Violence As The Default In AAA RPGs

tim-cain game-design violence aaa rpg market-dynamics player-behavior fallout

Abstract

Problem: Can AAA RPGs evolve past violence as the default mode of player interaction?

Approach: Tim Cain examines the question through the lens of market economics, player behavior data, and his own experience designing games like Fallout, Arcanum, and The Outer Worlds.

Findings: Violence dominates AAA RPGs not because designers prefer it, but because action-oriented games consistently outsell alternatives. Players overwhelmingly choose combat paths even when non-violent options exist. Removing uncommon paths rarely hurts sales, while removing combat often does. The cycle is self-reinforcing.

Key insight: The persistence of violence as the default is an economic feedback loop — players buy violent games, so publishers fund them, so developers make them — and the only real lever players have is voting with their wallets.

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

The Economic Reality

Tim Cain's core answer is blunt: companies make products people will buy. If a violent action RPG sells millions and a non-violent RPG of equal cost sells 100,000, the business decision is obvious. This isn't about what designers want — it's about what the market rewards.

Action RPGs outsell classic RPGs. Action games in general outsell puzzle games, adventure games, and narrative-focused titles. Look at the Steam top 100: it's dominated by action-oriented, violence-heavy games. Companies don't make them because they feel like it — they make them because they sell.

This pattern extends far beyond games. Violent movies, TV shows, and books all sell well. Violence as entertainment is a cross-media phenomenon.

The Marketing Problem

Tim shares a telling anecdote from The Outer Worlds development. He and Leonard Boyarsky had extensive discussions with marketing teams about how to convey the game's strong story and dialogue in trailers.

The problem: how do you show great writing in a 15-second trailer? You can show someone jumping, climbing, and shooting — that's visually immediate. But reducing a nuanced narrative arc to a sound bite is nearly impossible. Trailers default to action footage because that's what captures attention in seconds.

Tim notes the shrinking attention window: commercials went from 60 seconds to 30, then to 15. YouTube sponsorship segments are now rushed through in seconds because viewers skip anything longer. This attention economy naturally favors spectacle over substance.

The Fallout Story

During Fallout's development, a tester played through the game by shooting every NPC on sight before they could speak. This broke the main storyline — specifically at Gizmo in Junk Town, who was supposed to give the player an item created by script during dialogue.

Tim's response was instructive: rather than preventing the violence, they redesigned the game to accommodate it. The team combed through the entire game ensuring no NPC death could break the main quest. The Overseer was made essential until the endgame.

The irony: despite Fallout being designed with dialogue, stealth, and combat as equal paths, it was violence that found the edge cases and broke things — because that's what players defaulted to, even in a game that explicitly supported alternatives.

Non-Violence Options Exist — Players Don't Choose Them

Tim has consistently designed his RPGs to support non-violent playthroughs. He doesn't consider combat the "main" path with stealth and dialogue as alternatives — he frames all paths as equally valid.

Modern RPGs also offer story modes that drastically reduce combat difficulty. But the data is clear: more players choose standard modes than story modes. The non-violent options are appreciated by those who use them, but they're a minority.

Tim shares his own love of unusual playthroughs:

  • Fallout: Completed the game as "Potato," a 1-intelligence character, proving even the most limited build could finish the game
  • Arcanum: Played as a pure swordsman — no magic, no tech, keeping the magic-tech meter at zero
  • Temple of Elemental Evil: An all-halfling, all-bard party with no companions — which accidentally avoided a major crash bug related to bard songs persisting across map transitions

The Rarely-Chosen Path Problem

Here's the economic trap: when developers remove uncommon paths (like non-violent solutions), they see little to no reduction in sales. Players who wanted those paths often buy the game anyway. So from a business perspective, cutting niche paths saves development time, testing effort, and money with minimal revenue impact.

Conversely, deliberately removing a common path (like combat) often does lead to fewer sales.

This creates a vicious cycle. If players don't base their purchase decisions on non-violent paths existing, publishers have no financial incentive to fund them. The paths that get cut are the ones nobody paid for.

Vote With Your Dollars

Tim's advice to players who want change: vote with your dollars. He acknowledges the pushback — people say one purchase won't matter, or they have limited options.

His counter: if enough individuals make that choice, "those drops become a storm." He personally boycotts certain products, stores, and companies. He doesn't think they notice, but he does it anyway.

The alternative — not drawing a line because you think it won't matter — guarantees it won't matter. It's like not voting because one vote seems insignificant. Once enough people think that way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The AAA Budget Constraint

Tim emphasizes this discussion is specifically about AAA RPGs — games with budgets of $100 million and climbing. At that scale, you're spending someone else's money, and you need to work again after this project ships.

A game that doesn't sell is bad for the company, but it's also bad for every developer's career. Everyone wants their game to be good and reflect their creative vision, but the bottom line remains: violence currently sells well, has sold well for a long time, and companies will continue making violent games as long as that's true.

Indies and solo developers have more freedom to experiment precisely because they're risking less capital. The AAA space is constrained by its own economics.

References