Beginnings

tim-cain game-design first-impressions tutorials onboarding fallout arcanum new-ip

Abstract

Problem: What makes a good or bad beginning for a game, and how much time do developers have to hook a player?

Approach: Tim Cain reflects on his own experiences designing openings for Fallout, Fallout 2, and Arcanum, and discusses how the player's first impression has evolved from box art to digital storefronts.

Findings: The opening must communicate the simple, distinctive essence of your IP as fast as possible. Developers now have roughly 10 minutes (or less) to grab a player's attention. Long, unskippable intros are a recurring design mistake. The best openings are short, evocative cinematics that make the player curious about the world.

Key insight: Compress your IP's core identity into the shortest possible opening moment — if players aren't intrigued before they even start playing, you've already lost them.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnlnJSaj6z0

The First Impression Starts Before the Game

Tim emphasizes that the player experience begins even before launching the executable. In the physical media era, the box itself was part of the pitch. The Fallout box was deliberately designed to look like a rusty lunch box, covered in screenshots. The manual read like a found artifact from the game world — written in-character, filled with Vault Boy cartoons, Vault-Tec ads, and joke recipes. During the often lengthy installation process, players would read these materials, building anticipation before a single frame rendered.

Today, the digital storefront has replaced the box. Screenshots, trailers, and store page copy now carry that burden. Steam's refund policy (roughly 20 minutes to an hour) adds pressure: if the opening doesn't land, the player can simply return the game.

The 10-Minute Window

Tim believes developers used to have about 30 minutes to hook a player. Now he estimates it's down to 10 minutes or less. Whether it's shorter attention spans or the sheer volume of competing entertainment, players are quicker to abandon a game that doesn't immediately communicate what it's about and why it's worth their time.

Fallout's Opening — What He'd Change

The original Fallout drops players into a dark cave full of rats immediately after character creation. Tim now considers this a mistake for several reasons:

  • It forces combat on every build. A player who made a speech-focused character is stuck fighting rats as their first activity.
  • It doesn't teach the game's core philosophy. The Wasteland is about choice — fight, sneak, talk, avoid. The cave rat encounter teaches only fighting.

If he could redo it, Tim would open with a cinematic of the player stepping into a bright desert, then resolve into the isometric view. Nearby, rats would be chewing on a body with visible loot (a gun, ammo). The player could choose to fight for the gear, sneak past, or simply walk away. Lesson one of the Wasteland: you don't always have to fight — but if you do, know what you're fighting for.

Fallout 2's Temple of Trials and Fallout 3's Vault

The complaints about Fallout 1's weak onboarding led directly to Fallout 2's Temple of Trials — a mandatory, unskippable tutorial demanded by marketing. Tim considers it a "nightmare of a way of starting a game." Fallout 3's extended vault childhood sequence drew the same criticism: interesting the first time, painful on every replay.

The lesson: long, unskippable intros are a design sin, especially for games with high replay value.

Arcanum — The Model Opening

Tim holds up Arcanum's intro as his best example of getting it right. After the publisher logos, a 3–4 second cinematic plays: two figures in medieval armor duel, one raises a glowing magical sword — and the other pulls out a gun and shoots. In a few seconds, the entire premise of Arcanum (fantasy meets industrial revolution, magic versus technology) is communicated without a word of dialogue.

This is the formula: find the simple, distinctive essence of your IP and compress it into the shortest possible moment. Make it evocative. Make it fun to watch. Make the player immediately start wondering — what kind of character should I make? What's out there? Can I have a magic gun? Are there technological dragons?

The Principle

Tim quotes Princess Irulan from the original Dune film: "A beginning is a very delicate time."

The opening must stress the simple, distinctive essence of your IP — the same essence that should permeate design documents, elevator pitches, and design pillars. Find the fastest, shortest way to compress that identity into something a player sees before they've even touched the controls. Done well, it pulls people in before they've played a single second.

References