Abstract
Problem: What was "Epic," Troika Games' unreleased post-apocalyptic RPG, and why did it never see the light of day?
Approach: Tim Cain walks through his personal archive of design documents dated 2003–2004, sharing the game's origins, world design, skill system, and the business circumstances that killed it.
Findings: Epic was born from Troika's failed bid for the Fallout IP and reused their evolving in-house 3D engine. It featured an original post-apocalyptic world with four competing factions, a crossover skill system, and an open adventure structure — but no publisher picked it up before Troika closed in 2005.
Key insight: Epic represented creative liberation — designing a post-apocalyptic game without the constraints of the Fallout or Wasteland IPs, allowing Troika to explore the genre on their own terms.
1. The Only Known Footage
The video shown is the only known video footage or screenshot of Epic that exists. Tim doesn't have any video footage or code in his archive — only design documents and notes. His "Epic folder" is sparse, with documents dated from January 2003 to June 2004.
2. The Fallout Bid
In 2003, Interplay contacted Troika and told them Bethesda was bidding on the Fallout IP, asking if Troika wanted to bid as well. They did — but the details are disputed.
Tim remembers contacting a friend with venture capitalist connections who could guarantee a certain amount of money. Leonard Boyarsky remembers them saying they were going to bid but didn't actually have the money set up. Either way, Interplay used Troika's interest to tell Bethesda there was another bidder. Bethesda upped their bid beyond what Troika could afford, and the rest is history — Bethesda got the Fallout license.
3. The Engine Evolution
Since Troika had built a game engine, they decided to do something with it after Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines shipped. Tim traces the studio's technical evolution:
- Arcanum — Sprites on a tiled background
- The Lord of the Rings (unshipped) — Sprites on a pre-rendered background
- Temple of Elemental Evil — 3D characters on a pre-rendered background
- Epic — Completely 3D, but still isometric
They built the engine themselves from their "Game Foo #4" codebase. By the time Vampire was finished, they also knew the Source (Half-Life 2) engine well, so they actually made multiple proposals for the same setting and story on different engines — one for their in-house engine, one for Source.
4. The World
Epic featured an entirely original post-apocalyptic world — not Earth. Key characteristics:
- A ring and multiple moons orbiting the planet
- Crazy tides and monsters everywhere
- The world had been wrecked centuries before, and the player doesn't know how or why
- Discovery-driven narrative — you'd find evidence of what happened through exploration, artifacts, and isolated groups claiming knowledge of the old world
4.1. The Four Factions
The world had four groups corresponding to the four compass points, all fighting over a central contested region:
- North — Barbarians coming out of a cold waste
- East — An Empire that still maintained some cities, though they were in ruins. They seemed to control magic (or something that appeared to be magic)
- West — A vast desert of ruined cities with rusty girders and cement pylons, home to the Wardens of Rust
- South — A swamp filled with the Bogmen
5. The Skill System
Character creation involved two choices: your faction (which group you came from) and your background (what you did in that group). This combination determined your starting skill category.
There were four skill categories:
- Social skills
- Combat skills
- Thieving skills
- Magic skills
You started in one category and could only buy skills within it — unless you purchased crossover skills. Every pair of skill categories had crossovers that blended elements of both:
- Thieving + Combat crossover → Intimidating
- Thieving + Social crossover → Fast Talk
- Pickpocketing/stealing sat in Thieving; melee and ranged skills in Combat
Once you bought a crossover skill, it unlocked the ability to buy skills in the tree you weren't born into. This allowed for highly varied character builds — everyone started different based on faction and background, but could branch out in any direction.
The game also had eight stats, assigned at character creation and fixed throughout the game. Tim describes them as "pretty much standard stuff."
6. The Adventure
The planned adventure was very open. The core question: which group do you help gain control of the central contested region? Players could even venture into the outer faction territories, though those were firmly under faction control.
There was heavy emphasis on discovery — strange items and artifacts giving clues to what happened before the cataclysm. Isolated groups unconnected to the four main factions claimed to have been around in the old world and could trade knowledge and items for the player's services.
7. Why It Died
Troika shopped Epic around to publishers extensively in late 2004 and early 2005 but didn't get any takers. The studio closed in February 2005, with final paperwork completed in August 2005.
8. Tim's Reflection
Tim found Epic genuinely fun to design. It had been seven years since Troika's founders worked on Fallout, and Epic offered the same kind of creative freedom — just as Fallout was fun to make without the constraints of Wasteland, Epic was fun to design without the constraints of Fallout. It was nice to revisit the post-apocalyptic genre and put a different spin on it, even though nothing ever came of it.
9. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tSpo6gX1BE