Tim Cain on Fallout, Bloodlines and His Ups & Downs

[Dragula]

"Raphael Colantonio and Peter Salnikov talk to programmer and game designer Tim Cain, co-creator of Fallout, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Outer Worlds and other cult classic RPGs."

• How to understand your professional limits and what to do next;
• Reactive worlds: when the game strikes back everytime the player does something meaningful;
• 40 years in the game industry: what's changed for the better, and what got worse;
• How do modern-day monetizing mechanichs affect game design?
• Peace between the creative and the entrepreneurial;
• Nobody's got time to read that fancy manual. The availabilty of modern games.

 

[Gizmojunk]

@2:54 is an interesting tidbit.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

@2:54 is an interesting tidbit.

As someone who generally feels that a Fallout game set outside North America wouldn’t work, it is very interesting to hear this from Tim Cain.

 

[Josan]

Love that Tim Cain wanted to do Fallout games outside of the US. I never felt it had to be to be confined to US soil.

 

[Gizmojunk]

But Tim Cain wanting to do that does not change the gameworld setting as shipped. Tim (& Co.) would also have added a player-as-supermutant path (with all that that entails) had they the blank check to develop it. Tim was caught off guard by the devised ending (where the Overseer exiles the Vault Dweller). Tim was the first leg of the table, but not the only leg.

Tim wrote the intro; the intro states that "In 2077 the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders".

My own take on that is that the world was doomed (past the point of recovery) from the very start of the war [two hours into it], and that the rising civilizations themselves, who came afterward, were [figuratively] the futile walking dead; on their desolate island of irradiated wasteland. This very similarly in the sense of those who are war victims of radiation, who have survived the blast, and are still ambulatory, but who are quite terminally ill from the ordeal; having no real future.
(Which ironically, is like the Fallout setting itself.)

The only way to continue the Fallout narrative [post recovery] is to ultimately nuke the world again... else it recovers its way out of being the Fallout setting.

 

[william dempsey]

Brussels sprouts again.

 

[Ugly Kid]

I really like Tim Cain's takes on the Fallout series, it's interesting to see how different his view is from other writers like Avellone. I find it interesting how the team thought about many countries but Mexico wasn't one of them, and Mexico is now considered by some to be like the secondary country of the Fallout series (OWB for HOI4 for example).

 

[Josan]

I'm not an Avellone fan.

Planescape: Torment was my introduction to IPLY/BIS games. I thought Avellone was brilliant.

Then I played the rest, the Fallout, Icewind Dale and Baldaur's Gate games. And of course New Vegas.

And nothing Avellone did after Planescape ever impressed me. Especially his take on Fallout.

 

[Ugly Kid]

I'm not an Avellone fan.

Planescape: Torment was my introduction to IPLY/BIS games. I thought Avellone was brilliant.

Then I played the rest, the Fallout, Icewind Dale and Baldaur's Gate games. And of course New Vegas.

And nothing Avellone did after Planescape ever impressed me. Especially his take on Fallout.

I find some of his Fallout takes bad. Do you mind if I ask what are some Avellone takes or works you didn't like and why?

 

[Mirin Lurker]

I'm not an Avellone fan.

Planescape: Torment was my introduction to IPLY/BIS games. I thought Avellone was brilliant.

Then I played the rest, the Fallout, Icewind Dale and Baldaur's Gate games. And of course New Vegas.

And nothing Avellone did after Planescape ever impressed me. Especially his take on Fallout.

Yeah his contributions in NV always seemed a little tryhard and edgy to me, some is pretty good and I can tell he cares about his writing which is more than you can say about Emily P.

Ulysses seemed kind of interesting as a character but you can tell he was rewritten and what we ended up with was worse than the original plan of just a philosophical edgy legion friendly companion. Lonesome Road overall is pretty meh, Dead Money is pretty good but a but too over the top with the tone, OWB is funny but I never really thought too much about it seriously. What else did he do? The original Legion and Graham? I think in the game that's more Sawyer's work.

 

[Josan]

I find some of his Fallout takes bad. Do you mind if I ask what are some Avellone takes or works you didn't like and why?

It was nothing specific. I'm only familiar with his IPLY/BIS work and NV but... I played PS:T first, thought it was brilliant so I wanted to check out everything BIS did. Then I played FO and again, brilliant, FO2 not so much... then I got into the BG and IWD games and of course FO:NV.

Basically, I felt he had great potential but instead comes across more often as a juvenile frat boy, or with NV, just as Mirin Lurker said above "tryhard and edgy". I doubt I'd have enjoyed NV if Avellone was the Lead on the project.