Questions & Answers

Preferred Historical Setting for RPGs

A viewer asked if Cain ever considered a real-world historical RPG setting. He admits he's not a history buff — he famously told his high school teacher he'd learned nothing past World War II and refused AP History (his mother backed him up).

If forced to choose, he'd pick around the 14th century with a twist. This is his sweet spot: medieval settings are flexible enough to layer on interesting twists (industrial revolution in Arcanum, zombies, vampires). Modern settings introduce police and guns which reduce design freedom, and far-future settings with scanners and teleportation reduce it further.

Food and Catering at Game Studios

Despite the romantic notion, none of the studios Cain worked at had regular catering or food services:

• Interplay: Occasional food for launch day celebrations
• Troika: Three tiers — regular weekly food, crunch time food, and ship-day celebrations (all brought in from restaurants)
• Carbine and Obsidian: Dinner provided during crunch; big launch parties when games shipped
• The Outer Worlds launch party had themed food from the game world, including "Tartmac and Cheese"

AA vs AAA: Budget, Scope, and the Exponential Problem

A viewer asked about the difference between AA games (like The Outer Worlds) and AAA. Cain confirms it boils down to budget, which affects:

• Time to make the game
• Team size for development and QA
• Marketing — great games go unnoticed without marketing budgets; mediocre games succeed with strong marketing
• Scope — but here's the critical caveat

Budget increases linearly (1M → 5M → 10M → 100M), but scope increases exponentially. Every feature interacts with every other feature in a combinatorial web.

The Arcanum Newspaper System as a Case Study

Cain illustrates this with Arcanum's interconnected systemic features:

• Rumors — systemic, generated through dialogue opcodes, leading to side quests
• Quests — could advance the story state, also systemic
• Story state — tracked linearly even though players could reach points non-linearly
• Newspapers — intended to connect to all of the above

The newspaper system was supposed to generate rumors, deliver quests, and reflect story state. In practice, they only shipped with quest-state injection (e.g., burning down a factory in Tarant would appear as a headline). Budget ran out before the full vision was realized.

Why not just remove newspapers? Because removing a feature also costs time. Quests that planned to inject information via newspapers would need alternative delivery mechanisms. Some designers had built their quest communication flow around newspapers. Removal would cascade into rework across the project.

The Outer Worlds was explicitly AA — which is why it was shorter, had a smaller feature set, and Monarch wasn't as large as Cain wanted. All budget.

Designing Better Boss Encounters

A viewer complained about bullet-sponge bosses. Cain lists several alternatives:

Environmental Stages

The physical arena matters — cover, adjustable terrain, pits, lava, and hazards that affect both the player and the boss. Getting the boss into environmental hazards is a satisfying alternative to raw DPS.

Phase-Based Design

Bosses that change over time — new physical forms, new attacks, new defenses. The key is telegraphing changes visually so the player must adapt tactics rather than just maximize damage output.

Henchmen

• Trash mobs — fun for AOE abilities and can fuel kill-based mechanics (critical hit banking in Fallout, where killing Mirelurk spawn to charge crits against the Mirelurk Queen was a viable luck-based strategy)
• Named henchmen — high-HP enemies the player has encountered earlier in the story, whose attack patterns were telegraphed in prior encounters
• Low-HP swarm enemies — exist to drain health/mana or create additional hazards

Save Scumming: Completely Unconcerned

Cain is entirely unbothered by save scumming. Most of his games allow saving anywhere, including mid-combat — which he notes is extra engineering work due to the complex game state during combat, but he considered it worth doing.

His position: save scumming (saving before lockpicking, conversations, or combat) is simply part of the RPG experience. He finds checkpoint-based frustration worse than any supposed "abuse" of quicksaving.

Asset Reuse: A Smart Development Practice

Cain is strongly in favor of asset reuse, broadly defined — not just art assets but engines, engine components, sound effects, textures, trees, rocks, and anything that makes sense to carry forward.

Examples he cites:

• Troika had little art asset reuse (two isometric games with different art styles, then a 3D game), but Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil shared the same engine with modifications
• Bethesda reused their engine for decades — Fallout New Vegas was only possible in its short development window because of reused engine assets
• Modern studios all reuse engines (Unity, Unreal, internal engines) but some resist reusing other assets

His philosophy: don't reinvent the wheel, but don't just reshuffle a deck of cards either. Judicious asset reuse is a smart technique that could make games ship faster. He wishes more studios embraced it.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWrrhj_uAT4