Part of is also developer comprehension of the IP's boundaries - time passing between sequels means team members leave/new ones are hired, and over the past few decades larger and larger teams for each new iteration. This introduces more and more risk from every sequel to the next that any one team member wont "get" what the IP is about at a very deep level.
"this feels like the war happened in the 50s" I remember going through the fallout 4 intro and I think the only things that told me that the war wasn't happening in 1957 were the Mr Handy, the Army guy in power armour and the vault - all legacy items from fallout 1
Halo would've been the perfect example for this video. Master chief, the energy sword, the halo rings, the guns, almost everything from the original trilogy is iconic.
Can games be taken too seriously? I've been covering games for nearly ten years, yet I can find myself in the awkward position of interacting with players and critics that take them way more seriously than me, sometimes to the point of concern, whether its hours of arguing about a gun's damage output, talking down to developers, or threatening people with different opinions. I love games, but only so far... and obviously where that line's drawn will vary person to person. I'm curious to hear if you've ever felt like this as a game developer. It's a privilege to hear your insights and stories almost every morning, keep up the great work!
An electrician friend of mine once caught me off guard by saying that they didn't have transistors in fallout and that is why everything has bulbs instead, everybody went nuclear power and they had no need to develop them, which is interesting and cool. And your insight is also interesting, and I just kept thinking while you are talking about the marvel sludgepipe spewing out "content" without developing it carefully and consistently.
@3:18 I fully agree with your take on this-however..... just wanting to point out that the Twilight Zone episode 'The Lonely' does have synths. It would not surprise me if Bethesda rationalized it from there too; it was mentioned on their forums during Fallout three's development; (by me, as an example of 50's futurism; along with that 50's article by Harold Osborne, in Mechanix Illustrated about cell-phones). @8:36 Sad but true, I recall that there were game reviews where the author believed the setting was in/ or in an alternate 1950's, rather than the 50's anticipated future.
Thanks for this video. I agree with a lot. I see IPs diluting for a number of reason. One is profit. That’s obvious, but I think lack of creativity is a reason, which seems counterintuitive. It’s easy to do what Tim said, like throw in ghosts or other elements that exists in other worlds. That’s not being creative, that’s just throwing more ingredients in the soup. It’s like a drummer who adds more cymbals to his kit so he can make more sounds. This is not the same as learning new rhythms and exploring more of your kit. This is an easy trap for us nerds to fall into. I think expanding relationships and character development will go much further in keeping the IP strong and making it stronger. What happens ten years after the NCR is established? How does the Enclave change form and show up 5 years later? What if the NCR splits in leadership and now you have a eastern vs western faction? Who are the key players in that dynamic? What does family life look like? What does the rebuilding process look like? How does the economy change? Industry?
How you’re framing IP vibes pretty well with general branding topics. When I was in startups I would casually read on the topic. Your notion of IP dilution matches conversations on brand dilution; even how you position the overarching focus of an IP matches how one would say “a brand is a promise” and to keep that promise to the target demo. Appreciate your insights.
In Fallout 76, there is some mystical things brought down to reality. There is a quest to hunt a sheepsquatch(sheep bigfoot), but it involves someone so fascinated by it they just build an assaultron robot with sheep skin over it as an attempt to make it real. The quest was then completed as a group event where you fight it. There's also are real sheepsquatches, rip.
First of all, I'm glad I have found your channel, still not watched all of your videos but many of them were very inspirational to me so far as I was thinking of diving into the game design for long time now (I'm 33 today). For some reason I did not do this until beginning of 2023 where I started to read things, getting familiar with Unreal etc. but during whole 2023 I have noticed that I was more lost with all these stuff, materials, "tutorials". I don't understand how your videos did this but to me personally, watching your videos gave me more confidence into myself and today I'm closing 2023 with blaming myself that I have wasted whole year as after watching couple of your videos where you talk about taking notes, maintaing IP, creating design docs, agree with and fixing an issues and many more just did the thing. I'm looking into 2024 with a very good vibe which comes from your videos and your person. Maintaining some stuff regarding all my knowledge so I can step into 2024 with kind of free mind and start my very first and own project. I'M STOP MAKING EXCUSES AND START MAKING A GAME! P.S. Keep making your videos as long as you can as they are amazing!
As someone who is making an IP with a large scope. The one thing that I've neglected to do is write what CAN'T happen in my universe. I've been stuck in the mindset of telling what is possible in that world, that I've forgotten the other part.
@@_TristanGray Thank you, really means alot. Honestly, Tim Cain's insights are a treasure trove of industry experience.
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@@SoaringMoonI always say that product management is more about deciding what NOT to do than deciding what you should do. A monkey can say "just do everything, as everything is important" but deciding what fat can be trimmed away, that is hard for real and requires a true pro. Realizing that this goes for IP/lore etc as well was a real eye opener for me!
i view ghost in fallout 2 as merely something what happened to my character. it's just another story to tell at the end of the road/journey. that is, as long as it's not directly linked to any major story line, and especially main story, it's absolutely fine addition.
I'm sorry but I can't keep quiet today I feel like Black Isle/Interplay and Bioware are to credit with the popularization of (c)RPGs as we know them today And FINALLY a proper, deep, reactive RPG is crowned *Game of the Year* So a "thank you Tim" is in order I believe. THANK YOU
This just made me think of the old, classic Roky Erickson song; If you have ghosts (then you have everything).. Anyways, interesting as always Tim. I'm not even a game dev, but as a musician & generally creative person, I find all your stories both enlightening & entertaining!
The two big ways I've seen sequels be successful at avoiding this problem is by either being about the same core features but a different location (more making a series instead of a direct sequel), or by making ONE distinct change and exploring those ramifications. But yeah, far too often sequels introduce features and ideas that, while cool on their own, slowly chip away at what the initial core of the game felt like. When it comes fully to fruition you can end up in situations like most of the Blizzard IPs, where the modern games look, feel and play NOTHING like the classics that put them on the map, and the lore has been retconned or thrown out the window entirely to chase the next big idea.
Games have to evolve. There is so much room to better games and explore new ideas (as in other media). If you keep doing the same, old thing, the formula will grow stale, boring and outdated. The problem today is that money has driven companies to chase trends rather than innovate and consumers are rather passive. There lies the limiting factor on games today.
