I played my first four RPGs (Fallout, Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: Bloodlines) and give my thoughts about experiencing them now, decades later.
The CRT vs LCD thing is really interesting. My favorite example is the one red pixel in Dracula's eye in SotN. On CRT it makes his eyes glow red, but on LCD it's just one brilliant red pixel in his eye, like a laser. So many old games literally look different now, it's not just how we imagined them to appear as kids or our memory.
Very recently, I wanted to play Fallout on my Macbook and subsequently had the spend the next hour trying to download an emulator, download a Windows ISO file, setup the Windows on the emulator, download Steam on the emulator, and finally download Fallout. During the whole process I constantly thought to myself "if only I bought a Windows laptop". It also made me realize just how important backwards compatibility is, and how scary it is that only one company seems to care about it.
What are you talking about? The version from gog works without any kind of windows emulation. Maybe it runs through Rosetta for apple silicon, but it still works fine. Tim is just wrong here and clearly didn’t look into this when making his statement.
@@CainOnGames my bad Tim but I played it on my Mac. I’ll check and report back. I suppose I it was gog version through apple porting kit, but I agree that’s not user friendly at all.
@@CainOnGames I tried to reply multiple times but my comments don't show up for some reason. I just wanted to say that you are right, gog doesn't sell mac version and I played it through porting kit and through wine/proton. Thanks for your videos and looking forward to hear what you have to say in the future.
I recently saw a short documentary about the making of VtM:B and how painful the pre-release crush was. So even though it's been a long time now, I wanted to thank you for all the work you and the Troika team have done on Bloodlines. Today, with the work of modders over the years, it's a beautiful masterpiece which still brings joy and comfort to many people.
Thats the point of you playing those games with us: to hear any memories evoked by gameplay. Those tales are priceless and extremely inspiring! We don't care that there are people who can play it better, there's NOONE who can tell us what you experienced at particular points of making the game.
I think that what you're currently doing on this channel is great. Time and time again, I've seen people on TH-cam doing things that the community wants, but doesn't really make the creator happy and engaged. I know you aren't a "TH-camr" per se, but I feel like this can happen to anyone; especially people in your position. I don't know, just wanted to say this for the chance you see it and so that I can say I enjoy how genuine your videos are!
For real. With all the manufactured-to-audience-spec content out there, it’s nice to see someone genuinely interesting just talk about whatever they want to.
I wonder how Tim met all these great actors and voice actors during his career, like Ron Perlman, Keith David or Richard Dean Anderson etc. That would be interesting to hear.
The quests in Arcanum and Fallout are so fun. The atmosphere unmatched by other settings. The way you build characters very enteraining. Love the music and sounds. The writing paints an awesome world.
My top ten ever. 1. Fallout 1 2. Fallout 3 3. Fallout 4 4. Fallout New Vegas 5. Arcanum 6. Fallout 2 These 6 switches places. They are above any other entertainment. So shuffle them as you please to see my ranking or they all take nr 1 spot (different days different games hold nr 1) 7. Total war warhammer 2 8. Oblivion 9. Final Fantasy 7 10. Warhammer Shadow of the Horned Rat. 11. Jedi knight 2 12. Knights of the old republic 13. Jedi academy 14. Vampire Bloodlines 15. Super Mario Bros 16. Super Mario Bros 3 17. Legend of Zelda (snes) 18. Zelda (1 nes) 19. Punch out 20. Sonic the hedgehog 21. Tmnt 2the arcade game 22 Turtles lost in time (snes) 23. Street gangs/River city ransom 24. Dark forces 25. Dark Omen 26. Tales of Destiny 27. Better stop now....
So Tim. You mention in almost all of your videos, "My notes." Can you make a video detailing your core notetaking process? It would be great if you could include your storytelling along with it. Also, as a (soon-to-be?) retired dev, have you put any thought into modding your old games? You mentioned wishing you had used hot keys in Temple. Does improving your old games sound like something that would be fun? Or would that be the opposite of fun?
Hi there, @DoobieDoctor5000! I have made a video on my notes. It's here: th-cam.com/video/P0NKR9R0XTg/w-d-xo.html And I talk about what I would change in Fallout here: th-cam.com/video/hUrNahAr5ho/w-d-xo.html I have a similar list of changes for Arcanum and Temple. I will make videos about those too.
Really happy I found you. Sometimes the topic isn't something I'm necessarily ever going to apply, but I'll say you're quite the charming and calming personality. Also really have loved the games you've been a part of. Genuinely dig how much passion you have for game development.
Regarding the whole alignment incongruence issue, I think a lot of it is implied that the GM can mandate that kind of thing if they feel its neccesary. I was recently playing a Pathfinder 2e campaign and it mentions in the beginning that while not neccesarily a hard rule, characters in the occupation the campaign takes place around are expected to at least not outright malicious and that most are good as a way of nudging the player in their choice. Perhaps part of this is because what defines alignment can be pretty up to interpretation, and they don't want to bar edge cases in which a character with a different or abnormal alignment might still end up working (For instance, a chaotic aligned character who has been forced into service in a lawful order, or a Evil Lawful character begrudgingly working with Good Characters to defeat some greater chaotic evil)
I'm glad you were able to describe really well how it was fun for you to play the games. I think you succeeded in making something better than the typical "let's play" video. If you made an in-depth video on Arcanum, for example, listening to the way you describe things would definitely be much more fun than watching you make a character run all around Tarant.
Temple of elemental evil is only game from that four of yours that i didn't finish. Masquerade, Fallout and Arcanum are my most replayable games. Thanks for them.
I've put together 3 retro PCs just before the pandemic and that's how I play old games now. On a 15" CRT monitor as well, Quake 2 on it was such a great experience.
