your own save system, you now need to support the save system of your previous game...), and you might skip over those 3 bytes that identify that thing the player did that was really, really important to them.
Hi Tim, A complete off topic - but was wondering if you were aware of the Fallout themed Magic the Gathering edition coming out now (presumably you / other team members of Fallout 2 played the game as there was a reference to it in F2) and the upcoming Fallout TV show. I know you don’t do reviews but perhaps a couple of words on the topic of merch / expanding IPs into other art forms would be interesting. Or even on your own experience playing MTG - you talked a lot about playing other board games but don’t recall you ever speaking about MTG. Love your work btw and thanks for this channel :) (And yes I’m one of the people who are not subscribers - but watch almost all your videos - I recall you mentioning random unsubscribed people commenting on your channel, I’m not one of them:)
I suppose one can use statistics for game completions to pick the most probable result as canon. Or let the players to rate the story path upon completion and use that as an input.
I remember playing Mass Effect thinking that this is the peak of storytelling, not necessarily because of the writing but how it would let you do all these decisions and then would let you import your savegame into the next game. Of course, then the third game came out which was supposed to tie all the stories and in my humble opinion did such a terrible job at it that I stopped buying all EA games. You commit a genocide on Rachni, or you let them live? Doesn't really matter. Here fight some reaper rachni. You sacrifice Kaidan or Ashley? Oh, somehow they both end up on the same path as a human specter doing the same thing, ignoring that Kaidan is supposedly a very rare (according to the first game) human biotic, who never seems to actually use his abilities. And the fix for this game's very unsatisfactory ending and lack of closure? Some free slides and a paid DLC. I really loved the series and it's kinda silly that I still feel emotional about it 12 years later. Perhaps similarly, I was quite disappointed with how the 3rd act in Baldur's Gate 3 turned out. Why is Sarevok back in the town? The pragmatic guy, who called his father a fool and then moved on with his life, who went to Kara Tur to bury his soulmate? Really, after 100 years he is still in Baldur's Gate, wearing his old clothes, being a religious nut? So that the PC can kill him and gain some legacy items? Even worse, Viconia, who I think was the most complicated and interesting companion, makes an insane comeback. She, who was exiled because she didn't want to sacrifice a baby and become a tool of her religion, she who works with Drizzt and saves Suldanessellar, who is again and again hinted as being more than black and white evil, somehow spends 40 (40!) years torturing a girl and her parents. Wow. Also Shadowheart is now a 40 or 50 year old lady? What. But Viconia somehow looks like an old crone. Oh boy. I really wish it didn't affect me as much but I think it might have really killed my enjoyment of that game at that point. And I feel it was completely unnecessary. Sorry for the rant. I think even Witcher ended up ignoring a major decision (Iorveth's path) from the second game (which happens to be the one that I made), but I think the studio communicated it a bit better (were quite straightforward saying that it would be too expensive and complicated to incorporate it in the third game). I think they also released a comic book trying to tie it up. It still sucked but I personally didn't feel as manipulated as I did with ME3, where I felt "choices matter" was a big part of marketing.
I'm of the mind that if a particular ending is going to be chosen as right, then I'd rather there not be multiple endings in the first place. Nobody wants be told that their choices are invalid and that there is a wrong way to play the previous game. And just having a single ending would save some dev time so that resources wouldn't go to creating alternate epilogue scenarios that won't be represented anyway. Generally when I'm playing games with a lot of choices like Fallout, Dragon Age, or The Elder Scrolls, just pondering the implications of my decisions is satisfying in and of itself, enough so that I don't necessarily "need" to see how world-changing a decision is or lack thereof, especially if a game setting is separated from its sequel by thousands of miles and a number of years down the timeline to where you wouldn't notice the affects anyway. And if a game ending is going to be represented in some form, I don't mind things being vague or ambiguous enough that any of the endings could fit and still be internally consistent. I find that to be a preferable compromise, but obviously it's harder to pull off if the setting is the same or similar as the previous game. In an ideal world, I would have custom world states (maybe even general presets) or save imports so that a handful of relevant references can be specifically called back on.
I'm a big fan of Option #2, with the caveat that the decision as to what ending is canonical should be motivated *solely* by what ending would make for the most interesting jumping-off point for the sequel, even or especially if it's a "bad ending." I know that as a big CRPG fan I'm supposed to be all about choice-and-consequence... and I am, but for whatever reason I've never really felt that my decisions in any one game needed to be reflected in another game. Though part of that may be that I tend to try to make "good" choices, which (theoretically) ought to lead the characters and setting into a more stable. peaceful state with fewer problems -- a good end-game for a proper hero, but a bit of a dull starting point for a sequel, yeah? And why, yes, I am enormously fond of the Legacy of Kain games, why do you ask?
Same, for example I really love that XCOM 2's entire setup is that you lost Enemy Unknown fairly early into the war. It genuinely made for a more interesting scenario (occupation) than some contrived second wind after smashing them to pieces.
To be fair, I went with the flow on each ending. Fallout 1 and 2 are straightforward with the master and the enclave. Fallout 3, just doing the karmic way forward. New Vegas and 4 simply went with the cards delt with delivering the chip to its rightful owner and finding our son and went with their route head first. These were likely everyone's experiences in the very first playthroughs of each game before deciding how to try other outcomes differently, as explained in this video.
good to see that you are still making videos. i wish i had more time to watch these videos but when i get a chance its great watching and learning from your experience.
Speaking of player guides: what was it like working with the author(s) of such documentation? Did you have a different process for reporting the critical path of a game to them? Did you find that they properly represented the material once printed?
Blizzard used Option 2 with their original Warcraft games before StarCraft. The campaigns were identical except whichever side you played would win, and as they progressed the series, they switched which side canonically won in each game. WC1 it was orca, WC2 it was humans, and WC2X was kind of left up in the air until WC3 and WoW.
Canonicity is massively debatable. It tends to only really matter if the game has a sequel, and even then it can be messy. For games that have super hard splits like Fire Emblem: Three Houses it's basically impossible to pick any route as "canon" without pissing off a decent portion of the playerbase. The technology to track player action and follow up on it in a sequel is fascinating to me, but also has its downsides. A lot of people will assume that a "no prior save file" start is the Canon start, and from there retroactively determine canonicity of the first game. The "All possible overlapping events are canon even if their methods aren't" route is one of my favorites for games where it's possible in. In Warcraft 1 and 2 the games made every major story beat in both games canon outside of the actual endings themselves. Later plot and books settled on the specifics of HOW, turning it into a back and forth war, but all the details in both sides' campaigns worked out to be true, which meant for the most part even if you only played one campaign you will have had enough setup to follow the sequel and a minimal amount of your prior experience will be retconned.
