The best part about Arcanum is that you can do well with any build you dream up, as long as you play to that build's strengths. That idea should be central to any ROLE PLAYING game, but it's usually lost in favor of a few OP'ed combat skills, or buffing intelligence to pick one of two dialogue options. Or, instead of a few obviously more important skills, you have a game where any build works but you'll be a game breaking demi-God by the tenth level... I'm thinking of Bethesda games where you don't have to abide by your thief build constraints, because you can out-magic or out-melee anything anyway, completely ignoring your thiefly abilities for most of the game. Not here. Pick a diplomatic character, talk your way out of most things, and when you can't, have your party of allies fight it out for you. Or be an incredibly evil mage that everyone hates and just blow up all of your obstacles. You get the idea. Your character choices will also impact your experience of the game. There aren't any stupid mini-games or percentile chances of succeeding with a skill you haven't developed... you simply won't be able to do it. The story is a clever twist on the chosen one angle. The side quests and optional stuff usually feels just as well developed as the main plot, although there are some plain fetch quests and such. Now the bad: the stupid, horrible, lame level cap! There is a mod to remove it, but I wanted the vanilla experience, so I ended up hitting the level cap a third of the way into the game, and from that point on, I rushed through to the end. I ignored all side quests at that point, there was no need to do them. I was as rich and as powerful as I needed to be, many times over in fact. I was indestructible until the very end, where I was mildly challenged again. There's no universal loot chests, so you have to store everything in some random cabinet. Also, merchants don't all sell or accept every item. This makes sense logically, but it can be frustrating.
Wasteland 2 is split into two halves. The first half of the game feels really well put together and thought out, the plot revelations all lead to more forward momentum, and the enemies continue to present a challenge to the player while also staying new and fresh. Things start to fall apart in the second half of the game. Enemies get stale, minus a few set encounters. The quests become a string of bland, endless menial tasks. The goals of the main quest still hang over your head during this part of the game, but it's one of those situations where you have to achieve a bunch of small things before you can get back to the fun stuff. The game starts to just throw potential NPC recruits at you, as if by that point in the game you don't already have much better allies anyway. The player encounters different factions LONG before they ever get explained, which is kind of off-putting and sort of breaks immersion if you start to wonder just how in the world your Rangers know the name of those specific robots or moral zealots, etc. The second half just feels tacked on and overly long for it's own sake, as if the developers really, really wanted to be able to advertise 80+ hours of game play, even if the last 30 or so hours end up being a slog. There are other complaints to make, like a handful of useless weapons skills, an irritating skill use system that rewards save scumming, barely tactical combat, enemies that get dull well before the game is over, SOOO MANY faction quests that are just either/or choices... in fact, most of the game is faction quests, and they get old real quick. All that said, I still enjoyed Wasteland 2. The story is enjoyable when it's firing on all cylinders. The garbage loot is always fun stuff like old game consoles, sex toys, Atari ET cartridges. There are a lot of funny NPC dialogues full of Easter eggs and inside jokes. I would cut out most of the second half of the game if I could, but it's still a fun time to play through at least once.
