I talk about the systemic (i.e. coded) effects of the SPECIAL attributes in the first Fallout game. p.s. the audio track is slightly off in some places, and I have no idea why.
He needs the glasses for +1 perception and a plus 10 skill points in science; typically it would also be a -5 in charisma but it's Tim so it doesn't affect his charisma.
I think we all need to appreciate what we're getting from uncle tim every day for absolutely fucking free. I can't think of another big name in the game who has done something to this level and the insight not just on game dev but on life generally has been incredible to hear. I never expected Tim to be so enjoyable to watch too, he's very endearing
Seriously! Tim Cain is almost an idol to some of us who grew up on his games. These daily videos are really insightful about his time and experience in the games industry, and they have a really down-to-Earth charm to them!
"You're a hero... And you have to leave". This quote was a genius way to end Fallout. Could you talk about who wrote it and how did the team decide about that ending? Thanks and love your videos, bye!
Fallout 2 made charisma somewhat more useful by having it limit your party size. You could have a companion for every 2 points of charisma you had, so a 10 charisma character could have a whole squad of 5 blasting the enemy alongside you. And since party members in Fallout 2 gained levels and could potentially be equipped with power armor and gauss rifles, rather than gradually growing useless as the enemies got tougher like Ian or Tycho, this was quite powerful by the end game. Otherwise, though, charisma has always been treated pretty shabbily as a stat in Fallout. It's the stereotypical dump stat in New Vegas, as well.
I always go Gifted and 5 charisma, you can use the dual sunglasses to get +1 charisma for each, one perk and then mentats to get to 10, so all I need to keep a full party is looting and buying mentats everywhere, trying to not get addicted. xD Same with luck and other things. You only need 6, then one perk and zeta scans to get 10. Buffouts help with strength and endurance and so on. If you play your cards good, you can have a 10 in all character no problem. I put most into agility though, it is not easy to raise permanently and it saves you in combat.
@twerkingbollocks6661 You could also get the perk weapons handling which gives you +3 strength for handling guns. So you don't really need that much in Strength at all, unless you want certain specific perks like slayer. (edit: at least in the old games, I remember slayer having a 8St, 8EN requirement) Edit: For those that had low Charisma but still wanted more followers, they could always take the perk "magnetic personality", while it increased your party size by +1 it didn't go over the max size of 5.
Luck in the first two Fallouts are an absolute game changer tbh. I straight up got the UFO encounter after travelling only like three map squares from Vault 13 at the very start of the game. Hadn't even been to Shady Sands or anything yet.
It's always sad when you lose things you want to keep, especially things like programming notes and early concepts of things, because they aren't just part of the game development, but also part of your life and part of a legend that we all love.
8:42 I'm not sure if Tim's misremembering about companion count being limited by charisma. That was not the case in Fallout, but it was in Fallout 2. I learned this the hard way because I had come to expect charisma to not be very useful when I first played Fallout 2. Was the charisma-based limit added to Fallout 2 when Tim was working on it?
He's previously talked about putting that mechanism into Fallout if he had the chance to go back and improve the game. So he does remember that it wasn't in the original game.
I've been playing video games, crpgs esepcially, since I was little, and even though Fallout came out when I was 12 years old and wasn't that great at english yet.. It has always been dear to my heart. Finding out that you've made a channel actively talking about game development, your life IN game development during the time where games took up a massive chunk of my time, and the thoughts, systems and sometimes randomness that went into Fallout is amazing. Thank you for doing this! And thank you for being an awesome storyteller, these updates have very much become a "Storytime with Tim" part of my random free time.
The game wasn't translated in your language? Now that I understand English, I prefer to play Fallout/Fallout 2 in that language since it's more immersive (it's the US west coast after all), but I'm glad my first playthrough was in a language I could understand at the time. Dialogs are great and my favorite part of both games (and Arcanum's are even better).
@@assassindelasaucisse.4039 Nope, I remember the manual was translated, but the game was in English. But with 5 million or so Danes, the cost of translating a game would eat a huge chunk of potential revenue of almost any game sold here.
These have been very insightful and informative, Tim. Thanks for sharing so much of the process and your own personal experiences. Those bloomin' movers! At least you've still got your soap box!
Really love your videos and the insights you provide, I was of the generation that played FO3 first and later discovered the other games, I can honestly say the old games are some of the best I've played
Thank you Tim. Oddly, listening to your videos is kinda holy in a way. I can't describe it, but it just feels kinda sacred and fun to listen to you on these topics.
I first learned about Fallout from some GURPS publication strangely enough. GURPS was how I was introduced into the world of pen and paper role playing and remains my personal favorite system to play with. I guess for whatever reason that was no longer used as the basis for the games, but the amazing characters, atmosphere, and your own proprietary system to govern the gameplay still made it an instant classic for me.
In the charisma discussion you mentioned companions, I'd love to hear you go into more details about companion design and how you came up with the different concepts. Maybe even separate videos for Fallout and Arcanum :)
10:20 I noticed the reading speed increase. My first character had a mediocre INT stat (4 I think) and whenever I arrived at a town at night I would have to read 1, maybe 2, books and it would be day. I would use that to spend my time efficiently while waiting for shops to open (rather than just waiting with the pipboy). Then I played a highly intelligent character and tagged gambling, then used my infinite money to get science/first aid/outdoorsmanship to 99 with books without having to spend points, again I planned to read the books to pass time if I arrived at a place at night. I was very confused when I had to read like 4 books before morning broke. As for SPECIAL. I think it is really cool, I love how it let you create a "core" for your character, with skills being the expression of that core. You could be a tough brawler or an intelligent charmer, but some stats just felt so much stronger than others. You didnt need a lot of STR for early weapons, by the time you got endgame guns you would get power armor to get high STR. It also gave +1 maximum damage on your melees per point which was really weak. END was okay for more health, but poison rarely mattered and radiation was something you could nullify with 2 radX, it would be cool if it also made you more resistant to drug addiction or low END made you a lot more vulnerable to stuns in combat (like a very low END character would lose action points even from normal hits). High CHA gave you less dialogue options than high INT. Meanwhile INT and AGI gave you tons of bonuses. LUCK was great because criticals are really powerful and it helped you more with world encounters than outdoorsmanship. I wish the system couldve gotten another lookover. I love the core of it, but some of the stats and skills weren't very useful which took some of the fun out of character creation.
