Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says less is often more in game design: ‘As a very wise designer once said to me, a game that includes everything is about nothing’

In a new YouTube video detailing game design pitfalls that regularly derail game development projects, Fallout co-creator and veteran RPG designer Tim Cain said one of the most common issues in game design stems from neglecting an overlooked skill: Knowing when to stop.

“As a very wise designer once told me, ‘A game that includes everything is about nothing,'” said Cain, who recently returned from “semi-retirement” to resume full-time work at Obsidian.

Trying to fit too much into one game is what Cain calls a “design pothole”: a problem that’s easy enough to avoid if experience has taught you to keep an eye out for it, but could metaphorically “wreck your transmission or blow out a tire” if you’re going full speed ahead.

As Cain says, overambition is a vice that tempts the full spectrum of design disciplines. It can affect narrative scope, where—to use Cain’s example—a game’s lore might gradually incorporate aliens, supernatural psionics, magic systems, and gumshoe murder mystery until it’s lost its identity and central direction.

“The same thing can happen with mechanics,” Cain said, where “you start adding mechanics not because they belong in there, but because someone has told you, ‘Well, you got to have crafting, you got to have item degradation, you got to have base building. It’s what everybody wants these days.'”

(Image credit: Sony Santa Monica)

The problem with ballooning lore inclusions and feature creep is, according to Cain, one of focus and clarity of purpose. As he says, “everything should be added for a reason, and that reason isn’t ‘because I think it’s neat.’ That isn’t a good reason.”

The last decade of games is full of examples that lend weight to Cain’s theory. Series like Assassin’s Creed and God of War found themselves weighed down with crafting systems and Destiny-style incremental loot that felt—at best—like they were peripheral to the fantasy being offered, rather than reinforcing or transforming it.

That same lack of focus has led to other types of design missteps Cain says he’s seen in his career, like being presented with game design documents for RPG encounters where designers said they’d lock the player in a room and prevent them from leaving until performing a specific action, or said they’d “make” the player feel something instead of outlining how to evoke a feeling.

(Image credit: Obsidian)

While it goes without saying to anyone who’s sat through a game’s plot bludgeoning them over the head with a pipe labelled “It’s time to feel sad,” both of Cain’s examples demonstrate a misunderstanding of why someone picks up a game in the first place. And that, he says, is because they weren’t anchored by clear design pillars that ensured the things they were aiming to implement were in service of the game’s direction.

“If at this point you don’t know what all of this is in service of, you’re going to run into problems,” Cain said. “You should know why. Why am I doing all this? Why did I make this setting and tell this story with these mechanics?”

It’s not the first time Cain has underlined the importance of keeping a game’s scope in check. Last November, he urged today’s game devs to learn from games developed during the 1980s, which were forced by technical necessity to limit their mechanical and artistic ambitions—and, in his opinion, were stronger for it.

As the machines their games run on have gotten more capable, and as productions have grown in scale, game developers have been given what’s often been a fatal abundance of the proverbial rope. Design pillars, Cain says, help to anchor those ambitions within useful bounds.

“Once you’ve listed your goals, everything should fall from that,” Cain said.