Summary
- Fallout co-creator Tim Cain explains why fewer triple-A RPGs allow players to make non-violent character builds.
- One issue is that these games are harder to advertise, as trailer lengths get shorter.
- Another is that action-orientated games perform better, so publishers don’t want to take risks.
While RPGs can often be tackled in a variety of ways, many of them will always treat violence as the default. Some even make it incredibly hard to get through the game without killing a single person, so much so that such runs are often relegated to fan-made challenges.
However, the original Fallout is quite different. While it does give you a lot of ways to fight your way through everything, it is a little easier to be a pacifist than it is in other games. Games like this are few and far between, and according to Fallout co-creator Tim Cain, this is all because they’re harder to advertise – and game publishers don’t want to take risks on something that isn’t action-orientated.
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As reported by PC Gamer, Cain addressed this topic in a new video titled: Violence As The Default In AAA RPGs. This goes over the issues the devs encounter when they want to make an RPG that lets players approach the game in multiple different ways, especially when they have a big publisher to consider.
In the video, Cain highlights that while non-violent genres perform well, “action games far outsell those things”.
As he explains, “It’s easier to market those kind of games. When you watch a trailer and you see people actually doing things, jumping, climbing, shooting, punching, it looks like, ‘Whoa, look at all the things you can do in that game’.”
Cain says he and the team have encountered this issue before when it comes to advertising its own RPGs. “When we were putting together The Outer Worlds marketing, we had big discussions with the marketing people and the external trailer people that we hired,” he shares. “How do we show that this game has a really good story? How do we show that it has fantastic dialogue? How do you do that in a trailer that may only be 15 or 30 seconds long?”
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It isn’t just marketing, however. Cain also says that the industry is quite risk-averse because according to our spending habits, we’re more interested in games that solely focus on violence. “If you look at the Steam top 50 or top 100, you see an awful lot of action, violent orientated games,” has says. “The companies don’t make them because they feel like it, they make them because they sell.”
Cain, however, doesn’t want to change how he does his own games. “There have always been RPGs that you don’t need to do violence [in], so I’ve always touted my RPGs as not only not needing violence, not needing you to make a combat character, but I don’t even tout that one as the default path. I don’t consider combat the main path and stealth and dialogue as the alternatives.”
Cain is consulting on The Outer Worlds 2, so we’ll have to wait and see if that lets us approach obstacles just as he has always preferred in his RPGs. It’s set to launch at some point this year, after Obsidian’s other RPG, Avowed.
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