Fallout Creator Says Modern Games Are Going Through An Identity Crisis

"Veteran RPG developer and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain argues that modern games have forgotten some lessons of history--a point he made in a recent YouTube video--you can watch the full video below--responding to a viewer's question about whether older titles contain any supposed lost wisdom. Cain's answer--"Yes, there is. Good question." Looking back at his own early years in the industry, he describes an era with only programmers and some artists, but no narrative designers, and far fewer competing priorities."

"In about 13 minutes, Cain explains how he attributes the sharp focus of early games to the era's severe technical limitations and fragmented hardware landscape. "Games were being made for PC, for Apple, for Atari, for Commodore, for a wild assortment of consoles," he recalled, with no shared standards to ease development. Teams were small and multitasking was essential--programmers often acted as artists and sound designers, reverse-engineering undocumented hardware to make their games function."

"The first major lesson he believes modern developers should reclaim is the importance of efficiency. With the tiny memory budgets and slow processors of the 1980s, Cain says, "you write efficient code or your game doesn't work on the Atari console." Designers were equally constrained: They couldn't stack crafting systems, puzzles, companion mechanics, and sprawling narratives on top of each other. Instead, they had to choose a single segment of gameplay and perfect it."

Early videogames were created by very small teams—mostly programmers and some artists—across a fragmented hardware landscape without shared standards. Severe technical constraints and limited memory budgets forced developers to write highly efficient code and often reverse-engineer undocumented hardware. Designers focused on a single, well-executed gameplay segment rather than layering multiple systems, puzzles, or sprawling narratives. That narrow focus produced tightly tuned experiences such as dungeon-clearing in Gauntlet. Modern titles that attempt to include many disparate mechanics risk becoming indulgent and losing the concentrated design clarity that came from technological and team-size constraints.

Read at GameSpot