Hey Mr. Cain. Love your videos, I watch them every day! Last video you said you had a lot of GURPS stories (like with the anti-paladin etc.). I liked hearing those, it would be fun to hear more. Also I love Fallout. I'm playing it agaim right now.
Thanks for the comment about read time, very useful to know with the time limit ofr 150 days plus other sooner events. would love to see the radiation levels mechanic return, makes it more of a looming threat rather than instant debuffs.
Really cool to learn about the hidden effects of some of the attributes. I've wondered what kind of secret stuff there is under the hood of the game. Tell us more please!
Thank you for these insights to the system design of your games!!! I had not realized the depth the consequences of these stats had! Can we have the Arcanum version of this video too? 😅
Been loving these videos Cain! Its fascinating insight into game development that I probably would not get otherwise and it is greatly appreciated. I do have a question as well... is there any connection between Outer Worlds and Fallout from a lore perspective? I remember in a previous video that Vault-Tec's goals were very much about creating a successful colony ship... and in Outer Worlds there are multiple intersteller colonies originating from such ships, the corporations in Halycon feel like they would fit in perfectly alongside Fallout's pre-war corporations... and in Outer Worlds... Halycon lost contact with Earth and all of the other colonies... so I thought it seemed like there might be a plausible link between Fallout and Outer-Worlds... that at least some of these colony ships Vault-Tec and similar companies worked towards managed to launch before the War, and now the various colonies have only just started to figure out that Earth has largely gone dark. Thoughts?
That sucks, I lost a unique painting in a similar way, saying get rid of all of these but keep that one became just get rid of all of these. Really appreciate you going into detail on all of these things. Goes beyond the "bible" that you usually get packaged with the game now I'm sure modders out there would love to work with you to make a new mod that might address stuff that people might not even have known were problems. You ever been approached by modders over the years?
Hi Tim love all of the vids! For a future topic could you name any jRPGs or console RPGs that you enjoyed or may have had an influence? I loved all of the classic cRPGs but the Final Fantasy series and the recent Soulsborne series have had a huge impact on me as well.
Yes more Fallout! Great that you saved all this stuff. Charisma doesnt effect number of companions in Fallout 1. Knew about all of these except speed of reading books and that luck determined sequence if they were equal. So cool to hear! Sniper perk rolls against your luck stat so with 10 luck you always crit if you hit. Sweet shirt. Edit. I didnt know about endurance effecting the chance to go up a "level" in radiation sickness either.
Could you make a video where you talk more about companions from Fallout, Fallout 2 and Arcanum. Which ones are your favorites, their design, who originally made each of the companions, what happened to them after game ended. I love your video series a lot ! Thank you
Someone probably mentioned it, but the fixt mod actually fixed the chess game, can win it with 10 int or something. My story with it - back when I first played the game I made a nerdy 10 int character and spent so much time playing chess, and got so much radiation, that after I left the glow I didn't have enough radaway to cure myself, and would end up dying no matter what, and because Glow took a while my oldest save was not old enough, so I had to restart the whole game. Loved it lol
I was going to play a Fallout tabletop RPG, but when I saw that the rule book launched recently was based on the Bethesda Fallout and was pretty strange to play. So I started to study the Fallout 1 and 2 skills, SPECIAL and pretty much everything to "create" a tabletop RPG system that mirrors the first Fallout games. It would really good to speak about ideas that could help people to play Fallout on a tabletop RPG Thank you!
Thank you for the video! Would you mind expressing your opinion on skills and their balance in your games? I am particurlarly interested in how does one balance melle and unarmed skills, since they seem to fill very similar roles, but one is just better most of the time.
Hey tim just got done playing thru fallout 1 a couple times and gotta say I’m so thankful for it but I was wondering if you could make a video explaining your thoughts on fallout new Vegas or maybe your favorite ending in fallout 1
Hello, Tim, I very well knew about speed or reading depending on Intelligence. However it's not that critical, because of the bug/feature of Fallout, if you read books from inventory, if you used drugs to lower your stats to lower skills, to boost skills more with reading books, you can just read tens and hundreds of books like time is not passing (I mean it is passing, but stats do not change while your inventory is opened). What is far more interesting, the effect of Endurance which you told about radiation. I think I knew quite everything about this game, playing it for decades, finishing in tons of times since the early 2000s, but not, it still has some 'mysteries'. All other effects and mechanics I knew. Thank you very much for speaking about all that. Great stuff. And yeah, all wikis are trash, full of incorrect info and отсебятины, всякое васянство.. All the best.
Speaking of luck stat, for a good laugh of a time, try maxing out luck and taking jinxed. Encounters practically turn into Benny Hill as everyone breaks their own arms, drops their magazines, blows back a round, trips themselves, etc.
Talking of luck based encounters in Fallout, I'd love to know who on the team was a Doctor Who fan enough to put in the TARDIS! It set the tone for the bunch of Who references that got slipped into New Vegas later. I really love some of the pop-culture easter eggs, even though I know you've said you have some rules around them.
