Tim Cain
is the co-founder of Troika Games. He developed Fallout for Interplay
and started the initial design of Fallout 2 before departing to form
Troika in 1998. Now of course, he's awaiting the release of their
latest RPG, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and considering
future projects. Recently, he let Jason MacIsaac quiz him vigorously
on Arcanum, RPGs, and two different Tim Cains.
Electric Playground: What were your basic contributions to Arcanum
on a day to day basis?
Tim Cain: It changed a lot, but for most of the game, I pretty much
was programming. I did the AI, the in-game character editor, the inventory,
stuff like that. Also, I did all the system-level design. I did the
stats and skills and spells, and basically how the game engine controls
them; how particular stats were used in AI, and how a particular rank
converted to a chance of success. All the factors that affected the
chance of a skill succeeding, like lighting, distance, line of sight,
things like that.
EP: You're not just a sit-back manager, you're really in there getting
your hands dirty.
TC: Oh yeah. We really don't have anyone to just manage, we're too
small for that. And that's why we deliberately didn't put roles next
to our names. [Editor's note: Cain is referring to the game credits]
Everybody here did design, everybody here contributed to scripting,
and so many people here did dialogues. I mean, Leonard [Boyarsky]
and Chad [Moore] did most of them, but Sharon [Shellman] did a lot
herself too. So it's hard to point at somebody and say, "You're
an X." So we just put all our names on the credits.
EP: That's a rather unusual way of putting together a game. I wouldn't
think that most companies do it that way. Has it been structured that
way with your other projects?
TC: Well, was a lot more like that. That actually caused some problems,
because people were saying, "Oh, you have your artist doing design
and that's a problem." And I kept having people tell me that,
"You're having a game made by committee. No-one will want to
play." But I think the reason it worked is that it lets people
do the things they're best at. As long as we were honest with each
other, and [said], "Ok, you're doing something that stinks, you
can't do that anymore."
It lets people do what they like to do, and what they're best at.
I think you get a better game by doing that as opposed to saying,
"Okay, you're an artist, we don't ever want to hear a design
idea out of you."
EP: I've known many companies like that. I guess Arcanum is pretty
much done, you're just waiting for some of the localizations to catch
up?
TC: Right.
EP: Now that it's done, are you happy with the results?
TC: I think we are. I think you always look at games that ship and
go "God, if I just had more time I would have done that or this
or the other thing," but overall I think we're pretty happy with
it. It certainly seems like it's fun, which is the whole point of
a game, and people seem to have enjoyed it.
I wish the demo could not have had some of the problems it did, because
I think it turned some people off. Every time we do a demo we always
seem to have the same problem. Some mistake in either how we process
art or something causes game slowdown. It doesn't occur in the full
game. We had the same problem with the Fallout demo.
FP: Well, Fallout was a success. Maybe the problems with the demo
are a good omen.
TC: [laughs] Well I certainly hope we follow the same path with Arcanum.
EP: Let's get right back to the basics. How did the idea for Arcanum
come about?
TC: Well, it's funny. The way it worked was... we were talking about
what we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to do an RPG. I said I wanted
to do a fantasy RPG, which I think surprised Leonard and Jason [Anderson]
a bit because when we worked on Fallout, I said, "We're not doing
a fantasy RPG. I will entertain ideas for anything except fantasy,
because there are too many fantasy games on the shelves." But
when we were done with Fallout, I was kind of tired of that genre.
I didn't want to do Fallout 2.
I really wanted to do a fantasy RPG because I thought, "Well,
I've earned the right to do a fantasy game." I know there's a
bunch on the shelves, but that's really what everyone's prime RPG
is in their minds. And I wanted to do one. Leonard didn't want to
do one. Most of the RPGs you play are technologically 14th Century.
You don't really have machines of any kind, but you do have some metallurgy
and stuff like that. And Leonard's idea was to move it up to the 18th
Century. And I said, "That's going to be weird because we're
going to have technology and we're going to have magick, and I'm not
sure how to get it together." It was Jason's idea to have the
Magick/Tech aptitude scale, and have magick and tech actually be diametrically
opposed. It kinda grew out of all that. It took a few weeks of us
talking until we were all happy with how it sounded like it would
work. Then we started writing. Jason started working on interfaces,
I started working on the system design, Leonard started working on
the background system and environment. That's pretty much how we got
started.
