Abstract
Problem: What was Tim Cain's role in developing Tyranny, and why has he rarely discussed it?
Approach: Tim shares his personal recollections from Tyranny's ~18-month development cycle (March 2015 – November 2016), covering his programming contributions, cut story ideas, and how the project overlapped with The Outer Worlds.
Findings: Tim was a senior programmer on Tyranny (not a lead), primarily maintaining the spell/ability system he'd built for Pillars of Eternity. His involvement was fragmented by parallel work on The Outer Worlds and Deadfire, and the project's short timeline meant constant context-switching.
Key insight: Tyranny was a transitional project for Tim — sandwiched between Pillars and The Outer Worlds — which explains both his limited visibility on it and his inability to answer many fan questions about the game.
Tim's Role and Scope
Tim joined Tyranny in March 2015 immediately after Pillars of Eternity shipped. Tyranny was not a sequel but reused the Pillars engine, so his familiarity with the Unity codebase made the transition seamless. His work was almost entirely programming — specifically the abilities, items, creature attacks, and magic spells (all internally called "spells," same as Pillars). He also supported the spell crafting system's underlying components, though the UI was built by Bryson Till.
He was not a lead on Tyranny and emphasizes that for the "actual development" story, you'd need to ask Josh Sawyer, Brian Heins (the game director), or Chris Avalone (who started as game director).
The God in the Cave — A Cut Story Idea
Chris Avalone's original creative mandate included a world without religion. Tim found this fascinating, referencing a college philosophy professor who claimed every human civilization has independently invented three things: religion, dragons, and soup.
Programmer Brian McIntosh proposed a brilliant explanation for Tyranny's religionless world: the player could discover a hidden, hard-to-reach cave containing an old man — possibly the God. This God had witnessed the harm caused by worship and miracles, so he issued an Edict banning religion. The unintended consequence trapped him in the cave (since encountering a god would create religion), and his Edict power was stripped and distributed into the world — possibly into the Spires, possibly to Kyros, possibly to the player.
Tim loved the idea. It went nowhere — he doesn't know if it was shot down or simply never championed. But it remains a tantalizing glimpse of "the Tyranny that could have been."
The IP Meetings and The Outer Worlds Origin
In late 2015 or early 2016, Obsidian began holding afternoon meetings to brainstorm new IP. Tim initially refused to attend — he had plenty of ideas in his notebooks but didn't want to hand one to someone else to direct, and he didn't want to be a game director again (still burned out from his Carbine experience).
Programmer Anthony Davis persistently encouraged him to attend — "not in a manipulative way, in a very puppy dog kind of way." Tim relented and went. Several genuinely good IP ideas were pitched, including Tim's own concept: a game that feels like fantasy but turns into science fiction. Every single idea was shot down without constructive critique, which frustrated Tim enough to stop attending.
Later, one of Obsidian's owners revealed they'd had a game concept all along and were hoping someone would pitch a matching setting — which Tim felt was dishonest. When they asked Tim to be game director, he refused. But when they agreed to let him collaborate the way he used to with Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, things changed. Leonard was contacted, expressed interest despite being at Blizzard, and was hired in April 2016. The Outer Worlds was born.
The Juggling Act
Tim's Tyranny involvement was fragmented by overlapping projects — a pattern he'd already experienced with South Park and Pillars:
- March 2015: Starts on Tyranny full-time
- April–June 2016: Shifts heavily to Outer Worlds design work with Leonard
- Mid-summer 2016: Swings back to Tyranny for its final push and crunch
- November 2016: Tyranny ships
- Late fall 2016: Brief work on Deadfire spells (including the spell system handoff to Brian McIntosh), then back to Outer Worlds
During the Deadfire handoff, Tim gave McIntosh a refactoring wishlist for the spell code and mentioned he'd always wanted to make Pillars turn-based. Brian McIntosh eventually implemented the turn-based mode for Pillars II — "so thank him," Tim says.
Why He Hasn't Talked About It
Tim's limited involvement means he genuinely can't answer many Tyranny questions — "my answer would be 'I don't know, somebody else did that.'" He wasn't avoiding the topic; he simply had less to say compared to games where he was a lead. This video is his best effort at giving fans the Tyranny retrospective they'd been requesting.