I got a fun bit of emergent gameplay from the Charisma companion limit. In Fallout 2, Vault City makes you leave any mutant companions outside. I'd had my ear bitten off, giving me -1 Charisma. This took ne below the threshold to have the number of companions I had- nobody left my party but if I fired someone i couldn't get them back. This meant that every time I left Vault City, I had to eat Mentats to increase my Charisma so I could add Marcus back to my party. Well, less "fun" than "funny" I guess
What are your thoughts on Speech\Persuasion checks being seen as a "win" button in RPGs? And what do you think potential solutions to such a problem would be?
I know I'm not Tim, obviously. But I feel like Pillars went in a better direction in terms of advancing how speech and persuasion can exist. In Pillars, the more honest you are, you get a reputation for being honest. When when you want to persuade someone, they'll say "well, you've always seemed to be an honest person". So, I feel like things like that can help push speech into a better more immersive area. Of course it's probably more complex than that.
I knew just about all of these, including INT modifying time to read books. But I DIDN'T know END protects against critical hits crippling/knocking down. That's cool.
i lmfao when you explain how "useless" charisma is and how everyone used it as a dump stat. i always played an INT/CHA build with STR/END as dumps. i liked talking to people and having lots of caps from barter :) no hit points, no problem! i'm also 100% certain that not a single soul left alive noticed that how long it took you to read a book changed with INT xD
I just posted a response to a similar topic on Tim's 'Why I Like Flawed Characters' vid. Long story short, I get the impression most studios today are so focussed on refining combat playstyle mechanics from generation to generation that story and character have become afterthoughts at best. Obsidian seems about the only well-known studio still making actual RPGs of the kind Tim has worked on over the years, which is to say RPGs in which players can actually create interesting characters to play as opposed to the kind that has players step into the shoes of a prewritten protagonist.
Not sure if you're going to see this, but Personally I love attributes. But I was wondering how you feel about Ststic or somewhat ststic attributes ie you can't raise them after character creation or at least it's a significant event versus something like Fallout 4 where you can use a perk point to raise it and potentially have ten in all attributes.
Hey Tim. I have a question. What is the best way to approach and showcase music to game developers? I'd love to write music for games and was wondering how best to showcase it without being an annoyance, if possible. Thanks for the great videos :)
❤️ Apart from the SPECIAL attributes, how did they miss it or did they not notice how broken stealing is in the first Fallout? oversight or should it be like this? in the second they fixed it (+-) but man I remember and I still do how many npc there are in the game, I stole almost everything... it's always good to see him mr Cain❤️
Hey Tim! I've loved so many of your games, but my favorite has always been Arcanum of steamworks and magic obscura. Since Activision may be purchased by Microsoft and they hold the rights to Arcanum, what do you think the chances of a remaster would be? I love that game, and would love to see it rerelease.
9:50 - People exploring the glow be like: "Imma read this science skill book I found." Your rad-x has worn off. You have received a lethal dose of radiation. 💀
I wanted to have psionics in the SPECIAL system so I added willpower and psionics skill in 2002. Then I needed some weapon overhauls. I wanted CH to be undumpable, needed some social skills usable in combat etc. I then did some more weapon overhauls, spread strictly coupled psionic skills etc. Then I wanted rogue expertise detached from, say, trap making. So, separated trap related expertise from manufacturing. I had to overhaul the repair skill on the way, you know. But then I needed better sneak to balance new stuff. Oh, also how about sneak but in computers? I gotta add some hacker specific stuff. It had to be supported by science, tho. But it's unfair if science only supports a single skill. Then people wanted to play it like a space opera so I had to overhaul piloting and added some skill to manage augments/implants/drones. Anyway, they gave up on that and wanted to play occult mystery but in a high tech environment and I kinda managed to reduce every supernatural stuff to single skill and now I can implement some magic disciplines seamlessly. now at the age of thirty fking five, I just gm'd a game where one of the players is a nomad who believes his drone has an eagle spirit in it and the other guy is a tribal cultist who thinks anything with agency / personhood is a risk and void aberrations on robots is the greatest evil. you guys dropping GURPS (or the otherway around) is probably the most impactful event through my life and I did not even know it then.
I actually, to this day don't know whether I discovered a bug or not. I got into the glow with inadequate rad resistance and got the agony one and had to take buffout and mentats so that my stats don't go to zero and I die. Now a curious thing happened: my SPECIAL got like, god tier, like everything was 10 and like several stats were at 8 - HOWEVER, I'm not sure whether mentats&buffuot simply hadn't worn off yet, or the game overcompensated when restoring my stats when my radiation fell off. Wasn't smart enough back then to test it.
Can you comment on the “yellow reactor keycard” that can be found at the vertibird crash site in the west side of Klamath? Was it cut content or just a plant to peak the players curiosity? That crash site took a considerable size of the map. I'd like to think it wasn't just for show. Please upvote if you guys are curious too. I thought the crash site was going to lead to something and carried that keycard with me the whole time wondering when will I ever use it.
@@marcovirtual sorry. I can’t remember the crash that I picked the pass from in Fallout 1. So I googled the crash and Klamath came up. I need to replay Fallout 1 to remember exactly where I picked the pass from and it didn’t really do anything. Now that I think about it I probably confused it all because I started playing Fallout 2 right after I beat F1 last year. So I need to remember things right 😀👍🤦♂️
Thank you for detailed explanation! It always bugged me how in the game your character MUST have a high Int stat if you want to increase your skills at a decent rate. I wish there was some other way to do it because you don't have to be scientifically intelligent (which the stat correlates with in 3D Fallouts) to learn from life experience.
I recently started a re-run of Fallout (1) with a character called "Jinx". They have the jinxed trait and maximum luck. In one fight, I critically failed once, emptying my gun from full ammo to zero, and later I managed to drop my gun and I had to pick it up and run out of the cave, only to return after healing to kill it. Then in Vault 15 I've had two rats kill themselves with critical failure damage while I kept missing or dropping my knife in my fights with them, so dealing no damage in the entire fight. It's going to be an adventure.