So that's why in temple there are so many creatures used only once in a random room? Because you planned for sequels and expansions on this same engine?
I kinda how it was played out in Mass Effect Andromeda (or rather how I wish it would play out, since we got only reference about the other games in a log). Meaning that nobody really knows what happened at the end of the Reaper War. That mistery was really intriguing, becouse us not knowing which ending is canon, all and none are canon. So there is that possibility that Reapers won and they just might go after the refuges. Becouse what is a 200 years long trip to the other galaxy for eternal beings like the Reapers.
Besides sequels I think there can be one other reason to pick one possible ending as "Canonical": if the game you have retells an existing story. Then the ending of that existing story would be the Canonical Ending. But the player might end up with a different ending in their own personal playthrough, either due to explicit choices to get there or due to the way things just happened in their playthrough. Think for instance about an RPG that would let you replay The Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings stories (not just a story in that world but actual specific stories already told in the books). Those stories have canonical endings, even canonical playthroughs.
There might be another option: For the sequel you create a setting where the events of the first game are in doubt and accounts of them controversial. You make the discussion about canonical events part of the lore.
According to JSawyer himself, the canonical ending to NV is whatever the player chooses and thinks is right. He's actually pretty happy for fans to debate among themselves what the canon would be, he doesn't want to be the arbiter of it. Pretty based guy
I both like and dislike the way Deus Ex did it. Just make all the choices canonical lol. On the one hand, it acknowledges all of the choices you could have made which is cool, on the other hand it basically invalidates the notion of choice at all because the choice literally doesn't matter if they all happen regardless. I mean its a rock and a hard place thing isn't it? You either have to invalidate choice by picking one or some or all of the possibilities and going from there or you invalidate choice by making the choice so simple that the game ends in basically the same way no matter what you pick or you invalidate choice by making it so the story for the next game is so far removed that the impacts of your choices aren't felt at all. None of these options are really ideal in my opinion. Makes me think of Mass Effect 3 where all of the culmination of all the things you did over the course of three games is the colour of the explosion at the end and three possible cutscenes (although your choices definitely impact a lot of the possibilities of the gameplay in the third game as in who you can recruit for the final battle, in a really cool way IMO, the final stretch of the game is dependent on your choices in the previous two games which in itself is awesome even if the endings are a little bit disappointing in that regard). Or even in The Witcher games, those games are really so far removed from each other that the choices you pick don't matter very much for the sequels. There isn't much of an overarching story except for Geralt's search for Ciri and the mystery surrounding Geralt's death and revival. And you don't really make any choices that are relevant to that anyway, and most of the story in relation to that happens in the third game anyway. Certain characters will be alive or not, but those are very surface level nods to player choice. The Witchers games are one of the best examples of this kind of thing IMO, I'm just saying that no game that I'm aware of really takes this idea and runs with it to its fullest extent because that would require an insane amount of work and money. You'd have to really plan out a series of games from the beginning to have these choices matter which is a big risk and can easily increase the amount of work the sequels need exponentially. Because if you've got three drastically different endings in the first game that have huge implications, then you're basically making three separate but similar stories for the sequel, and if each of those stories have three different endings with huge implications, then you've got nine stories for the threequel. I'm sure there is probably some elegant solution to this that I don't know of because I don't have any experience making a game (I've just played lots and lots of them and think about this stuff way too much), but I can still see how there really isn't currently a very satisfying approach to solving this problem right now (at least in my opinion). In one way or another you have to undermine the notion of choice if you want to make a sequel. Maybe you could make it so the sequel is happening at the same time as the first game, and you could have a transferable save. So the impact of your choices in the first game take effect towards the end of the second game rather than the beginning? It still increases the amount of work but at least you can have massive choices that matter and are acknowledged whilst also managing the scope and only the really big choices have an impact. Like if Fallout 2 took this approach and was set in the same time as Fallout 1 instead of 80 years into the future, if you decided to just give up and let the Master do what he wants in Fallout 1, then by the end of the second game you could be facing a massive mutant army or the Enclave would be at war with the Master and his mutant army which makes it easier to defeat both. But I'm just thinking out loud really.
I mentioned this on the 'Cheevos video. But I think Achievements (at least ones not tainted by gamerscores) are a really good way for non-linear RPGs to farm out some telemetry to find out what quests and endings are most popular with the player base. And from there, you use this data to influence the canonical ending that sets the base for any sequels. e.g. if a quest was done by 10% of the playerbase, assume it was probably ignored, e.g. if a quest had ending A for 50%, ending B for 40% and ending C for 45%, you can pick whichever you like, but you should try to do something extra. i.e. if ending A has you protect someone and ending B has you kill them, assume A, but have him come back maimed because someone else came by to unsuccessfully do B after the fact. e.g. if a quest had ending A for 90% and the other endings
[MORTAL KOMBAT 11 & 1 SPOILERS] MK11 ended with 2 endings, MK1 makes you think only the good ending is canon until [SPOILERS] both become canon in a plot twist
Can i canonically have that jacket it’s sick
Fr
I'll fight you for it lol
Tims wardrope would warrant a video of its own.
Take a look at aaall the thumbnails , there are so many really cool shirts, jackets and pullovers I started to immediatly recognize if I know a video by the fact if I know the shirt haha
Yeah that's a really nice jacket.
My question is, how do you take care of a jacket like that so that it lasts for decades? Clearly he's not just throwing it in the washing machine.
The Witcher has also done the transferable save file, they've just also added an option to set your world for people that didn't have a save file/lost their save file/play on console.
I think the point was that something like ME and practically all prominent games before the Witcher didn't ask you, they had one canon already picked and assumed it if you didn't have the save file. So that would be two separate ways to do it.
“Now bear in mind I’ve only made one sequel… so far in my career - and that was Fallout 2.”
I know you can’t discuss OW2 for any number of reasons, but I’m very interested to see how the things you talked about in this video apply to the transition from Outer Worlds 1 to 2 and 2’s overall expansion(hopefully) of that universe kinda like how FO2 did for 1.
