Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura

The Good
I played many games and IT IS a good game...

The universe is original, it merges mechanic and magic, and the political context between the countries of Arcanum is an important side of scenario. In short the universe is very rich and well used.

The first 2/3 of the game are very very good. Even better than the famous Baldur Gate...

Important point : before starting the game, you can choose to play the official game OR to play games made by gamers or by even you (but not easy to make one). Then it's like if you play a whole new game in the Arcanum univers. There are a few ones on the Internet that you can download.

The Bad
Nothing except that an important thing looks obvious to me : I think they finished to develop the game in a hurry and past the 2/3 of the game you can really feel it. Some important areas of the game that you heard of are small and not as great as announced in the game, some crucial movies are more slideshows than movies and the quality of the end is very disappointing. Too bad... because it could have been the best game I ever played without that.

The Bottom Line
The universe of Arcanum is so rich that I can only advice you to play this game. But be prepared to a decreasing quality on the end and maybe you will like the game as a great one.

The Good
Arcanum directly continues the role-playing tradition of Fallout games, creating a similar RPG experience in its own original world.

Just like Fallout, Arcanum is a highly flexible, open-ended game, a whole world with vast possibilities and nearly unlimited freedom to role-play. In this game, you are what you want to be. Feel like talking your way out of any situation, charm people and have a huge party? Increase charisma, beauty, and intelligence, but be prepared for some tough combat. Want to talk like an idiot, but be a walking tank? Create a character with 3 points of intelligence and with maximum strength and constitution, and he'll talk grammatically incorrect English, but will beat the crap out of everybody who dares to stand on his way. You can be a good person, perform only good deeds, save families, towns, and kingdoms, or you can be a bad guy, shooting innocents on the streets and making deals with criminals and maniacs obsessed by world domination. You can be a powerful magic user, wielding ancient swords and defending yourself with an enchanted buckler, or you can be a skilled mechanic, make guns and rifles, and drift along with the new epoch of technology. In short, this is a game where you can do what your want, but you also have to deal with the consequences of your behavior.

But with all this freedom, Arcanum doesn't lose the track of its story, which is excellent, especially if we realize this is not a Japanese RPG that is all story and no role-playing, but a game that strives primarily to offer the player the ultimate experience of customizing, exploring, and experimenting. With all its heavy role-playing and its open-ended nature, Arcanum has an interesting, suspenseful story full of surprising twists and philosophical speculations.

The role-playing system in Arcanum corrects many things that were a bit underdeveloped in Fallout. You can raise your main stats, which is good. No more running around with measly 5 intelligence and eating drugs as the only mean to raise it somehow. Fight, perform quests, level up, and watch how you turn into a super-powered muscle mountain, or a respectable sage. Of course, there are also plenty of skills to develop in Arcanum. Whoever says most of the skills aren't necessary, like for example the gambling, probably preferred killing the ultra-tough undead pirate Pete with his skeletons, or performing his three tedious quests, instead of simply winning the ship you need, which you can do only if you are a master gambler. This is the beauty of this game: there are so many unique ways to shape your hero that you are likely to lose yourself entirely in all this experimenting. And think of its replay value!..

In an interesting twist, Arcanum offers three types of combat engines the player can select right from the beginning: real-time, semi-turn-based, and turn-based. Personally, I prefer the turn based combat, which I didn't find slow at all. It was more or less the same style as in Fallout clever, intelligent kind of combat, based mainly on strategy. You have action points which determine the amount of actions you can perform per turn. You also have practically no control over your party members. Of course, they would do stupid things sometimes, but I found the ones in Fallout much more stupid - they couldn't use almost any good weapons, didn't wear good equipment, and were sometimes shooting me instead of the enemies. Having Virgil in your party makes the combat much more comfortable, because his healing skill is extremely powerful, and he does use it when I need help. In general I found the battles in Arcanum to be on the easy side, but that only added to the immense amount of fun I was already having with this game.

Your party members in Arcanum are perhaps not as memorable as in Planescape: Torment, but to call them packhorses is an insult. Of course, just as in Fallout, they really make great packhorses, but have you ever seen a packhorse who falls in love with you? Or a packhorse who believes you are the incarnation of an ancient elven hero? Or a packhorse who will tell you how cruel you are if you kill an innocent person, threatening to leave your party for good if you do this again? Or a packhorse that was once the mighty ruler of dwarves, with a tragic, philosophical story behind? No, they are not packhorses, but great companions on your quest, and there a lot of them, too.

The interesting setting of Arcanum makes the already masterfully crafted game even more appealing. It is a unique mixture of technology and magic, but not in the sense of "science fiction magic", like in some Japanese RPGs, but a kind of an alternate Earth: "steampunk" era, similar to the end of the 19th century in England or North America. The game captures the atmosphere of the time, the clothes, the speech, the social structure, and paying attention to the smallest details - interior design of rooms, the growing power of technology, the general rise of activity among people, the desire to conquer and discover more, old-fashioned planes and trains, names of streets, the fight between the old and the new, etc.

Yet this realistic epoch is mixed with a world that strongly reminds of Tolkien's Middle Earth, populated by elves, dwarves, and orcs. All those creatures have now to deal with the development of technology by the humans, and to solve the problem in their own ways. Arcanum manages to seamlessly merge those two completely different worlds.

Just to illustrate how much detail was put into the game: try reading all those books scattered around the world of Arcanum. One of the books is called "The Orc Question", and the author discusses in a typical haughty manner of an English Victorian gentleman what to do with the orcs, how to deal with them, and whether they are really such villains as most people say they are. This book is interesting not only due to obvious parallels to our own reality, but also because the unique style of the 19th century European essays has been carefully preserved here.