@@lrinfi Well said. The internet has helped to make all these processes more transparent or at least easier to follow. In one video, Tim said that we have to vote with our wallet more. The pickier we become, the less often we reward companies taking advantage of well-established titles. We need to expose the mechanisms at play here.
Great video for understanding ip building. Also it’s fascinating, I never resized the constraint of Sequels. You really gotta thread the needle when making a good sequel.
So if Fallout did a sequel where there was a vault in say Australia that was populated full of wealthy Americans, and the adventures of a new land with unique creatures and architecture, would that breath new life into the IP or would it further dilute the IP? Are breathing new life into an IP and diluting an IP mutually exclusive?
@@lrinfi I think you miss the question, Fallout was only used as an example to make the question more clear. Not to advocate for any changes to the Fallout universe. The question is the distinction between breathing new life into an IP and diluting an IP. Are they they same thing? Are they mutually exclusive? You could even throw in when is breathing new life into an IP worth the possible dilution effect?
I think another aspect about diluting IPs is sometimes the games tone or stride if you will is found in a sequel whether that's intentional or otherwise. The Fable franchise in my opinion is a good example. The first game was very well received but in my opinion was a bit too generic fantasy. The second however makes a huge shift and becomes more of a think Sherlock Holmes London mixed with fairy tales mixed with classic hack and slash RPG. I felt that tone Fable 2 had found in the second installment was it's identity in the same way Fallouts identity is retro-futuristic. Then in the 3rd installment of Fable they pushed the timeline further and now it's steam punk fantasy which I felt was too generic for the time and they had something more unique with the tone and setting in Fable 2. Just my two cents though.
I agree 100% with Fallout not needing the supernatural etc. But i loved the Anna quest you did and i never viewed it as actual supernatural stuff but rather the chosen not being all there so to speak. And ofc a joke. Just like aliens, star trek etc were jokes in random encounters (unlike Anna who was not a random encounter but still a joke and showing the chosen one as hqving some spirit ideas, like sulik and so on) And sulik doesnt really commune with grampy bone. He thinks he does. It is how he views the world (man i love that character). And when he helps you with hints from grampy bone it is Suliks intuition and cunning that is used (which Sulik thinks comes from grampy bone ofc). I think the whole idea and design of tribal like this is absolutely fantastic and refers to nuclear war bringing back the stone age etc (and ofc with the awesome twist and design of Fallout) Lol we drank like a fish. spirits of anger and chaos pop out and now we have to pay some coin to make it right. Sure Sulik "we" drank (you and your dead relatives) and the spirits (not so much you) tore the place up. Also Sulik and the Chosen One doing some amazing stuff. Dont underestimate someone because they think the moon is cheese or they have a grampy bone. He might still be very cunning and dangerous. Boom goes the enclave. Reminds me of a book i read about a ninja. He is a great warrior and thinks the samurai who think their family swords give them power are misguided (the swords have no power). One day he mets a samurai that defeats him. He explains to the samurai which has a family sword of power that it is fake and that surely this very smart samurai gets it. The samurai diagrees. His family sword has power. And proceeds to explain to the ninja that even if someone else sword does not, the mere blind belief in a sword is a powerful power. To be able to have no self doubt can move mountains. The ninja finally understands that even if many or no swords have power, belief in them can be incredible power.
You've said something about newer Fallout games that annoys me personally. They seem to heavily focus on the "retro" part of retrofuturism. Stuff like the design of Fallout 4 "Assault Rifle". I can understand their desire to design a weapon that would look "cool" especially with the bigger and bulkier redesigned Power Armor, so a dinky G3 or M16 would look tiny in a hands of a Power Armor user. But I also don't understand why would a seemingly water-cooled machine gun be something that "People in the 50's would think future would look like". Water-cooled weapons were already outdated by WW2 and I always assumed the divergence in Fallout universe happened after WW2, so I'm not a big fan of this increasing focus on "retro" part in Bethesda's Fallouts. At the same time, as you've also mentioned, they've made heavy focus on Synths, something on the complete opposite of the spectrum. With those automaton-looking Synths and a water-cooled machine gun, you might think Fallout is a Steampunk game, not "50's Retrofuturism". I'm sure you had no ill intention, so sorry for loosely related Bethesda bashing, but every time their art direction in Fallout get brought up, I get annoyed.
Coming from someone who has never made a creative IP, I think most games should have at least one sequel. I've seen often that starting from scratch ends up setting the pitch and a sequel usually leads to the home run because it allows devs to flesh out what they wanted from the first iteration. I agree that IP saturation is a prevalent problem right now; but in my opinion, I think a sequel allows for way more pros than cons to an IP. Just my 2 cents.
This dilution concept actually clarifies something that's bothered me in Fallout 4 for years that I could never quite describe. In F3 and FNV, the weapon artists/designers understood from F1 the real world period plausible weapons that could be found in America in conjunction with the "50s imagined future" science fiction weapons. For instance, the common Assault Rifle in F3 and Service Rifle in FNV have wooden furniture instead of plastic, which is period accurate to the 50s-60s with only rarer "special forces" weapons having plastic. In Fallout 4, they heavily diluted small arms and their worldbuilding by adding anachronisms like the "Assault Rifle" a WW1 Lewis Gun, the Deliverer, a suppressed PPK that was a very forced reference to James Bond in the main questline on top of Nick Valentine, the Radium Rifle which is a direct copy of a WW2 last ditch rifle that makes no sense being found in Boston, the space aesthetic of Institute weapons, pipe weapons which feel mechanically implausible and unnecessary in the face of the plethora of guns in the US, and a number of modern 80s aesthetic revolvers with plastic handguards. It also got me thinking about how the spawn occurrence of such weapons in the world made no sense either.