I want OW2 so damn bad
Something about these videos is magical. Hearing about one of your favorite games from someone so deeply involved in everything about it, is just incredible. Who'd have thought we'd be listening to such candid and transparent thoughts about so many topics like these
Daggerfall: Everything is canon!
Yep and "Deus Ex - Deus Ex Invisible War"
@@ekzarsusMan, I remember playing Invisible War, and a certain character who had died in my playthrough of Deus Ex was alive. I was confused, because I had no idea that character could even be saved!
Skull and Bones: Everything _has_ cannons!
I love Daggerfall, but Damn I hate the warp in the west. XD
@@lonneansekishoku8288 I like the Warp in the West, but I don't like the tendency for people to leap to a Dragon Break or Warp for every single little lore inconsistency.
Something I find very cute and enjoyable about the Life Is Strange comics is that they always emphasize at the start that there are many possible timelines and that those stories take place in one particular timeline with some specific conditions.
Thats a really clever way to do it.
Branching sequels and supplemental material are cool. Like Drakengard/Nier and how different endings lead to different games or even subseries.
Personally I love Bethesda's Warp in the West that made all endings canonical simultaneously. It really provided the universe with a sense of dreamlikeness which is a sort of hidden theme in the lore of the games. You have these events like the Warp and the disappearance of the Dwemer that are just just barely incomprehensible and it gives the series a very unique feel. When you get into Elder Scrolls lore it just feels like the true understanding is just beyond your grasp.
The Warp in the West was a very clever idea for their series. Obviously that's not something that could fit every game.
@@The-Red-Menace You okay?
@@The-Red-MenaceYou good?
This triggered a funny memory of a certain game I enjoyed that had 10 or so endings, and none of them were canon in the sequel.
As someone eho never played game with that many endings: What?
And the title of this certain game was... what, exactly?
Are you really going to bait us like this
my guess is Daggerfall going into Morrowind. DF had about 8-10 endings, and Bethesda didn't want to pick one going into MW, so they made up some insane BS to combine all of them without any of them happening as stated in DF. It's a mess lol@@TinKelp
There is a fifth option, which is what Bethesda did with Daggerfall - all the endings happened simultaneously, even those that are contradictory, with the implication that something mystical and time-breaking happened. In the Elder Scrolls universe this is called the "Warp in the West". It's part of a recurring theme in those games that the ability of the player to choose what to do in the world is a kind of mystic power in itself.
I liked this too, it does require you to have a very fantastical setting and also it helped that the next game was set as almost as far away from Daggerfall as it is possible to get on the published world map so you didn't really need to properly engage with what the Warp in the West actually meant too hard.
Saving and loading the game is a super-power :)
thats good, but you cant really do it more than once unless you have an extremely good reason for it
I really like that in Elder Scrolls. There are those elements of the lore that really make that universe mysterious, unpredictable, and bizarre and the Warp in the West really is a lynchpin in that ironically.
Deus Ex: Invisible War did something close to that. It's been so long since I last played but I believe the three possible endings from the first game were: J.C. merges his consciousness with the Helios AI and rules mankind himself, J.C. restores the Illuminati to power so they can rule, or J.C. destroys the Internet so nobody rules on a global scale. Invisible War reveals that J.C. merged with Helios, the merging process ended up destroying the Internet in the process, and the Illuminati ended up being able to weather this and were able to rebuild anyway.
Deus Ex: Invisible War combined all three endings into one future timeline, and ran with that.
Hi Tim. It's us, everyone.
(Canonical post!)
I like what Firaxis did with their XCOM games, where the canonical ending of the first is that you lost the linear story and had a gameover, which leads into the second.
I hate what Firaxis did with Xcom. The first problem is that the "base defense failure" being canonical is that it's not internally consistent with Xcom 2 since everyone dies, including Central/Bradford who returns as a major character in Xcom 2. The second problem with the premature ending is that the the rest of the game is null and void. There's just no point in finishing the game since Xcom 2 undermines its narrative; the psionic character's noble self-sacrifice is now a nothing burger that never happened. If I read a book sequel that told me that the second half of the previous book didn't happen, then I'd ask why the previous book full of erroneous details was still in print and considered part of the same universe. As of right now, the mental gymnastics I use to rationalize the first game's existence is that everything after the base defense is part of the Commander's dream simulations. "It was just a dream" isn't a compelling story trope though.
I like the idea they lost but the timeskip and starting over with a couple people felt like a screw you. I love xcom 2 but the time skip was a middle finger
I also love that some games choose the bad ending as the canonical ending, like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.
Metro and Xcom did that
Forget Mass Effects, Dragon Ages did that too and in a lot more elaborate way. So since the game crossed console generations, you exported your save game to a web tool. It then allowed you to look over all of your choices to see what your state of the game is. If you didn't play the previous ones, the tool allowed you to fine tune the state yourself. And it then siphoned it into the new game through EA account. It was pretty great.
I think the DA Keep is a nice concept, but it would be a lot more convenient and future-proof if it were included with the game in the options somewhere. The website won't be around forever. And it's annoying to have to launch a website on a browser every time you want to start a new game of Inquisition (some of us play too much Dragon Age). I just stopped using the Keep altogether and no longer play the series as a continuous trilogy with a consistent world state. I just play 1 and 2 back-to-back, with DAI being the almost-standalone "other" if I'm in the mood.
Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend about the new Mass Effect forcing a canonical ending for the trilogy, so this is right on time !
How’d that go lol
@@TigBlack7 RED 🤣
it was always obvious that the red ending was canonical as it was the only one showing Shepard survive the attack in London.
Destroy. No other ending makes sense (they're still valid and fun to play, just non canonical).
@@xyhmo I think control makes plenty of sense. You become a galactic police force that fixes everything, with reapers as your own personal military to defend against any threat. What if there are more reapers outside the Milky Way who wouldn't have been affected by the Crucible's space magic? it wouldn't make sense that the reapers put all of their eggs into one basket by invading with every single reaper ship when they know that the Crucible plans exist. The destroy ending ultimately undermines the whole Quarian-Geth peace plot, and is vaguely noted by Star Child to destroy even "part synthetics" like Shepard. So does everyone with a pacemaker or other implant just die? Are computers in general wiped out? Now millions of people are stranded to starve in the Sol System after the relays are destroyed and galactic civilization is sent into a dark age?
Another way: just decide that all possible endings are canon and happened all at once, also known as Deus Ex: Invisible War way of doing things.
I was going to say that! Invisible War is very flawed but I enjoyed the concept. It felt very "quantum theory" to me somehow.
