Arcanum: Am I the only one...?

[Stormz]

I've always wanted to try this game. Think I will now in fact. I'm a big fan of these type of Rpgs.

 

[Good morning blues]

I've wanted to try this one ever since it came out, but I've never really been able to get into CRPGs. I want to do this one, but I kind of want to do it after I finally play Planescape: Torment.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Ok in a previous thread I mentioned a game called 'Arcanum' which was by the makers of Vampyre: the masqurade but a totally different style of game. Both games were brilliantly made and a wonder to play. They were both also extremly bugged

I feel this should be a testimate to how good each of these games are that a company can release 2 extremely bugged games but both are still amazingly fun to play and extremely open

Those of you who have come to this thread wondering what arcanum is: It is a top down RPG (Diablo style) in a steampunk era. You play as a self designed character exploring the open world of arcanum. You can use magic, technology and skills to and any quest can be done however you choose. This openess is taken so far that any quest you encounter can be done however you feel. You can even kill the person giving you the quest and just take the rewards. You can kill every person in the game, and the shear number of quests is staggering. You have to play it multiple times just to see most of them. I would advise it to any fan of an open RPG

My real question though is: Has anyone else actually played this game??

I tried to. I purchased the game based entirely on the weight of the box (in my experience, the heavier the box the better the game tends to be, at least that used to be true before games all shipped with a tiny pamplet of instructions and a warranty card as a rule rather than an exception).

It seemed like the kind of game specifically made for a person like me but in the end I just couldn't get into it. This was the same problem I had with morrowind really - the game rebuffed my first attempts to figure out what was going on. Only, with Arcanum the game never got a second chance. Morrowind on the other hand happened to be the only game I had to play for several months of a deployment and I grew to love the game.

Also, the technical term for the perspective in Arcanum is isometric.

 

[Tread184]

I own this game, it's one of my favorite RPGs ever. It's SO open ended and you can do SO much in it, much more than the original 2 Fallout games. Speaking of the Fallout series, many of the creators of Arcanum were former members of Black Isle and co creators of the Fallout games.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Yeah, I've played it. Although I would describe the gameplay as being much closer akin to Fallout 1 & 2 then Diablo. But anyway I loved Arcanum, it was an excellent game to be sure.

 

[Mekado]

I use to play this game a few years back, it was pretty fun

 

[WolfThomas]

Yes it was the first game I played on my, at the time, new computer (which is the same one I use today, except nothing of the original is left), I had the game a week before the computer arrived, I read the manual back to front twice (it was amazingly detailed).

I played it as so many different characters, cowardly human braggart who never fought up close, relying on ogre muscle, dark elven necromancer, dwarven barbarian (called Ivan Stormblast) and empowered feminist machinist who designed deadly robots.

I absolutely loved it at the time.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Yes, I played it. It was buggy as hell and often times I got lost on just where the hell I was supposed to go but it was pretty fun.

 

[Summerstorm]

Ah Arcanum... great game. Loved it. (It's awesome if you have a necromantic spell which will drag down the souls of your enemies to hell... and fire it at some random bartender for being rude *g*) Oh... and what was awesome too was that if you play a completely idiotic character ( ithink int under 3 or so) you play a different game... you talk like an idiot and everybody is always tricking and fooling you. Awesome.

Oh and the world itself was great too. With the airships( zeppelins) and elven magicians, Ogres with powergauntlets... you know what... i want to play it again.

Too bad that the dudes never got the money they deserved. Bloodlines was a near-perfect game too. But when i bought it, they were already bankrupt. If they would have bought/teamed up by/with by bioware or so... that would have been sweet.

 

[Satin6T]

my girlfriend says this is like her favorite game ever, I only clicked on this thread to see if she made an account and made this thread...

however it wasn't her, obviously,
but yeah sounded like fun, i'm trying to find a copy of it

the sex scenes sounded funny

 

[Graustein]

Played it before, found it extremely fun, but it's unfortunately very easy to break. When I went maximum stealth and speed, I wanted something viable, not the ability to kill everything before they get the chance to move.

That said, I miss it. I've heard it's essentially a steampunk Fallout, possibly even the same engine.

 

[Kilo24]

I have played it and although at points it really drew me in the engine was fairly weak and frankly it was impossible to give a toss about any of the characters. Your NPC partners (all woefully AI controlled) have no personality whatsoever, the one or two have actually have spoken dialogue pretty much repeat the same two or three lines over and over in combat then clam up for the rest of the game. Nice premise and it had potential but no characterisation really killed it for me.

That's not true for several of the characters. The first guy you meet has several plot events and a personality; most of the rest have at least a few sentences worth of description to their personality and abilities. The voiced characters do have a few interesting quirks to their name (several of the many ones that you can recruit have extra quests) though it's not much. It's not anywhere near deep enough to be a good point of the game, but there are many worse games out there in that regard.

It's my second favourite game behind Planescape: Torment. The diversity of characters you can make is really impressive (it's a point buy character system more flexible than many pen and paper RPGs,) the setting is unique and well implemented and presented, the ending changes significantly based on many actions you do over the course of the game, there's a lot of things to do in the game and several ways to do them, a great skill training system and the game changes for different characters moreso than I've seen in any game.
Of course, as all of Troika's games do, it suffers from a lack of polish, not much character development, wonky balance (you won't need any more than max strength + max dex + max dodge + max melee to easily slaughter everything in the game), and a number of little oversights that would have improved the game. But it's still unique and awesome.

And the persuasion is the best persuasion I've seen in any game (Phoenix Wright is probably the closest, but still isn't as good.) You need to both have the skills on your character and think about what you're really saying to persuade whoever you're talking to, rather than just clicking on an option that says "Persuade".