EP: Once the development go under way, what did you want to deliver
with Arcanum that was lacking in other RPGs?
TC: One the big things we wanted was a big world. I mean, the continuous
world was there from the beginning, because we wanted a big world
that felt like you could explore it, but at the same time we wanted
a strong storyline. We could satisfy the two different camps of RPGers,
one of which wants to play through the storyline, and the other camp
wants to ignore it, and run around the world doing their own thing.
When I used to play D&D--I still do, but not nearly as much--I
used to like the judge's guild modules. They would have these gigantic
maps with villages and mountain ranges and dungeons all over the world,
but then you could actually buy supplements that led you through big
areas on a particular path. And I thought that was a really good way
of handling it, because there's a lot of stuff out there to explore
on your own, but if you really wanted to progress in a story and feel
like something's unfolding, there's that play as well.
EP: The other thing that you've delivered that a lot of people are
talking about of course is the toolset so that gamers can make their
own maps and their own adventures. When did that decision come about?
When did you say, "We should put that in?"
TC: We really had that idea at the beginning. And the reason we felt
it was important was when Falloutgot so popular, probably the top
request we got--besides doing the sequel--was "Can you release
your mapper tools?" Even though it was single player, they wanted
to make their own modules. We knew we were adding multiplayer capability
to Arcanum, and we thought "Well gee, if we make these tools
from the very beginning with the idea that somebody will be using
them at home, then we'll have a lot more groundswell support. We'll
have a much better community because these people have things that
they can make themselves and share."
We had the idea from the very beginning, and it actually affected
our design. Sometimes we'd be arguing and one of the programmers would
say, "Gee, that would be so easy to do...if I didn't have to
support people at home wanting to edit that." In fact, that's
where the big constraint of items came in, that you can't take items
from one module to another. Somebody pointed out that if people could
edit items any way they wanted, then there are so many ways of making
items just too powerful. Even if we tried to catch it, there are just
so many ways of doing it that people could sneak an item in under
our tests and bring items from one module to another that don't really
belong.
EP: There's always someone out there who will cheat a little.
TC: Yeah. It's easier to catch with characters, because if you're
this level, you should have this many character points to spend. And
I can look at your stats and say, "These are way beyond what
you could have spent." But with items, you can attach scripts
to them, and there's no way for me to really look at those scripts
and see what they're doing. So people could make an item that looks
like a regular sword, but it has a script attached to its hit, and
that script does an ungodly amount of damage.
EP: You mentioned that there were certain challenges in having a very
powerful toolset right from the beginning, but do you think it made
the overall game design easier or harder, knowing that everything
you do, you want to give to the user?
TC: I think it worked both ways. Some things were much harder. We
had ideas later that we wanted to do, and we added them into the editor,
but they were much harder to add in because we thought, "We've
got to add this in such a way that it's still an editable feature
for the home user." On the other hand, some things were easier
because we ended up with tools that anybody here in the office could
use. When we made Fallout, our mapping tool was so hard to use that
there was only one guy on the entire team that could make maps that
looked good. It was easy to make a map, but it was really hard to
make a map that looked good. The way the tools work now--the way the
tile sets work and the wall sets--pretty much all that was automated.
It's very easy for someone to just throw down whole villages and towns,
and they look good. So I guess it went both ways.
EP: There are several RPGs coming, like Morrowind and Neverwinter
Nights, that are promising a very deep RPG experience and they're
also going to have editors for the gamer. What do you think sets Arcanum
apart from them?
TC: We have a really, really, easy tool to use. I think we've shown
that. And as Leonard would like to say, "Hey, we artists are
using this." I think that 3D toolsets are just that much harder
to use. I think Neverwinter Nights will be cool, but it's still D&D.
I think we have a much less restrictive system. You can use the WorldEd
to whatever depth that you want to. The power of adding the scripts
and being able to adjust almost any stat and build anything really
lets you make a really complex module if you want. But if people want
to make a Diablo-like dungeon crawl, they could probably have that
whipped out in about half an hour. I'm not sure if the others will
be that easy to use, and I'm not sure if they provide the depth that
our editor is going to, especially if you want to explore how the
script editor works.
