The concept sounds excellent, but it never became reality. It would have been fascinating if it had come together…
Tim Cain, co-creator of Fallout (and a prolific RPG programmer), is a real treasure trove of “what if…” stories on YouTube. In his latest video, Cain talked about Time Walker, a first-person RPG concept he developed at Troika with Jason Anderson, another RPG veteran who worked with him on games such as Fallout and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Although the game never materialized, not even as a prototype or a more developed design, it still seems ridiculously ambitious today.
In Time Walker, we would have played a time agent who travels through time and completes missions to ensure the existence of their own reality, while enemy agents try to rewrite history. As the timeline becomes less stable, our equipment becomes increasingly fantastical and improbable, but if we mess up too much, our reality disappears into nothingness. Once we guaranteed the existence of our reality, we would win, but if our reality ever became impossible, we would cease to exist. Visit 15 different eras, meet interesting historical figures, then kill them, Cain said. Some of the example missions he mentioned included assassinating a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, giving a certain doll to a little girl on her eighth birthday (presumably as part of some butterfly effect trickery), and creating a paradox by preventing the invention of time travel.
The probability of the timeline’s existence would have been designed to balance the gameplay, reversing the progression curve familiar from many RPGs: instead of the game becoming easier as we level up and acquire powerful items, it would become easier over time as we use anachronistic technologies. Once we restored order and moved closer to securing the existence of our own reality, we would have returned to a more traditional FPS loadout. Cain also mentioned that the game would have come to Xbox, with online multiplayer and an open skill tree offering multiple solutions for every mission, similar to the CRPGs he had previously worked on.
It is worth noting that Jason Anderson, who developed this concept with Cain, is currently working at InXile as lead designer on Clockwork Revolution, a… first-person time-travel RPG in which reality changes according to player intervention. It is difficult to say how much Time Walker influenced that game, since the former always remained only a concept, but it is an entertaining parallel.
Source: PCGamer