I think these old top-down RPGs hold up really well. I'm a little surprised to hear you mention the low resolution. I think they look great and once I start playing, I totally forget the original resolution is small. The UI stuff doesn't bother me at all, maybe because I've played through them so many times, but they are seriously great. You've done a lot in your career, but Fallout is so good that even that's all you'd ever done, that alone would be a career you could be really proud of.
Hi Tim, Just wanted to say that Fallout's UI was a major inspiration for me to become a graphic designer. I remember my friend and I salivating over all the wires, tubes, and rusty elements. It was just so unusual to see such detail in games back in the 90s, at least for us. It got to the point that my friend hired me to create a heavily Fallout inspired UI for his master's app, something about genetic-evolution-based code optimization (I can't quite remember). By the way, he graduated with honors. Yeah, it's a bit clunky and the usability isn't great by today's standards, but I still prefer the feel to the very generic and sterile UIs found in some modern games that remind me more of a spreadsheet or an accounting app than a game. :-)
Hey, Tim! Another great video. I have a lots of questions about building tools for other devs and teammates. What's that process like? What do the various tools look like for different departments? What problems can they cause and how could they be avoided? Basically, as much information as you're willing to give on making development tools. I like the idea of being a programmer for game mechanics themselves and for the tools my teammates use, makes me feel like a team player. Thank you, and enjoy your holiday week!
the reason why watching you stream older (or current) games you enjoy sounds like a good idea, would be to combine a sort of AMA with a relaxed atmosphere, maybe with workers remarks on game mechanics encountered along the way. but if you feel uncomfortable unscripted, that is totally fine and understandable.
The radials in TTOE are awesome. The spellbook UI on the other hand was almost game-endingly opaque, despite studying all the manuals and tutorial very carefully.
Microsoft don't get enough love for keeping that backwards compatibility, just this year I tried Temple and Baldur's Gate 1 and they worked with little to no hassle.
Thank you for the memories! I would love to hear your more detailed thoughts on these playthroughs (especially Arcanum) 😁 Back in a prior video when discussing Arcanum's 1 point fiasco (not the actual fiasco video but a subsequent one) you mentioned you found a way to compile Arcanum with the original leveling scheme and that you might play it that way and let us know how it went. Did you get a chance to do that? If so what are your thoughts? Have a great day!!! 😊
A huge part of it really is the nostalgia. I have kept a 1024x768 CRT with a Windows 98 machine in perfect condition, and going back to old games... yes the CRT feels different: it's a bit blurrier and there's glowy edges around any contrasting divides in the image. But for the most part I realize my brain was just filling in the pixels when graphics were that way back then. Having a 17" screen vs. 27" makes a difference too... your brain just fills in a lot of the fidelity.
I would love to see a video on your thoughts about changes the universal Arcanum patch did and what you would have not changed or handled differently to the mod
I love your talks Tim! This topic made me think: do you have any opinion on the sustained value this games have over time? I say this thinking that there are so many games nowadays (mainly GAAS) that are not playable right now or won't be playable in the future if their servers die, which is different from compatibility options (for older games you can grab an old PC or console and those will still be playable). Do you think younger game developers that work mostly on this type of stuff will have a different perspective on going back through their older stuff?
1e Dungeon Master's Guide pg. 23-25. Alignment languages were not to be spoken publicly. This is similar to how ideology between people cause disagreements. People catch on to what others ideology is by phrases that are spoken. The changing of alignment in 1e AD&D was brutal. It caused an immediate loss of a level. The player needed to spend 10k gold per level of that character to atone, and thus allowing them to be redeemed. These factors were used to keep players from drifting between the alignments by their actions. This essentially made for a self regulating party alignment. Players would want to be in a group with a shared alignment. That makes it easier on everyone on how they proceed with their decisions.
Some people updated your games, Their steam mod or patch that increases the resolution for Fallout and Fallout 2, and also a mod for Arcanum that increases the resolution for higher definition.
CRTs also had the mechanical effect of interlacing frames, which effectively made it look like games were running at double the FPS than they actually were.
I appreciate the edit "look at the space the game title is going to be edited into" visual gag. Please keep experimenting with video-editing stuff. That was very funny
I was a fairly late comer to your games but not by choice. I remember being absolutely in love with the box art to Fallout but sadly putting it back with the 16MB RAM requirement. It was already a success that I managed to scrounge money and beg my parents enough to upgrade to 8MB. Decades later, a dear friend bought me a copy of Fallout 3 and while I was grateful, I knew I couldn't dare to try until I played through the older games. That's just one of my quirks. Now I do own all the other games you mentioned on GOG and do intend to try them at some point but I'm so busy with work. I really want to try them out and see if if you're being overly self critical on Temple's dialogue. I'm intentionally avoiding your deep dives on Arcanum because it feels like a game that rewards a fresh experience. I did have a lot of Vampire spoiled by a youtuber that plays a lot of classic Fallout mods. Apparently a lot of former soviet countries really love modifying Fallout. Maybe it's because the setting didn't have the USSR as a major antagonist lore wise? Maybe a strong prevailing concern over a nuclear holocaust fear as I've learned more about the mass protests during glasnost about nuclear weapons? But regardless, I've gotten really into the lore of VtM and other world of darkness properties and I'm hearing a lot of universal acclaim that the game is a great a way for beginners to experience the world.
It's always nice to see footage from a dev/designer since you get to see the "intended" way to play. But I think this only works in games where the player has to fill in the blanks with imagination and adhere to some specific framework of rules. Fallout, especially 1 and 2, there isn't much to fill in as those two are designed in a way that there is a result for every action. Minecraft on the other hand also has no intended way to play as is it is limitless. So the game must be somewhat linear but not on rails like Portal for instance. BF/COD/Half Life singleplayer campaigns are a good example of how a designer would enjoy the game as they would adhere to their own vision of how to follow the design of the game, instead of merely responding to it and sometimes bypassing the intended feature.
