Tim Cain, one of the creators of Fallout, believes that old games can teach new creators and designers a lot of things, something he revealed in a response to a fan’s question.
In a video posted on YouTube and shared by PCGamer, Cain commented that today’s games suffer from an identity crisis, they don’t know what they want to be because they are trying to please everyone. This lack of focus ends up harming the games, rather than helping them.
“They don’t really know what they want to be. They try to be everything to everyone: designed by committee, to make the publisher happy, trying to guess what the larger demographic wants.”
Cain said that developers and designers should look to games from the 80s, when hardware wasn’t as powerful and there wasn’t a standard to develop for, there were countless platforms that were completely different from each other. Furthermore, he recalls that, at the time, the programmers were also working on sound and art, trying to understand how to make the game run within the restrictions of the time.
For Cain, games had to have a focus and know what they wanted to be because it was mandatory, there were so many limitations that the margin for error was minimal, if they weren’t extremely efficient, the game wouldn’t even run. Furthermore, efficiency was applied to the design itself, an action game had to be an efficient and well-designed action game.
Cain says that games from the 80s couldn’t make the mistake of adding too many things thinking they would make them better, so they had to choose carefully what they were going to put in and do it well, which meant greater focus on each thing done.
“You have to be simple. You have to stay focused and everything you do has to be extremely well executed. Then it’s like that fancy restaurant. You don’t have a lot of ingredients in the meal, but that meal is delicious.”
Source: https://www.eurogamer.pt/os-jogos-de-hoje-falham-porque-querem-agradar-a-todos