No. But I hate the elder scrolls. (which this sounds like)

The Elder Scrolls are much inferior in my opinion; their setting is much less original (especially Oblivion), their character development is more restrictive, most quests have one solution, the spells are less diverse, the potential differences between characters are smaller, and the dialogue is poor. They do have more content, but I'll take Arcanum any day.

 

[Jandau]

Played it, it was OK. A lot of interesting concepts ruined by atrocious graphics (the first Fallout looked better!), poor balancing, bugs, etc. It was one of those games that would have been legendary if only they had a bigger budget to do some proper graphics and polish the game much more.

 

[Daedalus1942]

Ok in a previous thread I mentioned a game called 'Arcanum' which was by the makers of Vampyre: the masqurade but a totally different style of game. Both games were brilliantly made and a wonder to play. They were both also extremly bugged

I feel this should be a testimate to how good each of these games are that a company can release 2 extremely bugged games but both are still amazingly fun to play and extremely open

Those of you who have come to this thread wondering what arcanum is: It is a top down RPG (Diablo style) in a steampunk era. You play as a self designed character exploring the open world of arcanum. You can use magic, technology and skills to and any quest can be done however you choose. This openess is taken so far that any quest you encounter can be done however you feel. You can even kill the person giving you the quest and just take the rewards. You can kill every person in the game, and the shear number of quests is staggering. You have to play it multiple times just to see most of them. I would advise it to any fan of an open RPG

My real question though is: Has anyone else actually played this game??

I own it, and when I was younger, played it for a day or so. It bored me at that age, but now I'm mature enough to enjoy text-based games and turn based Role playing Games, I may very well give this so-called gem another go.
It's got to be better than Icewind Dale. That game was just awful.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I re-played it fairly recently. It is interesting in a few ways but has a lot of problems. I have issues mainly with combat and navigating the game world not being enjoyable.

 

[TheDuckbunny]

Are you kidding me? It's one of my favorite games of all time! Even though it's a little broken and packed full of bugs, the atmosphere and the steampunk goodness make you forget about its problems instantly.

 

[Maxman3002]

I own this game, it's one of my favorite RPGs ever. It's SO open ended and you can do SO much in it, much more than the original 2 Fallout games. Speaking of the Fallout series, many of the creators of Arcanum were former members of Black Isle and co creators of the Fallout games.

Yea your right. It is a lot more like the origional fallout games. I only mentioned diablo because it was the first game that came to mind for the camera angles. Its a lot like fallout but the shear openness of it makes fallout almost look linear. People who often read reviews and find the reviewer complaining that a game claims to give you choice but only offers you totally good or totally evil, this game is an example of real choice. Good, evil, betraying, total genocide, or just plain robbing everyone. Even the main story line can be done by simply killing or robbing everyone you see and finding clues to continue on

my girlfriend says this is like her favorite game ever, I only clicked on this thread to see if she made an account and made this thread...

however it wasn't her, obviously,
but yeah sounded like fun, i'm trying to find a copy of it

the sex scenes sounded funny

Ha yea,and there was referance to sex in it. As a woman you could get things simply by having sex with the right people if you had the beauty. There was no actual sex scenes in it though for anyone currently bidding on ebay for it just to see pixely low res porn

I own it, and when I was younger, played it for a day or so. It bored me at that age, but now I'm mature enough to enjoy text-based games and turn based Role playing Games, I may very well give this so-called gem another go.
It's got to be better than Icewind Dale. That game was just awful.

Yes its better than Icewind dale. To clear things up here: People who have played Icewind Dale, Elder Scrolls or other games on that Par and got put off by the charater creation, this game is not like that. It is reasonably easy to use and the skills are obvious as to what they do. You basicly get a point each time you level and you can use it wherever (increace strenght, dex, increace your skill at theiving or shooting, learn a new tech or spell)

Played it, it was OK. A lot of interesting concepts ruined by atrocious graphics (the first Fallout looked better!), poor balancing, bugs, etc. It was one of those games that would have been legendary if only they had a bigger budget to do some proper graphics and polish the game much more.

Unfortunatly they were forced to releace early by their publishers. The same thing also happened with Vampyres:The Masqurade hence the same issues with massive bugs in the game. Both games also lacked in any sort of adverticement and eventually became known only by the origional fans. Lucky Vampyres got a second chance on steam and has done well by arcanum got left into obscurity

 

[ctrl-alt-postal]

Yep, love this game. I no longer have a copy, unfortunately, and was thinking of getting it again last week (as I never played all the ways I would like to...). great atmosphere, music and storytelling.

The amount of things you could build in this game was quite amazing if playing a technologist, and making mech spiders....priceless.

On the disc, did anyone else have a second campaign starting on some kind of small town where you only had two ways out, one to a desert islandish place full of zombies and the other a forest (you had to save someone)?

Now I found the high-res and bug fix patches, think I'll find a copy & fire it up again....here is the site:
http://www.terra-arcanum.com/

 

[Maxman3002]

On the disc, did anyone else have a second campaign starting on some kind of small town where you only had two ways out, one to a desert islandish place full of zombies and the other a forest (you had to save someone)?

Yea I had that. Even played it on a LAN with a few friends that I got into the game. Unfortunatly it was really hard and then the story for it trailed off quite quickly. It was never completed properly to work as a proper add on. Good fun for a LAN game though. And the level editor they gave with it has lead to some awsome extra campaigns to play. Gotta love the online communities sometimes

 

[NuclearPenguin]

Arcanum is one of my favorite games of all time, right up there with Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate and Fallout. First time I played it was with the free full-game I got with a game magazine, around the time everquest 2 was released I belive.
I loved the steampunk style. Running around as a dwarf with a huge rifle shooting people.