Option #3 was done, IIRC, on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire and I found it a nice way to close the gap between original and sequel since most of the time you either have a true canonical ending like in Tiberian Dawn to Sun (option #2), or the games may be on the same setting but with little connection between themselves, like in Harebrained's Shadowrun trilogy.
Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire also had Option #4. You could import your save from Pillars 1 and start from there with all the choices you have made in the first game. I must say that this is my favourite option. But Option #3 is a good subtitute if the games are too far away in time and importing a save from the previous game is technically impossible.
Thing I really loved about C&C is the Nod and Soviet campaigns felt like fun "what if?" scenarios, they could go a bit wild with them because they didn't have to worry about walking it back in a sequel. You can have Nod conquer the world and Kane become basically Jesus because you don't have to write around that in the sequel to un-destroy the GDI lol
Hi Tim,
Just wanted to quickly say that your work has been instrumental in the way I view cRPGs and my tastes in story telling at a whole.
I'm getting super into making mods for fallout 4 right now and I use that quote about 'not wanting to build a bigger gun' all the time when discussing what fallout is to me. Keep up the good work ^_^
it is interesting that Tim said he worked on Pillars of Eternity and Pillars 2 imports Pillars 1 save file and sets the word state based on Pillars 1 decisions and he did not even mention it
The Fallout 2 manual also says that Ian died in Junktown and Dogmeat was fried by a laser grid. I suppose how canonical that is depends on how you feel about manuals.
What if the vault dweller wasnt honest? What if the vault dweller actually wanted to join the mutants and murdered Ian? However the vault dweller found out that masters plan wasnt going to work (sterile). What if the vault dweller pillaged Arroyo and used it for fun? And got murdered? Or left?
Just because someone writes something down doesnt mean it is true.
What if someone else wrote the memoirs?
Well it's the first option: Ian died in Necropolis (that's the city in manual, not Junktown), where the clash with supermutants is probable unless afaik charisma build. And dogmeat most times died in base for those force fields.
They're the most probable options, such as rescuing Tandi from the raiders
@@fredrik3880 What if the vault dweller was actually Frank Horrigan the whole time and spun this wild story of a hero destroying the master's army when the whole time he was actually the bad guy and he drove around in a big monster truck with spiked wheels?
@@1sweetree lol finally the mystery is solved!
The way they did it in Mass Effect is my favourite way of doing Canon endings.
That was cool
Great video! I can think of another that might be useful: basing a conical ending on the systems you want in the sequel.
Say for example the Mass effect devs want to explore the impact of the ending where synthetic life and biological life merged, and how that would affect the mechanics. Maybe hacking is more important because now everything is synthetic. Maybe electrical damage has a different status effect and you can play around with stage hazards. Or maybe your telemetry tells you that a majority of players really enjoyed a style of play that meshes well with this theme so choosing the synthesis is a convenient way to give them what they want.
it's canon that Mr. Tim never disappoints
I can't believe this is happening! Free education at the highest level! Thank you Tim!
I played fallout 2 right after I finished fallout 1 and I think the "Look for the commonalities" method worked great. I saved Tandi and felt great about it, and seeing her as the leader of NCR was amazing! My ending made perfect sense, but I know any other ending would have either.
Using player's save file is also a good option, but! I'm a programmer and I know how difficult it is to implement that :D BioWare tried it in Dragon Age too, they tried to make dragon age origins save file usable in dragon age inquisition, but it was so buggy that they ended up making a tool to just create a save file from important events in DA:O and DA2
Well it's obvious Tandi survived cause she gives you a lot of xp for saving her, also means Vault Dweller had >4 INT due to the fact he didn't just go poof poof shady sands more like gravy sands
RPG devs: “canonical endings are hard”
Fighting game devs: 🫠
Let's talk Camera, Perspective, Control for party-based RPGs
If you had to do a new one (Arcanum 2, Fallout 2 2, Baldur's Gate 3 (non-Larian)) how would you approach perspective & camera?
I'm asking because I feel that there was something special about both iso perspective but also the non-3d sprites that made the games special.
Hey Tim,
do you think cRPG systems still need to evolve away from their pen-and-paper origins, or is it better to stay faithfull to the tabletop ways? I feel like computer RPGs are quite different from the physical games, and we can go so much further with their design, yet I'm not even sure it's posible to come up with a better novel system from the ground up.
For example, I don't really like how games often force you to fill in your character sheet at the very start of the game, before even explaining how it works. What if the game didn't devote any attention to sneaking, or I find out I don't really enjoy the combat, but my starting points are already spent and so I feel like I wasted them? Also, how do you effectively communicate to the player that X extra points in this skill bring such and such improvement in Y, so he understands whether he wants to upgrade it by 10 or 15 points? Do you really need a general level for the player, or maybe it's better to track each skill separately, and give points that can be spent only on a certain skill / group of skills, so that the player's improvement comes as a result of his actions, rather than just letting him spend some points on any random skill every time he reaches an arbitrary milestone?
Seems like a there has to be a better way that plays to the strengths of the cRPG specifically (i.e. we can track so much more stuff, do way more complex calculations), yet a lot of RPGs feel that it's better to just tweak the basic formula.
Sorry if I missed the vid where you spoke about this
Lots of love and thanks a lot for the great videos, they are always great food for thought!❤
Tim can you share with us which modern RPGs are your favorites and why? I would love to hear you talk about Witcher, Mass Effect, Deus Ex etc and things you like/dislike about them and which mechanics you would like to incorporate into your own game.
The witcher series isn't perfect, and is actually a pretty good example of why their method is difficult to implement. In the first game, you can save the princess of Temeria and marry her off to Radovid, which would completely end any conflict in the north. In addition, there's characters you can kill in the first and second game that will magically show up as alive in the 3rd.
There’s one other way to do it, which is to not pick any one ending and instead provide mutually exclusive evidence suggesting different endings.
The example I’m thinking of is Fable 2. In that game, it never tells you exactly what happened in the first game. Now, in the first game, the player has choice to kill an NPC and receive a specific unique item or to save that NPC and never obtain that item.
In the second game, the only thing that the in-game characters know for sure is that the player character obtained that item. Yet at the same time the NPC that you had to kill is alive and playing a role in Fable 2’s story.
This should theoretically lead to an “everything happened ambiguity”. How well it actually works is an exercise for the reader.
