Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Arcanum is, in many ways, the archetypal Troika game: Brilliantly conceived but sloppily executed. Bugs, combat that vacillates between tolerable and awful, unbalanced gameplay and an at times obtuse plot mar the experience. Still, the fact that Arcanum is among the finest RPGs ever created speaks volumes to the creative clout wielded by the now-defunct Troika. The game's weakest point is the combat. It is unbalanced, boring, repetitive, illogical (monsters are a mishmash of fantasy tropes that frequently have little or nothing to do with their respective environments) and is most often merely used as a barrier to player progress. The last point in particular is frustrating to me. In good game design, combat should enhance story progression, not hinder it. I don't want every combat area to merely be a grinding slog between plot points. The game's strongest point is the character creation and realization. You really can create and play a huge variety of characters (though the viability of characters varies wildly due to balance issues). Even if a technologist with an allergy to magicka is at a huge disadvantage compared to a pure mage, you can still play one consistently throughout--and the game will recognize and respond to your choices. That is not true with a great many RPGs that funnel different characters into one path or don't respond to unique character builds. Arcanum knows the difference between a suave human swashbuckler, a haughty elven mage, a brilliant dwarven tecnologist, a nimble halfling thief, and a half-ogre with a stunted IQ but an overgrown fist, and will respond accordingly. That, in and of itself, is probably worth the purchase price at $6. In conclusion, this is an outstanding game that could have been truly remarkable if only the flaws had been ironed out before release. If you like story-driven games with deep character choices and real role playing, there are few games before or since that are better. If you like great combat and high production values, however, you will likely be disappointed.

Unlike the other well known CRPGs this one isn't loved just for it's story and dialogue and in spite of a "good enough" gameplay system. This is all about the gameplay. The lean story and biting dialogue are just there to keep the atmosphere up while you explore an amazing world with numerous and diverse mechanics. You have 16 skills with 5 levels and 3 expertises (aquireable abilities/bonuses that require a certain skill level) each. And only 4 or 5 of these are combat skills There's 16 schools of magic with 5 spells per, filled with useful cantrips and even the 3-4 combat focused ones have some oddball stuff like raising back any deaders to talk to them. Then there's also 8 tech trees with 7 schematics each and another 30-40 recepies in the wild. Recipies for practical contraptions, queer drugs, mechanicals. The game is real time and done properly so (though it also has a turn-based mode for old people). Got high dexterity and a fast weapon? You will attack very fast, visibly. You can throw anything you can hold. Items in your grid based inventory have both size and weight and big things are big, I mean fill your whole inventory big, and it's a big inventory. I sometimes open the game just to listen to the menu music. You have deep lore with continent spanning mistery quests and occasional tongue and cheek moments but it's mostly serious. The culture of the world is real. Real people who do real things. Who show self-interest and don't care about you. Who are sometimes cruel but never villainous. Who don't drown you in exposition just because you're the player, excluding Virgil but like all characters he can be ditched or killed and the story adapts. I find it hard to tolerate a lot CRPGs because they're mostly dialogue and combat. Options given to you, options thought out by someone else. But this one is different. In this one you can be yourself.

Obscura: Not clearly expressed or easily understood. (Oxford Dictionary.) George Lucas once said a motion picture is never finished, it just escapes or words similar. This could also apply to games and could be fairly suppositioned that Arcanum must have escaped well prior to completion. A huge vast portmanteau sandbox of a game with no tutorials, this is no “my first cRPG”. Perhaps prescribe “three-wheeler” Fall Out 1 for non-RPG playing friends and family as a fun trainer and introduction to the world of role-playing. Patience is a virtue, a virtue much needed if you are to get into this RPG. If, up to now, your main supply of fun in gaming was strategy or adventure or shooters, run, run away now! This is an RPGer’s RPG of the save frequently, die frequently variety. Unlike most RPGs you start out as an individual protagonist on your own and gradually build up your collection of NPC followers. Be warned, accumulation of NPCs can take a while with the possible exception of the first. One of the more innovative features provides opportunity for evolution thru out the game of Good and Evil alignments depending on your actions (as in real life). Voice “acting” is mercifully sparse, as are game options regarding graphics, sound etc. If you enjoy running back and forth fetching items and executing various tasks for strangers and getting killed frequently (save, die, reload, die, reload etc) then Arcanum is your game. If you like wolves, wolves and more wolves and killing rats as big as overfed chihuahuas you’re gonna love it. If you like having to talk to every single character met to get info that should just be readily available, like locations on a map for example, you’re gonna love it! Tedious chores are something you can find in 9/10 typical fields of employment so why oh why would anyone want to play a game filled with tedious chores? And yet paradoxically, altho this game has a long list of defects, this does not stop Arcanum from being loads of fun! Rating: 60%

The game has rough graphics and unsettling soundtrack, but I guess the latter is by design. I like it, but not everyone does. Also the game seems a little imbalanced, but it boils down to "you need also a skill to make money", which is unusuall. You wont be showered with prizes for quests, little loot, you need to know how to steal, gamble or you'll end up cleaning trash (random cheap stuff appears there every day) just to buy potions/bullets to your gun/cash to repair your armor. And stealing is cool. You can steal everything from every shop, but they are heavily guarded and getting in, opening a stash and getting out alive is tricky. Much more rewarding than "max the skill and click". Now to the story and world: Story is AMAZING. There's multiple unforseen pivots, where everything you thought becomes something else than you thought. There's several Sherlock Holmes investigations you conduct, several Indiana Jones-like legends. The amount of content is even bigger than in Fallout 2, like 10x more than in modern games (maybe except Witcher 3). If you have enough imagination to suffer ancient graphics, this is a feast for an RPG fan.

I wanted to love this game. I'm a big fan of their other games, especially Fallout 1 & 2. I've played those through many times, and though those games have a few minor bugs, they are not bugs that ruin the game experience. If you could cut out the horrendous number of bugs in this game, this game could really be a great game. However, I've been playing this game for a few days now, probably put in about 20 hours of game play so far, and I'm not sure if I even want to finish it. I love RPG's and this is nothing against the actual base of the RPG itself. The leveling system and everything is interesting and the concept drew me in. The bugs started the very minute I started playing and continued growing throughout the gaming experience. For example, my character, being a mage, summons an orc champion to fight; after fighting, I decide to rest to recover my experience, and my orc champion disappears, but his icon remains in the upper left hand corner. No big deal, I think, a minor bug is all. Well, I continue playing and realize, not only will that icon never disappear, it affects my other characters. My NPC's will not fight, not even retaliate when being attacked. They would not walk with me, but would just magically appear by my side every few minutes. I could talk with them, whenever the computer decided. Later on, I manage to figure out that though invisible, I could still kill that orc champion spawned at the beginning of the game, which I do, and voila! My NPC's start working again! Ok, that's fine, I think, but even more bugs pop up, I put on a magical invisibility ring, and turn invisible; take it off again, and I remain invisible, unable to talk to any shop owners or finish my quests, because the people think it's a ghost! Some quests, when they become broken, remain in the journal, while other quests get marked as broken quests, correctly (Bring the ale quest, 1 example). Sometimes, when summoning a creature, my other NPC's get angry and start attacking me without provocation. There are tons of bugs like this. My character is a level 22, almost level 23, half-elf mage. He will probably stay that way, unless I can muster up the willpower to go in and suffer through till the end. My advice: If you haven't played the Fallout series, you're missing out. Go try that one instead.