Please tell us more about all the trivial things that should be fixed in Fallout. I recall ages ago someone mentioned it was either you or someone else thought it would be a better idea to roll the First Aid skill and Doctor together as "Medical" as first aid and doctor are both medical skills and you're really splitting hairs when it comes to having them as their own skills.
Anyone know if the Zax bug got fixed in a mod? And if it did, were the modders able to recover whatever outcome the devs had intended or did they have to write their own outcome? I always really wanted to know what was supposed to happen. Edit: Ok, I found the dialog for beating him. It's: "It would seem that you have defeated me. Extraordinary." A little anticlimactic.
One question, id love to know. In the original game, why the time limit? I get realism, but it just meant leaving out story until the patch fixed the timer issue. I don't want to rush in an RPG, I want to explore everywhere. Loke I said wasn't the world end as a patch fixed it, but I just wonder why it was chosen.
Early Fallout games SPECIALs also mattered far more than 3 and on. New Vegas for example has fixed skill point and half of the intelligence while Fallout 1-2 had pretty much just twice the intelligence, which is a massive difference. Early games also forced turn based combat making action points much more vital.
Fallout 1-2 have scaling point cost, NV doesn't. There's also the difference between tagging skills, tagged skills in 1-2 had their costs reduced by half to raise, tagging skills in 3/NV only gave them a one time bonus.
The mental block is probably the most useless perk as it only works when you get to the Master and nowhere else and you can use a nullifier instead. It would be an interesting perk if it was able for example detect lies of NPCs or if it would allow you to do an added effect like suffer less withdrawals from chems etc.
That missing box makes me want to tear my skin off that's so horrible ;-; Hopefully whoever was in there after you decided to be nosy and framed everything to hang in their home and appreciate every day
Out of curiosity, if you were to remake Fallout, how would you change charisma to discourage dumping the stat? I'm just asking because you sounded like you have some kind of idea about it :)
I thought in Fallout, if you missed or failed at something, it rolled a luck chance to turn that failure into a success. I might be thinking of another game, but there aren't many games with a luck skill.
Fallout question for you- were you and/or the game testers aware of how staggeringly overpowered the Gifted trait was compared to all of the other traits in the game? The impact of getting 7 extra SPECIAL points and being able to dump that into a primary stat like Agility or Perception is so massive it's almost like playing on a whole separate difficulty setting.
I have a question. I know you partially answered this one but anyway. How do you feel about modding, especially when people take your IP's engine and overhaul it into a completely different games (aka global mods). A bunch of those exist for Fallout 2. Have you heard of Arcanum Multiverse Team? These guys are your most passionate fans, I believe. They still keep Arcanum up to date, fixing bugs, reviving cut content, optimize the game for modern systems. Have you ever been contacted by modders for a help or an advice, maybe even worked with them together in a secret?
I love luck as an attribute. There's a lot of interesting ways to do it right (Fallout was a good example). There's a lot of fascinating ways to do it wrong. It just sucks when it's done boring (Say, baseline RPG maker).
I'm pretty sure Fo1 special encounters do not have a luck requirement. The wiki says that it does, but it's very likely just someone talking out of their arse again, especially since there are no details anywhere about what those exact requirements are. As far as I can tell from the code, in Fo1 it just picks a random special encounter and done.
@@plaidchuck You can check the decompiled code, there is no extra condition check for special encounters. If you win the roll to get one, it'll pick a random location and that's it. Fo2 is where they added actual luck requirements for them. Also Tim himself says in this video, that wikis he checked have wrong (or missing) information, which is something we already know for a while - you can't trust the wiki, especially when it comes to mechanics of the classic games.
Tim Cain fails to find a box due to an inadequate perception stat
You see a box of: Junk
Gets a water purification control chip stuck in foot.
He needs the glasses for +1 perception and a plus 10 skill points in science; typically it would also be a -5 in charisma but it's Tim so it doesn't affect his charisma.
I think he needed more points in the doctor skill to fix the injured leg
Tim's Luck was 3 when he was searching for the box and hurt his leg. At least it's not 2, but it is only temporarily decreased.
That poor shirt has been neatly folded for almost 30 years 😂
I think we all need to appreciate what we're getting from uncle tim every day for absolutely fucking free. I can't think of another big name in the game who has done something to this level and the insight not just on game dev but on life generally has been incredible to hear. I never expected Tim to be so enjoyable to watch too, he's very endearing
Seriously! Tim Cain is almost an idol to some of us who grew up on his games. These daily videos are really insightful about his time and experience in the games industry, and they have a really down-to-Earth charm to them!
@@SpookySurprise charming is certainly the word
Hopefully he is getting some money from ads,i hope he gets something out of it🙂
You give better talks for free than the ones I've paid to go to gaming conferences to hear. Thank you.
These videos are short and to the point. Sometimes you can feel those conference talks feel they have to drag a subject out longer than it's worth.
"You're a hero... And you have to leave". This quote was a genius way to end Fallout. Could you talk about who wrote it and how did the team decide about that ending? Thanks and love your videos, bye!
Fallout 2 made charisma somewhat more useful by having it limit your party size. You could have a companion for every 2 points of charisma you had, so a 10 charisma character could have a whole squad of 5 blasting the enemy alongside you. And since party members in Fallout 2 gained levels and could potentially be equipped with power armor and gauss rifles, rather than gradually growing useless as the enemies got tougher like Ian or Tycho, this was quite powerful by the end game.
Otherwise, though, charisma has always been treated pretty shabbily as a stat in Fallout. It's the stereotypical dump stat in New Vegas, as well.
