Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has released a new video on his YouTube channel, suggesting more modern games should look back on how '80s video games were put together to produce higher-quality titles (thanks, PC Gamer, for the spot!).
In the video, entitled "Lessons from Old Games", Cain suggested that a lot of games today, "don’t really know what they want to be" and instead "try to be everything to everyone" or guess at "the largest demographic wants." As a result, he suggests that to combat this, more developers should be open to learning from older games from the past, particularly when it comes to having a clear direction and executing that vision efficiently.
As he states, "You didn’t have a lot of memory [back in the 80s]. You didn’t have fast processors. You needed to be efficient. It’s not that you wanted to be efficient, or wouldn’t it be cool if we were efficient? It was, you write efficient code, or your game doesn’t work. On the Atari console, just doing graphics required timing. You didn’t say I want a pixel drawn here, you measured how many milliseconds it was, and you said ‘Turn on'."
"The game loop was [also] tight," he said elsewhere in the video. "It was, here is the gameplay, you’re doing it now, have fun [...] because [it] had to be. We couldn’t make giant sprawling games with tons of different things: I think I’ll go craft now. I think I’ll go explore now. I think I’ll go do this puzzle now, [etc]. You couldn’t do all that. You had to pick. What segment of all that gameplay do I want to represent? And then you did that. The idea that you could have a core gameloop that was a huge variety of actions pretty much did not exist [...] There weren’t a lot of extras, so it had to be done right."
While discussing the topic in the video, he acknowledged that bad games did exist in the '80s too, but suggests "the barrier of entry" was so high that by the time you made a game, in most cases, it had to be efficient and tight, especially when it comes to aspects like the core reason for playing, the story, and the setting.
This is something he says many modern developers miss, especially outside of the indie space, reasoning that because companies no longer have to make their games efficient, they are falling into the trap of adding a lot of unnecessary details, based on what they like and what they've seen elsewhere, that end up hindering the final product more than they actually help.
His advice? "You need to stay simple," he continued. "You need to stay focused, and whatever you do needs to be extremely well-executed.
You can watch the full video on Cain's YouTube channel, which we recommend subscribing to if you happen to love Fallout, or some of the other classic CRPGs he worked on, like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and The Temple of Elemental Evil.
He even has a video on his top five favourite video games, which unsurprisingly includes three games from the 80s: Star Raiders for the Atari 8-Bit computers, Ultima III: Exodus, and Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters.