It seems that Timothy Cain, programmer, Boss during Fallout development, later co-founder of Troika, started a video channel with memories and narrated notes he has taken during development of many games he worked on such as: Falouts 1,2, Pillars of Eternity, Outer Worlds, Tyranny, Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire Masquarade Bloodlines and finally Arcanum.

He seems to be very passionate about games he worked on and recently started to poke on some of these.
In one of his more recent videos he mentions that he owns source code of Arcanum, he does not own the rights (Microsoft does, since they bought Activision), so he can't release sequel nor even a patch to Arcanum.

That being said he has also shared his idea of updating the Arcanum, compiling it for Windows 10, spending a week on ironing out the errors due to modern Win. He is thinking about fixing bugs, balancing and features he was intending to add did not make it before release.

Timothy Cain's referenced videos;
Arcanum As A Windows 10 App

Thoughts On An Arcanum Remake

Troika And Kickstarter: What If?


What do you think? Is there a chance with Microsoft now being in charge that this can get some traction? I mean remake and sequel?

wow that sounds awesome!
but honestly, wouldn't it be fancier if microsoft just gave him a team of devs to make arcanum 2 ? i mean it's about 1/4 century old now, i'm pretty sure there are ways to keep the picturesque optics but do a total rework of the models. and i bet
that plenty of his old team work at microsoft somewhere anyway, as many studios as MS has bought up in the past 30 years ;D
(can you imagine that the same guys worked on GTA online as have worked on LoL? i was so baffled, dev-world is really small, should be even smaller inside microsoft-town)

microsoft is definitely never going to do that. also if he tried to make a "fan patch" he would probably be sued into oblivion by them....which is sad. a lot about the gaming industry makes me sad/angry, just the bullheaded shortsightedness of it is so very aggravating...

Uh, no. There's not reason to think MS would sue him for a fan patch. MS owns Bethesda ffs

Why the hell would MS sue him? Gives them some bad press, and it is basically a fan mod at that point. Getting a waiver from them seems the be the proper way though. The original game was a financial disaster and is still widely unknown today. Theres like 4 video with relevant clicks on youtube, which is basically nothing, and only RPG enthusiast beyond their 40s care about the game.
I love it, and I'd love me some HD remaster to run it without tweaking on modern machines, but there is absolutely no reason for MS to put money in Arcanum 2.

Wait, did this already happen? Today I noticed Galaxy wanted to download a patch for Arcanum, which I last played about 3 weeks ago. The release notes available through Galaxy are still the old ones from 2018, but I went to the GOG store page and it's showing an update on November 13 with several modernization fixes.

Did Tim Cain quietly release the patch he was talking about to GOG, or is Microsoft actually putting money back into this very old game?

No. These changes are related to GOG's recent "Preservation Program" (https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program).
I guess they were done by GOG's own team.

It would be great to get an update for Windows 10! Because I plan to play this game for the first time and I want it to run smoothly on modern systems. I hope that when I start playing, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura will give me a pleasant and interesting experience :)