I always go Gifted and 5 charisma, you can use the dual sunglasses to get +1 charisma for each, one perk and then mentats to get to 10, so all I need to keep a full party is looting and buying mentats everywhere, trying to not get addicted. xD
Same with luck and other things. You only need 6, then one perk and zeta scans to get 10. Buffouts help with strength and endurance and so on.
If you play your cards good, you can have a 10 in all character no problem.
I put most into agility though, it is not easy to raise permanently and it saves you in combat.
@twerkingbollocks6661 You could also get the perk weapons handling which gives you +3 strength for handling guns. So you don't
really need that much in Strength at all, unless you want certain specific perks like slayer. (edit: at least in the old games, I remember
slayer having a 8St, 8EN requirement)
Edit: For those that had low Charisma but still wanted more followers, they could always take the perk "magnetic personality", while
it increased your party size by +1 it didn't go over the max size of 5.
You can have 5 party members with 4 charisma. +2 mentats, +1 glasses, +1 memory module, then perk +1 companion.
Also it's an important stat in sex formula. Which is stronger than any other stat for quest sex dialogues.
Pretty sure "dump stat" is the one you "dump" all your points into because it's so good.
Luck in the first two Fallouts are an absolute game changer tbh. I straight up got the UFO encounter after travelling only like three map squares from Vault 13 at the very start of the game. Hadn't even been to Shady Sands or anything yet.
How manny luck did you had?
It's always sad when you lose things you want to keep, especially things like programming notes and early concepts of things, because they aren't just part of the game development, but also part of your life and part of a legend that we all love.
8:42 I'm not sure if Tim's misremembering about companion count being limited by charisma. That was not the case in Fallout, but it was in Fallout 2. I learned this the hard way because I had come to expect charisma to not be very useful when I first played Fallout 2. Was the charisma-based limit added to Fallout 2 when Tim was working on it?
He's previously talked about putting that mechanism into Fallout if he had the chance to go back and improve the game. So he does remember that it wasn't in the original game.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem That makes sense. Maybe Tim just forgot to mention that the companion limit was added in Fallout 2.
I've been playing video games, crpgs esepcially, since I was little, and even though Fallout came out when I was 12 years old and wasn't that great at english yet.. It has always been dear to my heart. Finding out that you've made a channel actively talking about game development, your life IN game development during the time where games took up a massive chunk of my time, and the thoughts, systems and sometimes randomness that went into Fallout is amazing. Thank you for doing this! And thank you for being an awesome storyteller, these updates have very much become a "Storytime with Tim" part of my random free time.
The game wasn't translated in your language?
Now that I understand English, I prefer to play Fallout/Fallout 2 in that language since it's more immersive (it's the US west coast after all), but I'm glad my first playthrough was in a language I could understand at the time.
Dialogs are great and my favorite part of both games (and Arcanum's are even better).
@@assassindelasaucisse.4039 Nope, I remember the manual was translated, but the game was in English. But with 5 million or so Danes, the cost of translating a game would eat a huge chunk of potential revenue of almost any game sold here.
Many thanks (again!) for all the experience and insight you give us here.
These videos are the best part of my mornings. Thank you so much for every one of these!
Thank you for giving us this Fallout lore and behind the scenes. You are a treasure trove of knowledge.
These have been very insightful and informative, Tim. Thanks for sharing so much of the process and your own personal experiences. Those bloomin' movers! At least you've still got your soap box!
Appreciate the insight into development! You’ve done great work, Mr Cain!
Really love your videos and the insights you provide, I was of the generation that played FO3 first and later discovered the other games, I can honestly say the old games are some of the best I've played
Thank you Tim. Oddly, listening to your videos is kinda holy in a way. I can't describe it, but it just feels kinda sacred and fun to listen to you on these topics.
I first learned about Fallout from some GURPS publication strangely enough. GURPS was how I was introduced into the world of pen and paper role playing and remains my personal favorite system to play with. I guess for whatever reason that was no longer used as the basis for the games, but the amazing characters, atmosphere, and your own proprietary system to govern the gameplay still made it an instant classic for me.
In the charisma discussion you mentioned companions, I'd love to hear you go into more details about companion design and how you came up with the different concepts. Maybe even separate videos for Fallout and Arcanum :)
10:20
I noticed the reading speed increase. My first character had a mediocre INT stat (4 I think) and whenever I arrived at a town at night I would have to read 1, maybe 2, books and it would be day. I would use that to spend my time efficiently while waiting for shops to open (rather than just waiting with the pipboy). Then I played a highly intelligent character and tagged gambling, then used my infinite money to get science/first aid/outdoorsmanship to 99 with books without having to spend points, again I planned to read the books to pass time if I arrived at a place at night. I was very confused when I had to read like 4 books before morning broke.
As for SPECIAL. I think it is really cool, I love how it let you create a "core" for your character, with skills being the expression of that core. You could be a tough brawler or an intelligent charmer, but some stats just felt so much stronger than others. You didnt need a lot of STR for early weapons, by the time you got endgame guns you would get power armor to get high STR. It also gave +1 maximum damage on your melees per point which was really weak. END was okay for more health, but poison rarely mattered and radiation was something you could nullify with 2 radX, it would be cool if it also made you more resistant to drug addiction or low END made you a lot more vulnerable to stuns in combat (like a very low END character would lose action points even from normal hits). High CHA gave you less dialogue options than high INT. Meanwhile INT and AGI gave you tons of bonuses. LUCK was great because criticals are really powerful and it helped you more with world encounters than outdoorsmanship. I wish the system couldve gotten another lookover. I love the core of it, but some of the stats and skills weren't very useful which took some of the fun out of character creation.
Hey Mr. Cain. Love your videos, I watch them every day! Last video you said you had a lot of GURPS stories (like with the anti-paladin etc.). I liked hearing those, it would be fun to hear more.
Also I love Fallout. I'm playing it agaim right now.
