Tim Cain on why cultural references are a bad thing
>90% of what you think are important, you yourself aren't going to care about, or even remember in 10 or 20 years
>The level of realism we can do gets better and better every year, so if you try to be super realistic in a video game, really quickly your game will look old and dated
>Add the reference in such a way that if the person reading or hearing don't get the reference, don't even know the reference was made. That way they don't feel like they missed out something
How is Tim Cain such a treasure trove of good advice, bros?
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Because he worked on two of the best rpgs of all time?
The Outer Worlds and?
Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE for short)
Oof isn't that game old as shit?
What can I say I love retro RPGs like ToEE and Left4Dead (L4D for short)
sex with middle aged men
He's gay so instead of wasting his semen on b***hes he swaps his semen (and knowledge) with other wise old men.
Fallout 2 is better than 1.
Sure chris give me a donut
Looks like a rapist l
heres the objective truth
>Fallout 1
better and more cohesive tone and narritive
>Fallout 2
better RPG
i like to replay both for different reasons but Fallout 2 gives much more freedom in character builds, choices and quest design
>freedom in character builds
Does not exist
>Fallout 2 gives much more freedom in character builds,
So long as started with a melee focused character so you can clear the forced combat sections at the start of the game.
You can beat them with RNG attrition even if your character is shit at melee, which is common knowledge because it's what what the vast majority of people will end up doing on a first playthrough. If you immediately restart the game and make a melee specialist for the sake of a few miniature radscorpions, you are a defective person.
>Its okay that the start of the game requires you to build a melee focused character
>Because you can instead savescum until all the combat dice rolls go your way.
LOL, 10/10 RPG, open a free.
I agree
Avellone would disagree with you.
he should replay them then
fallout 1 only has a good main story, most side content you can do is quite repetitive and samey, and not even close to as good as fallout 2
>junktown, gizmo hires hitman, you can either do the hit or snitch to kilian and kill gizmo
>junktown, vinnie hires hitman, you can either do the hit or snitch to lars and kill vinnie
>the hub, decker hires hitman, you can either do the hit or snitch and kill decker instead
>boneyard, zimmerman hires hitman, you can either do the hit or snitch and kill zimmerman and the regulators instead
Take that back.
You know how sometimes you come up with some your greatest ideas while thaking a fat dump on the toilet?
He can that and simulate that while by taking massive dicks up their ass all of the time, he is basicaly cheating IRL
That is also why the gayreeks were all over philosophy and shit
maybe you have something here
That screencap is redundant. He always looks like a soiboy regardless of his facial expression.
I agree with what he says about references, but it's an obvious point. What he says about graphics isn't really true. Look at contemporary discussions of older games which aimed for realism and you'll see people praising those games because they "hold up" well for their time. You often see people posting old racing game webms on Ganker for this reason. And who would say that the graphics in Final Fantasy X were not better than those in VII?
>90% of what you think are important, you yourself aren't going to care about, or even remember in 10 or 20 years
Anyone who genuinely thinks like this is not a human being.
You would probably think that way if you were a gay whose life was divided into two halves: the time before and the time after you came out of the closet.
Glad I'm not mentally ill then.
Mentally ill people always make the best art.
There are gays and then there are homosexuals. Cain may identify as a gay now but has always been a homosexual.
I don't care what this moronic actual homosexual has to say about anything. Fallout was an unfinished mess of a game carried heavily by a really cool setting and atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife (thanks Mark Morgan.) He proceeded to do jack fricking shit for decades afterwards and is now bathing in the narcissistic attention he gets from being credited as the "creator" of a franchise that normalgays just discovered last week.
Shut up homosexual defender.
>He proceeded to do jack fricking shit for decades afterwards
Arcanum is le good, akshully.
He had very minimal input on Arcanum.
it really is not that good
Damn someone got butthurt (lol) that their favourite game was made by a gay dude.
>Unfinished mess of a game
As was the style of the time. Only some of the Infinity Engine games came out in a relatively polished and finished state (BG, PT, IWD1).
do you still like the things you did when you were a child
Sorry, but he's a hack.
I'm sure that image doesn't misrepresent him at all
I can buy it with poe by how restrictive its respec and the authistic guy made ffx spheres tables "better"
He's at least partially right. PoE's skill tree is garbage.
If you're talking about the skills group with Lore, Athletics, Survival, etc., then yeah, I kind of hate the way that works. I don't think there's anything wrong with the class abilities though.
kek, he really be looking like this
triangles in HoI3 were gemmy though
>Man has an opinion on game design
>discusses issue he sees with game design
>Uses game he worked on to highlight issue
What is the problem here? He's not like Jonathan Blow just slagging other games as a way to get clout. Now he might be wrong, maybe Fallout's design is superior, but that is the point of discussion.