EP: This is not the first time you've worked on a game that's had
a toolset for the users. You also did Bard's Tale Construction Set.
TC: Right. In fact, that was the first game I actually did that got
me back into the industry. Way back in '92.
EP: The original Bard's Talecame out on the Commodore 64, didn't it?
TC: Yeah, in fact I hadn't really played those games. Interplay hired
me to do the construction set as a contractor. They had the code,
but it was really old, and it didn't really work very well. So I pretty
much had to rewrite combat and maps and all that so that it looked
like Bard's Tale, but it really ran a new set of code.
We were all excited about that game. It was one of the most popular
games on Compuserve. [laughs]
EP: I find it interesting that here you are, years later, and you're
kind of doing the same thing with Arcanum. You're providing tools
so that gamers can make their own adventures. Obviously the technology
has made some huge leaps forward, but I was wondering if there was
anything philosophically that remains the same?
TC: It's funny that one of the first toolsets that people tried making
was Forgotten Realms (which had the Unlimited Adventure toolset).
And that toolsets came out for RPGs, which are much harder for people
to make. With first person shooters, everybody has toolsets. And that's
what people really seem to get into. Making Quake mods and Doom mods...I
think now people are trying to advance beyond just making a map and
plopping down a couple monsters and saying "Ok, now I've got
my first person shooter." I think people are ready to make something
a little more complicated. So it seems like we've gone full circle.
EP: So you're not one of those people that believe story is dead in
computer games?
TC: Oh no. In fact, some of the ideas for games I want to make are
really more adventure games than RPGs. And everybody goes, "Oh,
adventure games are dead." And I say that's what people told
me about RPGs back in '94. Fallout got started in 1994 and RPGs were
dead . The whole trickle was drying up. The Ultima , people were saying,
"Oh, these aren't very good anymore. Wizardry , no-one's playing
those anymore." The ideas I have for adventure games I'm thinking
these will probably make good games, but of course everyone's telling
me adventure games are dead.
I think no genre is dead, people do ideas into the ground, and then
the public gets tired of playing the same idea over and over.
EP: I personally believe that a good game--an innovative game--will
do well regardless. Just let people know it's out there, market it
well...
TC: Right... It was sad to see Grim Fandango--a great game--but it
didn't sell very well. And I'm not even sure why. So I'm not convinced
I could make a great adventure game and get it sold. [laughs]
EP: Do you see Troika and yourself as primarily RPG makers? Because
it certainly sounds like you would like to branch out into other genres.
TC: I think we would. We understand that a lot of people may expect
RPGs from us, and we'll probably stick with it. But I think occasionally
we'd like to branch out, try something else. We all have ideas for
things. Somebody will say, "That's a great idea, but it's really
more of a first-person shooter idea. Or an adventure game idea."
We just shelve it. But I think someday we'd like to try some of those.
Plus RPGs are the most complicated games to make and we wouldn't mind
trying to make a more straightforward game at least once.
EP: If you do decide to go into another genre, what philosophies of
Troika or yourself will you bring into making it.
TC: I think we all bring different stuff. Leonard likes to bring a
certain style, both in the art and the dialogue, and how the game
feels. He likes a certain darkness, a certain angst. I like games
that don't impose upon the player, "Here's how you will play
this game. You will be the nice guy; you will be the hero. You will
go do this in order A, B, C." I'm big fan of non-linearity, if
that's the way the player wants to go.
I think we all bring different things to it and all of that gets pooled
together, and I guess people outside the company think of that as
"the Troika thing." It's really the combination of what
people here like to see in games.
EP: I'm just trying to imagine a non-linear adventure game, or a non-linear
3D shooter, at least in the same sense that Arcanum is non-linear.
It's a very interesting idea. How do you envision that?
TC: Imagine if you had Quake II (I loved Quake II and I played it
to do death), but instead of playing it that you go through a level,
then a new zone, new level, new zone, imagine the whole map is laid
out once and you know the big bad guy is in the central area. But
the closer you get to that area, the harder everything gets. You might
attack some of the fringe outlying areas first; pick up some good
items and some good armour, learn tactics, then slowly move your way
in. And there'd be several different ways you could attack that base.
