After heading up development on Fallout 1, project lead Tim Cain split from Interplay to found a new studio, Troika, alongside fellow Fallout devs Jason Anderson and Leonard Boyarsky. In a recent vlog on his YouTube channel, Cain dug into why Troika’s output lacked a certain spit shine polish compared to their previous games and later careers.
For the unfamiliar, Troika is a very ‘realheads know’ sort of studio: Its games presaged the similarly buggy (and occasionally unfinished) early work by Obsidian, which was also founded by ex-Interplay devs. But, also like Obsidian, Troika’s games were ambitious, imaginative, and unforgettable. They had strong word-of-mouth reputations on RPG forums, and all three of its games have received essential fan patches and laudatory reappraisals, with the Big Kahuna arguably being the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
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“We had a lot of feature ideas, we did not edit ourselves at all, and we were a small team,” Cain summarized at the beginning of the video. “Every time Troika went to make a game, whether it was Arcanum, or Temple of Elemental Evil, or Bloodlines, there were just so many things we wanted to do. We had so many ideas.
“We tended to make those features quickly. Even worse, we made the tools to put in the content for those features quickly. So not only the end result, but the tools to make the end result were buggy and flawed. Having so many possible options for gameplay meant unintended interactions.”
Troika’s first game, Arcanum, has a lot of great examples of the eccentric and ambitious mechanics Troika worked into its games, ripe for those “unintended interactions”:
- Kill or steal from anyone or be a complete pacifist.
- Weapon crafting, before it was cool.
- In-game newspapers that update with stories of your exploits.
- A speak with dead spell that works on every NPC, 23 years before Baldur’s Gate 3.
- Procedurally generated terrain filling out the entire world map between major settlements—it’s kind of deranged, and there’s not much reason to go out there, but still.
It mostly worked, and gels even better with Drog Blacktooth’s unofficial patch. Despite Troika’s small size and limited budget, Cain credited a certain youthful exuberance and naivete for driving its teams to make such complex, challenging games anyway. “We make this content as quickly as possible to try and fit it into the schedule we made,” said Cain. “And the schedule was what it was because I wasn’t a very good businessman and the budgets weren’t very big.”
Cain also alluded to a lack of systemization and consistency with how Troika’s developers wound up using its already-flawed proprietary tools. He recalled scripters coming up with ad hoc solutions to problems when there were ready-made functions they could have used instead, comparing the situation to someone using a screwdriver to cut lumber into a 2×4 when there’s a saw at the bottom of their toolbox they just didn’t realize was there.
“Tons of content means tons of bugs,” Cain said toward the end of the video. “You’d think we would have learned, but every time we learned the wrong lesson.” After the sprawling Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental Evil and Bloodlines had a tighter scope, but both games had their own quirks and ambitions that ballooned out into difficult development cycles.
Temple still boasted the open-ended, player-accommodating design Troika was known for, while also implementing an extremely faithful (and thus complicated) version of D&D’s 3.5 Edition ruleset.
Bloodlines, meanwhile, was a full-3D game from a new perspective and on a new engine (Valve’s Source) that was being actively built while Troika was attempting to use it, all while being one of the first fully-voiced RPGs—and without having the crutch of Knights of the Old Republic’s reused alien language sound files subtitled whatever which way.
While Cain said the games’ bugginess “was our fault,” and that this video was aiming more to explain the games than excuse them, he did note that RPGs tend to be rough around the edges in general. Cain also believes that it just wouldn’t have been in Troika’s nature to temper its ambition in the name of polish.
And I’m extremely grateful for that: Many of the videos’ commenters seem to agree with me that a flawed but memorable game is preferable to a perfectly executed mediocrity. People are, after all, still coming back to Troika’s games over 20 years later (I’m people).
Reality seems to reflect the inverse of that fake Shigeru Miyamoto quote about a bad game being bad forever: Games like Bloodlines or, more recently, Cyberpunk 2077 that have a spark of artistry and excellence can, with enough support or a more charitable assessment, rise above the “buggy game” label. “Or, as people called them, flawed masterpieces,” Cain quipped in the video.
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