I've become a bit of a old school CRPG fanatic, and I REALLY want to find a way to enjoy and play this game, but I have tried half a dozen times to get past the first map and every time I want to reach for the razors. I am convinced by word of mouth that this is well-worth playing, but I can without reservation say this game's control system is one of the worst I have ever seen or experienced, even with the patch. It is horrendous.

That being said, I'm sure I can deal with the clunky movement and inane combat system, but for ANOTHER problem that I have ran into. Everytime I finish a fight in fast turn-based and press the spacebar to end combat and return to regular movement, my combat mode switches me BACK to real time, which is all but unplayable. Am I making some mistake here?? And are short load times between areas the norm on modern computers and when pulling up a saved game??

Yes. The spacebar toggles turn-based vs. real-time combat. The R key switches into and out of combat mode. So that's actually working as intended! Yes, I think so. Pretty sure I had them when I played.

Hang in there... Arcanum's combat isn't that great, but its plot is excellent and it has tons of opportunities to really roleplay different characters. It's worth sticking it out!

Adding to what Waltorious said, didn't your download come with a reference card? That lists all of the keyboard shortcuts, so that you won't have any more confusion going forward.

Thanks for the tips, I tend to just dive in and figure things out as I don't like tabbing out to the pdf files more than I can help it. For the first time in at least half a dozen tries I got the hell out of the crash site and completed the quest with the priest and his cohorts. Truthfully, playing Fallout during the last week made me understand the combat system a heck of alot better.

The game is still beyond clunky from a control perspective, but I knew this was a flawed masterpiece going in. I'm just grateful I'm not going to uninstall it in frustration again.

I understand this, but I really must recommend the Arcanum manual as its an uncommonly good read. I had much more fun reading it ahead of time than I did trying to find information in it afterwards, actually, but I was using a print copy rather than the searchable PDF which might make it easier to find stuff. It's not the best as a reference, but it is a fun read.

So if you have some downtime, maybe check it out!

The most important thing, however, is that you enjoy the game!

[edited for grammar]

I'll add my voice to reading the manual; it's pretty darned good!

I always had issues with the combat as well, but once you start to get the feel for it, it actually becomes kind of fun and that clunky poorly-made feel kind of goes away.

I might even recommend leaving the game for a day or 2 and then coming back to it, you might just easily "slip in" to the feel of it and have smooth sailing from there.

Back when I first played this I actually printed out the manual so I could read it in my hands. It does what manuals used to do, and acts as a preamble/introduction to the world. It was nice to get a lot of the exposition out of the way through the manual, I could then pick an interesting character to play from the very start, specifically to exploit prejudices of the game's setting.

My real problem with the game, early on, was the travel system. It doesn't pull punches with the random encounters, I would always meet a damn bunch of bears, right out from the starter town.

Apparently this is affected by the Unofficial Patch... the base game does use "leveled" encounters while traveling but this caused some weird problems and meant certain monsters would never ever appear, or something like that, so the Unofficial Patch removes leveled encounters and just makes it random. Which means sometimes you get wrecked by a random encounter that's way too hard. It's annoying, and means saving and reloading a lot while traveling, but apparently it's better than what the base game had. At least according to the author of the Unofficial Patch.

As Waltorious said, this is likely caused by the UAP. If I'm not mistaken, level-scaled encounters were actually introduced in one of the official patches. One of the reasons the UAP changed this was that there's a quest midway through the game where you're asked to collect some item only dropped by a specific creature that appears in random encounters, and depending on your level that creature could never appear at all (although there's a place that always contains them, IIRC, but you need to explore a lot to find it).

I think after a few reloads I started to bypass early random encounters by not using the world map travel. Walking for 20+ screens is boring, but so is reloading after running into a pack of wererats near Tarant and having a total party kill as a result.

The Games of Yore often had excellent manuals. Fallout and Arcanum both have good ones.