Summary
Voi ch'entrate lasciate ogni speranza (Dante, but not the one met in Ashbury)
The Good
You WANT to play this game. It's Fallout garbed in Wild Wild West and
Dungeons and Dragons finery, with scents of Ultima VII. You want to play
until you have figured
the use of all those trinkets, filaments, metal shavings, sprockets,
watch mechanisms, and so on, and so on. Until you have built something
out of a broken flintlock pistol and a small tube (answer: a working
flintlock pistol). Until you have pieced together the fascinating
story of this engaging parallel world. Perhaps I have explored as much as
one hundredth of
the world of Arcanum, perhaps as little as a thousandth.
I want to see more, to explore it all.
Most likely, I never will. Why?
The Bad
It started gradually, my annoyance growing slowly, slowly. Little, tiny
wee pieces of aggravation which I was all too willing to put up with, so
eager I was to play on. Then it exploded like a soap bubble. Joachim's
trail of notes told us, Virgil and me, to go next to Stillwater.
Oh, we'd come across a mention of Ashbury too, but Stillwater seemed the
logical next stop. No Stillwater, no Ashbury on the World Map when
we consulted it, though. So we decided to board the train in
Tarant. As I went to buy tickets at the booth, my mouse pointer
turned into a sword. Wot? Combat mode? What had I done to deserve
that? I quit, reloaded, and was careful to watch my step this time. Combat
mode again?! Was it something I'd eaten? (too much garlic, maybe?).
After a few reloads, Virgil and I just decided to walk to Black Root
and board the train from there. All went well. So the Tarant incident
must have been a bug. But... wot? Stillwater was not on the time
table, but Ashbury was. So we rode to Ashbury, which then, and only
then, showed up on the map. We really had no interest at all in
fixing their problem with the ghouls, zombies, and assorted undead
in their cemetery, and Dante, who had eagerly joined us, seemed such
a shady necromancer type that we quit again, and reloaded. That is
when the bubble burst.
The bugs, the inept combat, the needle-in-a-haystack errands, everything.
The bugs. I just mentioned one. Another is during combat, when your
followers, or the beasties, appear to go into an infinite loop,
leaving you there, waiting for your turn, forever and beyond.
And then, the odd screen freezing solid, but we're used to that.
The inept combat. The blurb on the game box is a farce. Don't you
believe a word of it. The so-called
turned-based combat allows you no tactics. In Fallout, like
in X-COM Enemy Unknown, you know in advance the cost of moving here or there,
and how many movement points you will have left for an attack.
In Fallout, for every weapon you had, you knew the cost of
using it, so many movement points for a shot of the sniper rifle, so many
for the Desert Eagle pistol, so many for the sledgehammer, and so on.
Nothing of the kind here. You just now how many movement points
you have and the "speed" of your weapon, whatever that is.
But you never know how many moves away you are from your
target, how long it takes you to reload... why, as far as I could
figure out, there was no reloading time, so that the only difference
between a one-shot flintlock and a six-shot revolver was only
damage and range. This is grotesque. Reloading a flintlock must
have taken 30 seconds in real life. Shooting the next round of a
single-action revolver? Cock the hammer, pull the trigger. A split
second. Now all
those things were nicely taken care of in Fallout. Here? Nothing.
Combat has become a mindless brawl, a sorry farce. And I am cutting it short.
I could rave on for two pages and more, count your blessings.
Next, the maps. Everytime you enter a town you can bring up
a local map of it. The map is unrealistic and useless, because there is no "fog of war" so that
the parts you have not explored are just as clear to see
as those you have, and, typically, you never know whether you've already been
here, or there, or if it remains to be explored. There is worse. If you have strolled
along, oh, say, Devonshire Way in Tarant, and looked at
the number plates of the houses there, they will show as
question marks in the map, and, hovering your mouse pointer
over them, the addresses will be revealed (good)... but not all
places so observed will show with a queriable question mark (bad, very bad).
