After thousands of hours spent in combat with orcs, androids, and enemy militants, I'll admit that it's gotten harder to find novelty in videogame violence. While Steam overflows with trucks, farms, and city builders for when I've grown battle-weary, violence overwhelmingly remains the basic mode of interaction, even in AAA RPGs that tout player freedom. No matter how fantastic a world big-budget RPGs might imagine, they rarely imagine one where it's not just a matter of time before the swords are pulled back out—and Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says that's not going to change as long as we all keep buying it.
In a YouTube video that went public on New Year's Day, Cain responded to a viewer who asked whether he thinks we'll ever see AAA RPGs move beyond violence as the default way for players to interact with the world. Cain's answer was simple: Big budget RPGs will center combat as long as combat sells best, and nothing's ever sold as well as combat has.
"Companies make games—and in general, products—that people will buy," Cain said. "That's it. It means games that sell the most, and I'm not even talking about review the best, just sell the most, will dictate future games."
Cain was conscious to limit the scope of his response to AAA RPGs, particularly because the production demands of mainstream game releases have grown exponentially. "If you have a company and it's trying to make money and there's one game type that sells millions of copies and another one that sells 100,000," Cain said, "which one are you going to do if they both take just as much time and money to develop?"
In RPGs, Cain said, action RPGs like Diablo, broadly speaking, tend to outsell CRPGs that might feature more dialogue or pauseable combat, in part because combat is simpler to market. "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 said.
As a point of comparison, Cain explained that during his time as game director on The Outer Worlds, Obsidian ran into difficulties finding a marketing strategy that would highlight its non-combat elements in preview trailers.
"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?" Cain said. "You have to reduce this wonderful narrative that's super creative and nuanced that has a huge arc down to a soundbite."
Cain underlined that he wasn't saying noncombat games don't sell, noting classics like Myst and more recent games like Life is Strange and the explosion of farm sims clearly "sell well enough to keep making them." Action games just tend to sell better.
"If you look at the Steam top 50 or top 100, you see an awful lot of action, violent-oriented games," Cain said. "The companies don't make them because they feel like it. They make them because they sell."
In an earlier section of the video, however, Cain urged viewers not to feel like voting with their wallets is useless.
"There are products and stores and entire companies that I will not buy from. I don't think they care or even notice, but I do," Cain said. "It's just one of those things that you have to draw the line somewhere and everyone draws it in a different spot."
I think we'd all have to draw a pretty thick line to make a noticeable mark on the market share when those multimillion dollar marketing budgets are in play. Cain seems more optimistic, however, that "companies will listen" if enough players decide they'd like a bit less combat, please.
"To not draw a line because you think it won't matter is a way to guarantee it won't matter," Cain said. "It's like when people say, 'I don't vote because my one vote won't matter.' Once enough people think that way, it matters."
