No Simple Answers

Isometric vs. First Person

Fallout was isometric not because the team determined it was objectively superior, but because Tim tried building different engines and the isometric one looked best given the technology available. First-person games at the time were low-poly with poor texture resolution.

Isometric excels at:

• Tactical combat — seeing the lay of the land, cover positions, enemy locations, and line of sight
• Party control — seeing all party members at once, zooming out, clicking on individuals

First person excels at:

• Single-character immersion — you're right there, seeing things directly
• Exploration — looking behind objects, entering buildings without roofs and walls getting in the way

With modern engines, either perspective is viable. The decision should flow from what kind of game you want to make, not from a belief that one is inherently better.

Complex vs. Simple Mechanics

Tim deliberately left this off his design preferences video because he's done it both ways and sees merit in both.

Simple mechanics bring in a larger audience. The less complex a game is, the more people tend to play it — up to a point. If players feel they're being pandered to, the backlash from the complexity-seeking audience can be severe.

The key principle: complexity can be added later. Start simple, then let players dig deeper. Tim draws a parallel to lore delivery — the old approach of dumping exposition on players has given way to "here's what you need to know; if you want more, here's where to find it." Mechanics can work the same way.

Examples of this layered approach:

• Some games defer character creation until after you've played a level
• Some let you pick only basic traits (appearance, name) and unlock deeper choices later
• The Outer Worlds let players pick broad skill categories upfront and worry about individual skills later

Deterministic Checks vs. Dice Rolls

Tim personally loves the randomness of dice rolls — the tension of whether you disabled the trap or triggered it, picked the lock or jammed it, persuaded someone or failed.

However, the prevalence of save-on-demand (replacing save points) has made dice rolls functionally meaningless. Players simply save-scum until they get the result they want. Tim compares this to modern air travel: passengers chose the cheapest airlines, so airlines raced to the bottom on price and added fees for everything else. Players chose save-scumming, so designers moved to deterministic checks.

The result: systems like "your Persuade is 50, so he's persuaded" or "your Lockpick is 40, so you can attempt this lock." Tim doesn't want to remove player agency over saving, so he's unlikely to return to skill rolls outside of combat.

Small Studios vs. Large Studios

Tim's range spans from Pegasus/Cyberon (never more than 8 people) to WildStar (150–200+ people), with Interplay reaching around 600 company-wide.

Small teams

• You know everyone, what they're doing, what they're good and bad at
• Work can be assigned based on individual strengths
• Development is faster with more feedback and less overhead
• More nimble — failed experiments are caught quickly
• Risk: Requires enormous trust. It's easy for someone to say "everything's fine" and sweep problems under the rug

Large teams

• Necessary for modern high-resolution open-world games — what 20–30 people could build before now takes 80–90
• Requires dedicated production staff to coordinate art, code, and design and flush out bottlenecks
• Creates what Tim calls "politics" — people thinking about career advancement, work getting coordinated by political considerations rather than features or schedule
• Tim admits he's never been good at detecting or playing office politics

Tim skews toward smaller teams. WildStar was his first truly large-team project, and he didn't finish it.

Generalist vs. Specialist Character Builds

Tim's earlier games leaned specialist; over time he came to value supporting generalists too, starting as early as Arcanum with its magic-tech balance.

How it plays out in quest design

Main story quests must be completable by any character build. This means at least one solution path has a low skill check to accommodate generalists. But generalists benefit: because they spread points across skills, they often qualify for multiple solution paths, giving them variety in how they approach each quest.

Specialists have honed specific skills to maximum. This makes some main quests harder (they can only do it one way, and that way might not be the easiest for that quest). But side quests in their specialty become trivially easy, since side quests don't need to support every approach and don't require minimum checks.

The Outer Worlds approach

Tim designed skill unlock tiers with both playstyles in mind:

• First unlocks were made especially cool — generalists who buy many skills hit a lot of these
• Final unlocks were made aspirational and powerful — specialists who max out a few skills get access to things generalists never will

This hedges the design to reward both approaches meaningfully.

The Meta-Lesson

This video is a companion to Tim's design preferences video. Where that video covers things he has clear opinions on, this one covers the areas where he genuinely sees both sides. The takeaway for developers: when facing these decisions, don't look for a universal answer. Look at what's important for your specific game, your team, and your audience — and decide based on that.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwIUbUZ3Ak