Hi Tim. In your Arcanum 2 video, you talked about about what your plans for the game were originally going to be. Given the evolution of technology, design, player engagement / expectations, and your own skills improving over the years, what would a modern Arcanum 2 look like if you had the opportunity to make a sequel? What things would you keep from your original plans and what would you do differently? Do you think you would keep the overall story of "Journey to the Center of Arcanum" or would you do something entirely different?
Just got Arcanum. I am not an RPG person at all, but I wanna play these games to the light of your notes, as part of the gamedev experience. If you have more design/implementation details about this game I will enjoy it even more. my2c
I played Fallout 1 & 2 with my mini laptop somewhere in 2013 for the first time ever and at some point I connected my laptop to CRT through VGA port and I just remember how stunning, rich and deep the graphics looked compared to the laptop's LCD display, which was not even the worst to be honest.Too bad CRTs are not good for your eyes I suppose, but maybe some day we get a display that can match the magic of CRT without its drawbacks.
When it comes to resolution of older games like Fallout or pretty much any older RTS game, I very much prefer a stretch to some content (doesn't have to be full stretch but from like 640x480 to 1024x768) than full stretch or going with my resolution. I really dislike seeing everything in miniatures. I did it with DOS games too, I just usually set a certain DOSbox window size so the game is not stretched, not tiny, but is a bit bigger than default. Tbh I prefer GoG when it comes to older games, because Steam sometimes doesn't offer what I want (especially versions of the game or they give hard patches I don't want etc, like Final Fantasy 6 there was a time when they only offered the mobile remake with ugly sprites.)
Hey Tim, I was curious how NDA works in the game industry, and especially for people working at home. It would be incredibly interesting to hear any stories or advice you have on the subject.
Re: "I'm surprised that (alignment conflict) never comes up in D&D" It absolutely does, and it's part of why I had to stop playing with my last group. I played a relatively good character and the rest of the party had a far more loosely-defined moral outlook, and I didn't want to change my character to suit theirs. I feel like if we had agreed on something like your ToEE idea from the start, we wouldn't have had that problem. I really enjoyed ToEE, by the way.
I use integra scaling for all older games, lets you drop the resolution without getting bury. You dont get the CRT look, we did lose something with the move to LED's. There's also some tricks artists did on CRT's that dont work on LED's, the retro emulators are reverse engineering it back in to console games with CRT effects. I find UI harder in older games, still Fallout 1/2 & Arcanum hold up fairly well. There's some older games I bounce off in under 10 mins, some old UI/UX is hard.
While I agree that the radial menu wasn't great for performing the same action every round, it was still impressive in that in crammed so many class and system elements from that version of D&D into one menu. Today, it would probably have worked better as a touch based menu. I hated it and thought it was still genius.
Ib be curious your thoughts on the communities maintaining or restoring unfinished content from your older games. I know probably one of thr most vibrant and active communities is thr Bloodlines one, with the Unofficial patch and its "Plus" version which added the unfinished bits.
I think all of these games have good fan made high resolution patches that I consider essential for replaying them. Fallout and Arcanum have these patches, a bit unsure about ToEE.
Hey Tim, I would like to hear your thoughts on oop vs functional vs procedural. For example I think unity makes a perfect usecase for oop, when coding in the engine it makes perfect sense to me, however, in my not too long experience this is not really the norm
Hey Tim, love your videos! Got a question about Outer Worlds - somewhat unusual for the genre, there are no romance options for the player. Remembering what you said about your opinions of romances in games, was that your decision - and if so, did you get any pushback, considering how widespread romances in 'modern' RPGs are?
Dear Tim, I recently had an argument with a game developer about User Interfaces in video games and how much they can be viewed as separate entities. What’s your take on it? I believe that user interfaces are part of the game, the very same way cards are essential to any card game. An interact able interface for a mental game. His take was that it’s better to just copy interfaces instead of paying a specialist whose sole purpose is what is nowadays called a “UX Designer”. I love your content, finally someone who speaks about the why and less about the how.
I respect Tim's choice to not do streaming. There are a lot of other chores that come along with something like that such as chat moderation for example. With that said I can still say it would be an event that I would build my schedule around. I can only wish I was in the parallel universe timeline where he does decide to stream. Even a one off event where he goes through the catalog of games he has made for a couple hours would be enough for me.
You might not be interested in streaming- but there's a reason director's commentary tracks exist for movies and tv shows, and yes, games too. We like to hear the reasons behind some of the design decisions and what problems were solved by certain elements, and how things started vs how they ended up.
I use slip (i think it is called) for Fallout 1 (this fixes resolution), uap for Arcanum (again resolution and fixes), uap for Bloodlines (resolution and fixes). I have also made my own balance mods for Fallout 1 and Arcanum. Fallout 1 and Arcanum is absolute magic and i play them atleast once a year. Sometimes more. I went back to bloodlines for the first time in like a decade. I liked it back in the day. But i didnt remember it as fondly. It is not as great as Fallout or Arcanum but man compared to todays games it is an absolute masterpiece. Temple i wont go back to i think. Played it a few times on release. It was ok entertainment for the moment but nothing special. I also went back to Oblivion. Back in the day i was impressed by the size and graphics, music and feel. Never returned to it as i felt it aged poorly compared to F3 etc. And while it is no Fallout or Arcanum i must say i am (like bloodlines) shocked. The quality of the world, the atmosphere etc. An absolute masterpiece. To think bethesda made it with fewer people and less time. Like Arcanum huge job effort it must have been. Anyway no setting in entertainment is as good as Fallout and Arcanum (Fallout wins by a tiny margin). I dont really like the elder scrolls setting much. But man what a game they made.