You might go underground, you might fight your way across the surface,
and you could pick which zones you wanted to go through.
It's weird. I had an idea for a game about six or seven years ago
that was like Quake II , only you chose which direction, or how to
approach the big end boss. I think it was a tank game. Everybody was
getting into neural nets, which I didn't think really applied. The
whole game was predicated on a genetic algorithm that controlled how
the enemy created units to attack you. Basically it would inspect
your style of play and create units that would be good to function
against you. I wouldn't mind making that game, but I think people
would superficially look at the game and say, "This is no different.
This is not a game at all like I'd expect Troika to make." But
I think after you played it, you'd go, "Oh, there's lots of ways
of playing through it and it's non-linear..." And I'm sure Leonard
would add all the angst [laughs]. It would have that Troika feel,
even though it wouldn't be an RPG at all.
EP: Not that I'm ask you to slag off the competition or anything like
that, but what's your impression of RPGs today?
TC: I find a lot of the times that I'm playing RPGs I feel forced
to play a certain way. I liked Planescape: Torment a lot, but the
biggest complaint I gave Chris Avellone, even before it shipped, was
I really hate the fact that you're giving me just one person, and
I can't play anything else. But of course, the power that give him
was that the story was incredibly intense. Of course, I couldn't play
it any other way. I was the Nameless One and I was going to progress
to the end, and everybody was pretty much going to discover the same
thing.
That's the other thing. I feel that a lot of RPGs...The way I played,
if I talked to someone else, they had the exact same experience. And
that's what I loved about Fallout . I often found people would be
coming to their friends, "Yeah, I played Fallout last night.
I found this crashed flying saucer and I got this really cool weapon
and it let me go into this base and then I found this, this, this..."
[And the friend says] "What are you talking about? I never saw
that. I never had that encounter. I never had that follower. How do
you get that follower? He won't join me." That's the kind of
experience I want in an RPG, and I don't see it as much.
Someone just asked me recently why I don't like what they call the
"Eastern-style" of RPG, like Final Fantasy . And I think
that was one of my biggest complaints. I feel too constrained. To
be given a character and play it the way the designers expected me
to play through.
EP: When you are given a choice of characters, what kind of characters
do you prefer to play?
TC: Like in Arcanum , or in RPGs in general?
EP: Both really.
TC: With Arcanum it's funny, because I really thought I was going
to go magick. My first few characters were always these Elvin magick
users. Very quickly I fell in love with the big stupid Half-Ogre,
mainly because of the dialogue that Leonard and Chad wrote. Some of
it I laughed so hard I was literally having trouble breathing. It's
great. And for me, that's much more important when playing the game.
I just said, "I'm enjoying myself so much with this character,
this is the character I'm going to take. Even though it's not the
character I conceived would be the one I would enjoy the most."
Then I played the game through with a character that didn't do magick
or tech. I thought, "Wait a minute, you spent so much time making
magick and tech systems and now you're playing the game through not
touching either of those." It's a bit ironic.
My second favorite character was a thief, who did magick and tech.
In other games, I almost always play the spellcaster. In games like
EverQuest and Baldur's Gate I have to play somebody who can cast spells.
Otherwise I found the games a little boring. I just don't like being
a person who says, "I've got good armour, I've got a good weapon,
I go up and hit the thing a few times and it dies." I find that
boring by the third or fourth dungeon.
EP: In Arcanum, there are still traditional fantasy elements, but
you've given them a different spin...
TC: We especially tried to do quests that weren't necessarily, "Go
find this object and bring it back to me." [Editor's note: Tim
and Jason here discussed a quest related to a thief-style character
that definitely falls into spoiler territory. But it is quest that
we guarantee you've never seen before. Here's a juicy hint from Tim
"You have to give up a bit of your integrity." And yes,
even a thief's relative integrity.]. I don't want to give anything
away, but it's not Fedex.
EP: That's true.
