Tim Cain Retrospective Interview

The RPG Codex is offering a rather excellent retrospective interview with ex-Interplay/Troika veteran Tim Cain, who is currently working as a senior programmer on Obsidian Entertainment’s South Park: The Stick of Truth.

The interview touches on about every subjects you’d expect it to ouch on, from his opinions on the Fallout franchise after he left Interplay, to his years at Troika working on Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil, to his most recent work at Carbine and Obsidian.

Here’s a sampling:

Troika’s games, while arguably among the genre’s most outstanding achievements, were notoriously rough at the time of release, often criticized for bugs and unfinished content. In retrospect, how do you explain this? Do you feel this kind of criticism can sometimes get unfair?

I don’t think criticizing Troika games for being buggy was unfair. They were buggy, and I think there were two big reason why that was so. First, we tried putting a lot of features into these games. We really needed to learn how to edit, because we would spend a lot of man-hours putting a feature into a game that hardly any of the players would ultimately care about. For example, Arcanum had newspapers that reported on major incidents that were caused by the player, but I don’t remember a single review mentioning that. We spent a lot of time getting that working, and those hours could have spent balancing real-time combat, or fixing the multiplayer code.

Second, we kept our team sizes small, both for budget and for management purposes. This meant we had less total man-hours to work with, and all of the late nights and weekends couldn’t make up for the fact that we only had about a dozen people working on the Arcanum and Temple projects. Looking back, I am amazed our games were as feature-rich as they were, but I am not surprised they were as buggy as they were. We should have made some serious feature cuts early in their development.

Troika got characterized as (always blaming the publisher) when something was wrong and I think this was unfair. We would always own up to the parts of the development process in which we had made mistakes, but it seemed that if we ever said (we messed up this, and our publisher messed up that), some people just heard the latter part of the comment and would start screaming (Troika is blaming the publishers again!). It got frustrating after a while, especially when I saw people at Troika quoted out of context. But I did gain quite an insight into the American political system, which seems to deal with the same kind of illogical, sound bite oriented system of criticism of its political candidates. People hear what they want to hear, and often make up their minds before seeing, or even in spite of, any evidence to the contrary.

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It is known that Arcanum’s sequel, Journey to the Center of Arcanum, was supposed to be a first person game using the Source engine and eventually led to Bloodlines. Can you tell us more about the plans Troika had for the project? Are there any details you can share about the setting, story or gameplay you wanted the sequel to have?

The sequel was based loosely on Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, where we planned to continue the adventures of the great explorer Franklin Payne. He has disappeared into the bowels of the earth, and his wife has hired you to find him. We had laid out most the storyline, and it included finding prehistoric monsters, subterranean humanoids, and most thrilling of all, a clue about how magic and tech can be reconciled in the same artifact, something that most learned people had believed to be impossible. Of course, none of this came to be, but our talks about using the Source engine led to our making Vampire: Bloodlines.