I've heard old games don't look as good as they were designed to when played on a LCD. I've seen some attempts at fixing this for retro players. I'm hoping the ultimate solution comes in a software piece that uses some more modern graphics can help - it's not like even CPU-based graphics is working very hard on retro games.
Concerning CRT Anti Aliasing: LTT had a great video with a deep technical on this, that devs back then, especially on Nintendo and SEGA Systems, specialized in pixel squatting to build beautifil graphics despite the low resolution. And why they look so horrible on modern displays.
I replayed Arcanum this year. And oh yes does it hold up. It has its flaws. It's a bit clunky. But I still love the good bits as much as the first time. Same with Bloodlines, which I replayed (and finally beat!) last year. In some ways, I think the old games are not even that clunky. I only tried Starfield a little bit on game pass earlier in the year. Not enough to talk about the game in detail. But getting an overview of your character's stats and equipment in that game takes so many clicks in and out of various menus and submenus, I thought it was a nightmare. Then compare that with e.g. Fallout's stat screen where you have everything on one screen with minimal scrolling. Night and day, and I far and away prefer Fallout's, even if it might look less sexy (I don't know that it does look less sexy, but whatever). Okay, both games have clunky inventory screens... But Fallout's or Arcanum's never made me so frustrated as I got with Starfield's. Sorry for bringing Starfield into it. Like I said, didn't play it enough. But I just really struggled with that game's interface.
Are there any secrets in any of your older games that, to your knowledge, no one has found yet? Are you willing to reveal what they are? Even if the answer is no, hidden secrets and how/why to implement them could be a good video idea.
Ye, CRT graphics really looks different a bit, but also eyes hurt after few hours. I think you may want to present some gameplay of your. Commentary would be really interesting, more than gameplay probably, and that's ok. Maybe not often - as with interviews. For sure it's a different experience, either live commentary, or edited records. Latter is even more work I think to make it work. But please, no wide stretch, unless such resolution is supported by newer patches/mods. You may often control aspect ratio in GPU settings. Like let it be corrected by GPU or monitor.
Tim, do you have any insight as to why games seem to take longer to make these days? Do you think it's that the amount of content in games today is just greater than it used to be or has the time cost per "unit of content" risen in some way?
How do you get design, programming and art to agree on some feature and it's implementation together? Often I find that when design wants a feature, programming would try to over architect it to perfection, while artists would just want it to look good and cares little about anything else.
What tools are you or the people in the comments using to plan before they code larger or complex interactions in code? I've been absorbing myself in the world of UML diagramming and wondering if it's used much in the game dev industry
I'd love to watch you streaming, but for reasons you excluded before: live review of games. But interviews, like podcasting, can be interesting and would suit the style of the channel, if they are e. g. around the game dev topic. Maybe discussing decisions, directions, choices you and some other leading dev made in a game. Preferrably someone you wouldn't agree with in the first place, to have several PoV, pro/con on a decision you/he/she made and you/he/she liked and disliked. And what I really would love to watch, maybe in a longer series, but I think you'd totally dislike that because it's opening a can of worms: a live review of WildStar - and what was your idea and what you didn't like. Also some more backstories, why this was on a road to fail, from your PoV. Maybe easier, when I think of your "True Stories With Me As The Villain" video, than live review of current games, because you are beating a dead horse - concerning the game and the company. So no big hurt for anyone. Or maybe not?
While fallout has lots of games inspired by them,arcanum and vampire basically have none and are completely unique experiences that I wish there were more like in the modern gaming era.
The CRT vs LCD thing is really interesting. My favorite example is the one red pixel in Dracula's eye in SotN. On CRT it makes his eyes glow red, but on LCD it's just one brilliant red pixel in his eye, like a laser. So many old games literally look different now, it's not just how we imagined them to appear as kids or our memory.
I still miss my 19" iiyama crt monitor, it lasted about 15 years (gave it away to a neighbour who lacked a monitor). It was excellent quality.
The Arcanum low-intelligence playthrough is probably the funniest thing I've ever played in a video game. Whoever wrote that dialogue deserves joy.
I didn’t write it, but I agree it’s awesome. “Virgil says I’m impotent” is one of the best lines ever.
Very recently, I wanted to play Fallout on my Macbook and subsequently had the spend the next hour trying to download an emulator, download a Windows ISO file, setup the Windows on the emulator, download Steam on the emulator, and finally download Fallout. During the whole process I constantly thought to myself "if only I bought a Windows laptop". It also made me realize just how important backwards compatibility is, and how scary it is that only one company seems to care about it.
What are you talking about? The version from gog works without any kind of windows emulation. Maybe it runs through Rosetta for apple silicon, but it still works fine. Tim is just wrong here and clearly didn’t look into this when making his statement.
@ecchikind3341 GOG does not sell the Mac version of Fallout.
@@CainOnGames my bad Tim but I played it on my Mac. I’ll check and report back. I suppose I it was gog version through apple porting kit, but I agree that’s not user friendly at all.
@@CainOnGames I tried to reply multiple times but my comments don't show up for some reason. I just wanted to say that you are right, gog doesn't sell mac version and I played it through porting kit and through wine/proton. Thanks for your videos and looking forward to hear what you have to say in the future.
I recently saw a short documentary about the making of VtM:B and how painful the pre-release crush was. So even though it's been a long time now, I wanted to thank you for all the work you and the Troika team have done on Bloodlines. Today, with the work of modders over the years, it's a beautiful masterpiece which still brings joy and comfort to many people.
Thats the point of you playing those games with us: to hear any memories evoked by gameplay. Those tales are priceless and extremely inspiring!