Most details are better left nebulous. When you explain everything in detail it removes most of the mystique around it. The problem with telling everything and answering every question that a lot of TV shows and horror run into quite frequently.
such a good video topic. i tend to always prefer the first game in a series, even if the sequels tend to win popularity contests with more polish and budget or simple tech advancement. i haven't played too much of fallout 2 (and not recently), but i vaguely recall it feeling a little strange to me that you periodically get visions from the village elder? (is that right?) and this video also reminded me of how the first fallout had those psykers in the LA vault. seems out of place at first, but it made some sense viewing them as mutations and connected in some way to the master's experiments, though i do see how that kind of thing dilutes the core idea of the setting
I've been subconsciously feeling what you said about Fallout being diluted for a long time now, but only when you explicitly say it here do I really understand what has been happening to Fallout. I now honestly think that Fallout needs to be rebooted with the next installment, otherwise we run the risk of it descending into Fortnite levels of absurdity.
Marketing and business people are probably the #1 troublemakers on this topic. "Hey lets add this and that to it!" "Hey I heard about this new trend and it's going in!" "Well you can always work somewhere else, lol"
Hey, Tim! I have a question. I'm a huge movie fan and I've been collecting dvds and blu-rays for the past 20 years or so. And what I love the most about those is audio commentaries by writers, directors etc. What are your thoughts on retrofitting classic games with audio commentaries by original creators? Is that even feasible from a programmer's standpoint? I guess it could work in VtmB, seeing as most Valve games have audio commentaries, but what about Fallout, Arcanum and ToEE? And would you be interested in doing something like that? Thank you.
It would be fun to get together with some of the other devs and do commentary tracks on our old games. My guess is that it would be more like RiffTrax than commentary.
They did that in Left 4 dead I think. It’s a special mode that you run through the campaign and have these floating dialog symbols on the map. If you go to them and interact, they play audio comments from the developers and sometimes an animation or event around the player in order to emphasize their points.
If you see this, what do you think about old instruction manuals. If I'm not mistaken one Civ game came with ~200-page book. You couldn't finish a game without reading a book / or randomly discovered Diplomacy spying. I think this side of gaming is overlooked now. What are your thoughts. And talk about other things that are not executables on a system, but contribute greatly to a game / longterm.
Hey Tim, any chance you could get Jason Anderson for A Conversation With video? Would be interesting to hear his perspective from time his at Interplay and Troika. There are also a bunch of folks at PlanetVampire that would love to get some questions asked about Bloodlines and cut content, since from watching your videos and watching Boyarsky present at SINFO 2017, it seems like he drove a lot of design choices for adapting VTM 3rd edition for Bloodlines.
You are still very much correct. The more you expanded, the more it can be diluted. But could you reduce the dilution by logical tie backs to story plot elements? Could we have vampires or were-wolves in Fallout if they get tired back to F.E.V.? The super mutants are a result of failed experiments, why can't we do some form of splicing? Both questions I would answer no. But its a nice thought exercise.
in the real world there are many things that happen to very few. or at least some claim that one or another thing happened to them. alien abductions, bigfoot encounters, even vampires... does that make all these stories real? the same applies to fictional characters, it's just a matter of how everything is presented to the player imo.
@@lrinfi because i wouldn't be able to express myself so opinionatedly and to the core. not just because i'm not an english speaker and never been expressive with words, but also because i've never touched any fallout game after fallout 3. :)
My questions on the channel are usually deeper than this, but how do you not have a book yet! You could easily make 2. One on game design and one on your career. (Or maybe you do and I just don't know about it 😗)
I've thought of these topics through the years (played the first Fallout game in '98, and followed the franchise since then), and I definitely feel a kind of vindication that IP's need to be focused in the way you explain it, one example being "I want to see what Europe/Asia/South America looks like in Fallout!" and I constantly say that is not what Fallout it is about - it is American-centric, telling the stories after the War, and what happened before the War and outside of America is uninteresting. Also, on another point I like to share on "summarizing an IP with one sentence", one of the foundational Swedish tabletop RPG's was called "Mutant", and its sales pitch in a board meeting was "It is like Gamma World - but set in Sweden". And this franchise has been running strong to this day since 1984.
It might be tough to make a full video out of this but in Fallout what was the difference between Thrust and Swing on melee weapons? On some of them the AP cost was the same, but others Thrust cost one more. I've sunk over 1k hours into Fallout and still haven't been able to figure it out.
As far as I can tell, thrust and swing are just two animation variants of the same melee attack, just as punch and kick are two animation variants of an unarmed attack. In fact, 25% of unarmed attacks are made into kicks, if the animation is available to that character model. So unless there is a difference in weapon data (I didn't look at that), I don't see a combat difference.
@@CainOnGames On the sledgehammer and super sledge thrust cost an extra AP from swing, but on the knife and combat knife it had the same AP cost. I always figured it was intended to do something extra. Thanks for the explanation!
Recently the finals been getting negative reviews because they slowed the movement. It turned out that they decreased the default FOV and it was only an illusion. What's your take on this situation?
Hey Tim, I was watching your source control video, and I noticed you didn't mentioned GIT, wich is odd to me. When I started to play around in Unity a few years ago I noticed that it has it's own source control, no git option. I find this kind of weird since git is kind of the standard for source control in most development areas, is there a reason for this? I searched a bit, some say is because of the binary assets, other say that that's not a problem, some say it's that people are reluctant to change... idk. Perhaps you or someone of the game devs that visit the channel can clarify this, since this has bugged me for some time.
Tim I love your videos. I have a question that touches on your previous comments on character flaws and a bit about outer worlds. I am playing outer worlds for the first time now and really like it, but if I hadn’t been told by a friend to take the phobias when they came up, I probably wouldn’t have picked some. In other reviews of the game I have listened to, people echo the same sentiment about being afraid to potentially kneecap their character with a flaw. What is it about willingly choosing a defect that is so hard for players to agree to? How could a game (e.g. outer worlds) better convince the player to at least experiment with them? I took robophobia due to advice and had the awesome experience of first confronting my ships auto mechanical and my only dialogue option was to scream, and it got a genuine laugh out of me. I really like the idea now but it seems like a hard sell for most players. How could this be overcome?