>What is the problem here?
It's bait for morons lacking context.
dudes kinda right
I feel like the best skill system is some sort of 1-5 or 1-10 level scaling with level up being some sort of expontential gain.
VtMBL was the peak Tim Cain because he had so little do do with it.
Did he design Fallout 1 and 2's gameplay mechanics? If so, he's fricking awful at game design and you should not take advice from him
The triangle shit is moronic but he's right about rpg bullshit.
I hate shit like this:
>STRENGTH - Every point gives 5% more melee damage.
>DEXTERITY - Every point gives 5% more ranged damage.
>INTELLIGENCE - Every point gives 0,1% more magic damage (which is useless because you can just ranged weapons that don't use up mana).
>DUMP STAT 1 - Every point gives 0,001% to poison resistance (only 2 enemies in the game use poison damage).
>DUMP STAT 2 - Every point gives 0,0000005% to base npc disposition.
>DUMP STAT 3 - Bugged and does nothing.
This is why unironically, the Diablo 1 and 2 Original System was better As Daggerfall
>level of realism we can do gets better and better every year
This comment didn't age well.
Where's the 'ak
New 'jak just dropped
This guy looks so much like my high school chemistry teacher that I briefly thought it was him.
stop making these threads, you schizophrenic moron
Why are gay people allowed to voice their opinions on anything and be taken seriously?
You LITERALLY eat cum and expect anyone to care about your thoughts on ludonarrative complexity or whatever.
Because around 2010 media started shifting to portray gay characters as misunderstood innocent victims bullied by vicious white males and every moron, especially women, just gobbled it up and internalized it.
>Why are gay people allowed to voice their opinions
Like what you're doing now?
male cum is proven to increase one's health. all males should be consuming each other's boy pudding
>Why are gay people allowed to voice their opinions on anything and be taken seriously?
Because ALL opinions are gay.
True. Just like marriage
but you’re a homosexual with an opinion, anon.
>90% of what you think are important, you yourself aren't going to care about, or even remember in 10 or 20 years
old = good gays btfo
why do people shill this chomo
Probably doing it as a form of agitprop (agitation propositions).
fotm ragebait meta
As seen with Duke Nukem Forever. They wrote the script way too soon into the development cycle, and the result was that the game was a mess of stale memes by the time it came out.
Anon that Game issue wasnt writing its the fricking fat bastard of john buzzard eating more than he can chew by trying it to be half life 2
>Out of the top 10 CRPGs of all time personally have a hand in making 7 of them
>Somehow also make Outer Worlds, the blandest RPG ever produced that literally NO ONE fricking likes
I still have no idea how Outer Worlds ended up so bad.
Cultural references is the lowest form of storytelling, every competent person knows that.
The problem is we have a world of morons who eat slop from Hollywood regularly, and it's hard for visionaries who are experimental like George Lucas to come around.
People have been trained to love cultural references to where it's unprofitable not to implement it.
Needs wider cheeks, should've traced it instead
So boomer gamedevs are moronic right? We can agree on this right?
>Cain (90's game developer): pop culture reference and realistic graphics become outdated!
>Sakurai (90's game developer): Have a problem? Your team will handle it!
i mean the entirety of fallout is a popculture reference. theres not a single thing they didn't steal from other media
That's not a pop culture reference, that's an influence. Fallout 1 had pop culture references so lets not pretend they're the same thing.
yeah man the leather outfit was uhhhhhh a influence :v)
No, that's a pop culture reference, you really can't tell a difference can you?
Actually developed the same amount of games too (ie barely any)
>kojima invented camera
>yuji naka balan wonderworld
>itagaki NFTs
The position I've settled on is that being "over the hill" is some kind of actual mechanism and that once a creative passes their expiration date and produces something terrible they'll never recover. The only challenge to this idea I've encountered is Mr. Shitface, who somehow managed to produce real video game Psychonauts 2 after the piece of shit that was Broken Age.
it's easy to do good work if you give a shit, it's just impossible to give a shit when everyone thinks a director is god's gift to the medium, and you have a gorillion dollars.
Tim Cain is to gaming what Coach Red Pill was to dating. I love his videos.
I genuinely love Tim Cain. Game dev shit on youtube was rare, and getting daily thoughts on variety of subjects by a RPG industry legend has been more than I could've expected.
Listening to his videos while working on my own game is just priceless.
>20+ years since FO1 released
>I still get the references in the game, and the references in the second game
Whoah, so he was just speaking bullshit huh?