Thanks for the comment about read time, very useful to know with the time limit ofr 150 days plus other sooner events. would love to see the radiation levels mechanic return, makes it more of a looming threat rather than instant debuffs.
Really cool to learn about the hidden effects of some of the attributes. I've wondered what kind of secret stuff there is under the hood of the game. Tell us more please!
These vids are lovely.
Thank you for these insights to the system design of your games!!! I had not realized the depth the consequences of these stats had! Can we have the Arcanum version of this video too? 😅
Love these vids and Fallout and Fallout 2 are my favorite
Thanks Tim! You're the best!
Been loving these videos Cain! Its fascinating insight into game development that I probably would not get otherwise and it is greatly appreciated. I do have a question as well... is there any connection between Outer Worlds and Fallout from a lore perspective? I remember in a previous video that Vault-Tec's goals were very much about creating a successful colony ship... and in Outer Worlds there are multiple intersteller colonies originating from such ships, the corporations in Halycon feel like they would fit in perfectly alongside Fallout's pre-war corporations... and in Outer Worlds... Halycon lost contact with Earth and all of the other colonies... so I thought it seemed like there might be a plausible link between Fallout and Outer-Worlds... that at least some of these colony ships Vault-Tec and similar companies worked towards managed to launch before the War, and now the various colonies have only just started to figure out that Earth has largely gone dark. Thoughts?
I could listen to you talk about Fallout all day.
That sucks, I lost a unique painting in a similar way, saying get rid of all of these but keep that one became just get rid of all of these. Really appreciate you going into detail on all of these things. Goes beyond the "bible" that you usually get packaged with the game now
I'm sure modders out there would love to work with you to make a new mod that might address stuff that people might not even have known were problems. You ever been approached by modders over the years?
Hi Tim love all of the vids! For a future topic could you name any jRPGs or console RPGs that you enjoyed or may have had an influence? I loved all of the classic cRPGs but the Final Fantasy series and the recent Soulsborne series have had a huge impact on me as well.
man this is total gold
Yes more Fallout! Great that you saved all this stuff. Charisma doesnt effect number of companions in Fallout 1. Knew about all of these except speed of reading books and that luck determined sequence if they were equal. So cool to hear! Sniper perk rolls against your luck stat so with 10 luck you always crit if you hit. Sweet shirt.
Edit. I didnt know about endurance effecting the chance to go up a "level" in radiation sickness either.
Could you make a video where you talk more about companions from Fallout, Fallout 2 and Arcanum. Which ones are your favorites, their design, who originally made each of the companions, what happened to them after game ended. I love your video series a lot ! Thank you
Someone probably mentioned it, but the fixt mod actually fixed the chess game, can win it with 10 int or something. My story with it - back when I first played the game I made a nerdy 10 int character and spent so much time playing chess, and got so much radiation, that after I left the glow I didn't have enough radaway to cure myself, and would end up dying no matter what, and because Glow took a while my oldest save was not old enough, so I had to restart the whole game. Loved it lol
Furiously taking notes every time you discuss game design
I was going to play a Fallout tabletop RPG, but when I saw that the rule book launched recently was based on the Bethesda Fallout and was pretty strange to play. So I started to study the Fallout 1 and 2 skills, SPECIAL and pretty much everything to "create" a tabletop RPG system that mirrors the first Fallout games.
It would really good to speak about ideas that could help people to play Fallout on a tabletop RPG
Thank you!
Thank you for the video! Would you mind expressing your opinion on skills and their balance in your games? I am particurlarly interested in how does one balance melle and unarmed skills, since they seem to fill very similar roles, but one is just better most of the time.
3:16 You can absolutely find editors/decompilers/recompilers for the dialog scripts in F1/F2 ;)
Hey tim just got done playing thru fallout 1 a couple times and gotta say I’m so thankful for it but I was wondering if you could make a video explaining your thoughts on fallout new Vegas or maybe your favorite ending in fallout 1
The game Biomutant did the geometric shape stat system you talked about having an idea for in a previous video. Thought you'd like to know
Hello, Tim, I very well knew about speed or reading depending on Intelligence. However it's not that critical, because of the bug/feature of Fallout, if you read books from inventory, if you used drugs to lower your stats to lower skills, to boost skills more with reading books, you can just read tens and hundreds of books like time is not passing (I mean it is passing, but stats do not change while your inventory is opened).
What is far more interesting, the effect of Endurance which you told about radiation. I think I knew quite everything about this game, playing it for decades, finishing in tons of times since the early 2000s, but not, it still has some 'mysteries'. All other effects and mechanics I knew. Thank you very much for speaking about all that. Great stuff.
And yeah, all wikis are trash, full of incorrect info and отсебятины, всякое васянство..
All the best.
You are a hero.
I wonder what the NMA forums will make of this. Interesting stuff, Tim!
Speaking of luck stat, for a good laugh of a time, try maxing out luck and taking jinxed. Encounters practically turn into Benny Hill as everyone breaks their own arms, drops their magazines, blows back a round, trips themselves, etc.
Thank god for your kinda unusual note-taking tendencies, haha. Digitizing them really came in handy
Talking of luck based encounters in Fallout, I'd love to know who on the team was a Doctor Who fan enough to put in the TARDIS! It set the tone for the bunch of Who references that got slipped into New Vegas later. I really love some of the pop-culture easter eggs, even though I know you've said you have some rules around them.
I got a fun bit of emergent gameplay from the Charisma companion limit. In Fallout 2, Vault City makes you leave any mutant companions outside. I'd had my ear bitten off, giving me -1 Charisma. This took ne below the threshold to have the number of companions I had- nobody left my party but if I fired someone i couldn't get them back. This meant that every time I left Vault City, I had to eat Mentats to increase my Charisma so I could add Marcus back to my party. Well, less "fun" than "funny" I guess
Thanks Tim
Hearing that Tim has lost some of his notes must be what it felt like when fire struck the Great Library of Alexandria.