KOTOR II had a whole section where you got to answer questions about KOTOR I to set what went down. Well, the whole game had a lot of that going on for the main plot/protagonist (and I don't think the protagonist had "amnesia" either). One of my favorite ways to handle it (the Mass Effect save files are cool, but it's hard to remember all the choices several years later when the sequel comes out).
Witcher 3 and Mass Effect both have save loading, but Mass Effect had a much better system for it. Also in regards to Witcher 3, you can only choose events from Witcher 2, and of those it doesn't really effect much (one character shows up as a cameo for a one off quest, which is all I can remember of the crossover). It depends on how grand the ending is in my opinion. You can't possibly code and write every ending, so instead its just a pop quiz on what characters, towns, factions, or even ideologies are around. Usually any of the choses have little weight (I'm fairly certain that Mass Effect's saves are similar to the Witcher 3 quiz, but with slightly more impact on cutscenes/quests. I might be biased, but Fallout 1's canon ending was pretty perfect. It's vague enough that my Vault Dweller could have been chaotic, lawful, or even just pure neutral, and it wouldn't effect Fallout 2's story at all.
Great video as always Tim! If I were to give small advice, some visuals would go a long way. They don't have to be obnoxious or even take over the screen. You could just have a picture of whatever game you're talking about in the corner. The only negative would be blocking out your massive collection for a little bit.
Fallout 2 is a weird one for me, because people get hung up on the canonicity of the events the Vault Dweller took in canon, but nobody ever really brings up that essentially your character is "hijacked" to set up the events of the sequel. Like founding a primitive tribe in Arroyo when you could end the game big brain tech warrior, or an anti-social thief.
I know in Fallout 2, in NCR some developers weren't happy that the statue of the Vault Dweller was male because they felt it removed player agency, but idk they already did that before the game even started.
Dragon Age did a combo (same company as Mass Effect).
You import your save game, but Alternatively they made a tapestry of the story so far where you can go from scratch, or import your save, and edit every event.
Nothing is more annoying in an RPG focused around choice and consequence than to be told that your choices don’t count because the devs said so
Planescape Torment did this great where the story is YOUR Nameless One's story, and the locations and people are apart of your story. The Lady of Pain, the ruler of Sigil is herself a side background character in your story.
It doesn't bother me much as it still proves the player made a impact in the world. Reminds me of WoW where the player takes down the bosses but all the npc leaders are still doing stuff.
Really curious to hear your take on game option menus from programmer's perspective. Any interesting or non-obvious things you've included over the years or wanted to include but for some reason weren't able to?
I enjoy presenting a volume slider with a reference sound scene on first launch. With the main purpose of letting a player increase volume from zero to a comfortable level without the game being initially too loud. Publishers veto this quite often though.
Hey Tim!! Would you review Mandalore gamings review of Arcanum?
I was hoping you did a video like this
Regarding just picking one ending, worth mentioning that a way to do it - especially now that achievements and many other things about a game are tracked online - is to see what most people did. I’ve heard that’s how the new X-COM chose their canonical ending.
I feel like I'm on the verge of my own canonical ending.
Don't do it.
The ending at the beginning isn't canon
Me too man. These videos are somehow kind of comforting though.
Btw if i remember well good old Lord British allowed import of savegames from ultima IV and V into ultima V and VI but i can't remember if it could change something else than the character sheets
Hey tim! Do you still have any character’s design and concept arts for fallout? I saw some old concept art for the game and it looks really cool, maybe you can post a video about it.
I like how some situations can make sense of it, like TES 2 (I believe it was 2 anyways) they say because of the time distortion that was essentially happening, ALL of the endings were canon, as they all "happened".
Another thing would be to do what Robert Jordan did in Wheel of Time (book series).
Sometimes he shows what someone did, and later on you see how others who weren't there receive the knowledge of it, and it's normally absolutely INCORRECT on how it went down. So huge sections of people think something happened or was went about in a completely incorrect way. Other times you don't see an event at all but "hear" about it, and when those happen, you find yourself thinking, "It probably didn't happen that way".
I bring this up because major events can always be canonically true, but HOW they went down, can always be up for debate in future games, and you could always work in different portions of people thinking it happened a certain way, or some thinking it NEVER happened. It would be a fun way to acknowledge choices, while never giving a definitive answer.
When it comes to a sequel to a story with many endings I try to see what the story tells me about the protagonist. For instance, in New Vegas, the courier seems to be the kinda person to "go the extra mile" so any solution that seems like a long shot or has some major blockage to achieving the best/most "valuable" outcome, they went for it. So the Vault 34 residents are most likely alive and mostly well, Jacobstown is bustling with slightly less psychotic night kin and heck there might just be a wig wearing super mutant traveling with her robot companion (I like to think she became the new radio host after Mr. New Vegas eventually shut down).
i slept in and missed therapy but also missed my morning ritual coffee with Tim, and on the day with such a killer jacket!!
Amazing video as always 🖤🖤🖤
I love ALL Timothy Cain videos
as much as I think Mass Effect is a flawed series, the ability to port your save through the whole trilogy strikes me as the best overall solution to this. It's very satisfying as a player to see the results of decisions in the previous games manifest in the sequels.
Love your videos, thanks. I play and enjoy games that you discuss (Outer Worlds!) and your videos are motivating me to find more, such as Fallout 2. May I make a suggestion? Remove the moving props from your background. In the language of theater, they "upstage" you. On most videos, there is a swirling ball that is very distracting. On a few videos filmed in the dark, there have been too many lights, too busy, in the background. I suggest that you settle your background down to only non-moving, non-distracting visuals. It will be easier to be immersed in the spoken content of the videos.
1It's always valuable to see an actual Creator talk about this stuff, even though you didn't create it all by yourself 100% and probably not 100% of all ideas were only from you and also you just could change as a preson through years and have simply different PoV on it all (for example "Star Wars" vs "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Special Edition" ) compared when the "ritual" was started and finished first time (ie with game's release).
Nevertheless, it is Your train of thoughts and your mind that influenced a lot of it. Your particular way of thinking from and thinking through, which is unique on itself (as can be VERY vividly seen by, for example, comparing Action Comics #1 and McClure and Superman #1 origin of Superman vs More Fun Comics 101 origin, which wasn't written by one of co-creators of Superman, at least not directly, even though, it Wasn't really That weird shift considering More natural evolution of the core lore betwixt 1933 and 1938, but still if you see it you Will know something isn't right), which will never be replicated by anyone, at best honored and emulated.
probably the best way I've seen a sequel deal with canon through games was with Pillars of Eternity which would either import your previous game's data or asked questions about your previous game's choices.