>if the person reading or hearing don't get the reference, don't even know the reference was made.
Is this dude moronic? If they don't get the reference then obviously they're not going to realize it was a reference.
If it's well written yeah. Otherwise it will feel like you're not getting it. Like imagine you're playing FO2 and you find the bridge guardian from Monty Python. If you didn't watch that movie with the knights you'd be left utterly confused.
I refuse to watch British 'comedies'.
>weird stranger demands questions answered or he blows you up with magic brahmin
Sounds Fallout-enough to me.
>magic is Fallout
This kinda sucks.
First game has a psychic The Thing eldrich horror that uses glorified magic to melt your brain and eyeballs.
Get over it.
We both know there's a difference between "grim mutated monster with psychic powers" and "dude in a robe summons magic exploding brahmins". I know it, you know it. You just pretend it's the same to win an argument on the internet.
First game also has normal dudes who have equally powerful psyker abilities including pyrokinesis (throwing fireballs)
Pay attention to the original game please.
Take it up with Tim. Psykers were in 1.
Oh but this doesn't count as a pop culture reference because... uh... I said so!
No, that doesn't follow. The only way you can feel left out is if the game outright says "THIS IS A REFERENCE TO X" and that's basically impossible.
Yes is does. It's a lol so random encounter that could only possibly make any kind of sense to somebody who watched Holy Grail.
Do you realize how incredibly stupid it is to assume that anything nonsensical is actually a reference?
When I saw the Tardis in 1 and didn't have any idea what Dr. Who was, I didn't think "aww geez this is a cool reference I'm not getting..."
Because it would be 100% on point? After getting some references in those stupid encounters I just assumed everything is a reference. And most of the time, I was correct!
Congratulations: you're incredibly stupid.
Yes, I'm stupid for figuring out that a lot of FO2 weird elements are references to something I'm not aware about and you're so damn smart for thinking blue police boxes are just a normal thing to find in the Wasteland.
You know that resorting to putting words in my mouth means you lost, right?
Then I don't even know what your point is.
>The only way you can feel left out is if the game outright says "THIS IS A REFERENCE TO X" and that's basically impossible.
Most people refer to the .223 pistol as "That Gun from New Vegas", when the actual name was- and I quote- "That Gun from Fallout and Fallout 2".
And it's actually a Blade Runner reference.
That's actually a very poor example.
>Didn't watch it: Huh, that was a weird encounter. Anyway...
>Did watch it: Hey I got that reference. Other people will likely be confused and enraged when they don't get it!
>Me: Wow, they actually referenced an Ultima Online meme!
Not necessarily. Like if you watch Simpsons as a kid you miss out on dozens of cultural references per episode. Then you watch it a decade or two later and get it. A properly written joke could reference something and still land for someone who did not get it.
Now if you do the Working Designs in the 1990s thing of just inserting Bill Clinton, yea, that's bad. That said I'm still glad WD brought these games over because nobody else was going to do it, even if they fricked some of them up (Silhouette Mirage).
>A properly written joke could reference something and still land for someone who did not get it.
that's exactly what I said (and what Tim Cain said)
Pop culture references aren't inherently humorous.
They could also work in a non-humorous manner. Like the Mad Max leather jacket in FO1, if you didn't watch MM you just see a cool leather jacket. It's not out of place and is appearance is a neat bonus.
People who put on the leather armor in Fallout without watching The Road Warrior have no idea that its from a movie. People who pick up the Red Ryder BB Gun from bob's car mart and haven't seen A Christmas story just think its a BB gun. That's what he's talking about. The reference is there and if you don't get it you don't even know there was a reference being made.
>If they don't get the reference then obviously they're not going to realize it was a reference.
Sure they can. People go "I don't get it" all the time when they can tell there was a joke but not what it was about.
Are YOU moronic, or do you simply struggle with reading comprehension? He's saying that references should be something you can recognize as references if you are familiar with the thing they are referencing, but if you're not, nothing about it looks out of place and you just think it's something normal. When you see/hear something that very obviously relies entirely on you knowing about something else, but you don't, it becomes frustrating and you feel like you missed something. The references should only ever add something without the possibility of taking something out from your enjoyment.
>90% of what you think are important, you yourself aren't going to care about, or even remember in 10 or 20 years
This is why I can't understand tattoos. Nothing except my mother have I consistently liked throughout my entire life
poor core values.
All his writing advice is pretty good. Respect tone, try to be interesting, etc etc.
All his design advice/anecdotes are fricking terrible.
