Tim Cain's most enduring work is certainly Fallout, the classic RPG he created the concept for and led development on. But he's also known for a trio of cult classics he developed at Troika Games, the studio he co-founded with other Fallout veterans. Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines are all remembered as wildly ambitious RPGs held back by their technical flaws, and Cain says those two things go hand in hand.
"Here's the real thing that everybody has to think of," Cain says in a new video on his YouTube channel. "Game players never think of this. Every single game developer has to. If your budget is fixed, which is 99.999999% of budgets, more of one thing means less of another. If you want all these quest types in your game and you want to support them all with all the additional design, code, and art needs that are going to come with them, and QA and debugging needs, you're probably going to have less of something else."
Whatever dream feature you want to add will mean less time spent on something else, whether that's enemy variety, environment variety, or something else. "You're going to have less something," Cain says. Unless, of course, you simply choose not to cut back your ambition, as he and other developers once did at Troika. Then your games are just going to be buggy as hell.
"At Troika, we kept adding features, and we never told ourselves no, and most of our publishers not only didn't tell us no, but sometimes encouraged us to add all those features," Cain explains. "But we didn't get more time to fix anything, so our games shipped buggy. You can view it as we chose lots of features over bug fixing. And you're going to have to think of that if you want to make games."
Here, Cain refers back to a video he published at the end of December, where he addressed the issues at Troika more directly. There were poor tools and poor communication between devs about how to use them effectively. But ultimately, those issues would've been fixed in the same way: by cutting back features so that the devs would've had more time to get everything right.
"We were a small team trying to make a really overly featured, huge amount of content game for a team that size," Cain says. "Those were all choices we made and went with, and the result was some very, very buggy games. Or as people called them, 'flawed masterpieces,' which I think sounds a lot better than 'really buggy game.'"
