What made the original Fallout RPG so great wasn’t just its dark humor or apocalyptic setting or branching choices, according to co-creator Tim Cain. What made Fallout great was actually how it was made.
Part of the team responsible for the original Fallout – and now part of Obsidian Entertainment, a studio working on an all-new Fallout game – Tim Cain recently spoke about an aspect of the series’ creation that often goes “overlooked” by many developers and fans alike nowadays.
In a new vlog posted to his YouTube channel, Cain brings up something called the Abilene paradox, which refers to how a group of people might refuse to push back on a bad idea because they’re afraid to rock the boat. Maybe you’re too shy to say you don’t want to eat at a restaurant you know is crappy, just because everyone else seems excited about it.
“That happens all the time in video game development,” Cain says, but instead of submitting to a crappy restaurant, developers might go along with a not-so-great feature for a game. “Too many people think that discussion is argument, and discussion is not argument.”
The famed game dev mentions how he’s worked with people who want to be told what to do, rather than having deep discussions. “If you treat discussion as argument then ideas will never be questioned much less really tested,” he explains. “And, so, your game will go out with a bunch of things that somebody thought should go in. No one ever pushed back on it. Nobody ever implemented it, tested it, and went, ‘No, that’s not very good. We should change that.'” He’s also seen the same pattern in publishers and fans in online forums, too.
“So, this gets back to why I think Fallout was a great game,” he goes on. “Fallout was great because we pushed each other during development and we pushed each other pretty hard. We asked ourselves difficult questions about what we were doing. Should that creature look like that? Should that character talk like that? Should that map be that size? We questioned ideas. We would discuss them. We would defend them. And we would offer better ones… This is something that’s kind of overlooked, I think, in development now.”