We don't care that there are people who can play it better, there's NOONE who can tell us what you experienced at particular points of making the game.
Worst case it is boring and i stop watching. Best case we get tons of lil info
I think that what you're currently doing on this channel is great. Time and time again, I've seen people on TH-cam doing things that the community wants, but doesn't really make the creator happy and engaged. I know you aren't a "TH-camr" per se, but I feel like this can happen to anyone; especially people in your position. I don't know, just wanted to say this for the chance you see it and so that I can say I enjoy how genuine your videos are!
For real. With all the manufactured-to-audience-spec content out there, it’s nice to see someone genuinely interesting just talk about whatever they want to.
I honestly would love to see you do a full director's commentary type playthrough of fallout 1 with Leonard. That would be awesome imo.
I wonder how Tim met all these great actors and voice actors during his career, like Ron Perlman, Keith David or Richard Dean Anderson etc.
That would be interesting to hear.
I thought they did that at some point?
The quests in Arcanum and Fallout are so fun. The atmosphere unmatched by other settings. The way you build characters very enteraining. Love the music and sounds. The writing paints an awesome world.
Arcanum and Bloodlines remain among my top ten most beloved games ever so it was interesting to hear your take on them today.
My top ten ever.
1. Fallout 1
2. Fallout 3
3. Fallout 4
4. Fallout New Vegas
5. Arcanum
6. Fallout 2
These 6 switches places. They are above any other entertainment. So shuffle them as you please to see my ranking or they all take nr 1 spot (different days different games hold nr 1)
7. Total war warhammer 2
8. Oblivion
9. Final Fantasy 7
10. Warhammer Shadow of the Horned Rat.
11. Jedi knight 2
12. Knights of the old republic
13. Jedi academy
14. Vampire Bloodlines
15. Super Mario Bros
16. Super Mario Bros 3
17. Legend of Zelda (snes)
18. Zelda (1 nes)
19. Punch out
20. Sonic the hedgehog
21. Tmnt 2the arcade game
22 Turtles lost in time (snes)
23. Street gangs/River city ransom
24. Dark forces
25. Dark Omen
26. Tales of Destiny
27. Better stop now....
So Tim. You mention in almost all of your videos, "My notes." Can you make a video detailing your core notetaking process? It would be great if you could include your storytelling along with it.
Also, as a (soon-to-be?) retired dev, have you put any thought into modding your old games? You mentioned wishing you had used hot keys in Temple. Does improving your old games sound like something that would be fun? Or would that be the opposite of fun?
Hi there, @DoobieDoctor5000! I have made a video on my notes. It's here: th-cam.com/video/P0NKR9R0XTg/w-d-xo.html
And I talk about what I would change in Fallout here:
th-cam.com/video/hUrNahAr5ho/w-d-xo.html
I have a similar list of changes for Arcanum and Temple. I will make videos about those too.
@@CainOnGames Thank you! Looks like I haven't gone as far back in your backlog as I thought.
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Gotta tell ya tim, been reeallly liking these morning uploads. Cool stories and fun facts go great with morning coffee.
I love how you are transparent about your channel and it’s goals.
I'm glad such a legendary game developer as yourself is consistently making content on youtube. It's inspiring for anyone who follows the industry.
Really happy I found you. Sometimes the topic isn't something I'm necessarily ever going to apply, but I'll say you're quite the charming and calming personality. Also really have loved the games you've been a part of. Genuinely dig how much passion you have for game development.
Regarding the whole alignment incongruence issue, I think a lot of it is implied that the GM can mandate that kind of thing if they feel its neccesary. I was recently playing a Pathfinder 2e campaign and it mentions in the beginning that while not neccesarily a hard rule, characters in the occupation the campaign takes place around are expected to at least not outright malicious and that most are good as a way of nudging the player in their choice. Perhaps part of this is because what defines alignment can be pretty up to interpretation, and they don't want to bar edge cases in which a character with a different or abnormal alignment might still end up working (For instance, a chaotic aligned character who has been forced into service in a lawful order, or a Evil Lawful character begrudgingly working with Good Characters to defeat some greater chaotic evil)
I'm glad you were able to describe really well how it was fun for you to play the games. I think you succeeded in making something better than the typical "let's play" video. If you made an in-depth video on Arcanum, for example, listening to the way you describe things would definitely be much more fun than watching you make a character run all around Tarant.
The original Fallout absolutely still holds up today -- and way better than many other RPGs from those years!
Just got off of work, got a hot cuppa in my hands and a new tim video to enjoy it with. Yeah I'm having a good day.
Temple of elemental evil is only game from that four of yours that i didn't finish. Masquerade, Fallout and Arcanum are my most replayable games. Thanks for them.
I've put together 3 retro PCs just before the pandemic and that's how I play old games now. On a 15" CRT monitor as well, Quake 2 on it was such a great experience.
I think these old top-down RPGs hold up really well. I'm a little surprised to hear you mention the low resolution. I think they look great and once I start playing, I totally forget the original resolution is small. The UI stuff doesn't bother me at all, maybe because I've played through them so many times, but they are seriously great. You've done a lot in your career, but Fallout is so good that even that's all you'd ever done, that alone would be a career you could be really proud of.
Hi Tim,
Just wanted to say that Fallout's UI was a major inspiration for me to become a graphic designer. I remember my friend and I salivating over all the wires, tubes, and rusty elements. It was just so unusual to see such detail in games back in the 90s, at least for us.
It got to the point that my friend hired me to create a heavily Fallout inspired UI for his master's app, something about genetic-evolution-based code optimization (I can't quite remember). By the way, he graduated with honors.