Basically the only thing I strongly dislike about New vegas is how much it looks like a 50s apocalypse. Especially when the fallout 1 and 2 art style were so distinctive and cool and we were finally returning to the east coast. Its easily the worse offender for this. Also the old power armour and vault suits just looked better imo (Oh and the old weapons were so fun and creative- had really cool mad max vibes compared so a lot of the later ones)
Awesome content Tim, as always. Much appreciated. However your argument kinda contradicts itself in the sense that you claim that making a new IP is great on its own but you advise against making any more product within that IP because of the possible side effects. Which are valid by themselves and make sense. BUT.. From my understanding, IP by definition is supposed to be an entire series of products that reside within that same universe. Otherwise, you're not creating an IP, just telling one single story. Then your argument doesn't make sense. It's like saying that Duet should only be performed by one single performer because if there are two, then the voice of any one of them will be diluted. But for example any single Star Wars movie would be an incomplete story told without the other 5 movies. So what are your thoughts on this? Why bother creating an entire universe in such great detail in the first place only to abandon it after releasing one single product? It seems like a waste to me.
I don't advise against making more products within an IP, but I do provide a lot of warnings about how hard it will be to make those products good. Personally, I am much less interested in sequels than original games, but many people like making sequels, so I am just providing cautionary advice.
A fantasy world undergoing the industrial revolution. It awakens my curiosity and imagination. Fallout mets firefly sounds like someone forgot to do their homework and just tries to come up with something on the spot by using someone elses work. But a good pitch doesnt determine a great game and Arcanum is far greater than the above sentence. The outer world tried to borrow, beg and steal from Fallout but even so fell flat on its face. It is boring and so unremarkable i really cant express my disapointment with it in this simple post. (I enjoyed the video and thanks for sharing)
This makes me think of the rules of magic and why not everyone blames weird shizzle going on, on magic in a lot of medieval fantasy settings where any form of spellcasters are pretty common
The problem is that there is an overreliance on IP's to generate money and minimize risk. Come up with new ideas rather than trying to milk old ideas until people are sick of them. This is a sickness ailing almost every corner of the entertainment industry today. If you want to come back to an old IP, it will be there: don't force things. Star Wars is a great example of what has been going on in the last ten years or so. At this point, Disney wants to sell us the Death Star blowing up in fifty different permutations, when the first Star Wars came up with that forty six years ago.
@@lrinfi That's true. I felt like the dialogue options and morality system in Mass Effect 3 were essentially a mouthpiece for the writers to tell me what to think rather than leave me the choice to interact with the world in a deeper and more engaging way. I felt like a passenger rather the driver in the story at that point. Mass Effect 3 is a good forerunner to explain what happened. It's also surprising that they couldn't think of a better ending since the game was based almost wholly on a book series called "Berserker", which is the namesake for a possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Berserkers are self-replicating machines (cf. the Reapers), originally alien-made weapons of mass destruction, that kill all life and are based on Von-Neumann probes. If you look into the books, you'll see the story could have practically written itself. But perhaps thanks to changing staff and management, there wasn't the same intellectual and thus thematic continuity between those who made the first game and the last game.
I disagree that putting ghosts in Fallout was a mistake. If you had made ghosts an enemy that you were facing, yeah, you'd have a point. That would have been a misstep and I think putting aliens in was highly questionable. But just having ghosts involved in a couple non-essential side quests did not feel terribly strange because while ghosts are supernatural, they're also a common enough idea in normal life that it didn't feel like you were reaching too far into other things. Ghosts presumably existed before the bombs dropped and then they existed after. If you threw vampires in, then yeah, it's just too much stuff. But ghosts aren't so weird of an idea that it was distracting. I agree with your point, but ghosts didn't detract from Fallout 2 or screw up its IP. If ghosts had become a central part of the main quest, then I'd agree with you. That would be ridiculous.
I really agree with Tim about not attacking a person when you criticize ideas, but I think this has an exception and it's Todd Howard. Sometimes you have to call out a person being the source and root problem of something's failure. In the case of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and some of the other IP Bethesda holds, you can point to the culture of Todd Howard's startling lazy mediocrity and frankly his arrogance and presumption as being the cause of their problems. Starfield is a new IP with no previous entries to pull into the conversation, and it's nevertheless (literally) the worst game ever made, and Todd Howard is why. Not the writers or coders or getting details wrong that warrent valid but positive criticism. Todd Howard is why that's the worst game ever made. There may be one or two other non-Todd exceptions. But for the most part, there's no use getting personal.
@@Dr.Mrs.Pancakes in really simple terms * blocks the ability of individuals to create new items/services * doesn't actually prevent large wealthy entities from copying anything * passes the cost of the legal system onto the individual * i don't consider "IP" to be actual property overall it's a gnarly growth killer
I saw this at least once a month, the setting of fallout was people getting knocked back to the stone age but they know how to make synthetic life? I played fallout in order. Stopped when I saw the FEV vats in fallout 3, I'm 22 BTW so that wasn't easy playing fo1 or 2, but it was very satisfying
Part of is also developer comprehension of the IP's boundaries - time passing between sequels means team members leave/new ones are hired, and over the past few decades larger and larger teams for each new iteration. This introduces more and more risk from every sequel to the next that any one team member wont "get" what the IP is about at a very deep level.
"this feels like the war happened in the 50s" I remember going through the fallout 4 intro and I think the only things that told me that the war wasn't happening in 1957 were the Mr Handy, the Army guy in power armour and the vault - all legacy items from fallout 1
Halo would've been the perfect example for this video. Master chief, the energy sword, the halo rings, the guns, almost everything from the original trilogy is iconic.
Can games be taken too seriously?
I've been covering games for nearly ten years, yet I can find myself in the awkward position of interacting with players and critics that take them way more seriously than me, sometimes to the point of concern, whether its hours of arguing about a gun's damage output, talking down to developers, or threatening people with different opinions. I love games, but only so far... and obviously where that line's drawn will vary person to person. I'm curious to hear if you've ever felt like this as a game developer.
It's a privilege to hear your insights and stories almost every morning, keep up the great work!
An electrician friend of mine once caught me off guard by saying that they didn't have transistors in fallout and that is why everything has bulbs instead, everybody went nuclear power and they had no need to develop them, which is interesting and cool. And your insight is also interesting, and I just kept thinking while you are talking about the marvel sludgepipe spewing out "content" without developing it carefully and consistently.
