Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura

The Good
This game generally fulfilled its vision of a new setting and story with the same sort of flexibility that worked for the Fallouts. The number of possible character choices and development paths is significantly greater and more diverse than in the earlier games. The interplay of magic and technology, and the different feel of each, is interesting. The evocation of a Victorian English feeling (with some more modern conspiracies below the surface) is particularly wonderful.

Perhaps most promising, the developers seem to have mostly grown up since Fallout2. The sophomoric "humor" is mostly replaced by more interesting and better developed characters. There are moral dilemmas and issues to think about. Many of the factions are drawn in moral grays instead of melodramatic monochrome.

Although some have complained about the "sexism" in the game, including both the lack of female art for two of the playable races (a production cost decision) and the inclusion of some gender discrimination in the world and character reactions (an integral part of the success in producing a Victorian flavor for the game world), I did not find the game particularly prejudiced, and in fact there is a strong subplot around issues of racism and racial exploitation.

The Bad
Not all characters are created equal - there were some balance issues.

One of the most interesting side quests was unfinished, and just leaves the player dangling.

The desire to make a "toolbox" game was not carried far enough to really catch on - in particular third-party adventures can't have a world map - but it was carried far enough to limit options for game scripting.

There were some annoying bugs in the UI even in the final patch.

Managing NPCs in your party was done well in general, but a technical character was not allowed to purchase items for magical followers and vice versa - shopkeepers refused to interact with opposite-aligned characters entirely.

The game was a slug on the best machines available when it shipped.

The Bottom Line
A fine, though not perfect, game and a landmark in CPRGs.

The Good
There's a lot to love about Arcanum, it's the first rpg to come out from the runaway splinter group of Fallout's developing team, and suffice to say that the pedigree shows.

The game provides a truly engrossing experience, in a completely unconventional setting, with lots of rpg-ing goodness and a wonderful character editing system.

Truly the game's strongest point is it's world, it's a mixture of traditional fantasy elements with a strong "steampunk" edge that makes for an incredibly unique gameworld (sort of like "Thief meets The Difference Engine"). A gameworld that is populated to the max with npcs, quests, and places to explore. This of course takes the focus off the main plot, but as long as you understand that, that half the fun in Arcanum comes from exploring and fooling around at your leisure, then you'll be okay. Arcanum appeals to those types of players that want to experience a game from end to end, not just 1 (one) adventure in 1 (one) setting. If you want everything tied up nicely with the main plot then you are barking at the wrong three. The game has millions of sidequests that both enrich and liven up the experience (if you are willing to put the storyline in the back-burner for a while) in fact, few games take you off the main plot to explore an X-files like conspiracy or have you solve murder cases, negotiate political treaties, or lots of impressive quests like the exceptional one with the fortune teller early on....Granted, the game has a bit of "filler" material, but it's nothing compared to the amount of innovative and truly interesting quests it has in store. And the story itself even though is starts out rather bland, gets way better as the game progresses, with a lot of good twists and situations.

The npcs that can be added to your party come in a nice variety, and add a lot of color to the game, they add info and comments on locations and have their background, motivations and will add their own participation to the storyline. Only a select few have this however (tip: choose the talking ones! ;)) and they don't add as much color as in other games like Baldur's Gate, but they bring a lot more to the game than more inventory space and fighting muscle. Whoever says they are merely packhorses hasn't taken Magnus around, or left Virgil early on in the game, didn't take Z'an A'zul Rhin (or whatever!!) to Arronax, left Raven to rot in Quintarra, or didn't even bother to check Torian, etc...

