Tim Cain has a new video out titled “RPG Features That Are Disappearing” (link below).

To save you 12 minutes, Tim is largely talking about how RPGs 20+ years ago used to have a lot of hidden, unexplained, and/or missable content. The disappearing features are:

• Non-linear stories
• Unguided exploration
• Strong opening, middle, and ending acts
• Companions that can be missed
• “Dumb” dialog (e.g. low INT builds)
• Full character creation
• Focus on combat
• Undefined progress (don’t know how many acts remain, etc)

Towards the end, Tim says:

“I’m being told that those things I like, don’t increase sales. Or the things that do increase sales, like a fully voiced player protagonist, preclude the inclusion of things like dumb dialog or specialized dialog for certain [vampire] clans would be too expensive.”

There is a ongoing zeitgeist that gaming executives across the industry are, in fact, destroying the industry. Chasing trends, designing by committee, general enshittification, and so on. For a large part, I agree. How many subscription MMOs battle royales hero shooters extraction shooters do we really need in 2026 and beyond? How anyone with an MBA expects to be able to chase a trend with a product that takes six years to produce, I will never understand.

At the same time though… are the managers always wrong?

The original Fallout was made in 3.5 years and cost $3 million to develop. Even if we assume 1993 money, that’s still just $7 million after inflation. Fallout 2 was basically completed nine months later. How was that possible back then, and not today? Well, have you seen Fallout 1 & 2? Of course it is going to be easier to slap a few extra companions and unique endings when everything is a 2D sprite, a prerendered background, or some text.

Games are not really made that way anymore. Hell, Tim used Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines as one of his examples of “dumb” (e.g. alternative) dialog features that are disappearing, specifically the Malkavian clan. If you never played Bloodlines, the vampire clan choice during character creation really can change the entire way you approach the game. Pick Malkavian and you will get all kinds of unique, crazy dialog through the entire game (because they’re crazy). Pick Nosferatu and all of a sudden you can’t interact with regular human NPCs. Having such radically different options is (conceptually) good!

Unfortunately, a conceptual good is no match for an objective bad, which was Bloodline’s commercial failure. The game was overbudget, underdeveloped, and its limited sales was the last nail in the, ahem, coffin for the entire studio, which shut down shortly afterwards. Would things have been different if the Malkavian and Nosferatu options did not exist or were watered down? Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that Bloodlines was doomed at the start for using the prototype Source engine instead of something else… like 2D sprites and just text. Then again, the developers certainly spent a non-zero amount of time working on those clans, balancing them, and so on, all in an environment in which the game was already struggling to be completed on time.

My point is this: sometimes things disappear for a reason.

It would not take me more than 30 seconds to find someone who genuinely feels like Bethesda ruined the Fallout franchise by pivoting to 3D. Counterpoint: Fallout 3 sold 12.4 million copies. OK, yeah, well Fallout 4 was an immense dumbing down of every aspect of what made the franchise great, especially the dialog. Counterpoint: Fallout 4 sold 25 million copies. I am not saying there is a 1:1 causation between sanding down the design edges of a game, and it selling better. Nor do I want to imply that Candy Crush is the pinnacle of game design simply because it made billions of dollars. But… if not proof, there’s something in that pudding. And that sure beats empty pockets.

I do feel like gaming in general is on a bad trajectory. Regardless of causes, AAA games costing $300 million and taking an entire console generation worth of time to release is unsustainable. I can empathize with executives’ desire to water down everything in a desperate attempt to broaden the potential appeal of these all-in games; it’s not going to work, but I can see the logic. It’s also very possible (and likely) that if these auteur developers (like Tim) were left to their own old-school devices, the games would still fail. Failure, in this case, meaning that the game was unable to recoup its costs.

On the bright side, we do have the continued maturation of the indie scene/AA space, the occasional Baldur’s Gate 3, and the fact that all these old games still exist. You can go play them right now, if you want. Assuming you can bring yourself to do so. I don’t know about anyone else, but whatever part of me that was fine with spending my vanishingly small gaming time aimlessly wandering around to achieve intentionally (!) vague objectives died long ago.