Yeah, it's a bit clunky and the usability isn't great by today's standards, but I still prefer the feel to the very generic and sterile UIs found in some modern games that remind me more of a spreadsheet or an accounting app than a game. :-)
Hey, Tim! Another great video.
I have a lots of questions about building tools for other devs and teammates. What's that process like? What do the various tools look like for different departments? What problems can they cause and how could they be avoided? Basically, as much information as you're willing to give on making development tools. I like the idea of being a programmer for game mechanics themselves and for the tools my teammates use, makes me feel like a team player.
Thank you, and enjoy your holiday week!
I never realised you did the Temple of Elemental Evil, that was a fun game. In fact I like all of the 4 you picked out here.
the reason why watching you stream older (or current) games you enjoy sounds like a good idea, would be to combine a sort of AMA with a relaxed atmosphere, maybe with workers remarks on game mechanics encountered along the way. but if you feel uncomfortable unscripted, that is totally fine and understandable.
The radials in TTOE are awesome. The spellbook UI on the other hand was almost game-endingly opaque, despite studying all the manuals and tutorial very carefully.
I actually really like the party alignment mechanic from Temple and I've since brought it into my D&D and Pathfinder games.
Microsoft don't get enough love for keeping that backwards compatibility, just this year I tried Temple and Baldur's Gate 1 and they worked with little to no hassle.
Thank you for the memories! I would love to hear your more detailed thoughts on these playthroughs (especially Arcanum) 😁
Back in a prior video when discussing Arcanum's 1 point fiasco (not the actual fiasco video but a subsequent one) you mentioned you found a way to compile Arcanum with the original leveling scheme and that you might play it that way and let us know how it went. Did you get a chance to do that? If so what are your thoughts?
Have a great day!!! 😊
A huge part of it really is the nostalgia. I have kept a 1024x768 CRT with a Windows 98 machine in perfect condition, and going back to old games... yes the CRT feels different: it's a bit blurrier and there's glowy edges around any contrasting divides in the image. But for the most part I realize my brain was just filling in the pixels when graphics were that way back then. Having a 17" screen vs. 27" makes a difference too... your brain just fills in a lot of the fidelity.
I'm working my way through playing your older games, inspired by this YT series. Currently doing TOEE.
I would love to see a video on your thoughts about changes the universal Arcanum patch did and what you would have not changed or handled differently to the mod
I love your talks Tim! This topic made me think: do you have any opinion on the sustained value this games have over time?
I say this thinking that there are so many games nowadays (mainly GAAS) that are not playable right now or won't be playable in the future if their servers die, which is different from compatibility options (for older games you can grab an old PC or console and those will still be playable).
Do you think younger game developers that work mostly on this type of stuff will have a different perspective on going back through their older stuff?
1e Dungeon Master's Guide pg. 23-25. Alignment languages were not to be spoken publicly. This is similar to how ideology between people cause disagreements. People catch on to what others ideology is by phrases that are spoken.
The changing of alignment in 1e AD&D was brutal. It caused an immediate loss of a level. The player needed to spend 10k gold per level of that character to atone, and thus allowing them to be redeemed.
These factors were used to keep players from drifting between the alignments by their actions. This essentially made for a self regulating party alignment. Players would want to be in a group with a shared alignment. That makes it easier on everyone on how they proceed with their decisions.
Some people updated your games, Their steam mod or patch that increases the resolution for Fallout and Fallout 2, and also a mod for Arcanum that increases the resolution for higher definition.
CRTs also had the mechanical effect of interlacing frames, which effectively made it look like games were running at double the FPS than they actually were.
I play your older games all the time! lol
I appreciate the edit "look at the space the game title is going to be edited into" visual gag. Please keep experimenting with video-editing stuff. That was very funny
Fallout, Arcanum, and Vampire are some of my favorite games ever. TOEE, even with the circle of 8 patch, doesn't quite make that same list.
All terrific classics
I was a fairly late comer to your games but not by choice. I remember being absolutely in love with the box art to Fallout but sadly putting it back with the 16MB RAM requirement. It was already a success that I managed to scrounge money and beg my parents enough to upgrade to 8MB. Decades later, a dear friend bought me a copy of Fallout 3 and while I was grateful, I knew I couldn't dare to try until I played through the older games. That's just one of my quirks.
Now I do own all the other games you mentioned on GOG and do intend to try them at some point but I'm so busy with work. I really want to try them out and see if if you're being overly self critical on Temple's dialogue. I'm intentionally avoiding your deep dives on Arcanum because it feels like a game that rewards a fresh experience. I did have a lot of Vampire spoiled by a youtuber that plays a lot of classic Fallout mods. Apparently a lot of former soviet countries really love modifying Fallout. Maybe it's because the setting didn't have the USSR as a major antagonist lore wise? Maybe a strong prevailing concern over a nuclear holocaust fear as I've learned more about the mass protests during glasnost about nuclear weapons? But regardless, I've gotten really into the lore of VtM and other world of darkness properties and I'm hearing a lot of universal acclaim that the game is a great a way for beginners to experience the world.
It's always nice to see footage from a dev/designer since you get to see the "intended" way to play. But I think this only works in games where the player has to fill in the blanks with imagination and adhere to some specific framework of rules. Fallout, especially 1 and 2, there isn't much to fill in as those two are designed in a way that there is a result for every action. Minecraft on the other hand also has no intended way to play as is it is limitless. So the game must be somewhat linear but not on rails like Portal for instance. BF/COD/Half Life singleplayer campaigns are a good example of how a designer would enjoy the game as they would adhere to their own vision of how to follow the design of the game, instead of merely responding to it and sometimes bypassing the intended feature.
TTOE definitely holds up today, especially if played with the Circle of Eight bug fix pack which is also available on GOG.
Playing Arcanum as I watch this. It sure does hold up.
Hi Tim. In your Arcanum 2 video, you talked about about what your plans for the game were originally going to be. Given the evolution of technology, design, player engagement / expectations, and your own skills improving over the years, what would a modern Arcanum 2 look like if you had the opportunity to make a sequel? What things would you keep from your original plans and what would you do differently? Do you think you would keep the overall story of "Journey to the Center of Arcanum" or would you do something entirely different?
Just got Arcanum. I am not an RPG person at all, but I wanna play these games to the light of your notes, as part of the gamedev experience. If you have more design/implementation details about this game I will enjoy it even more. my2c
I played Fallout 1 & 2 with my mini laptop somewhere in 2013 for the first time ever and at some point I connected my laptop to CRT through VGA port and I just remember how stunning, rich and deep the graphics looked compared to the laptop's LCD display, which was not even the worst to be honest.Too bad CRTs are not good for your eyes I suppose, but maybe some day we get a display that can match the magic of CRT without its drawbacks.
When it comes to resolution of older games like Fallout or pretty much any older RTS game, I very much prefer a stretch to some content (doesn't have to be full stretch but from like 640x480 to 1024x768) than full stretch or going with my resolution.
I really dislike seeing everything in miniatures.
I did it with DOS games too, I just usually set a certain DOSbox window size so the game is not stretched, not tiny, but is a bit bigger than default.
Tbh I prefer GoG when it comes to older games, because Steam sometimes doesn't offer what I want (especially versions of the game or they give hard patches I don't want etc, like Final Fantasy 6 there was a time when they only offered the mobile remake with ugly sprites.)
Hey Tim, I was curious how NDA works in the game industry, and especially for people working at home. It would be incredibly interesting to hear any stories or advice you have on the subject.
Re: "I'm surprised that (alignment conflict) never comes up in D&D"
It absolutely does, and it's part of why I had to stop playing with my last group. I played a relatively good character and the rest of the party had a far more loosely-defined moral outlook, and I didn't want to change my character to suit theirs. I feel like if we had agreed on something like your ToEE idea from the start, we wouldn't have had that problem. I really enjoyed ToEE, by the way.
I use integra scaling for all older games, lets you drop the resolution without getting bury. You dont get the CRT look, we did lose something with the move to LED's.
There's also some tricks artists did on CRT's that dont work on LED's, the retro emulators are reverse engineering it back in to console games with CRT effects.
I find UI harder in older games, still Fallout 1/2 & Arcanum hold up fairly well. There's some older games I bounce off in under 10 mins, some old UI/UX is hard.
as someone who mostly came to those games after the fact, i think your assessment is pretty much correct.
I think most people would enjoy a commentary track like Portal 2 has.
But your channel is mostly that, but not a bubble to click on during gameplay.
Don't forget to thank Valve and WINE, Tim. They made it almost perfect playable on Linux systems before Microsoft made it playable on older systems.
While I agree that the radial menu wasn't great for performing the same action every round, it was still impressive in that in crammed so many class and system elements from that version of D&D into one menu.
Today, it would probably have worked better as a touch based menu.
I hated it and thought it was still genius.
Ib be curious your thoughts on the communities maintaining or restoring unfinished content from your older games. I know probably one of thr most vibrant and active communities is thr Bloodlines one, with the Unofficial patch and its "Plus" version which added the unfinished bits.
I think all of these games have good fan made high resolution patches that I consider essential for replaying them. Fallout and Arcanum have these patches, a bit unsure about ToEE.
Hey Tim, I would like to hear your thoughts on oop vs functional vs procedural. For example I think unity makes a perfect usecase for oop, when coding in the engine it makes perfect sense to me, however, in my not too long experience this is not really the norm
Hey Tim, love your videos! Got a question about Outer Worlds - somewhat unusual for the genre, there are no romance options for the player. Remembering what you said about your opinions of romances in games, was that your decision - and if so, did you get any pushback, considering how widespread romances in 'modern' RPGs are?
Are you willing to post reactions/commentaries to speedruns of your games? I think that would be nice.
Hey Tim, love your work
Whats the last game you played that made you ( briefly )forget you're a game designer ?
Dear Tim, I recently had an argument with a game developer about User Interfaces in video games and how much they can be viewed as separate entities. What’s your take on it? I believe that user interfaces are part of the game, the very same way cards are essential to any card game. An interact able interface for a mental game. His take was that it’s better to just copy interfaces instead of paying a specialist whose sole purpose is what is nowadays called a “UX Designer”.
I love your content, finally someone who speaks about the why and less about the how.
I respect Tim's choice to not do streaming. There are a lot of other chores that come along with something like that such as chat moderation for example. With that said I can still say it would be an event that I would build my schedule around. I can only wish I was in the parallel universe timeline where he does decide to stream. Even a one off event where he goes through the catalog of games he has made for a couple hours would be enough for me.
You might not be interested in streaming- but there's a reason director's commentary tracks exist for movies and tv shows, and yes, games too. We like to hear the reasons behind some of the design decisions and what problems were solved by certain elements, and how things started vs how they ended up.
I don't really want to see you stream gameplay, but id like to hear your thoughts on your games after you've recently played them?
I use slip (i think it is called) for Fallout 1 (this fixes resolution), uap for Arcanum (again resolution and fixes), uap for Bloodlines (resolution and fixes). I have also made my own balance mods for Fallout 1 and Arcanum.
Fallout 1 and Arcanum is absolute magic and i play them atleast once a year. Sometimes more.
I went back to bloodlines for the first time in like a decade. I liked it back in the day. But i didnt remember it as fondly. It is not as great as Fallout or Arcanum but man compared to todays games it is an absolute masterpiece.