So it boggles the mind that he developed on Outer Worlds with the mindset that he was a bad writer and a good designer. It's like we got the worst of both worlds.
What the frick, the design of Outer Worlds is some of it's largest problems. Every woman has short lesbian hair for frick sake, because they couldn't be fricked modelling LONGER HAIR.
Seem like an engine problem, not a design one.
>implying I don't watch peanut butter jelly time 4x per week
I sure how you guys stick with the winners.
That doesn't really mean cultural references per se are bad, it means that adding <CURRENT THING> is bad and will age poorly (like localizers adding moronic memes into japanese games or stuff like that)
What's worse is when authors or localizers make references to Internet memes. In this case, the reference loses its power before the game is even released.
Watched a few of his videos and he always has good takes, so i find it really strange that he cant make a good game anymore or recommends shit like fallout series though the later i imagine is more keeping with his obligations than anything else
I wanna pop my dick in his mouth
Whys tim cain wasting time on anything but his trans child
doesnt he know how little time he has with xem, most likely?
shouldnt he be melting down on podcast for an hour about trans rights instead of talking about euch, videogames
he doesnt have a kid
I hate popular references. Just do something original without making "homages" to some shitty ass teen movie made 20 years ago, you gays.
He made the Outer Worlds. This is an advice from the man who made The Outer Worlds.
Old white dudes are so fricking hot
>aren't going to care about, or even remember in 10 or 20 years
False:
A Wojack reference inserted in a game ten years ago will still be understood today
A twitch frog reference inserted in a game ten years ago will still be understood today
I'd rather make something that people like enough to reference than be the guy that can only reference better works
You just know he made this face when he saw this.
I have no idea how anyone would care about what Tim Cain has to say, he's a literal grifter and has been an industry wide joke especially after that embarassing presentation he made 10 years ago
>industry wide joke
according to whom
That's not how it works. Cultural references are extremely important and they are always timeless.
You don't put them in the game because you want to ride a current wave of something. Deus Ex 1 has tons of cultural references. It works because it fits in the world.
Realism is never a thing any game aspires for. It is always about the style and setup. Nobody tries to be hyperrealistic. RDR2 is 6 years old game that is realistic and yet not a single game looks better today. Witcher 3 the same thing. Even Deus Ex 1 looks exactly how it should for the needs of the game. And it is still realistic. Brain fills up the gaps.
You don't have to get any reference. There is tons of references in games I don't get and I don't care. It does not ruin my pleasure from the game. I don't feel I missed anything.
What an extremely dumb video, this moron is really out of touch. One game from 30 years doesn't make you an expert on anything and everything.
Wasn't he just producer/programmer.
Some other guy wrote the story who no longer is in game industry.
Kneejerk dislike to references are honestly kind of stupid. References have always existed, thorough the entirety of art and entertainment history. Historians and anthropologists actually use references as a way to try and understand the culture and opinions of the time period.
So you don't want references to 2161 when the game takes place you want it to have various allusions to 1998's current events like the Lewinsky scandal or the Seinfeld finale?
I think it's safe to say David Mitchell's examples here are very different from the case in point.
It's not the same referencing le arrow to the knee in 2012, which would be shitty current year "pop culture" than referencing Wagner or Proust, which were already just "culture". Period.
The point isn't that all references are bad, the point is that you should keep in mind what something seems like if you don't get the reference.
In-jokes by game developers are worse, especially since this shit was so prevalent in point and click adventure games.
Tombstone jokes are always the fricking worst. I hate them so much.
It actually doesn't feel like this guy or Obsidian invented Fallout. I am not sure THEY get it.
>fallout is about le mad max references
die
>Add the reference in such a way that if the person reading or hearing don't get the reference, don't even know the reference was made. That way they don't feel like they missed out something
I never liked this advice, because it implies that getting the reference is harmless. Even if I get the reference, I'm still taken out of the experience. I'm no longer thinking about the world of the game I'm playing, I'm thinking about whatever pop culture media you just referenced.
Most people aren't that autistic.
I really just think the 90s were obnoxious as shit.
Tim Cain sure is a better Gamedev Youtuber than that Dragon Age freak from BioWare.
People take this line of thought too far. I've heard of authors go as far as not wanting to reference specific tech like telephones because it will date the book. Cultural references are time capsules and if it bothers someone that much they didn't get a reference then google it and learn something
>Tim Cain tried to get women at Interplay fired for saying they didn't want a troony using the women's bathroom
Why didn't his wokeness bleed into Fallout 1?
there is a 25 year gap between those events
How can one man have a such horrible list of suggestions? I'm glad almost no one follows any of these or we'd have lost so much over time.