Lastly, the music of Arcanum is outstanding, and deserves to be released on a special CD. The whole soundtrack is performed by string instruments. Without too many effects, limited by its intimate instrumentation, this music is both tender and deep, threatening and meditative, emotional and calm, and has a flavor of deep melancholy. The high-quality music of Arcanum can nearly be compared to pieces by Shostakovitch or Bartok.

The Bad
The graphics are functional, but that's all they are. Of course, RPGs are seldom distinguished by their graphics, but it's a real pity that outdated visuals attracted negative attention to the game. Such is the world we live in: games are often judged by their "clothes".

I couldn't get into the real-time combat. I found it way too fast and confusing. The game was clearly developed with the turn-based combat in mind; looks like the real-time one was added as an afterthought.

The game opens with a beautiful CG movie; there are a few others in it, but too few for my tastes. A game with a narrative of this quality could have been more cinematic, pay more attention to dramatic depiction of events.

Oh, and I almost forgot: the level cap! I rarely reach those when I play RPGs; but when I played Arcanum, I hit it at some point before venturing into the final location. Luckily, there is a "level cap remover" floating on the net somewhere; be sure to apply it!..

The Bottom Line
Arcanum is the spiritual heir to Fallout games. Like its famed predecessors, it is a remarkably open-ended game with meticulous customization and nearly unlimited possibilities to role-play. Set in a highly original "Tolkien steampunk" world and offering an interesting, well-written story, Arcanum is a true delight for the RPG gourmet.

The Good
If there was one RPG game that deserves an award in originality, story, concept, and everything else you can think of...this would be it.

I feel in love with the game almost instantly. It was odd, weird, unique, different, that was the feeling I got while the first cinematics played. It was unlike any game I've ever seen before...and I haven't even started playing yet. The music sank right in.

I must say I'm impressed by the Arcanum world. For some odd reason, no one really actually imagined a "modern" medieval world. It was either future or medieval. A world where they combined a world where technology and magic exists caught me off guard. I thought the concept was brilliant. Well, technically not that original, but it's worth the effort in my book!

I thought I was in love the first time around. Then I saw the character creation part. I don't remember the last time I felt this exited as far as RPG's go. Wow! They may have something going here. I always felt that the soul of RPG's is in either character creation or character development. They overdid themselves in the character creation department.

Ah, now we start playing. Oooh, stuff to pick up. Just like Ultima all over again. I'm really liking this game. Haha. They did a good job with the story line too. I felt almost like reading a book while I played the game. Well, close enough.

The Bad
Unfortunately, as much as I have respect for the game, as always, I must focus on the bad stuff that almost ruined the game in my perspective.

Well, the first thing mistake is mine. I have a habit of downloading patches before I play the game, and unfortunately I read a little to much information about the game than I should have. I knew the existence of the NPC's before I even played the game. This got me to a lot of thinking and planning. The problem is, when it comes to games, I'm a perfectionist. I MUST have it all. The though that there were NPC's that I couldn't bring a long was TOO much for my brain to handle. So I had to narrow it down to a few NPC's. It seemed that any NPC that had a voice was invaluable not to have. Then that stupid dwarf started complaining about the death knight as company, I started to get irritated. Oh well, restart game...let's try to be careful handling NPC's.

The more I learned about the game, the more I was a little put off. The fact that I found out there was a level limitation on my character kinda put me in the fits. This means I have to PLAN my character development. If I didn't browse the net, I wouldn't have known. Oh, well, restart game. Time to plan ahead.

Oh, it appears that having this ability at the start is much better than the other one. Oh, well, restart game.

Oh, it appears I should've solve the puzzle this way rather than that way. Oh, well, restart game.

Do you know that being a perfectionist is absolute TORTURE? Try restarting a game for 7-8 times, each lasts more than 10 hours long. You'll understand what I mean.

Then I realized something awful. I started comparing the game to Fallout 2. It started going waaay down hill after that. I discovered that combat was BORING. I had a hunch brushed aside, but I'll get to that later. I remember the extreme joy in Fallout 2, everytime combat initiated. The smell of blood, sounds of crushing bones and spilled guts. Hey, what happened? Suddenly combat was Ho-Hum. I actually resented that I had to fight. They took the fun out of combat. Must be the lack of sound or something. Whatever it was, it didn't feel the same.

Now comes to my hunch. Hmm...why are they making this game semi-real time/turned based. Why not either real-time or turned based why don't you. Why did you have to have both? Then it triggered another fishy hunch I had. Then a word popped up in my mind! Gasp! Diablo 2.

My god, is it me or is this a little similar with Diablo 2? Hey, Diablo's a great game, but honestly, as an RPG...welcome to pre-school. Diablo has incredible cinematics, but as an RPG...a kiddies game. My second fishy hunch was on character creation. They had an option for "quick" character creation. It bothered me to think that someone would actually play this game without going through the detailed character creation. Oh my god! It occured to me...they wanted non-serious gamers to also enjoy the game! NO! The shock was to much for me. Now I see it. That's what's wrong with the game...they bowed down to capitalist demands of the market! Well...not that I blame them, but they sure hell screwed up somewhere. Enough drama.

Then comes the bugs. Had to restart 3-4 times just because I found so many god dang bugs, that messed up my saved games. Well, eventually, all the stress said above and the bugs finally popped my rocker. I was so dang pissed. I really tried to play this game, but it wasn't easy. I finally retired the game, fearing my high blood pressure would get the better of me.

When you play this game, you'll know that is one of those games that comes once in a life time...but it didn't become the perfect masterpiece because they with-held it to become the masterpiece it could, should or would have been...for the sake of...well...the common folk.

Well, I tried. I really really tried.

The Bottom Line
As I said. Almost perfect. But unfortunately, I am sad to say that Fallout 2 is better. Maybe after my temper cools down, I'll pick up this game again...and finish it.