Hi Tim, can you share your opinion on Caesar's Legion as a faction and it's place in the Fallout world?
Van Buren
Do you think the reason so few games go the Mass Effect route is due to technical difficulties or narrative ones?
You can jump ahead in time and start with new status quo. Whatever ending chosen in previous game is reset to 0 (or close to 0) due to some huge event between 1 & 2. (alien invasion, magic meltdown, etc etc)
I'd argue there's a 5th way but I can't think of any great examples outside of Zelda & even then it's not a great fit but if your story only has a few lines of diverging you can make separate timeliness for each different ending. Much like how there's the adult, child, and Ganon timelines in Zelda based off of the ending of Ocarina of Time.
BioWare did importing world state for Dragon Age and for Mass Effect. It feels really good when you play it, because the world feels truly yours.
Hey Tim, can we get the option for Picture in Picture? I love to listen to your videos in the background while I work but without it it makes it very difficult.
Hey Tim, I have a question that might be hard for you to answer, since that's not the area you worked at: What are the inspirations for the gun designs in TOW? Some of them are easier to trace back to early 1900s but some of them, like the Vermin, have completely eluded me. Thanks in advance!
Dont know who this is, but I’m enjoying this
the guy who made Fallout 1
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cain
Hey Tim, question. How come we don’t see devs doing more import saves for endings like BioWare did in Mass Effect? I understand the strain on writing something like that can have. But is it so much that most devs don’t bother going that route altogether?
I'm not sure if today we have any big AAA titles that would or could pull off sequels that are released every 2-3 years. Game development seems to take a lot of time these days and I think why the idea of it worked is that Bioware was able to release these games quite quickly.
It also lead to one of the most controversial releases with ME3, a lot of people felt deceived with how choices and consequences lead to unsatisfactory endings, and also a lot of the game seemed to be cut to be sold as paid DLC, like the day 1 Prothean companion DLC, but that's off topic.
I can think of another way. Your sequel is built as an uchronia of the preceding game meaning you make sure than none of the possible endings is the ending serving as history for the sequel 🤪
What's a uchronia?
An alternative history like Tarantino's Inglorious Bastard or The man in the High Castle from P.K. Dick
The easiest (and often used strategy) is to use illusion of choice, have the main story threads merge anyways and have just some unimportant side content have divergent ending. Saves a lot of time and budget.
Joshua Sawyer has a wonderful blog post that touches on this, specifically about Fallout: New Vegas and what a post-Hoover Dam Mojave might look like; and his response has absolutely shaped my way of thinking when it comes to writing and such. I will reply to this comment with an excerpt from that post.
NOTE: ASIDE FROM THIS; THE REMAINDER OF THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY JOSHUA SAWYER
I get messages from a lot of creative and curious people asking questions like the one you posed. I think it is better and more productive for these questions to be asked in communities where the ideas can be debated, where you will (hopefully) be forced to defend your opinions and push others to defend theirs. Or don’t ask them at all and just create content - stories in your head, fan fiction, illustrations, whatever - that explore the ideas that you have. Yeah, there are things that we wanted to do for post-Hoover Dam reactivity in Fallout: New Vegas that we didn’t get to do. For someone who’s interested in modding in post-HD reactivity, what they think should happen is infinitely more important than what I wanted to do.
It would be contrary to the spirit of creative expression for me to opine on the validity or quality of speculation that pokes past the borders of what I have directly created. I wish that my opinions were just taken at the same value as anyone else’s, but I know that they often are not - and can even be used as cudgels between passionate and disagreeing fans. I prefer to build these worlds, characters, and ideas as they are needed and leave their boundaries blank, open, and as free to individual interpretation as possible.
This is one of the reasons why, if the stories of the Mojave Wasteland are never revisited in an official Fallout product, I take great solace in knowing that I will never have to invalidate a single player’s choices by making a “canonical” ending. They’re *yours*, and *right*, forever.
@@BumNanner451beautiful. Couldnt agree more.
each of these approaches comes with pros and cons: and most of the "cons" boil down to how much and what you are invalidating.
-the "broad strokes" (commonalities) what caries over will be vague in that you take that starting point and act like everything else doesn't matter, this approach works best in referential passing because if the player runs into a character that they purposely killed because they wanted them dead in their story (they were in league with the big bad, but the majority of endings they could be redeemed/saved)
-"just pick one": this will come down to how many endings you have, and maybe even how difficult some of them are to obtain; a lot of even linear RPGs can still have multiple endings, but they will often make the "canonical" ending the hardest to obtain (you have to save everyone, you have to defeat the secret boss, you have to collect the 13 mega-magoffin to...) meaning that it is only the most dedicated players that will see it, and even if you didn't pick the 100% ending as Canonical, how difficult was that ending to achieve, what portion of your player base actually saw/experienced your "canonical ending"
-"let the player choose": you will probably have a broad framework for events that are effected from the previous game, and can easily make things interchangeable (these 2 lines of dialog are delivered by 1 of 5 characters depending on what the player picked, and it is very easy for these choices to end up being superficial. Then in even asking the questions you will probably not be able to ask about all the little nuances (kind of similar to "just Pick one"), and you might not ask about something that the player felt really attached to. If the player didn't play your previous game, they might have No Got Dang Idea what you are even talking about "who is Kadin, and Ashley, well Ashley sounds like a better name, so maybe she survived, Oh what have I done..."
-"Let the player import a save": not every player will have played your previous game, there will be people that buy game 3 in your continuity based series, without ever playing the previous 2, so you will have some combination of the other options, and then what if the player picks "no" to importing a save, or lost it, and similar to "Let the player choose" it requires reading that save in (not only do you need to support your own save system, you now need to support the save system of your previous game...), and you might skip over those 3 bytes that identify that thing the player did that was really, really important to them.
Hi Tim,
A complete off topic - but was wondering if you were aware of the Fallout themed Magic the Gathering edition coming out now (presumably you / other team members of Fallout 2 played the game as there was a reference to it in F2) and the upcoming Fallout TV show. I know you don’t do reviews but perhaps a couple of words on the topic of merch / expanding IPs into other art forms would be interesting. Or even on your own experience playing MTG - you talked a lot about playing other board games but don’t recall you ever speaking about MTG.