Another highlight of the game is it's powerful character editing system... Which again, will piss off players that have little grasp of what they want. I'm not calling myself an expert in this types of games, but I have seen newbie rpg friends stare blankly at the screen trying to figure where to put their skill points. One must certainly know what he wants when he creates his character, and must be prepared to steer him in the direction that matches his playing style. As in other skill-based rpgs like the Fallout games, the character evolves continuously, and is not limited by a particular class. However the character system in Arcanum goes a step further and in some aspects even surpasses Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. For starters it's based on points, which as even the remaining Black Isle developers admitted, works a hell of a lot better than Fallout's percentage system. You could sometimes add 15% to a skill and nothing tangible would happen, you always had to raise the percentages above certain "milestones" to get stuff to happen (say, 50, 70, 100, 150, etc.). On Arcanum you get a small number of points to add to any skill, but said points ALWAYS make a difference, so needless to say there's a great feeling of reward for every point earned, not to mention that you have considerable bonuses for excelling on each skill like being able to buy worn items, get any npc in your party regardless of alignment, etc.

Furthermore, the game allows you to put points into your basic skills, which is to me, another great choice. The lack of that option in the Fallout games placed you in a shell you had no chance of getting off in the game, once you assigned your points, it remained forever etched in stone for the rest of the game... effectively thrusting you in a class of sorts, a class made by you, but a class in the end. Sure, this system only works if you like this kind of freedom, but even if you don't Arcanum comes with lots of pre-made characters, and an auto-level up scheme which simplifies the whole process.

On the technical side of things, the game comes with a great soundtrack and good sfx. The graphics are dull at times, but they are functional enough. Oh, and for the millions of geeks that keep bugging about the lack of a decent viewing area, I should mention that my copy came with a big Arcanum FULL SCREEN start icon... I suggest you guys try it!

Oh, and you also get a multiplayer mode, an editor, and the chance to play mods! How's that for more player value?

The Bad
For starters there's the fact that the game has serious performance issues. I am well above the recommended system requirements and even so I experienced stuttering, and choppy animations... next time add some 3D stuff guys, if only to take advantage of hardware acceleration...

Also the cutscenes in the game are exceptionally well made, but are veeeery scarce. In fact, there isn't a real ending movie, and there isn't a proper epilogue to your adventure, just a rundown of how you affected each location and character in the world, which is a nice touch... but it's not an ending sequence!!!

Other than that there's the issue of fights and experience earning. The fight system is rather good, it offers a significant amount of options without becoming cumbersome and allows for an interesting set of options, I for one think the addition of a fatigue system works great, since it forces you to keep an eye on what your choices are. Unfortunately you have little to no control of your party members in combat, you can order them to stop or start attacking, but that's about it. Mind you, they work a hell of a lot better than in the Fallout games (whoever says he didn't cross his fingers and clench his teeth whenever any party member whipped-out a smg or minigun is lying his ass off!) but they still have weird quirks. The weapon selection is always weird ("ok Virgil, so you are telling me that Broadsword you can't even handle is better for you even when I'm giving you a filament sword??") and the AI on both opponents and allies is questionable at best. Your friends will take the most weird and stupid routes to get to their enemies, and they will make use of their most powerful spells in completely absurd situations. Ditto the enemies, whom most of the times I just tricked into targeting and following me (keeping out of his reach), while the rest of my party kicked his ass to his seemingly complete ignorance.

Regarding the exp. issue, the game has adopted a weird system. You get experience when you kill monsters, but also when you hit them!! Needless to say, you get very strong, very fast, and while in a decent town you will probably level up once due to the quests, in a typical dungeon you'll go 3 levels up minimum! It sure is nice to feel that you are always moving forward, but your character does get VERY strong VERY fast, especially if you do the altar quests. Memo for Arcanum 2: Fix up the exp. balancing.

The Bottom Line
A truly unique rpg that stands on its own, and even surpasses it's predecessors in some accounts. An interesting question was risen in a previous review, does Arcanum have a meaning? Yes it does, but not in the "You have to go and do this" kinda way. Arcanum's meaning is "You just got dropped on Arcanum. Enjoy yourself" :)

Completely engrossing and fulfilling, Arcanum is truly a landmark in the genre of crpgs, a game that sucks you in, and gets you lost in a brilliantly crafted world.

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.

1. 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).

2. Be prepared to be frustrated.