Disappearing Features
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.
Posted on October 16, 2026, in Commentary and tagged Enshittification, Fallout, Game Design, Tim Cain. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
Somewhat related, I just finished Gothic 1 Remake, having never played the Gothic games prior. It was fantastic. More modern graphics, stable, and ran as I would expect a game to run in 2026, but with gameplay and game design that was certainly from years past, in a good way.
I do think there is something, perhaps a lot of something, about the way games (specifically RPGs) were made in the past. BG3 is amazing, but its rooted very much in the earlier games. Expedition 33 is IMO one of the best games in recent years, but it too has clear roots in old-school RPG design.
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It’s funny, because while I agree with you… what is the “old-school RPG design” exactly? Is it missable content? I didn’t get everything in Expedition 33, but the things I skipped felt largely like the same padding you get in any sort of other modern game. BG3 has a lot more legitimately missable content in comparison. At the same time, a game having “missable content” in the first place sort of indicates that the devs had enough time/money to create more content than normal, which is already valuable.
When it comes to E33 and BG3, one of the aspects that stood out to me was the nigh-unnecessary depth of options for builds. There are like 193 Pictos in E33, and that immediately reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics, trying out all the combinations of skills, classes, and equipment. Same with BG3. So many other games slap a Fire/Ice/Wind/Earth elemental system and call it a day.
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So specifically with Gothic, its a little like Fallout/Elder Scrolls where the environment tells as many stories as the official quests, only in Gothic the map is so much smaller, so its just stuffed with details. And because the default difficulty is rather high, and you always feel like you could use more ‘stuff’, so exploring feels rewarding. It also is very mixed in terms of where harder mobs are. Ten steps from a starter mob might be a mid-game mob group that one-shots you.
Add in that skill points are very limited, but the options on where to spend them are vast, and you always feel like maybe you could have done X instead of Y to be stronger vs making something like lockpicking or crafting easier.
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I can’t really speak to single-player RPGs but the same argument comes up over and over for MMORPGs. The argument is always that developers, possibly at the command of higher management, are making the games dumber and easier and far less complex, challenging and satisfying, as though that’s a choice they have made, unilaterally. In most cases, when someone gives examples of what’s changed for the worse – quest markers over NPCs, mini-maps, instant travel, flying mounts etc – it’s something I can quite specifically remember players demanding, en masse and repeatedly,back in the supposed golden age.
The genre went the way it did because players a) demanded it and b) chose to play those games that changed to accommodate their demands. I suspect if there’ been a similar drift in RPGs, it’ll be for much the same reason. Popularity doesn’t equate to quality but it does equate to commercial success. At a certain level, indie and even AA, there’s space for art-minded teams to create something like Expedition 33 or Disco Elysium and have some success but that’s not really an option for most developers in the supposed AAA space, where the costs are astronomical and anything short of massive sales is a total loss.
I guess BG3 proves it is possible, theoretically, but how many BG3s could the market absorb in a single year, even if there were teams able to make them?
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I will never forget the crying in the WoW forums when Blizzard added quest markers on the mini-map in WotLK. I think there is an argument to be had whether quest zones should be highlighted, or quest items in the world having huge sparkles or whatever. But the quest givers themselves? I wasted so much time in the vanilla zones and sometimes TBC whenever the quest giver ended up being inside a building or basement. Big ole’ yellow exclamation mark is fine, but a dot on a minimap is an immersion too far?
In any case, the evolution of MMO design owes a lot to the existence of mods. If something is immensely popular, the devs have direct feedback from active, engaged players as to what they would like to change. In the single-player game space, devs (or management) are just throwing shit at the wall/focus groups. Presumably. Maybe there are scores of failed traditional RPGs out there I’m not aware of (because they failed), which makes the larger devs shift focus to more action-RPG combat systems, etc.
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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.
On the flip side of that, there’s Octopath Traveler, which used the old style design to great effect. I’d argue that there’s a time and a place for high-end graphics and 3D designs, and if BG3 had shipped with the old isometric RPG style but with a story and worldbuilding as good as the version we got, I’d be fine with that. I suspect I’d be very much in the minority, because I’d imagine the number of people who bought BG3 because of its innate, uh, horniness and the game’s absolutely bonkers non-linear style of solutioning was likely non-zero as well.
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