Great External Ideas

tim-cain game-development fallout outer-worlds wildstar bards-tale team-management game-design production

Abstract

Problem: How often do great game ideas come from people outside the development team, and what do those contributions look like in practice?

Approach: Tim Cain searched through his personal development notes across decades of projects to identify cases where external ideas significantly shaped a game.

Findings: Across four major projects — Bard's Tale Construction Set, Fallout, WildStar, and The Outer Worlds — critical contributions came from outside the dev team, ranging from entire game concepts and naming to system design prompts and staffing decisions.

Key insight: Some of the most impactful ideas in game development come from people outside the core team — executives, producers, and studio owners can provide valuable high-level direction that fundamentally shapes a game for the better.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax5olbUFxZQ

1. Background

Tim Cain addresses a question from a viewer (Brains and Beats) who asked whether someone from outside the development team ever brought in an idea that turned out to be great. Tim notes that while he often tells stories where outside interference doesn't look flattering, he wanted to highlight times when external input was genuinely valuable.

He defines "development team" as everyone who works on the game as their daily job, from game director down to the most junior member. Finding these examples took months — not for lack of trying, but because searching his digitized notes for terms like "good" or "idea" returned too many results. He eventually re-read his notes cover to cover and identified four projects with notable external contributions.

2. Bard's Tale Construction Set

The entire concept for this game came from outside. Tim was brought in as a contractor and handed a high-level design description: take Bard's Tale I, II, and III and create a construction set that lets players build their own maps, characters, monsters, and spells. He doesn't know exactly who originated the idea, but it came from people at Interplay — potentially Brian Fargo, Becky Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, or others who had worked on the original trilogy but were not assigned to the construction set team. This is a case where an entire game's genesis and high-level design was external to its development team.

3. Fallout

Two major external contributions shaped Fallout:

3.1. The Name

The development team brainstormed names but couldn't settle on anything. Brian Fargo played the game and suggested "Fallout." They shipped with it. The name of the entire franchise came from someone outside the dev team.

3.2. Perks

The SPECIAL system, designed by Chris Taylor based on a homebrew tabletop system, originally had no perks. Tim's only early suggestion was adding Luck to the attributes (making it SPECIAL instead of SPECIA). When Brian Fargo saw the system, he said he wanted "something more to buy when I go up a level than putting some points into skills."

Chris Taylor and Tim both knew GURPS and recognized this as similar to GURPS advantages, but with a key twist: GURPS advantages were typically front-loaded at character creation, while Fallout's perks became advancement rewards — something you earn over time rather than start with. Traits filled the character-creation role (a combined positive and negative), while perks became the leveling incentive. The entire perk system originated from Fargo's feedback.

4. WildStar

When Tim took over as design director in 2008, the original setting concept positioned the game's planet as the nexus of the entire multiverse — the literal zero-point of all space-time coordinates. This explained all the varied content they wanted (robots, magic, high-tech, flux events that transformed zones) but Jeff Strain, acting president of development at the newly formed NCSoft West, identified the fundamental problem: if your setting allows everything, it has no flavor. A setting needs to clearly answer what belongs and what doesn't.

Strain suggested narrowing the backstory. The team reworked it into what shipped: the planet was the home world of a precursor civilization that predated all other galactic races. This focused the setting while still explaining the diverse elements — the robots, for instance, were built by that ancient civilization. The change gave WildStar a much stronger identity.

5. The Outer Worlds

Two external contributions stand out:

5.1. The Elevator Pitch

Similar to Bard's Tale Construction Set, the core concept came from studio ownership. When Tim sat down with Leonard Boyarsky at Obsidian to start a new game, the pitch he was given was "Fallout meets Firefly." That phrase became the foundation for everything that followed.

5.2. The Producer Staffing Decision

When estimating personnel and budget, Tim and the team planned for one producer. Chris Parker, one of Obsidian's owners, insisted they needed at least four. Tim pushed back, believing one good lead producer would suffice. Parker was "absolutely 100% correct." The four producers handled external art management, strike teams, and — critically — publisher relations with Private Division, which required far more interaction than Tim had anticipated (especially since the project originally wasn't supposed to have a publisher at all). Tim now says he wouldn't do a game past a certain size without multiple producers to handle logistics and inter-team communication.

6. Takeaways

The examples share a pattern: external contributors tend to excel at high-level framing and structural decisions rather than granular design details. Naming a franchise, defining a setting's boundaries, identifying a missing character progression mechanic, establishing a production staffing model — these are the kinds of contributions where outside perspective proves most valuable. The people doing the daily work are often too close to see these forest-level issues.

7. References