@3:18
I fully agree with your take on this-however..... just wanting to point out that the Twilight Zone episode 'The Lonely' does have synths. It would not surprise me if Bethesda rationalized it from there too; it was mentioned on their forums during Fallout three's development; (by me, as an example of 50's futurism; along with that 50's article by Harold Osborne, in Mechanix Illustrated about cell-phones). @8:36 Sad but true, I recall that there were game reviews where the author believed the setting was in/ or in an alternate 1950's, rather than the 50's anticipated future.
Thanks for this video. I agree with a lot.
I see IPs diluting for a number of reason. One is profit. That’s obvious, but I think lack of creativity is a reason, which seems counterintuitive. It’s easy to do what Tim said, like throw in ghosts or other elements that exists in other worlds. That’s not being creative, that’s just throwing more ingredients in the soup. It’s like a drummer who adds more cymbals to his kit so he can make more sounds. This is not the same as learning new rhythms and exploring more of your kit. This is an easy trap for us nerds to fall into.
I think expanding relationships and character development will go much further in keeping the IP strong and making it stronger. What happens ten years after the NCR is established? How does the Enclave change form and show up 5 years later? What if the NCR splits in leadership and now you have a eastern vs western faction? Who are the key players in that dynamic? What does family life look like? What does the rebuilding process look like? How does the economy change? Industry?
How you’re framing IP vibes pretty well with general branding topics. When I was in startups I would casually read on the topic. Your notion of IP dilution matches conversations on brand dilution; even how you position the overarching focus of an IP matches how one would say “a brand is a promise” and to keep that promise to the target demo. Appreciate your insights.
This is a masterclass from one of the greats, and it's free... unreal.
In Fallout 76, there is some mystical things brought down to reality. There is a quest to hunt a sheepsquatch(sheep bigfoot), but it involves someone so fascinated by it they just build an assaultron robot with sheep skin over it as an attempt to make it real. The quest was then completed as a group event where you fight it.
There's also are real sheepsquatches, rip.
"...even DLCs can do this."
You just know that the Fallout community hears this and instantly thinks of Mothership Zeta.
@@lrinfi Why was some random 76 event what broke it for you?
First of all, I'm glad I have found your channel, still not watched all of your videos but many of them were very inspirational to me so far as I was thinking of diving into the game design for long time now (I'm 33 today).
For some reason I did not do this until beginning of 2023 where I started to read things, getting familiar with Unreal etc. but during whole 2023 I have noticed that I was more lost with all these stuff, materials, "tutorials".
I don't understand how your videos did this but to me personally, watching your videos gave me more confidence into myself and today I'm closing 2023 with blaming myself that I have wasted whole year as after watching couple of your videos where you talk about taking notes, maintaing IP, creating design docs, agree with and fixing an issues and many more just did the thing.
I'm looking into 2024 with a very good vibe which comes from your videos and your person. Maintaining some stuff regarding all my knowledge so I can step into 2024 with kind of free mind and start my very first and own project.
I'M STOP MAKING EXCUSES AND START MAKING A GAME!
P.S. Keep making your videos as long as you can as they are amazing!
As someone who is making an IP with a large scope. The one thing that I've neglected to do is write what CAN'T happen in my universe. I've been stuck in the mindset of telling what is possible in that world, that I've forgotten the other part.
Those limitations are going to enrich your game so much, great takeaway.
@@_TristanGray Thank you, really means alot. Honestly, Tim Cain's insights are a treasure trove of industry experience.
@@SoaringMoonI always say that product management is more about deciding what NOT to do than deciding what you should do. A monkey can say "just do everything, as everything is important" but deciding what fat can be trimmed away, that is hard for real and requires a true pro. Realizing that this goes for IP/lore etc as well was a real eye opener for me!
👍
i view ghost in fallout 2 as merely something what happened to my character. it's just another story to tell at the end of the road/journey. that is, as long as it's not directly linked to any major story line, and especially main story, it's absolutely fine addition.
I'm sorry but I can't keep quiet today
I feel like Black Isle/Interplay and Bioware are to credit with the popularization of (c)RPGs as we know them today
And FINALLY a proper, deep, reactive RPG is crowned *Game of the Year*
So a "thank you Tim" is in order I believe. THANK YOU
you're up bright and early. thanks for the video!
This just made me think of the old, classic Roky Erickson song; If you have ghosts (then you have everything)..
Anyways, interesting as always Tim. I'm not even a game dev, but as a musician & generally creative person, I find all your stories both enlightening & entertaining!
I LOVE LIKE STORIES OF OLD. His blade runner 2049 is incredible!
Wow thanks for referencing like stories of old I really love the one about the knight of cups
The two big ways I've seen sequels be successful at avoiding this problem is by either being about the same core features but a different location (more making a series instead of a direct sequel), or by making ONE distinct change and exploring those ramifications.
But yeah, far too often sequels introduce features and ideas that, while cool on their own, slowly chip away at what the initial core of the game felt like. When it comes fully to fruition you can end up in situations like most of the Blizzard IPs, where the modern games look, feel and play NOTHING like the classics that put them on the map, and the lore has been retconned or thrown out the window entirely to chase the next big idea.
give some examples on the two different methods pls
Games have to evolve. There is so much room to better games and explore new ideas (as in other media). If you keep doing the same, old thing, the formula will grow stale, boring and outdated. The problem today is that money has driven companies to chase trends rather than innovate and consumers are rather passive. There lies the limiting factor on games today.
@@lrinfi Well said. The internet has helped to make all these processes more transparent or at least easier to follow. In one video, Tim said that we have to vote with our wallet more. The pickier we become, the less often we reward companies taking advantage of well-established titles. We need to expose the mechanisms at play here.
@@lrinfi As a historical linguist, I appreciate this comment.
I could listen to Tim to for hours
Great video for understanding ip building. Also it’s fascinating, I never resized the constraint of Sequels. You really gotta thread the needle when making a good sequel.
So if Fallout did a sequel where there was a vault in say Australia that was populated full of wealthy Americans, and the adventures of a new land with unique creatures and architecture, would that breath new life into the IP or would it further dilute the IP? Are breathing new life into an IP and diluting an IP mutually exclusive?
