Would you say that Contemporary games have a problem? For Tim Cain, co-creator of Falloutdebuts on PC and Steam Deck, PS5, Xbox and Switch have forgotten their past.
Cain sums it up in one type of identity crisis where they try to be”everything for everyone” and in the end they end up being nothing in the process. Do you agree with him?
Through a video posted on YouTube and responding to a user who asked if older games could offer any “lost wisdom“To the current developer and designers, Cain was straightforward.
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“Yes“he said.”They don’t really know what they want to be.“he explained.”They try to be everything to everyone: designed by committee, please the editor, try to guess what the largest demographic wants“.
The ancient games, according to Cain himself, had another, clearer focus. And he is not referring to the saga he helped create, but to the games in the 80s when he started working as a teenager.
Before there was less capacity, although “games being created for PC, Apple, Atari, Commodore and a wide variety of consoles“. Of course, the developers were less specialized.
“These games were very focused, because they were supposed to be“, he commented. The first thing they should look at is efficiency, as then there was much more room for error due to the capabilities of the time.
“It’s not that you want to be efficient or ‘it would be great to be efficient’, but rather ‘either you write efficient code or your game doesn’t work on the Atari console’“.
This efficiency was necessary and was present in all projects, something that many developers today forget, if we take into account the amount of broken games released on PC.
Fallout co-creator clearly sees the problem with current games
“You couldn’t do all that. You had to choose: ‘What part of the whole game do I want to represent?’ And then make one.
The idea that you could have a basic gameplay loop with a wide variety of actions didn’t exist“, so Cain summarizes this as avoiding the “become indulgent“like the current ones.
“The difficulty is when you start creating a game. (…) You need to be simple. You need to be focused and everything you do has to be very well executed.“.
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