TC: What you have to do isn't that hard, but it's got ramifications
in the game later on. And you know what they'll be. It's not like
we spring them on you. I like that because all the other games would
say, "Give me your gold, give me this object..." I'm saying,
"Give me a little bit of your integrity. Give me a little bit
of your feeling of self-worth, and then I'll give you this skill you
want so badly." And I like that kind of stuff. It's the kind
of thing that makes people look at our RPGs and then look at other
RPGs and say, "I find you wanting. I want more of this stuff."
EP: Very few companies are going for anything different though. They're
either going for your standard swords and sorcery, or the online persistent
world. Why do you think that is?
TC: I think it's always been the way in this industry that innovation
has been second to trying to reach the masses. So what happens is
Diablo comes out. It does really well. People go, "Well, let's
make more action-oriented RPGs that are quasi-swords and sorcery."
A lot of people wouldn't even call that an RPG. Now of course, we're
getting great stuff. Dungeon Siege and looks like a great game. And
yet it struck me as Diablo 3D. But it looked like a great game so
I'm not saying that in all these cases, we're not getting fantastic
games. But I think there are only so many games that can be made like
that before the public really wants something new. But innovation
is hard. So most of these companies don't want to risk making three
or four games and only having one of them really be innovative. So
what they do--especially the marketing people--they go, "Look,
this is what's selling. We want a 1st person fantasy RPG that's got
a lot of action and a lot of nice cinematics and a very a small learning
curve, and we want you to make it in 18 months and get it out on the
shelves."
EP: What do you think RPGs need to evolve a little further? Kill all
the marketing people?
TC: [laughs] I think the environment needs to become even more of
a simulation, so that you can have even more freedom. I want people
to be able to up to a building and go, "Inside there's a chest
with something I want in it." I don't want every different solution
to getting that object out of the chest to be something that a scripter
has to put in. I want the world to be so simulated at the physics
level that I can go, "I want to try breaking that window. Oh,
but that creates a lot of noise. Well, maybe if I cut the glass off
the window, cut the glass and go in." I think that would really
make people open up to just how creative they can be in trying to
achieve their goals in one of these RPGs.
It will eventually happen. When all the engines go 3D, which most
of them are, and people concentrate less on using their CPU power
and their hardware power to make it look good, and they instead concentrate
on making it very interactive. I think we're starting to see RPGs
going like that.
EP: The sort of thing you're describing is almost like a pen and paper
RPG where you have a judge or gamemaster. They don't actually physically
simulate the world, but they have their imagination and can improvise
anything...
TC: When
I was a GM I very much discouraged people from doing the standard
rush-in-beat-everything-up-and-take-the-stuff approach, because that
has ramifications that most people ignore. If you do that often enough
in the real world, people are going to come after you. Bounty hunters.
People are going to be scared of you. Shopkeepers are gonna close-up
when they see you coming. It's going to be hard for you to interact
with the normal population, because they're gonna know who you are.
So I'm a big fan of reputation and alignment and factions. I really
feel like going in that direction in RPGs helps.
EP: Do you think there's anything that can be done in computer RPGs
to make them more like pen and paper?
TC: I looked at the Vampire stuff because it had a GM that was actually
running parts of the world because there are some things that a computer
just won't do well. I would love to have dialogue generated, because
we spend so much time writing it. So much time is spent on the design
side making the dialogue for all people. But it's so hard to make
a computer do reasonable dialogue that it has to be a human being.
So I was so fascinated by the Vampire approach and that I can take
over control and I can handle the dialogue, which a human does well,
and the computer can handle the combat, which it does well. I think
that direction is a good direction to go. Eventually. I'm not sure
the mass market bought that. They have to be exposed to it a few more
times before they grow to like it.
To wrap
the interview, Tim told me that Troika is spending the time before
release assisting in the localization, and pitching new game ideas
to Sierra. Sadly, he wouldn't reveal what they were, but he did say
that Sierra is very open to ideas and is not pressuring them in any
direction. We ended the interview discussing Tim
Cain, the award winning children's recording artist. Tim has visited
his site, and has even listened to the MP3 of his song, "Shark."
The two have never met, but both are located in California, so Tim
jokingly speculated that they might do a game together someday. I
proposed Shark: The RPG. This is not likely to get pitched to Sierra.
