Tim Cain, designer and lead programmer on the original Fallout, hears a particular sort of question a lot these days—why not make a new, original RPG? Better yet, why not return to Fallout or make a sequel to one of his other classic games like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura or Temple of Elemental Evil? The full answer is complicated, and Cain took to his YouTube channel Friday to clear the air.
Granted, Cain has been prolific since the ’90s. While the development studio he co-founded, Troika, stopped making games after Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, Cain went on to work on games like now-defunct MMO Wildstar and multiple Obsidian RPGs, including The Outer Worlds which he co-directed.
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However, Cain said in his videos that fans are ever eager to know when he might helm a new RPG in his classic style. “I love making games, so it really confuses people when they’re like, ‘Why are you not making games, new IPs?'” he said in the video. “Other people have made way more money off of IPs I’ve created than I’ve ever made. It’s not by a little. It’s by a lot … the IPs that I made years ago, people who just work on them in a team make more money than I got to even create the IP.”
Cain reckons that, while it might be fun to revisit a game like Arcanum in some form, there’s not much in it for him; and even if there were, he doesn’t have the rights or resources to produce a new CRPG out of thin air. He explains in the video that he doesn’t feel “bitter,” just “exasperated with the question”: “You have to imagine what it must be like to be asked this question over and over.”
In the video, Cain lays things out in metaphor: it’s as if he were a painter that, at one point, was just happy to be making art professionally. Soon enough, his paintings are sold for outsized amounts of money of which he sees a pittance. While he’d like to just sell them himself, it’s unsustainably expensive to do alone, and with help, “it turns out that the guy who’s making the frames is making more money than me. I guess I can’t sell paintings.”
While he conceded there might be a way to thread the needle financially, he added “I’m not good at that. I’m a good painter.” Moreover, he’s satisfied with the work he’s doing—”fun little doodles,” as characterized in the painting metaphor—and has “moved on,” reasoning in the video that anyone who wants to play his old CRPGs can do so pretty inexpensively these days.
“If you really care about what I want, I’m still making toys and I love them and they make me happy. I’m over making people really wealthy with my own creations,” Cain said in the video. “Could you give me a reason other than a very selfish reason—like you want something new, or those other people want to make more money—that I should just not keep painting whatever I feel like?”
As for what might reignite his interest, he ended the video by saying he’d like to see the industry split the pie up a bit more: “When a painting sells, everybody makes money.”
Cain posits the movie industry has done this “for decades,” and while there are all sorts of labor rights issues in every corner of the entertainment industry, it’s no secret that a huge number of game developers are working thankless jobs for studios that chew them up and spit them out.
And it’s not like Cain isn’t still working on games either: He recently rejoined Obsidian full-time after working as an external consultant on The Outer Worlds 2. It just sounds like whatever role he occupies now, the legendary developer is not in the driver’s seat.
In addition to non-lead design roles on The Outer Worlds 2 and Pillars of Eternity, Cain is credited as a rank and file programmer on a number of Obsidian games, including South Park: The Stick of Truth, Tyranny, and the first Pillars of Eternity game (he pulled double duty there). Cain’s statements in the video perhaps point to him returning to that sort of role.
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