Fallout and The Outer Worlds co-creator Tim Cain has began a YouTube channel overlaying tales from all through his over 30-year profession within the video games business. One of the crucial stunning tidbits he is shared within the week since coming on-line is that the corporate he co-founded with fellow ex-Interaction Fallout luminaries, Troika, nearly made a Lord of the Rings RPG (opens in new tab).
Cain nonetheless has footage of the demo he mocked up again in 2000. It is on the Arcanum engine, and even boots up with that recreation’s primary menu and shares a lot of its UI parts. Curiously, it has this actually attractive pre-rendered background artwork like Baldur’s Gate as an alternative of the admittedly drab (however nonetheless charming) Fallout-style modular tiles of Arcanum. If I did not know higher, I might have guessed this was a prototype of Troika’s later Temple of Elemental Evil (probably the most D&D of all D&D video games (opens in new tab)).
To listen to Cain inform it, Troika was contracted to make the demo by now-defunct writer Sierra after it acquired the rights to the LotR books (however not the flicks! A really familiar-sounding state of affairs (opens in new tab)). “Sierra favored what they noticed,” Cain mentioned within the video, “then determined to tug all the event internally. So we did not get to make the sport.” Sierra went bust in ’02, and the LotR CRPG went the way in which of the Dodo or the Jess Mariano spinoff of Gilmore Women (opens in new tab).
Cain says the sport would have adopted a kind of “shadow Fellowship” clearing the way in which for Frodo and the gang, which to me sounds so much like EA Redwood’s PS2 Lord of the Rings JRPG, The Third Age (opens in new tab). Actually this one does not bum me out an excessive amount of to have misplaced on this timeline, although it does rule to gawk at a never-before-seen, prototype Troika RPG on Arcanum’s engine, or a minimum of it does for a freak like me.
In one other video, Cain does get right into a recreation from Earth 2 I actually do want I might have performed in some way: Arcanum 2: Journey to the Centre of Arcanum (opens in new tab), which by no means acquired previous the design doc part. As an apart: you may peep a cheeky PC Gamer Editor’s Selection medallion on the Arcanum massive field Cain holds up—it is actually nonetheless this PC Gamer editor’s selection. Although if Troika had tried making a Supply engine, first-person sequel to Arcanum, who is aware of in the event that they ever would have gotten round to creating certainly one of my all-time favourite video games: Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines (opens in new tab).
In yet one more video from this previous week, Cain reveals that the legendarily fraught growth of this primary particular person vampire RPG was nearly much more bold: Troika proposed a multiplayer mode Cain affectionately refers to as “Counter-Chunk,” the place a group of vampires would sq. off in opposition to a group of Vampire Hunters to try to wake or stake a strong, sleeping, elder vampire. Activision (maybe very correctly) judged Troika had an excessive amount of on its plate already, and outsourced Counter-Chunk to a different studio earlier than axing VtMB’s multiplayer aspect fully. Unexpectedly, battle royale VtM recreation Bloodhunt (opens in new tab) appears a lot much less of an “on the market” concept to me.
It is solely been like, every week, and Cain’s already blown this RPG fan’s thoughts a number of instances over with these candid seems to be into his video games’ growth—and I have never even began the video titled “The True Function of Vaults in Fallout (opens in new tab).” Cain says he is entered a semi-retirement now, nonetheless consulting on tasks with Obsidian and different builders, and his Cain on Video games (opens in new tab) collection is properly price watching—he is gotta do an episode on Troika’s Fallout-like publish apocalyptic RPG prototype (opens in new tab) ultimately, proper?
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