@@lrinfi I think you miss the question, Fallout was only used as an example to make the question more clear. Not to advocate for any changes to the Fallout universe. The question is the distinction between breathing new life into an IP and diluting an IP. Are they they same thing? Are they mutually exclusive? You could even throw in when is breathing new life into an IP worth the possible dilution effect?
Everyone making video games need to watch this
Love your videos, Tim!
Like Stories of Old is such a good channel =]
I think another aspect about diluting IPs is sometimes the games tone or stride if you will is found in a sequel whether that's intentional or otherwise. The Fable franchise in my opinion is a good example. The first game was very well received but in my opinion was a bit too generic fantasy. The second however makes a huge shift and becomes more of a think Sherlock Holmes London mixed with fairy tales mixed with classic hack and slash RPG. I felt that tone Fable 2 had found in the second installment was it's identity in the same way Fallouts identity is retro-futuristic. Then in the 3rd installment of Fable they pushed the timeline further and now it's steam punk fantasy which I felt was too generic for the time and they had something more unique with the tone and setting in Fable 2. Just my two cents though.
Great video Tim! Again, thanks for sharing all your knowledge/perspectives with us.
I agree 100% with Fallout not needing the supernatural etc. But i loved the Anna quest you did and i never viewed it as actual supernatural stuff but rather the chosen not being all there so to speak. And ofc a joke. Just like aliens, star trek etc were jokes in random encounters (unlike Anna who was not a random encounter but still a joke and showing the chosen one as hqving some spirit ideas, like sulik and so on)
And sulik doesnt really commune with grampy bone. He thinks he does. It is how he views the world (man i love that character). And when he helps you with hints from grampy bone it is Suliks intuition and cunning that is used (which Sulik thinks comes from grampy bone ofc). I think the whole idea and design of tribal like this is absolutely fantastic and refers to nuclear war bringing back the stone age etc (and ofc with the awesome twist and design of Fallout)
Lol we drank like a fish. spirits of anger and chaos pop out and now we have to pay some coin to make it right.
Sure Sulik "we" drank (you and your dead relatives) and the spirits (not so much you) tore the place up.
Also Sulik and the Chosen One doing some amazing stuff. Dont underestimate someone because they think the moon is cheese or they have a grampy bone. He might still be very cunning and dangerous. Boom goes the enclave.
Reminds me of a book i read about a ninja. He is a great warrior and thinks the samurai who think their family swords give them power are misguided (the swords have no power). One day he mets a samurai that defeats him. He explains to the samurai which has a family sword of power that it is fake and that surely this very smart samurai gets it. The samurai diagrees. His family sword has power. And proceeds to explain to the ninja that even if someone else sword does not, the mere blind belief in a sword is a powerful power. To be able to have no self doubt can move mountains. The ninja finally understands that even if many or no swords have power, belief in them can be incredible power.
You've said something about newer Fallout games that annoys me personally. They seem to heavily focus on the "retro" part of retrofuturism.
Stuff like the design of Fallout 4 "Assault Rifle".
I can understand their desire to design a weapon that would look "cool" especially with the bigger and bulkier redesigned Power Armor, so a dinky G3 or M16 would look tiny in a hands of a Power Armor user. But I also don't understand why would a seemingly water-cooled machine gun be something that "People in the 50's would think future would look like".
Water-cooled weapons were already outdated by WW2 and I always assumed the divergence in Fallout universe happened after WW2, so I'm not a big fan of this increasing focus on "retro" part in Bethesda's Fallouts.
At the same time, as you've also mentioned, they've made heavy focus on Synths, something on the complete opposite of the spectrum.
With those automaton-looking Synths and a water-cooled machine gun, you might think Fallout is a Steampunk game, not "50's Retrofuturism".
I'm sure you had no ill intention, so sorry for loosely related Bethesda bashing, but every time their art direction in Fallout get brought up, I get annoyed.
Coming from someone who has never made a creative IP, I think most games should have at least one sequel. I've seen often that starting from scratch ends up setting the pitch and a sequel usually leads to the home run because it allows devs to flesh out what they wanted from the first iteration. I agree that IP saturation is a prevalent problem right now; but in my opinion, I think a sequel allows for way more pros than cons to an IP. Just my 2 cents.
This dilution concept actually clarifies something that's bothered me in Fallout 4 for years that I could never quite describe.
In F3 and FNV, the weapon artists/designers understood from F1 the real world period plausible weapons that could be found in America in conjunction with the "50s imagined future" science fiction weapons. For instance, the common Assault Rifle in F3 and Service Rifle in FNV have wooden furniture instead of plastic, which is period accurate to the 50s-60s with only rarer "special forces" weapons having plastic.
In Fallout 4, they heavily diluted small arms and their worldbuilding by adding anachronisms like the "Assault Rifle" a WW1 Lewis Gun, the Deliverer, a suppressed PPK that was a very forced reference to James Bond in the main questline on top of Nick Valentine, the Radium Rifle which is a direct copy of a WW2 last ditch rifle that makes no sense being found in Boston, the space aesthetic of Institute weapons, pipe weapons which feel mechanically implausible and unnecessary in the face of the plethora of guns in the US, and a number of modern 80s aesthetic revolvers with plastic handguards. It also got me thinking about how the spawn occurrence of such weapons in the world made no sense either.
"(with sequels,) you dig down deeper (into the IP)"
Ah, so this was the inspiration for Arcanum II: Journey to the Center of Arcanum
Most details are better left nebulous. When you explain everything in detail it removes most of the mystique around it. The problem with telling everything and answering every question that a lot of TV shows and horror run into quite frequently.
such a good video topic. i tend to always prefer the first game in a series, even if the sequels tend to win popularity contests with more polish and budget or simple tech advancement. i haven't played too much of fallout 2 (and not recently), but i vaguely recall it feeling a little strange to me that you periodically get visions from the village elder? (is that right?) and this video also reminded me of how the first fallout had those psykers in the LA vault. seems out of place at first, but it made some sense viewing them as mutations and connected in some way to the master's experiments, though i do see how that kind of thing dilutes the core idea of the setting
I've been subconsciously feeling what you said about Fallout being diluted for a long time now, but only when you explicitly say it here do I really understand what has been happening to Fallout.
I now honestly think that Fallout needs to be rebooted with the next installment, otherwise we run the risk of it descending into Fortnite levels of absurdity.
