Abstract
Problem: Tim Cain spent his career making RPGs, but many of his IPs felt like they could thrive in other genres. What would Fallout, Arcanum, and The Outer Worlds look like reimagined outside the RPG framework?
Approach: Drawing from decades of notes in his idea book — some entries 25 years old — Cain walks through two or three alternate genre pitches for each of his three major IPs.
Findings: Fallout naturally splits into a Borderlands-style looter-shooter and a deadly exploration/adventure game. Arcanum's faction-rich world was designed with MMO potential (complete with an elaborate in-game newspaper system Cain later tried to implement in WildStar), plus a 4X strategy game. The Outer Worlds lends itself to a Star Control-style space exploration RPG, a Starfield-scale multi-system RPG, and a No Man's Sky-inspired survival colonization game.
Key insight: Great IPs aren't locked to one genre — the same world and themes can generate fundamentally different gameplay experiences by emphasizing or removing specific pillars like combat, exploration, or politics.
Context
This video is a follow-up to Tim Cain's "Meta Postmortem" video, where he briefly mentioned feeling "pigeonholed" into making RPGs. Commenters and even someone "in the business" asked him to expand on the idea, so he pulled out his idea book and walked through his alternate-genre concepts for Fallout, Arcanum, and The Outer Worlds.
Fallout: Two Opposite Directions
Fallout as a Looter-Shooter (FPS)
Cain's first instinct after finishing Fallout was to double down on the combat and make a pure FPS in the Fallout universe. Years later, when he played Borderlands, he recognized exactly what he'd envisioned: a quest-driven game where you run into locations, kill things, and grab loot — all set in the post-apocalyptic Fallout world. He notes that Borderlands already had "very Fallouty elements."
Fallout as an Adventure Game
The opposite approach: strip out combat almost entirely and make an exploration and puzzle-solving game. Combat would exist only as a consequence of failure — and it would be nearly lethal. The gameplay loop would center on exploring the wasteland, breaking into vaults, and stealing things, with the constant threat that getting caught means death.
Arcanum: MMO and 4X
Arcanum as an MMO
Cain was deeply into EverQuest while making Arcanum and kept writing notes about how the IP would make an excellent MMO. The magic-versus-technology tension, the racial factions (elves, dwarves, gnomes, half-orcs), multiple countries, and procedurally generated exterior zones between handcrafted content — all of it mapped naturally to an MMO structure.
His most detailed design note was about an in-game newspaper system, which he described at remarkable length. The newspaper would serve multiple purposes:
- Something to do during downtime — instead of waiting around for your group to assemble, you'd read the paper
- Replace external third-party sites — guild recruitment, item databases, server stats, and achievement tracking would all live inside the game, keeping players logged in
- Sections would include:
- Local — events on your specific server
- World — aggregated news across all servers (meaningful because each server had slightly different procedurally generated terrain and monster populations)
- Guild — your guild's weekly kills, hall upgrades, plus recruiting info for other guilds on your server
- Financial — auction house records, vendor sales, total gold generated
- Real Estate/Housing — available neighborhoods, player-submitted home tours with screenshots, and how-to guides for purchasing
- Aspirational content — seeing that someone killed a boss you didn't know existed, or that a boss rampaged through a city, or that a rare drop appeared on the auction house
Cain explicitly notes that he tried to implement this newspaper system during his time on WildStar — it was part of the design doc — but it didn't make it into the game.
Arcanum as a 4X Strategy Game
A briefer note: Civilization set in the Arcanum world. You'd pick a faction, grow both military and political power, and navigate separate magic and technology trees. This was literally a single line in his idea book.
The Outer Worlds: Three Alternate Visions
Star Control-Style Space Exploration RPG
Your ship is the character. You explore the galaxy via skip jumps, investigate whether aliens truly exist, uncover mysteries at other colonies, engage in dialogue, and upgrade your ship. A space exploration RPG with the outer worlds' corporate-dystopia setting.
Starfield-Scale Multi-System RPG
The "whole kit and caboodle" — multiple star systems, planetary and lunar surface exploration on foot, ship combat, ground combat, leaving your ship freely. Essentially what Starfield attempted, but set in The Outer Worlds IP.
No Man's Sky-Style Survival Colonization
The lore of The Outer Worlds mentions that some worlds required massive terraforming devices before colonization could begin. Those early days — dealing with hostile local fauna, trying to grow Earth crops on alien soil, building a kickstarter colony with a handful of people — would make for a compelling survival game. Could be multiplayer or solo.
Recurring Theme
Across all three IPs, Cain's approach is consistent: identify the pillars of the RPG (combat, exploration, dialogue, politics, survival) and ask what happens when you isolate or remove one. The IP provides the world and tone; the genre determines which systems get the spotlight.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxREx0QZmDs