Try that in Black Root especially. Some of the locations
will have been recorded on the map, most not. This is particularly infuriating when,
having found Sarah Boone in Dernholm, solved her problem
in Tarant, and hoofed it back to Dernholm to tell her
the good news... you have forgotten where she lived, and
you have to visit every single godforsaken shack in
godforsaken Dernholm to find her again (no-one you meet
knows about her). Your journal is completely, utterly useless there. Why, you
can't even jot down your own blog in it (remember
Ultima Underworld?).
So Virgil and I resolved to download the two patches (5.4M in all), in the
fond hope that they would make the game playable at last.
We had learnt our lesson, too, namely, that if you take
on many quests (errands, rather) you soon become lost.
Er... yes... we got Colonel Eric von Stroheim's silver
dentures from the Dark Elven Ruins, but where does he live again? With a great deal
of luck your Journal has it: 36 Alexandrov Prospect. But
in what city? Tough luck. You should have made a note of
it on good old real paper with a good old modern real ballpoint pen.
Imagine: all those technological gadgets in Arcanum, and
they didn't even think of inventing the PIP Boy!
Or at least, some proper paper and a proper goose quill, to keep
with the Victorian England retro style.
So Virgil and I started all over again, from scratch,
swearing never to take on a new quest until we had
solved the current one.
And thus we came to the Mayor of
Black Root, burdened as we were with the task of convincing him
to pay his back taxes to the King of Cumbria in
Dernholm. The mayor asked us to find his ceremonial
dagger, his symbol of office, stolen by thieves "on the outskirts
of town". We searched the outskirts of Black Root high
and low, left, right and centre, east, west, south and
north, to no avail. We interrogated every single living
soul in Black Root. Not a clue. We downloaded a walkthrough, which
said: follow the path leading out west of town, eventually
you will find the thieves' camp.
We did follow the path, and beyond, when the path
petered out. Nothing. We trekked back and forth, forth and back,
south and north, north and south, west of Black Root. In vain.
And no wonder, a screenful covers an area of about
20 metres by 30, and after trudging 20 screens worth at least,
you still find yourselves only a pixel away from your
point of departure on the world map. We switched to
the world map view, picked a point a longish way due west of Black
Root, clicked "Go". Never a whiff of a thieves' camp.
Navigating the local maps is an infuriating business. Want
to go from Madame Tussaude's to Delores Boston's place to
deliver a crystal ball? Theoretically, you scroll the map,
mark way points by clicking, then click the "Go" button and
there you... go. First, why do you need intermediate points?
Why can't you just click on your destination and be done
with it?
Second, you often get this hair-tearing message: "your path
is blocked" when, in fact, the two points are within plain
view of each other, without a single obstacle in between.
Third, sometimes, you just don't make it there because a
wandering pedestrian has chanced into your path, and
the AI is too stupid to have you walk around him. You have to
take over and do it yourself.
A similar "path blocked" message often flashes on
the world map when trekking from one city to another, even
though there is nothing in the way of your destination.
You just have to find another way point, not "blocked",
a few pixels away.
And the world map is bogus. I talked Virgil into taking
a break on our way to Black Root to take a look at the
bridge over the river (what's its name? No names for
those rivers on the world map). I was expecting a breath-taking
view of a feat of Victorian engineering. I clicked on a point
carefully picked slap bang in the middle of the picture of
the bridge... go!
When we got there, lo and behold... no bridge, no river.
Just grass.
We went in ever widening circles looking for the bridge.
We didn't even find the river. But just try clicking
your first way point on the west side of that non-existent
river, the second on its east side... "path blocked".
To get through, your two way points must straddle the
bridge exactly. Ridiculous.
The Bottom Line
1. Combat is a brainless, preposterous farce. Don't put up
with it: find a character editor and pump up your and
your followers' strength and dexterity right up to the
maximum.
2. Don't rely on
your "journal", keep your own, either on physical paper
using a physical pen, or repeatedly hitting Alt-Tab to
access your favourite word processor (mine is NoteTab).
3. Be prepared to be frustrated.
