High Level Design Direction

tim-cain wildstar game-direction fallout outer-worlds design-vision game-development leadership

Abstract

Problem: What is the most important — and most misunderstood — responsibility of a game director?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on his experiences directing Fallout 1, observing Fallout 2's development from the outside, working as design director on WildStar, and guiding The Outer Worlds to illustrate what "high-level design direction" actually means in practice.

Findings: The game director's core job is maintaining a cohesive vision across every element of the game — systems, narrative, tone, maps, lore. When this role is absent or weak, even talented designers produce work that doesn't fit together, resulting in a game that feels disjointed. This happened with Fallout 2 (tonal inconsistency, siloed areas) and WildStar (where NCSoft concluded the art and code were cohesive but the design was not). The role is frequently mischaracterized as egotistical gatekeeping, when it's actually editorial stewardship.

Key insight: A game director isn't judging whether individual work is good or bad — they're ensuring all the work serves a unified vision. The analogy: a book with brilliant chapters by different writers still needs a strong editor.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joN36JIsz8o

The Core Responsibility

The game director's single most important task is high-level design direction: watching everything going into the game — systems, mechanics, story, quests, maps, dialogue, NPCs, names, lore — and ensuring it all fits and serves a unified vision.

This role is simultaneously:

  • The hardest part of the job
  • The most misunderstood part of the job
  • The part that most frequently goes wrong

The Book Analogy

Tim offers a clarifying metaphor: imagine a book written by excellent writers, but each chapter is by a different author. That book will absolutely need a strong editor. Some fantastic writers will be asked to rewrite material — not because it's bad, but because it contradicts other chapters or doesn't match the overall tone. The game director is that editor.

Fallout 1: The Gatekeeping Role in Action

On Fallout 1, Tim exercised this editorial function by removing or changing content that didn't fit the vision:

  • The Rree — a talking raccoon race that was cut
  • Terminator-style robots — removed for tonal mismatch
  • A character with Tourette's — written by Scott Benny (whom Tim praises as a great narrative designer), the character swore every other word. Tim asked for a rewrite, reasoning the character wouldn't realistically have survived in that world

None of these were cut because they were poorly designed. They were cut because they didn't serve the high-level vision of Fallout.

Fallout 2: What Happens Without Direction

Tim's core criticism of Fallout 2 isn't that it had bad design — he thinks it has very good design. The problem was the absence of cohesive high-level direction:

  • Designers were given free reign over their own areas
  • Each area became a self-contained experience with its own tone
  • The game doesn't match up tonally across regions
  • Too much over-the-top pop culture referencing and fourth-wall breaking humor
  • Players are simply "breadcrumbed" from one isolated area to the next

The result: parts of the game feel different from other parts, and the whole feels different from Fallout 1. The designers were the same talented people from the first game — what was missing was the editorial oversight.

WildStar: The NCSoft Evaluation

After three years of development, NCSoft Austin and NCSoft Seoul visited Carbine to evaluate the project. Every director faced intensive questioning:

  • Tim spent hours with a top programming director from Seoul who asked detailed questions about the engine
  • When Tim offered to bring in the specialist programmers, the evaluator refused — he wanted Tim's answers specifically
  • Tim later realized he was being tested — NCSoft wanted to know why three years and significant money hadn't produced a cohesive game

The Verdict

NCSoft's conclusion:

  • Code/engine: Looked good, cohesive, features planned for use ✓
  • Art: Looked good, everything belonged in the same game ✓
  • Design: Not cohesive ✗

Tim expected the design directors to be reassigned. Instead, all but one designer was laid off — a decision Tim had no insight into beforehand, mirroring how the original art director had been let go without Tim's knowledge.

Compartmentalization at Carbine

The WildStar experience highlighted a broader organizational problem: information was compartmentalized. Tim didn't know what was happening to the design group. Other employees later told him they had no idea what was happening to him as design director. Departments operated in silos.

Tim's first reaction to the layoffs: "Do you know how much knowledge we just lost?" These designers had intimate knowledge of the game engine and tools — an enormous setback regardless of the vision problems.

Tim's Assessment

The design wasn't bad — there was no high-level vision that had jelled enough to satisfy NCSoft. This wasn't Tim's personal feedback; it was NCSoft's conclusion. Tim still has extensive notes from this era (the most detailed he's ever taken) but doesn't like looking at them — they bring up bad memories of arguments and anger.

The Outer Worlds: Direction in Practice

On The Outer Worlds, Tim's role was primarily high-level guidance rather than hands-on design. This meant:

  • He didn't write system mechanics, create parameters, or do balancing
  • He played the game 16-19 times with wildly different characters
  • He checked for narrative bias — was the game pushing players toward one "correct" path?
  • He evaluated difficulty curves — was a map too hard, or was the system mechanic broken?
  • He identified when a map and a mechanic "didn't go together" and decided which one to change

The game still shipped with imbalances (items, economy), but the high-level direction kept the overall experience cohesive.

Why People Get Mad

The biggest challenge game directors face is being perceived as egotistical dictators. When you tell a designer their work needs to change, they hear "your work is bad." What you're actually saying is: "80% of the game has one tone, and your 20% has a different tone — rather than redo the 80%, we're redoing the 20%."

No matter what decision you make, people will get mad. They think you're calling their work bad. You're not — you're saying it doesn't fit. But unless someone has done the job, Tim doesn't think they fully understand how difficult these decisions are.

The TL;DW

A good game director's primary job is high-level design direction. Without it, the game suffers — and that's not the team's fault. Individual designers can't be expected to coordinate a unified vision among themselves. Someone needs to step back and ask: "How does all this stuff fit together?"

Tim's complaint across all his retrospective videos has never been about the quality of individual work. It's always been about vision.

References