I'm gonna bring this title into the gutter by talking about prostate health
Marketing and business people are probably the #1 troublemakers on this topic. "Hey lets add this and that to it!" "Hey I heard about this new trend and it's going in!" "Well you can always work somewhere else, lol"
Love the thumbnail selections as usual
Hey, Tim! I have a question. I'm a huge movie fan and I've been collecting dvds and blu-rays for the past 20 years or so. And what I love the most about those is audio commentaries by writers, directors etc. What are your thoughts on retrofitting classic games with audio commentaries by original creators? Is that even feasible from a programmer's standpoint? I guess it could work in VtmB, seeing as most Valve games have audio commentaries, but what about Fallout, Arcanum and ToEE? And would you be interested in doing something like that? Thank you.
It would be fun to get together with some of the other devs and do commentary tracks on our old games. My guess is that it would be more like RiffTrax than commentary.
They did that in Left 4 dead I think. It’s a special mode that you run through the campaign and have these floating dialog symbols on the map. If you go to them and interact, they play audio comments from the developers and sometimes an animation or event around the player in order to emphasize their points.
If you see this, what do you think about old instruction manuals. If I'm not mistaken one Civ game came with ~200-page book. You couldn't finish a game without reading a book / or randomly discovered Diplomacy spying. I think this side of gaming is overlooked now. What are your thoughts. And talk about other things that are not executables on a system, but contribute greatly to a game / longterm.
Hey Tim, any chance you could get Jason Anderson for A Conversation With video? Would be interesting to hear his perspective from time his at Interplay and Troika. There are also a bunch of folks at PlanetVampire that would love to get some questions asked about Bloodlines and cut content, since from watching your videos and watching Boyarsky present at SINFO 2017, it seems like he drove a lot of design choices for adapting VTM 3rd edition for Bloodlines.
You are still very much correct. The more you expanded, the more it can be diluted. But could you reduce the dilution by logical tie backs to story plot elements?
Could we have vampires or were-wolves in Fallout if they get tired back to F.E.V.?
The super mutants are a result of failed experiments, why can't we do some form of splicing?
Both questions I would answer no. But its a nice thought exercise.
in the real world there are many things that happen to very few. or at least some claim that one or another thing happened to them. alien abductions, bigfoot encounters, even vampires... does that make all these stories real? the same applies to fictional characters, it's just a matter of how everything is presented to the player imo.
@@lrinfi thank you for replying with this. :)
@@lrinfi because i wouldn't be able to express myself so opinionatedly and to the core. not just because i'm not an english speaker and never been expressive with words, but also because i've never touched any fallout game after fallout 3. :)
I’m here for Fallout 5 the Masquerade! Ghoul vampires, let’s go!
My questions on the channel are usually deeper than this, but how do you not have a book yet! You could easily make 2. One on game design and one on your career. (Or maybe you do and I just don't know about it 😗)
I talk about that here: th-cam.com/video/QvgttRI7oSU/w-d-xo.html
That Amazon show, huh?
i have never thought that a turn based RPG would ever win Game of the Year award and BG3 did it, as a life long fan your thoughts?
I thought the Den ghost fit with the F2 protagonist's tribal perspective, but maybe that whole culture is a form of IP dilution.
I've thought of these topics through the years (played the first Fallout game in '98, and followed the franchise since then), and I definitely feel a kind of vindication that IP's need to be focused in the way you explain it, one example being "I want to see what Europe/Asia/South America looks like in Fallout!" and I constantly say that is not what Fallout it is about - it is American-centric, telling the stories after the War, and what happened before the War and outside of America is uninteresting.
Also, on another point I like to share on "summarizing an IP with one sentence", one of the foundational Swedish tabletop RPG's was called "Mutant", and its sales pitch in a board meeting was "It is like Gamma World - but set in Sweden". And this franchise has been running strong to this day since 1984.
It might be tough to make a full video out of this but in Fallout what was the difference between Thrust and Swing on melee weapons? On some of them the AP cost was the same, but others Thrust cost one more. I've sunk over 1k hours into Fallout and still haven't been able to figure it out.
As far as I can tell, thrust and swing are just two animation variants of the same melee attack, just as punch and kick are two animation variants of an unarmed attack. In fact, 25% of unarmed attacks are made into kicks, if the animation is available to that character model.
So unless there is a difference in weapon data (I didn't look at that), I don't see a combat difference.
@@CainOnGames On the sledgehammer and super sledge thrust cost an extra AP from swing, but on the knife and combat knife it had the same AP cost. I always figured it was intended to do something extra. Thanks for the explanation!
Is the concept of an IP important if you don't plan sequels in your opinion?
Recently the finals been getting negative reviews because they slowed the movement. It turned out that they decreased the default FOV and it was only an illusion.
What's your take on this situation?
Hey Tim, I was watching your source control video, and I noticed you didn't mentioned GIT, wich is odd to me. When I started to play around in Unity a few years ago I noticed that it has it's own source control, no git option. I find this kind of weird since git is kind of the standard for source control in most development areas, is there a reason for this? I searched a bit, some say is because of the binary assets, other say that that's not a problem, some say it's that people are reluctant to change... idk. Perhaps you or someone of the game devs that visit the channel can clarify this, since this has bugged me for some time.
Tim's been watching Seamus's videos (RIP)
The bookshelf is bigger than we initially knew...
Given the dilution problem of an IP you presented here, do you think the idea of making an 'mmorpg' which is meant to last forever is a fools errand?
Tim I love your videos. I have a question that touches on your previous comments on character flaws and a bit about outer worlds. I am playing outer worlds for the first time now and really like it, but if I hadn’t been told by a friend to take the phobias when they came up, I probably wouldn’t have picked some. In other reviews of the game I have listened to, people echo the same sentiment about being afraid to potentially kneecap their character with a flaw. What is it about willingly choosing a defect that is so hard for players to agree to? How could a game (e.g. outer worlds) better convince the player to at least experiment with them? I took robophobia due to advice and had the awesome experience of first confronting my ships auto mechanical and my only dialogue option was to scream, and it got a genuine laugh out of me. I really like the idea now but it seems like a hard sell for most players. How could this be overcome?