I could listen to Tim for hours haha
Timothy Cain you are Awesome!
What are your thoughts on Speech\Persuasion checks being seen as a "win" button in RPGs? And what do you think potential solutions to such a problem would be?
I know I'm not Tim, obviously. But I feel like Pillars went in a better direction in terms of advancing how speech and persuasion can exist.
In Pillars, the more honest you are, you get a reputation for being honest. When when you want to persuade someone, they'll say "well, you've always seemed to be an honest person".
So, I feel like things like that can help push speech into a better more immersive area. Of course it's probably more complex than that.
Mr. Cain, please add some information about Fallout 2 version 0.5 in your next videos. Would be incredibly interesting.
I knew just about all of these, including INT modifying time to read books. But I DIDN'T know END protects against critical hits crippling/knocking down. That's cool.
Regarding sniper: I believe you got critical chance 10 x luck. So 10 luck would always crit (similar to how Slayer works with melee(always crits)).
tim once mentioned "specia" in on of his talks. said nobody knows that that is. i wonder if he will ever elaborate on what that meant :D
"If I was gonna remake fallout today" My heart almost jumped out of my throat. If only this were to happen.
i lmfao when you explain how "useless" charisma is and how everyone used it as a dump stat. i always played an INT/CHA build with STR/END as dumps. i liked talking to people and having lots of caps from barter :) no hit points, no problem!
i'm also 100% certain that not a single soul left alive noticed that how long it took you to read a book changed with INT xD
I just posted a response to a similar topic on Tim's 'Why I Like Flawed Characters' vid. Long story short, I get the impression most studios today are so focussed on refining combat playstyle mechanics from generation to generation that story and character have become afterthoughts at best. Obsidian seems about the only well-known studio still making actual RPGs of the kind Tim has worked on over the years, which is to say RPGs in which players can actually create interesting characters to play as opposed to the kind that has players step into the shoes of a prewritten protagonist.
Well who the hell else would it be, Tim
Not sure if you're going to see this, but Personally I love attributes. But I was wondering how you feel about Ststic or somewhat ststic attributes ie you can't raise them after character creation or at least it's a significant event versus something like Fallout 4 where you can use a perk point to raise it and potentially have ten in all attributes.
What was your favorite fallout build you enjoyed playing when tested or just played yourself?
Hey Tim. I have a question. What is the best way to approach and showcase music to game developers? I'd love to write music for games and was wondering how best to showcase it without being an annoyance, if possible.
Thanks for the great videos :)
I want one of those shirts so bad!
❤️ Apart from the SPECIAL attributes, how did they miss it or did they not notice how broken stealing is in the first Fallout? oversight or should it be like this? in the second they fixed it (+-) but man I remember and I still do how many npc there are in the game, I stole almost everything... it's always good to see him mr Cain❤️
Hey Tim! I've loved so many of your games, but my favorite has always been Arcanum of steamworks and magic obscura. Since Activision may be purchased by Microsoft and they hold the rights to Arcanum, what do you think the chances of a remaster would be? I love that game, and would love to see it rerelease.
Max luck plus jinxed trait was fun
Could you make a video about the clay models in fallout? Do you still have one? What was the process like?
9:50 - People exploring the glow be like: "Imma read this science skill book I found." Your rad-x has worn off. You have received a lethal dose of radiation. 💀
I wanted to have psionics in the SPECIAL system so I added willpower and psionics skill in 2002.
Then I needed some weapon overhauls. I wanted CH to be undumpable, needed some social skills usable in combat etc. I then did some more weapon overhauls, spread strictly coupled psionic skills etc. Then I wanted rogue expertise detached from, say, trap making. So, separated trap related expertise from manufacturing. I had to overhaul the repair skill on the way, you know. But then I needed better sneak to balance new stuff. Oh, also how about sneak but in computers? I gotta add some hacker specific stuff. It had to be supported by science, tho. But it's unfair if science only supports a single skill. Then people wanted to play it like a space opera so I had to overhaul piloting and added some skill to manage augments/implants/drones. Anyway, they gave up on that and wanted to play occult mystery but in a high tech environment and I kinda managed to reduce every supernatural stuff to single skill and now I can implement some magic disciplines seamlessly.
now at the age of thirty fking five, I just gm'd a game where one of the players is a nomad who believes his drone has an eagle spirit in it and the other guy is a tribal cultist who thinks anything with agency / personhood is a risk and void aberrations on robots is the greatest evil.
you guys dropping GURPS (or the otherway around) is probably the most impactful event through my life and I did not even know it then.
I actually, to this day don't know whether I discovered a bug or not. I got into the glow with inadequate rad resistance and got the agony one and had to take buffout and mentats so that my stats don't go to zero and I die. Now a curious thing happened: my SPECIAL got like, god tier, like everything was 10 and like several stats were at 8 - HOWEVER, I'm not sure whether mentats&buffuot simply hadn't worn off yet, or the game overcompensated when restoring my stats when my radiation fell off. Wasn't smart enough back then to test it.
Can you comment on the “yellow reactor keycard” that can be found at the vertibird crash site in the west side of Klamath? Was it cut content or just a plant to peak the players curiosity? That crash site took a considerable size of the map. I'd like to think it wasn't just for show. Please upvote if you guys are curious too. I thought the crash site was going to lead to something and carried that keycard with me the whole time wondering when will I ever use it.
Tim didn't participate in the development of Fallout 2, so I doubt he'll answer this. Good question nonetheless.