Love your work btw and thanks for this channel :)
(And yes I’m one of the people who are not subscribers - but watch almost all your videos - I recall you mentioning random unsubscribed people commenting on your channel, I’m not one of them:)
I think XCOM 2 was based on what happened with the largest percentage of players in the first game?
I suppose one can use statistics for game completions to pick the most probable result as canon. Or let the players to rate the story path upon completion and use that as an input.
This can be summed up real quick: canonical ending is the goodguy saves the day. Fallout 1 demonstrates this
Most games do that but not every game
Tandy did not survive the second explosion ... but the door is at least open. So there is that.
I remember playing Mass Effect thinking that this is the peak of storytelling, not necessarily because of the writing but how it would let you do all these decisions and then would let you import your savegame into the next game. Of course, then the third game came out which was supposed to tie all the stories and in my humble opinion did such a terrible job at it that I stopped buying all EA games. You commit a genocide on Rachni, or you let them live? Doesn't really matter. Here fight some reaper rachni. You sacrifice Kaidan or Ashley? Oh, somehow they both end up on the same path as a human specter doing the same thing, ignoring that Kaidan is supposedly a very rare (according to the first game) human biotic, who never seems to actually use his abilities. And the fix for this game's very unsatisfactory ending and lack of closure? Some free slides and a paid DLC. I really loved the series and it's kinda silly that I still feel emotional about it 12 years later.
Perhaps similarly, I was quite disappointed with how the 3rd act in Baldur's Gate 3 turned out. Why is Sarevok back in the town? The pragmatic guy, who called his father a fool and then moved on with his life, who went to Kara Tur to bury his soulmate? Really, after 100 years he is still in Baldur's Gate, wearing his old clothes, being a religious nut? So that the PC can kill him and gain some legacy items? Even worse, Viconia, who I think was the most complicated and interesting companion, makes an insane comeback. She, who was exiled because she didn't want to sacrifice a baby and become a tool of her religion, she who works with Drizzt and saves Suldanessellar, who is again and again hinted as being more than black and white evil, somehow spends 40 (40!) years torturing a girl and her parents. Wow. Also Shadowheart is now a 40 or 50 year old lady? What. But Viconia somehow looks like an old crone. Oh boy. I really wish it didn't affect me as much but I think it might have really killed my enjoyment of that game at that point. And I feel it was completely unnecessary.
Sorry for the rant.
I think even Witcher ended up ignoring a major decision (Iorveth's path) from the second game (which happens to be the one that I made), but I think the studio communicated it a bit better (were quite straightforward saying that it would be too expensive and complicated to incorporate it in the third game). I think they also released a comic book trying to tie it up. It still sucked but I personally didn't feel as manipulated as I did with ME3, where I felt "choices matter" was a big part of marketing.
5:38, wasn't the start of PoE2: Deadfire just like that?
I'm of the mind that if a particular ending is going to be chosen as right, then I'd rather there not be multiple endings in the first place. Nobody wants be told that their choices are invalid and that there is a wrong way to play the previous game. And just having a single ending would save some dev time so that resources wouldn't go to creating alternate epilogue scenarios that won't be represented anyway.
Generally when I'm playing games with a lot of choices like Fallout, Dragon Age, or The Elder Scrolls, just pondering the implications of my decisions is satisfying in and of itself, enough so that I don't necessarily "need" to see how world-changing a decision is or lack thereof, especially if a game setting is separated from its sequel by thousands of miles and a number of years down the timeline to where you wouldn't notice the affects anyway. And if a game ending is going to be represented in some form, I don't mind things being vague or ambiguous enough that any of the endings could fit and still be internally consistent. I find that to be a preferable compromise, but obviously it's harder to pull off if the setting is the same or similar as the previous game. In an ideal world, I would have custom world states (maybe even general presets) or save imports so that a handful of relevant references can be specifically called back on.
It would've been better to have some comparative analysis and assessment.
I'm a big fan of Option #2, with the caveat that the decision as to what ending is canonical should be motivated *solely* by what ending would make for the most interesting jumping-off point for the sequel, even or especially if it's a "bad ending."
I know that as a big CRPG fan I'm supposed to be all about choice-and-consequence... and I am, but for whatever reason I've never really felt that my decisions in any one game needed to be reflected in another game. Though part of that may be that I tend to try to make "good" choices, which (theoretically) ought to lead the characters and setting into a more stable. peaceful state with fewer problems -- a good end-game for a proper hero, but a bit of a dull starting point for a sequel, yeah?
And why, yes, I am enormously fond of the Legacy of Kain games, why do you ask?
So which side does your coun land on :p
Same, for example I really love that XCOM 2's entire setup is that you lost Enemy Unknown fairly early into the war. It genuinely made for a more interesting scenario (occupation) than some contrived second wind after smashing them to pieces.
If I remember correctly, the Metro series uses the bad ending to start the sequels.
To be fair, I went with the flow on each ending. Fallout 1 and 2 are straightforward with the master and the enclave. Fallout 3, just doing the karmic way forward. New Vegas and 4 simply went with the cards delt with delivering the chip to its rightful owner and finding our son and went with their route head first. These were likely everyone's experiences in the very first playthroughs of each game before deciding how to try other outcomes differently, as explained in this video.
good to see that you are still making videos. i wish i had more time to watch these videos but when i get a chance its great watching and learning from your experience.
Speaking of player guides: what was it like working with the author(s) of such documentation? Did you have a different process for reporting the critical path of a game to them? Did you find that they properly represented the material once printed?
Blizzard used Option 2 with their original Warcraft games before StarCraft. The campaigns were identical except whichever side you played would win, and as they progressed the series, they switched which side canonically won in each game. WC1 it was orca, WC2 it was humans, and WC2X was kind of left up in the air until WC3 and WoW.
Canonicity is massively debatable. It tends to only really matter if the game has a sequel, and even then it can be messy. For games that have super hard splits like Fire Emblem: Three Houses it's basically impossible to pick any route as "canon" without pissing off a decent portion of the playerbase.
The technology to track player action and follow up on it in a sequel is fascinating to me, but also has its downsides. A lot of people will assume that a "no prior save file" start is the Canon start, and from there retroactively determine canonicity of the first game.
