Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says today's games suffer from trying 'to be everything for everyone' when they should be learning from '80s games: 'These games were really focused, because they had to be' | PC Gamer

Veteran RPG developer and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain pointed out that modern game development has forgotten lessons from the past. In a YouTube video this week, when a viewer asked if there was any 'lost wisdom' old games could offer today's developers, Cain flatly said, 'Yes.' According to Cain, today's games are having an identity crisis. He explained, 'The game doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries to be a game for everyone, designed by committee, trying to satisfy the publisher, guessing what the biggest demographic wants.' In contrast, old games *had* to be highly focused. Cain isn't just talking about the time he made Fallout; he means the entire industry starting in the 1980s. Hardware back then was severely limited. Plus, there was no standardized hardware or software (PC, Apple, Atari, Commodore, various consoles), forcing developers to be creative in a highly restricted environment. Developers weren't specialized either. Programmers were simultaneously artists and sound designers, and they had to figure out how to run the game within hardware constraints with almost zero documentation. Cain stated, 'These games just *had* to be really focused.'

Ultima 3. The first lesson today's developers need to learn is efficiency. The limited memory and processing power of the 1980s forced programmers to calculate the display time of individual pixels down to the millisecond, or creatively manage values at specific memory locations. Cain said, 'It wasn't like, 'It would be nice to be efficient.' It was, 'If you don't code efficiently, the game won't run on the Atari console.'' This efficiency naturally translated into game design. Today's games are complex messes of intertwined side activities and systems. Action games have crafting, puzzles, and companion growth systems all running simultaneously. 1980s designers, on the other hand, had to be more deliberate.

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Wizardry. 'You couldn't do all of that,' Cain explained. 'You had to pick which gameplay element you were going to represent and execute it perfectly. The very concept of a core loop that includes all kinds of actions didn't exist.' Because 80s games focused on a narrow scope, they maximized completion quality and impact. For example, if the core of Gauntlet was entering a dungeon, killing monsters, and getting treasure, then combat and treasure collection *had* to be perfectly implemented. Cain pointed out, 'Modern games think 'more features make the game better' and cram too much in, which actually dilutes the game.' He compared it to food. 80s game development was like a high-end restaurant making excellent food with a few high-quality ingredients, while today's massive games are like a buffet, only emphasizing ingredient variety. 'It's easy when making a game to think, 'I want to put this in, that was cool, the recent game I saw had this so I should add it.' Small team indie games benefit from a more focused scope,' Cain said. 'It has to be simple, it has to be focused. And whatever you do, you have to execute it perfectly. Then you become like that high-end restaurant. You might not have a lot of ingredients, but that one meal is delicious.'

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