Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Arcanum seems like an RPG which will let you be creative. Initially that excited me: an RPG with lots of options and this kind of design would be really fun! The excitement quickly turned into disappointment. Despite how it looks at first, it's quickly apparent that Arcanum's choices are irritatingly narrow. You're given many tools, spells, and hints at possibilities. However, the tools/spells don't effect much, and the hints lead nowhere. I had to adhere to the set story-line in a bland way, and even the side-quests were bland. Meanwhile, the NPCs were boring and the game was annoyingly misogynistic. At first, I was thrilled with the possibilities. I decided to play a mage, because I thought that spells could potentially effect the game. Resurrection, speak to dead, and mind-domination are all spells which could be fun to play with if they effected story elements. Yet they don't at all. I also took the trait “extreme personality” for my mage, because I thought that'd get interesting responses from the NPCs. This didn't affect much either. In Arcanum, you can take a tech or magic path, but they seem to ultimately do the same things. Using magic didn't give me an edge outside of battle. For instance, even when resurrection is useful for a potential party member's story-arc, there's a scroll of resurrection nearby in a barrel. Putting points into the spell doesn't change the game or even prove interesting. Most of the corpses the player encounters (not ones the player or party makes) can't be resurrected. Instead, you get the generic message, “This life cannot be replenished.” When they can be, the game tends to glitch or it doesn't notice (I raised an entire group of people at one point and it didn't notice/effect anything.) Speak to dead also proved ineffectual: NPC souls just cried out generic responses. There was only one exception, in a side-quest, but it wasn't necessary or enjoyable. I got the same information from the soul that I did through weak dialogue with the living. So, it wasn't a useful spell either. Mind domination turned out to be useless as well and, at one point, taking a dominated NPC to another part of the world managed to crash the game. So it doesn't matter what kind of character you play, techie or mage. It's not just the character abilities which lack depth, either. As a player I was severely limited in my choices. At points, I thought the game hinted at depth and options. I thought it was trying to coax me to recognize decisions which laid outside of character abilities/spells. When I saw what I thought were hints, I followed up on them. This also led to disappointment. For instance, at one point, there's a murder you can solve in a side-quest. Attempting to resurrect the dead elf leads to information about how some poisons can prevent resurrection. Well, “aha!,” I thought, “I'll just go to the NPC who was earlier mentioned as a specialist in poisons.” He was in Black Root, I went there, and I couldn't even speak about it. The poison specialist exists in isolation. He's for another side-quest, and is useless for the rest of the game. There's also a newspaper article on using fingerprints to solve crimes, but that wasn't an option to pursue either. The game is filled with such hints, but following up on them is useless. And as a player, this made me feel like it was a waste of time to keep trying to explore the game. Too much of the content led nowhere, and the quests had the narrowest of solutions. The theme of uselessness was pervasive. Plot points in the story – the major quests – tended to work the same way. There's often only one way to do things, and when there are options it doesn't matter. For instance, at one point you need a ship. To get one, you can either gamble for one, buy one, or help out a ghost. I chose the ghost option. I gave some treasure to personality-free NPCs, moved a rock, and put a sword in a furnace. None of this seemed to particularly matter. The dialogues were equally pointless. They usually gave limited choices, if any at all, and this held true even when I maxed out persuasion (and mastered it), charisma, and beauty. One sentence was often all I could select. At other points, my choices were: say something sane, threaten the NPC, announce I'll attack the NPC, or walk away. There were minor exceptions – like getting 2 NPCs who didn't get along to party with me, because of my persuasiveness – but these exceptions were boring. For instance, in the example I just gave, it didn't matter to me if these 2 particular people came along or not. It didn't matter to me because the NPCs didn't matter, and that's the next gripe I had with the game. They weren't well-developed, and so I didn't care about them. With the two just mentioned, one was a good elf and one was a bad elf. They each got some initial dialogue when I met them. After that, they commented about the area we were in, if I asked them about it, or screamed for healing if they got hurt in battle. Exceptions from this norm were rare for all of the NPCs. And when they did get development it was weak. One party member's easily interchangeable with another, and battle considerations are more important than plot ones. There are few exceptions to this. The main one comes at the end of the game: there's an NPC you can recruit who gives you an opportunity to talk your way out of a big fight. (You can also get a slightly different “ending” with another one, Magnus, but the ending's the next gripe.) Otherwise, one NPC's as good as another. Since I felt detached from the NPCs, and the world itself, the half-assed ending was lame to me too. Arcanum's ending consists of a slideshow while a narrator says what happened after you beat the game. You hear about how your actions influenced SOME of Arcanum's cities and people. You don't even find out what happened to everyone. In my party I had 3 elves, 2 dwarves, a lizard man, Virgil, and a dog. I got to learn about what happened to the dwarves, and about 1 elf burying somebody. The others didn't even merit a sentence. Instead, I got to find out stuff like how a random bartender NPC got a swanky new place, because I'd destroyed the local crime. The bartender was a minor NPC. I'd had a sentence or two of dialogue with him. I had more interest in the dog's story-line. I was serious when I said I wasn't invested in my party members. However, I found it stupid that a random NPC factored into the ending, but my own party didn't. That'd be like watching the end of Star Wars, finding out what happened to the Cantina owner, and never knowing what happened to Chewbacca. It's not only lame but kinda weird. As for the misogyny... well, it's mainly an issue of contrast. For one, there's the romance issue. Men can woo Raven but women get no love interest. This is fine on its own, since that romance is weak anyway. However, men can have sex with about 8 gorgeous women in the game – a widow, a voiced NPC (Raven), a priestess, prostitutes, and so on. A man can even convince a house-keeper that she'd make a great prostitute, and she'll go to the brothel and offer to let the PC try her out. Women get 2 slobbering, short, greasy fat men. Worse yet are why women get these options. If you're a male character, you can woo your way into panties or pay for it, but you don't get harassed. A female character will be propositioned. If you ask the brothel owner about work (which is common to ask NPCs in the game – they send you on errand quests), she suggests you go to a gross man to prostitute yourself for a couple hundred gold. If you tell her you changed your mind, she'll even say she understands, since he's a gross person, and she's fine with it. The option's so bad even the NPC mocks it. A male PC isn't told any of this; he's not bothered. And if you try to get into the Gentleman's Club and you're male it's fine, but if you're female then you come across the other slobbering idiot. You need an invite since women aren't allowed in. The only way to get the invite other than pickpocketing, murdering, or lying, is to sleep with the nasty owner. The programmers were also “kind” enough to put in the option for a female player to repeatedly bang that slob for fun. Then there's the tavern interactions. No matter how high of a level you are, if you're a female PC then there will be tavern patrons who harass you. These men can offer to let you make-out with them or their shoes. If you insult the NPCs harassing you and they attack (or you decide to attack them first), then the town guards will help them try to kill you. Your alignment also goes down from killing the guards. Apparently it's evil for a woman to defend herself from attempted murder when she tells a jerk off, and he doesn't like what he hears... Design-wise, the graphics are passable. The music's beautiful on the soundtrack. Otherwise, I can't think of much else positive to say. For $6 it was worth playing while I was bored, but only because I had no better games to play and it took a while for the game to severely irritate me. It was cheaper than seeing a movie, at least.