The "All possible overlapping events are canon even if their methods aren't" route is one of my favorites for games where it's possible in. In Warcraft 1 and 2 the games made every major story beat in both games canon outside of the actual endings themselves. Later plot and books settled on the specifics of HOW, turning it into a back and forth war, but all the details in both sides' campaigns worked out to be true, which meant for the most part even if you only played one campaign you will have had enough setup to follow the sequel and a minimal amount of your prior experience will be retconned.
Set up with questions : but you did do that, or someone from your team! In Deadfire.
So that's why in temple there are so many creatures used only once in a random room? Because you planned for sequels and expansions on this same engine?
Damn, posted right as I get to work 😂😂
yeah this time of the day one hour before you used to uploading the videos its great to start the day 😊
I kinda how it was played out in Mass Effect Andromeda (or rather how I wish it would play out, since we got only reference about the other games in a log). Meaning that nobody really knows what happened at the end of the Reaper War. That mistery was really intriguing, becouse us not knowing which ending is canon, all and none are canon. So there is that possibility that Reapers won and they just might go after the refuges. Becouse what is a 200 years long trip to the other galaxy for eternal beings like the Reapers.
Besides sequels I think there can be one other reason to pick one possible ending as "Canonical": if the game you have retells an existing story. Then the ending of that existing story would be the Canonical Ending.
But the player might end up with a different ending in their own personal playthrough, either due to explicit choices to get there or due to the way things just happened in their playthrough.
Think for instance about an RPG that would let you replay The Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings stories (not just a story in that world but actual specific stories already told in the books).
Those stories have canonical endings, even canonical playthroughs.
There might be another option: For the sequel you create a setting where the events of the first game are in doubt and accounts of them controversial. You make the discussion about canonical events part of the lore.
"And obviously Thandi survived..."
Whoah, man, spoilers! 😂
Unless I missed it, surprised he did not mention "The Dragon Break" style of all endings are canonical.
I wonder which method Outer Worlds 2 is going to use.
KotOR2 allows you to chose the canonical ending of the KotOR1 in the first dialogue with the Atton. You can even say Revan was a female (FACT).
Pillars of Eternity 2 also let you use a save game file from Pillars 1.
I wish to keep my inventory from Arcanum for the journey to the center of the earth. What's the Void then?
the canonical ending to FO2 is whatever ending Tim thinks it should be
the canonical ending to FNV is whatever J. Sawyer thinks it should be
According to JSawyer himself, the canonical ending to NV is whatever the player chooses and thinks is right. He's actually pretty happy for fans to debate among themselves what the canon would be, he doesn't want to be the arbiter of it. Pretty based guy
Fallout 2 did a good job in my opinion
It's not just Tandy though, in Fallout 1 you can massacre the entire Shady Sands so none of the NCR comes to exist. :V
I both like and dislike the way Deus Ex did it. Just make all the choices canonical lol. On the one hand, it acknowledges all of the choices you could have made which is cool, on the other hand it basically invalidates the notion of choice at all because the choice literally doesn't matter if they all happen regardless.
I mean its a rock and a hard place thing isn't it? You either have to invalidate choice by picking one or some or all of the possibilities and going from there or you invalidate choice by making the choice so simple that the game ends in basically the same way no matter what you pick or you invalidate choice by making it so the story for the next game is so far removed that the impacts of your choices aren't felt at all. None of these options are really ideal in my opinion. Makes me think of Mass Effect 3 where all of the culmination of all the things you did over the course of three games is the colour of the explosion at the end and three possible cutscenes (although your choices definitely impact a lot of the possibilities of the gameplay in the third game as in who you can recruit for the final battle, in a really cool way IMO, the final stretch of the game is dependent on your choices in the previous two games which in itself is awesome even if the endings are a little bit disappointing in that regard). Or even in The Witcher games, those games are really so far removed from each other that the choices you pick don't matter very much for the sequels. There isn't much of an overarching story except for Geralt's search for Ciri and the mystery surrounding Geralt's death and revival. And you don't really make any choices that are relevant to that anyway, and most of the story in relation to that happens in the third game anyway. Certain characters will be alive or not, but those are very surface level nods to player choice. The Witchers games are one of the best examples of this kind of thing IMO, I'm just saying that no game that I'm aware of really takes this idea and runs with it to its fullest extent because that would require an insane amount of work and money.
You'd have to really plan out a series of games from the beginning to have these choices matter which is a big risk and can easily increase the amount of work the sequels need exponentially. Because if you've got three drastically different endings in the first game that have huge implications, then you're basically making three separate but similar stories for the sequel, and if each of those stories have three different endings with huge implications, then you've got nine stories for the threequel. I'm sure there is probably some elegant solution to this that I don't know of because I don't have any experience making a game (I've just played lots and lots of them and think about this stuff way too much), but I can still see how there really isn't currently a very satisfying approach to solving this problem right now (at least in my opinion). In one way or another you have to undermine the notion of choice if you want to make a sequel.
Maybe you could make it so the sequel is happening at the same time as the first game, and you could have a transferable save. So the impact of your choices in the first game take effect towards the end of the second game rather than the beginning? It still increases the amount of work but at least you can have massive choices that matter and are acknowledged whilst also managing the scope and only the really big choices have an impact. Like if Fallout 2 took this approach and was set in the same time as Fallout 1 instead of 80 years into the future, if you decided to just give up and let the Master do what he wants in Fallout 1, then by the end of the second game you could be facing a massive mutant army or the Enclave would be at war with the Master and his mutant army which makes it easier to defeat both. But I'm just thinking out loud really.
I mentioned this on the 'Cheevos video.
But I think Achievements (at least ones not tainted by gamerscores) are a really good way for non-linear RPGs to farm out some telemetry to find out what quests and endings are most popular with the player base.
And from there, you use this data to influence the canonical ending that sets the base for any sequels.
e.g. if a quest was done by 10% of the playerbase, assume it was probably ignored,
e.g. if a quest had ending A for 50%, ending B for 40% and ending C for 45%, you can pick whichever you like, but you should try to do something extra. i.e. if ending A has you protect someone and ending B has you kill them, assume A, but have him come back maimed because someone else came by to unsuccessfully do B after the fact.
e.g. if a quest had ending A for 90% and the other endings
[MORTAL KOMBAT 11 & 1 SPOILERS] MK11 ended with 2 endings, MK1 makes you think only the good ending is canon until [SPOILERS] both become canon in a plot twist
The obvious canonical ending of Fallout was being turned into a super mutant.
The Master seizing the Institute would be interesting and let it accomplish its plans.
Arcanum 2 confirmed?