Tim Cain on Carbine’s Mystery Project, and a Lifetime of Working and Teaching in the Gaming Industry

By Steven Crews | October 10, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: Carbine Studios, NCSoft, Tim Cain

The MMO Gamer: When you use the word “progress” you almost sound like the player is moving along a path which they can see the end of; making progress towards an ultimate goal.

Which would imply that the game would actually come to an end, at some point… which is yet another issue with MMOs as compared to single player RPGs.

You can wrap a single player game up in a nice, neat three act package, and at the end the credits roll and that’s that. But in an MMO you have to keep a player interested for months, years—I mean, EverQuest has been going for a decade, now.

How do you make a player feel as if they’re continually progressing over that span of time?

Tim Cain: Every one of my single player RPGs had a level cap. And every time I did that, “Why don’t you just remove the level cap and let us play?”

And I always said, “Well, what would you do? What would you keep doing in this world? You’ve met all the characters, you’ve done all the stories we put in there…”

Some of the fans had an answer to that. So, we’ve tried to incorporate some of that feedback.

I think people have been trained that an MMO has to be a certain way, and that they have to think of their progress as their experience bar. There’s other ways that are equally rewarding that are not necessarily, “You got two thousand experience points for doing this quest.”

That’s what we’re exploring, because I think our game actually begins when you hit the level cap.

We’ve made a lot of interesting progress, and had a lot of interesting ideas about what to do in an MMO. Because I don’t want this to be the MMO where you play up to level 50, or whatever, and then you’re like “Okay, I guess I’ll roll an alt.”

I’m bringing a lot of the single player ideas that I’ve had, and I don’t want people to have to go through all these old interviews and forum posts, but I’ve gotten really good ideas from fans, where they say, “Well, why don’t you let us do this? Why don’t you include this idea in the game?”

It’s mainly because I didn’t think of it. Where were you during the development process? So, I’m trying to incorporate a lot of that into the MMO.

Since I always play an MMO—I mean, I actively sought out this, I didn’t just go, “Well, I’ve made single player RPGs enough, I’m done.”

When Troika shut down I said, “Okay, what do I want to do? What do I do all the time?” And I played a lot more MMOs five years ago than I was playing single player RPGs. So I decided, why don’t I just make one? Rather than just playing everyone else’s idea.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, after that answer I’m going to put you on the spot here, because I’m sure whatever you say someone is going to gripe about it: Favorite MMO of all time?

Tim Cain: My first one… well, my first MMO that people would recognize would be EverQuest 1. It’s hard to forget your first. I was addicted to that game, I would go home every night and play probably six hours.

I’d work for my usual ten or eleven hour day, and then I’d play EverQuest for six hours, and then I’d sleep for whatever the balance of that time was. Before that, though, I was a huge fan of MUDs, especially LPMud.

When I played EverQuest, it felt like someone had taken MUD and put a graphical front-end on it. I mean the console commands were exactly the same.

So I’d have to say EverQuest 1, but really LPMuds were my first real addiction into this area.

The MMO Gamer: MUDs were mine as well, that’s how I got into the whole online gaming genre. I actually miss them terribly, because MUDs were pretty much always created and run by the players themselves.

There were very few “professional” MUDs, only a small minority were actually making any money off them…

Tim Cain: What I loved about it, too, was you had to play for 20 levels before you were allowed to make any content. So everybody who made content was forced to have played the game.

If people asked to do it earlier, you’d just go, “Look, if you can’t even play the game, why would you expect to be able to make content for people who are playing?”

The MMO Gamer: Do you think we can ever get back to that point in the MMO genre? In commercial, mainstream MMOs?

I thought the Architect patch in City of Heroes was a good step in that direction.

Tim Cain: I think we’re actually moving away from it in MMOs. All you had to do back then was just very simple scripting, and everything was in text.

Now, if you need to invent a new monster you can’t just write a line about what the monster looks like; you need a new model, it needs to be textured, and animated…

It’s very hard to put things together without a whole support suite of personnel. But I’d like to think so, maybe with these new editors that are coming out, where you have so much content in an MMO that people can put together in whole new ways…

But just making a dungeon requires so much work, I just can’t see someone doing it at home easily.

Prove me wrong.

The MMO Gamer: Personal challenge from Tim Cain. You heard it here first on The MMO Gamer.

Tim Cain: [laughs] I’ll play it. I play other people’s games so I can relax, and retire.

The MMO Gamer: I know there are a lot of things that you can’t talk specifics about, yet. But is there anything that you, personally would like to talk about? Something that perhaps we could get into a bit more depth with?

Tim Cain: One of them is why I switched. People ask me why I switched from single player to MMOs. I just thought it was a natural thing to do.
I felt like, I had these ideas for single player RPGs, and I’ve already made them. Also, I think the ones that had the most story and stylistic elements were the ones that people reacted to the most.

Fallout probably had the most, up there with Arcanum, and Temple had the least.

Because we were trying to mimic an exact style, and Temple was supposed to be as sandbox as possible, so it didn’t have a strong storyline that pulled you through it.

I think that bothered a lot of people, they wanted something… “What should I be doing right now?” “You can do whatever you want!” “No, what should I be doing right now?!”

What I liked about MMOs was I kind of had this freedom; people are okay with sandbox in an MMO. That’s what they were taught five or ten years ago to expect.

If you give them something else, it’s refreshing. But they know what to do when they’re not exactly told to do moment to moment.

I play a guild on one MMO where it’s a wide assortment of people who play on it. We’ve got PvPers, we’ve got a lot of people who love raiding, and that’s why I joined it.

I’ll log in on the weekend and see what they’re doing, and sometimes they’re all doing a fishing contest, or the guild leader hid something somewhere and said, “Hey, can someone find it? Someone’s holding something, someone in the guild, and I’ve put clues all throughout the world.”

It’s fun, and it’s kind of quasi-user generated content.

I’d like to see more of that in an MMO, because there’s so much that people can do with that, it felt like a natural thing to move from single player, “How can I challenge one person at a time?” to, “How can I challenge one person in an environment where there are three thousand other people trying to be that special snowflake?”

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