Fallout co-creator and prolific RPG programmer Tim Cain's YouTube channel is a treasure trove of what-if stories. What if WildStar had shown up to the MMO craze just a few years earlier? What if Interplay made Fallout 3 instead of Bethesda? What if THAC0 wasn't so egregiously confusing that Cain's encyclopedic knowledge of it didn't get him hired at Interplay in the first place? They're all worth the watch if you fancy yourself an RPG gamedev loremaster—but yesterday, Cain talked about one of his wildest what-ifs yet.

In his most recent video, Cain discussed Time Walker—a proposal for a first-person RPG he drafted at Troika with fellow RPG veteran Jason Anderson, who worked with him on games like Fallout and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. While the game never came to be, even in the form of a prototype or more elaborate pitch, it sounds ludicrously ambitious even today.

In Time Walker, you'd play a "temporal agent" traveling through time and completing missions to ensure your own reality's existence as enemy agents try to rewrite history. As the timeline becomes less and less stable, your gear becomes "more fantastic and improbable," but mess things up too much and your reality poofs out of existence. Once you guarantee the existence of your reality, you beat the game, but if your reality ever becomes impossible, you "cease to exist." Horrifying!

"Feature bullets, these are great," Cain laughed in the video. "One, visit 15 different time periods. Two, meet interesting historical figures. Three, kill them." Some example missions he mentioned involved assassinating a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, giving a young girl a specific doll on her eighth birthday (presumably as part of some shenanigans involving the butterfly effect), and creating a paradox by preventing the invention of time travel.

The way your timeline's likelihood of existence would balance gameplay was meant to invert the typical progression curve you find in many RPGs—instead of the game getting easier as you level up and snag powerful items, the game would get easier as time unraveled and you got to play with anachronistic technology. Once you restored order and got closer to guaranteeing your own reality's existence, you'd be back to a more standard FPS loadout.

Cain also mentioned the game would have made it to the Xbox, incorporated online multiplayer, and had an open-ended skill tree offering multiple solutions to each mission like the CRPGs he'd worked on before this. I still get surprised by the strange and novel ways in which you can beat Fallout, so thinking about the different routes you'd have to account for by throwing in time travel through 15 different zones makes my head spin.

It's worth noting that Jason Anderson, who concocted this pitch with Cain, is currently working at InXile as principal designer on Clockwork Revolution—a first-person time-traveling RPG where reality morphs in accordance with your meddling. It's hard to say how much of Time Walker ended up in that game since it was only ever just a proposal, but it's a fun parallel.

Crimson Desert is a solo RPG, but you'd be forgiven if you mistook it for a live service MMO just based on the headlines it generates. It's morphed and added features rapidly in response to player feedback—as PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor put it, "the playerbase says jump, and Pearl Abyss says how high." While developer Pearl Abyss has received kudos for cleverly nailing the "singleplayer MMO," the studio's director of marketing and public relations, Will Powers, told The Washington Post this approach is the team's norm.

“There was no official communicated roadmap with set-in-stone dates,” he told the Post. "Everything, patch-wise, content-wise, has been iterated in real time based on feedback, based on response … If you bake in a roadmap, you’re presuming. We are not baking in presumptions around what the players want."

Powers drove home that the studio's work on Black Desert prepared it for the rapid, feedback-driven support it now gives Crimson Desert. “That is not normal in the industry. That is normal here," he said.

While there's a lot to be said for executing a distinct vision, Crimson Desert has certainly made popular moves by rendering itself beholden to players' wishes. The people wanted a 'hide helmet' button, so they got one. Movement controls were a bit awkward on launch, and just a few weeks later they were overhauled with a "classic" option retained for purists. Game too hard? Too easy? Don't worry about it either way, because here comes a slew of new difficulty options.

Whatever the vision for Crimson Desert is, it's clear that the game's playerbase has been invited to place a hand on the wheel and get to steerin'. That might be the norm for live-service games and MMOs, and there are perhaps more radically democratic implementations (such as Old School RuneScape's player polls, which determine if new stuff is allowed to go into the game), it's still novel to see a singleplayer RPG operate on this scale and with this intent.

Perhaps it's a sense of partial ownership that drives the game's community to be so passionate about it. PC Gamer online editor Fraser Brown called the online fandom forming around the game "pretty dang wholesome" and perhaps "critical to the game's success"—I imagine that knowing the developer is building a roadmap on the fly in response to players' feature wishlists only makes people more inclined to discuss the game and spread their enthusiasm on social media.

"We’re not onerous about, if an idea didn’t come from us, then it can't be in the game," Powers told The Washington Post. "I think that's something that [other companies are] too ego-driven a lot of the time to be able to accept other people's ideas. It's almost Silicon Valley-esque. A good idea can come from anywhere."