Unique story, setting, and soundtrack. Enjoyable if you like to fail often and love frequent loads/reloads.

I just love this game. There's nothing like it!

graphic bug in WIN10, yes as the title tells.

I can understand why people might enjoy this game, I enjoyed this game for a bit but it really just does not work for me. -The build everyone wants to play in a steampunk fantasy is completely unviable, the gunslinger. -It looks terrible, and I mean terrible, not terrible for it's time, absolutely horrid. Planescape: Torment came out around two years prior, Fallout 1 four years, and both these games look infinitely better, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 even more so. You might think, "Well, I wouldn't be playing older games if I cared that much about visuals", trust me, they are really bad. -Now, people always talk about how good the writing is in Arcanum, okay, what? Maybe it gets better later, because I didn't play it through and through but I think I played it a significant amount and I can really find nothing redeeming about it as far as I played which was about 10 hours, which might not be a lot to you, but, if there's nothing enjoyable in a game after even 5 hours I usually quit it but I put more mental effort into playing this due to the overwhelming love I see for it and it did not end up being enjoyable I'm sorry to say. -Some people say, "Oh yeah, the first bit of the story starts off slow", ahem. WHAT? My man, I've played through quite a bit of slow story-ness, e.g. Peragus Mining Facility & Telos, Shin Megami Tensei IV, etc. and nothing comes even remotely close to this game. +Character creation is fun. I really wanted to like this game, I enjoyed VTMB, which was kind of why I wanted to go back and check this out but yeah, didn't exactly work out.