@@marcovirtual this is Fallout 1 I’m asking about 😀
@@KaziQTR but Klamath is in fallout 2 😅
@@marcovirtual sorry. I can’t remember the crash that I picked the pass from in Fallout 1. So I googled the crash and Klamath came up. I need to replay Fallout 1 to remember exactly where I picked the pass from and it didn’t really do anything. Now that I think about it I probably confused it all because I started playing Fallout 2 right after I beat F1 last year. So I need to remember things right 😀👍🤦♂️
Josh Sawyer had to crawl, so Tim could run.
(On video making)
Is there any difference in trust and swing modes on melee weapons other than animation??
Thank you for detailed explanation! It always bugged me how in the game your character MUST have a high Int stat if you want to increase your skills at a decent rate. I wish there was some other way to do it because you don't have to be scientifically intelligent (which the stat correlates with in 3D Fallouts) to learn from life experience.
Iron your awesome Fallout shirt Mr. Cain! Just kidding lol, love your videos and love the SPECIAL system in the game!
I recently started a re-run of Fallout (1) with a character called "Jinx". They have the jinxed trait and maximum luck.
In one fight, I critically failed once, emptying my gun from full ammo to zero, and later I managed to drop my gun and I had to pick it up and run out of the cave, only to return after healing to kill it.
Then in Vault 15 I've had two rats kill themselves with critical failure damage while I kept missing or dropping my knife in my fights with them, so dealing no damage in the entire fight.
It's going to be an adventure.
I must say, SPECIAL is my favorite attribute system of any RPG
Luck is absolutely what I would max out if we could choose our attributes in real life.
Please tell us more about all the trivial things that should be fixed in Fallout. I recall ages ago someone mentioned it was either you or someone else thought it would be a better idea to roll the First Aid skill and Doctor together as "Medical" as first aid and doctor are both medical skills and you're really splitting hairs when it comes to having them as their own skills.
Anyone know if the Zax bug got fixed in a mod? And if it did, were the modders able to recover whatever outcome the devs had intended or did they have to write their own outcome? I always really wanted to know what was supposed to happen.
Edit: Ok, I found the dialog for beating him. It's: "It would seem that you have defeated me. Extraordinary." A little anticlimactic.
do you have any tips, tricks, or sage like advice for anyone modding the original fallouts? newcomer or veteran alike
One question, id love to know. In the original game, why the time limit? I get realism, but it just meant leaving out story until the patch fixed the timer issue. I don't want to rush in an RPG, I want to explore everywhere.
Loke I said wasn't the world end as a patch fixed it, but I just wonder why it was chosen.
Early Fallout games SPECIALs also mattered far more than 3 and on. New Vegas for example has fixed skill point and half of the intelligence while Fallout 1-2 had pretty much just twice the intelligence, which is a massive difference. Early games also forced turn based combat making action points much more vital.
Fallout 1-2 have scaling point cost, NV doesn't. There's also the difference between tagging skills, tagged skills in 1-2 had their costs
reduced by half to raise, tagging skills in 3/NV only gave them a one time bonus.
The mental block is probably the most useless perk as it only works when you get to the Master and nowhere else and you can use a nullifier instead.
It would be an interesting perk if it was able for example detect lies of NPCs or if it would allow you to do an added effect like suffer less withdrawals from chems etc.
That missing box makes me want to tear my skin off that's so horrible ;-;
Hopefully whoever was in there after you decided to be nosy and framed everything to hang in their home and appreciate every day
Out of curiosity, if you were to remake Fallout, how would you change charisma to discourage dumping the stat? I'm just asking because you sounded like you have some kind of idea about it :)
That is the *coolest* shirt
I thought in Fallout, if you missed or failed at something, it rolled a luck chance to turn that failure into a success. I might be thinking of another game, but there aren't many games with a luck skill.
Fallout question for you- were you and/or the game testers aware of how staggeringly overpowered the Gifted trait was compared to all of the other traits in the game? The impact of getting 7 extra SPECIAL points and being able to dump that into a primary stat like Agility or Perception is so massive it's almost like playing on a whole separate difficulty setting.
You know that shirt has been packed away a long time... those fold lines are permanent now. LOL
I have a question. I know you partially answered this one but anyway.
How do you feel about modding, especially when people take your IP's engine and overhaul it into a completely different games (aka global mods). A bunch of those exist for Fallout 2.
Have you heard of Arcanum Multiverse Team? These guys are your most passionate fans, I believe. They still keep Arcanum up to date, fixing bugs, reviving cut content, optimize the game for modern systems.
Have you ever been contacted by modders for a help or an advice, maybe even worked with them together in a secret?
can we get a video explaining what you would do if you could remake fallout today
You mentioned that you would do Charisma different; how would you change it?
You should do a fan patch.
I love luck as an attribute. There's a lot of interesting ways to do it right (Fallout was a good example). There's a lot of fascinating ways to do it wrong. It just sucks when it's done boring (Say, baseline RPG maker).
I'm pretty sure Fo1 special encounters do not have a luck requirement. The wiki says that it does, but it's very likely just someone talking out of their arse again, especially since there are no details anywhere about what those exact requirements are. As far as I can tell from the code, in Fo1 it just picks a random special encounter and done.
Hopefully the guy that made it is right..
@@plaidchuck You can check the decompiled code, there is no extra condition check for special encounters. If you win the roll to get one, it'll pick a random location and that's it. Fo2 is where they added actual luck requirements for them. Also Tim himself says in this video, that wikis he checked have wrong (or missing) information, which is something we already know for a while - you can't trust the wiki, especially when it comes to mechanics of the classic games.
@@Lexx2ki thought that was for the outdoorsman encounters?
I'm tempted to try out a low-int, high-charisma/luck character now. 😅
I absolutely support you doing that but buckle up
Charisma was super important in Fallout 2 :) Only way to be Porn star in New Reno was to have high charisma . Epic! :)
They should call you for Fallout V!