However, some of the best IPs shine after someone dives deeper into it. E.g. The Lord of the Rings expands The Hobbit masterfully.
It’s interesting how Epic Games with Fortnite have made this sort of thing a strength for them.
I am interested in this since I am developing a video game.
Excercise I struggle with - summarise Stormlight IP in two sentences.
My pitch - Free* to play, pay locked after lvl 18, fantastic graphics, established universe. *forced to play
Basically the only thing I strongly dislike about New vegas is how much it looks like a 50s apocalypse. Especially when the fallout 1 and 2 art style were so distinctive and cool and we were finally returning to the east coast. Its easily the worse offender for this. Also the old power armour and vault suits just looked better imo (Oh and the old weapons were so fun and creative- had really cool mad max vibes compared so a lot of the later ones)
Awesome content Tim, as always. Much appreciated.
However your argument kinda contradicts itself in the sense that you claim that making a new IP is great on its own but you advise against making any more product within that IP because of the possible side effects. Which are valid by themselves and make sense.
BUT..
From my understanding, IP by definition is supposed to be an entire series of products that reside within that same universe. Otherwise, you're not creating an IP, just telling one single story.
Then your argument doesn't make sense. It's like saying that Duet should only be performed by one single performer because if there are two, then the voice of any one of them will be diluted.
But for example any single Star Wars movie would be an incomplete story told without the other 5 movies.
So what are your thoughts on this? Why bother creating an entire universe in such great detail in the first place only to abandon it after releasing one single product? It seems like a waste to me.
I don't advise against making more products within an IP, but I do provide a lot of warnings about how hard it will be to make those products good. Personally, I am much less interested in sequels than original games, but many people like making sequels, so I am just providing cautionary advice.
A fantasy world undergoing the industrial revolution. It awakens my curiosity and imagination.
Fallout mets firefly sounds like someone forgot to do their homework and just tries to come up with something on the spot by using someone elses work.
But a good pitch doesnt determine a great game and Arcanum is far greater than the above sentence.
The outer world tried to borrow, beg and steal from Fallout but even so fell flat on its face. It is boring and so unremarkable i really cant express my disapointment with it in this simple post.
(I enjoyed the video and thanks for sharing)
This makes me think of the rules of magic and why not everyone blames weird shizzle going on, on magic in a lot of medieval fantasy settings where any form of spellcasters are pretty common
The problem is that there is an overreliance on IP's to generate money and minimize risk. Come up with new ideas rather than trying to milk old ideas until people are sick of them. This is a sickness ailing almost every corner of the entertainment industry today. If you want to come back to an old IP, it will be there: don't force things. Star Wars is a great example of what has been going on in the last ten years or so. At this point, Disney wants to sell us the Death Star blowing up in fifty different permutations, when the first Star Wars came up with that forty six years ago.
@@lrinfi That's true. I felt like the dialogue options and morality system in Mass Effect 3 were essentially a mouthpiece for the writers to tell me what to think rather than leave me the choice to interact with the world in a deeper and more engaging way. I felt like a passenger rather the driver in the story at that point. Mass Effect 3 is a good forerunner to explain what happened. It's also surprising that they couldn't think of a better ending since the game was based almost wholly on a book series called "Berserker", which is the namesake for a possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Berserkers are self-replicating machines (cf. the Reapers), originally alien-made weapons of mass destruction, that kill all life and are based on Von-Neumann probes. If you look into the books, you'll see the story could have practically written itself. But perhaps thanks to changing staff and management, there wasn't the same intellectual and thus thematic continuity between those who made the first game and the last game.
I disagree that putting ghosts in Fallout was a mistake. If you had made ghosts an enemy that you were facing, yeah, you'd have a point. That would have been a misstep and I think putting aliens in was highly questionable. But just having ghosts involved in a couple non-essential side quests did not feel terribly strange because while ghosts are supernatural, they're also a common enough idea in normal life that it didn't feel like you were reaching too far into other things. Ghosts presumably existed before the bombs dropped and then they existed after. If you threw vampires in, then yeah, it's just too much stuff. But ghosts aren't so weird of an idea that it was distracting. I agree with your point, but ghosts didn't detract from Fallout 2 or screw up its IP. If ghosts had become a central part of the main quest, then I'd agree with you. That would be ridiculous.
This is exactly how Hellfire expansion diluted Diablo, thus became non canon.
"Synths would not fit into it" - Isaac Asimov would disagree.
What is the D&D IP? Exactly. It was so diluted that you can't pinpoint exactly what it is in a way that doesn't feel clunky. Nice talk, mr Cain.
Borderlands IP is one of the examples that sticks to the core.
I really agree with Tim about not attacking a person when you criticize ideas, but I think this has an exception and it's Todd Howard. Sometimes you have to call out a person being the source and root problem of something's failure. In the case of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and some of the other IP Bethesda holds, you can point to the culture of Todd Howard's startling lazy mediocrity and frankly his arrogance and presumption as being the cause of their problems. Starfield is a new IP with no previous entries to pull into the conversation, and it's nevertheless (literally) the worst game ever made, and Todd Howard is why. Not the writers or coders or getting details wrong that warrent valid but positive criticism. Todd Howard is why that's the worst game ever made. There may be one or two other non-Todd exceptions. But for the most part, there's no use getting personal.
Do you like chicken dino nuggets, or chicken tenders?
in bethesda fallout the 50's never ended
@Tim Cain please get back into game development, I'll help you write! PLZ sir! Get back into it. You are the genesis of my personal dreams.
hate ip.
I would love to hear more about why if you wouldn't mind?
@@Dr.Mrs.Pancakes in really simple terms
* blocks the ability of individuals to create new items/services
* doesn't actually prevent large wealthy entities from copying anything
* passes the cost of the legal system onto the individual
* i don't consider "IP" to be actual property
overall it's a gnarly growth killer
Thank you for replying. I agree with with you that it can be limiting in many ways @@aslkdjfzxcv9779
I saw this at least once a month, the setting of fallout was people getting knocked back to the stone age but they know how to make synthetic life? I played fallout in order. Stopped when I saw the FEV vats in fallout 3, I'm 22 BTW so that wasn't easy playing fo1 or 2, but it was very satisfying