Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

i m giving 5 stars mostly because game is absolutely worth playing level of minor bugs and funky glitches is insane frustrating quest design where you need to deliver inventory tax and if you don't have space it gets dropped on the floor... There is a lot of items that if you don't take advantage of private property for storage you will get lost Some of the backgrounds and pre-mades are quite useless and sometimes would just take bonus points instead Technological tree is weird, its overpowered by inventory in slots and useless by itself Having to reset shops 30 times to craft items you need in the endgame is a joke Magic gets completely flat-lined by Harm and summon ogre...there is a lot of wonderful spells to play with, but few insanely violent and strong spells dis-encourage people from trying cool things Fate point system is amazing - in exchange for resolving situations more or less as developers wants you, game provide you with points that can be used for minor cheat Karma/morality system is a joke, its nearly impossible to be evil unless you play as murderous-failure or take advantage of Amy's Blade -30 karma per hit... Game itself often see Evil as killing good... but if you are "better" than everybody else killing others is fine... Followers magically sense your karma... Game have neat in theory friendship system... in practice Friendship only goes down and once it gets there you need to bribe your friends unless you intentionally killing them to ressurect... Half of the spells and abilities are completely useless or insulting if you end up investing there Story is very good and World is insanely immersive if you like fallouts/adventure games/immersive sims/mass effect (story-choice side) this game might appeal to you A lot of quests have multiple solutions, Spells can be very creative and wonderful to play with You can make entire playthru around collecting newspaper volumes! Community exist and i even made nexus mods for this game!PLAY IT!

I discovered this game in my very early teens around 2005 and could not make heads or tails of it. But the world drew me in so much that I could not stop playing it and finally leared what's what. I come back to it every few years or so to remember how absolutely fun Arcanum is, and how infuriatingly broken it is. Buyer beware - even with Drog's unofficial patch it's still... janky. But if you're willing to give it a try and overcome the bugs when they pop up, you're in for an amazing adventure.

extremely enormous dialog for diverse situations. More complex than common DnD games.

Maybe it's the rose tinted glasses talking, but I played it before, and I still love it now. I forgot so much of the story that I only remember the main twist; but on revisiting this classic, I got so much more of the nuances. The... "bodyguard making factory"... was a particualry dark questline. Although a lot of the modern features that we're used to isn't in this game, do stick with it. Also, get the fan patch. You have no idea how much better the fan patch makes this. This is one story you'll have to exprience to understand.

I played this when I was in the single digits and it captured my imagination. I love this title. It has its quirks and its shortcomings, but they're shortcomings that are present in games that deserve a sequel to have a chance to iron them out. It's steampunk, magic, guns, swords, fantasy, and intrigue. It's controls are dated, maybe. We won't be getting any updates for it. But it's so lovely and fleshed out and so rich in its content (in my opinion). I love it, and I wish we could either get a remaster or remake, or even a sequel.