Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

I nearly had a heart attack when I looked at my RSS feeder and saw that GOG had released Arcanum! I've been hoping for this to be released more than any other game I can think of, as it's one of my fondest memories of years gone by. Sadly, being no longer in possession of the original disc version, I've been unable to experience the wonderful universe of Arcanum for some time. Arcanum was somewhat heavily criticised by reviewers at the time for petty things like its graphics, which were, on my PC, very nicely designed. Arcanum has a lot of style flowing through it, and the steampunk elements are visually still great to look at. There are so many choices in Arcanum, that it would be almost impossible to ever see all that the game has to offer. There are so many different ways to advance your character that the character creation screen is at first quite mind-boggling - magic, technology, stats, all sorts of goodies! There are tpms pf different locations to explore, people to meet, companions to drag around, and even a brothel! I would honestly recommend this game above all others on the site, as it is truly a Good Old Game. The only thing that would top this is System Shock 1 and 2. Do it, GOG!

I'm 15 years old, i try my best to play great and good games (not BF3 or COD) My dad told me about this game he used to play so much, said he put almost 70+ hours in it and still never finished it! So me being a steampunk fan looked up GOG and decided to buy it, i have now put 20-30 hours into this game and im still loving it! I recommend this to any and all steampunk/rpg/magic fans!

I bought Arcanum way back when it was first released - I'd heard a great deal about the Fallout games but never got the chance to play them as I was too young to really be into gaming when they came out, and by the time I was interested, they were too difficult to find. Having heard that Troika was made up of a lot of the key people behind that series, I knew I wanted to check out Arcanum, and the relationship with the Fallout series becomes very clear from very early on in the game. Aside from the mechanical similarities in the way turn-based combat works, the game clearly takes inspiration from Fallout's open nature, and cranks it up as high as it will go. There's remarkable freedom in the character creator, and it's often surprising how many different ways there are to complete a given task with different types of characters. That's not to say that every build of character will be POWERFUL, but so long as you put a little bit of thought into what kind of character you make, it's easy for your character to be viable. A real strong point of the game for me is the dialogue. I've played this game more times than I can remember, and each time I try a different kind of character, I'm still surprised by new dialogue options that didn't show up before. Every aspect of the game seems to be based around "freedom" - a lot of games make the claim that "You can play whoever you want!", but usually when you go through a second time with a different character, you notice that you get more or less the same dialogue options with maybe one or two unique cases where there's a difference. Arcanum, on the other hand - well, to give you an idea, if you play a character with intelligence lower than 9, the entire game will be a significantly different experience for you. Other options might not be quite as... noticeable as that case, but playing through as a half-orc gets you many different reactions from NPCs than playing as an elf. The game isn't perfect - combat is kind of a weak point, though you can actually avoid combat in a lot of cases. There are a few mandatory dungeon crawls, however, the first of which tends to be a major stopping point for a lot of people trying the game. My advice here is just fight past it - it's not as long as it feels and the game gets good again afterwards. Likewise, as I mentioned earlier while every character build can be viable, that doesn't make them even. There are quite a few magic and tech choices that are significantly better options than others, sometimes so much so that choosing them can feel like it ruins the game when you play a character that doesn't have them. Still, overall this is the ideal game for someone who really likes to play their character they want to play it - even the fallout games don't reward individuality as much as this game, and I'd say this is a must-have for any fan of detailed RPGs.

What do you get when you combine a great character creation system with an interesting setting and then toss in a mountain of glitches, broken and boring gameplay, and strange design decisions? You get Arcanum. Arcanum has, by far, some of the coolest character development options I've seen in any game, ever. It's unbalanced: I mean, why would you ever play a gunslinger character when you have to buy ammunition and you do less damage than some beefcake with a sword? Why even bother collecting all the parts needed for an effective technology character when you could just be a mage and just keep yourself stocked on inexpensive fatigue potions? Arcanum is one of those games where you HAVE TO, absolutely have to make your own fun. The game is not going to do it for you. The towns are boring, many of the quests are boring, the moral choices are boring. The world map is possibly one of the stupidest and lamest design decisions in the game. The map itself is freaking gigantic. We're talking, like, real world size. If you tried to walk from one corner to the other I could see it taking you in excess of 500 hours of non-stop running. Possibly more. Here's the problem though: there's nothing on the map. There's nothing to find apart from wherever the developers decided to put a town or dungeon. There really aren't that many towns and dungeons considering how big the map is. There are no random encounters on the world map (that I could find, at least), no random treasure chests, no nothing. It's huge for the sake of being huge. The only time you'll find something on the world map is when you "fast travel" (I put it quotes because it's slow and monotonous) from one part of the map to another in which case sometimes you'll be attacked once by a group of level 1 ailing wolves and sometimes you'll be attacked 10 times by level 40 grizzly bears. My point in laying all this out is that the main problem with Arcanum is obvious: the developers bit off more than they could chew. I believe I read somewhere that Arcanum was rushed to be put out by the publisher and I absolutely believe it. It's so unpolished in so many ways. I feel bad for the people at Troika because if I had been on that development team I would have felt disappointed and, frankly, embarrassed at the end product. So why should you play it? Well, there's a few reasons. As I said above, the character creation system is fantastic. There are many, many possibilities as far as what sort of character you could make. I don't think anyone could play the game and not be able to make whatever sort of character they desired and at least sorta succeed with it. You can basically do whatever you want. I had a blast clearing out the first town of racist schmucks with my half-ogre warrior necromancer. Granted, this did break the game as half of the people in the town treated me like their best friend and the other half tried to kill me on sight about 50% of the time they'd see me (the other 50% they ignored me completely). But hey at least I was able to do that. I enjoyed that if I wanted to do something using diplomacy, violence, sneakiness, etc. I usually could. Arcanum is basically about making your own fun. You just kind of do whatever you want and that's pretty enjoyable. I guess I don't really have much else to say on the positive side because that's really about it. I guess it's just more fun to complain about everything that's completely broken about the game. Believe me, it is broken... but still kinda fun.