Temple i wont go back to i think. Played it a few times on release. It was ok entertainment for the moment but nothing special.
I also went back to Oblivion. Back in the day i was impressed by the size and graphics, music and feel. Never returned to it as i felt it aged poorly compared to F3 etc. And while it is no Fallout or Arcanum i must say i am (like bloodlines) shocked. The quality of the world, the atmosphere etc. An absolute masterpiece. To think bethesda made it with fewer people and less time. Like Arcanum huge job effort it must have been.
Anyway no setting in entertainment is as good as Fallout and Arcanum (Fallout wins by a tiny margin). I dont really like the elder scrolls setting much. But man what a game they made.
Another amazing video from an incredible creator.
I quite like the interface in F1/F2.
Me currently doing my first playthrough of Arcanum 😊
I've heard old games don't look as good as they were designed to when played on a LCD. I've seen some attempts at fixing this for retro players. I'm hoping the ultimate solution comes in a software piece that uses some more modern graphics can help - it's not like even CPU-based graphics is working very hard on retro games.
Now I want to purchase a CRT monitor just to play my old games.
Yeah I had to play fallout 1&2 on an emulator on my MacBook 😞 I still purchased them, but yeah, it was hard to set up (for me) and kinda wonky.
Vampires the Masquerade was just a masterpiece for its time.
Concerning CRT Anti Aliasing: LTT had a great video with a deep technical on this, that devs back then, especially on Nintendo and SEGA Systems, specialized in pixel squatting to build beautifil graphics despite the low resolution. And why they look so horrible on modern displays.
I replayed Arcanum this year. And oh yes does it hold up. It has its flaws. It's a bit clunky. But I still love the good bits as much as the first time. Same with Bloodlines, which I replayed (and finally beat!) last year.
In some ways, I think the old games are not even that clunky. I only tried Starfield a little bit on game pass earlier in the year. Not enough to talk about the game in detail. But getting an overview of your character's stats and equipment in that game takes so many clicks in and out of various menus and submenus, I thought it was a nightmare. Then compare that with e.g. Fallout's stat screen where you have everything on one screen with minimal scrolling. Night and day, and I far and away prefer Fallout's, even if it might look less sexy (I don't know that it does look less sexy, but whatever). Okay, both games have clunky inventory screens... But Fallout's or Arcanum's never made me so frustrated as I got with Starfield's.
Sorry for bringing Starfield into it. Like I said, didn't play it enough. But I just really struggled with that game's interface.
Tim I see lots of boardgames in the background. Could you talk about what you thought was interesting from recent board games?
The best I can give you is my top 5 board games: th-cam.com/video/I37RXM71qmU/w-d-xo.html
Outer Worlds writer at the end is so daring ahahaha
Are there any secrets in any of your older games that, to your knowledge, no one has found yet? Are you willing to reveal what they are?
Even if the answer is no, hidden secrets and how/why to implement them could be a good video idea.
Ye, CRT graphics really looks different a bit, but also eyes hurt after few hours.
I think you may want to present some gameplay of your. Commentary would be really interesting, more than gameplay probably, and that's ok. Maybe not often - as with interviews.
For sure it's a different experience, either live commentary, or edited records. Latter is even more work I think to make it work.
But please, no wide stretch, unless such resolution is supported by newer patches/mods. You may often control aspect ratio in GPU settings. Like let it be corrected by GPU or monitor.
Tim, do you have any insight as to why games seem to take longer to make these days? Do you think it's that the amount of content in games today is just greater than it used to be or has the time cost per "unit of content" risen in some way?
Citizen Tim Cain likes to take notes
Love the nerd talk on this one ❤
How about quick video reviews of games that were inspired by Fallout, such as ATOM RPG?
How do you get design, programming and art to agree on some feature and it's implementation together? Often I find that when design wants a feature, programming would try to over architect it to perfection, while artists would just want it to look good and cares little about anything else.
just started bloodlines the other day for the first time actually
I would absolutely love to see you play your own games!
Now that MS owns Arcanum can you look at getting a source code release.
What tools are you or the people in the comments using to plan before they code larger or complex interactions in code?
I've been absorbing myself in the world of UML diagramming and wondering if it's used much in the game dev industry
I *just* started Arcanum and the UI is clunky and unintuitive but there is a weird charm to it
I'd love to watch you streaming, but for reasons you excluded before: live review of games. But interviews, like podcasting, can be interesting and would suit the style of the channel, if they are e. g. around the game dev topic. Maybe discussing decisions, directions, choices you and some other leading dev made in a game. Preferrably someone you wouldn't agree with in the first place, to have several PoV, pro/con on a decision you/he/she made and you/he/she liked and disliked.
And what I really would love to watch, maybe in a longer series, but I think you'd totally dislike that because it's opening a can of worms: a live review of WildStar - and what was your idea and what you didn't like. Also some more backstories, why this was on a road to fail, from your PoV.
Maybe easier, when I think of your "True Stories With Me As The Villain" video, than live review of current games, because you are beating a dead horse - concerning the game and the company. So no big hurt for anyone. Or maybe not?
When you played Arcanum did you play vanilla or did you use the community patches?
am effectively addicted to your channel! help me😀
While fallout has lots of games inspired by them,arcanum and vampire basically have none and are completely unique experiences that I wish there were more like in the modern gaming era.
Beenthinking about replaying Arcanum for a while. I just don't have time :/
I'm still trying to play fallout 1... but man, the interface is rough.
Have you played fallout fixt? Thoughts on it? 😶
😎👍
Small question. How did you guys produce those small cutscenes in 1 and 2?
now when people call me a dinosaur for playing in 1080p because "nobody does that anymore", i can say "Tim Cain does!". :)
Tim Cain fallout playthrough when?