All About Arcanum

[alec]

Yeah, I remember the Flame Axe (Featherweight Axe + Gasoline?) to be one uber weapon.

Pyrotechnic axe, I think. Probably the best melee weapon in the game. Overpowered, but meh, who cares.

 

[Bulderbak]

Pyrotechnic axe, I think. Probably the best melee weapon in the game. Overpowered, but meh, who cares.

What I really like about the Pyro Axe is that it doesn't get damaged by hitting rock golems, chests, doors etc. and that you can make it very early in the game. Too bad it has such a low speed.
Personally I prefer:
[spoiler:72e244059a]The sword from the pit on the Isle of Despair, it looks like a balanced sword but with increased speed and damage and if i remember correctly it is also neutral.[/spoiler:72e244059a]

 

[UniversalWolf]

So I just got Arcanum a couple weeks ago, and, not surprisingly, I think it's pretty amazing. A few observations:

1) I don't think the combat is as bad as its reputation. It's not great, but it's not that bad. I use turn-based exclusively except when I'm bashing something or letting my followers clean up the residue of my enemies. Real-time is good for that, at least, so it's not completely useless.

2) Tech is underpowered compared to Magick. It can be very underpowered depending on the kind of Tech you specialize in. The ealry firearms are a joke (punching does more damage than a flintlock pistol), and the later ones use so much expensive ammo you can find yourself running out of money and ammo. I'd say the Dodge skill should have a severe penalty against firearms (really, how many people can dodge bullets?), and making your own ammo should produce a larger amount than it does.

3) That being said, Tech is more fun than Magick.

4) The character system is great. The main thing I like about it is that there are so many different avenues you could choose - you must have to play through the game twenty times to try everything. It's possible to be anything from a demon-loving dark necromancer to a halfwitted, super-strong, half-ogre barbarian to a silver-tongued rogue to an eccentric genius who uses an army of robots to do his fighting for him. A+.

5) Along that line, the first thing I did upon starting the game was spend about twenty minutes reading through all the different character backgrounds. Some of them are extremely funny.

6) The NPC controls are very bad. The worst of the worst is probably Magick healer NPCs travelling with a Tech PC. Their spells don't work on a Tech character, so they'll waste their entire combat turn fruitlessly trying to heal the PC. Bad. At least you can avoid it if you know about it.

I could go on and on, as I'm sure you're aware. Great game. Anyone who likes Fallout and doesn't own Arcanum should go get it ASAP.

 

[SuAside]

2) Tech is underpowered compared to Magick. It can be very underpowered depending on the kind of Tech you specialize in.

euhm, and some Magick schools are very underpowered compared to Tech?

what's your fucking point? the choices are yours.

really, the agility rings from the electric school of tech is very powerful, as well as everything you get from smithing.

but on the other hand, unlocking cantrip and such are very handy.

in the endgame, i say all are pretty equal.
Tech with agility rings, fireaxe, goggled helmets,...
Magic with unlocking, sensing or identifying various stuff, teleport, disintegrate (or nearly abusive use of harm at high magic affinity levels).

i'd say balance for both is totally screwed since they're both all powerful.

The early firearms are a joke (punching does more damage than a flintlock pistol),

but that's not really much of a problem. starting from the gun you get from the doc, it's going fine.

and the later ones use so much expensive ammo you can find yourself running out of money and ammo.

what?
1) you manage to run out of MONEY? fuck, this is the game where you take junk and turn it into gold if you're into Tech.
2) run out of ammo? i think you're doing it wrong.

that said, fireaxe motherfucker, use it. muhahahahahaha.

 

[TamaNeko]

Arcanum is a good game, but the game mechanics has got to be the most broken one I've ever seen in any RPG ever. The fact that I could kill the final boss with such a low-level spell like harm is just ridiculous!

Still quite memorable though. I'll never forget Half-Ogre Island. FUCK GNOMES!

 

[Misteryo]

I love Arcanum. I've been playing it for a while with Chris Beddoes' Car Arcanum mod. Lot's of people complain that it changes so much, which it does. But I enjoyed an imaginative messing around in a game I like so much.

Now I am playing through with Drog Blacktooth's extensive fix pack. I also installed his very small extra pack because it includes a restoration of the Charged Axe schematic! Drog has fixed at least 90% of the bugs and problems that make people bitch about Arcanum in the first place.

As to the who-is-more-overpowered question: In such a story-driven and dialogue-heavy game, I don't really care. Since there is a lot of fighting, yet it is not really the heart of the game, I am glad to be overpowered later in the game so that I don't die in combat before getting to the next part of the story or the next interesting character to talk to.

Also, I just love going tech. I get such a kick out of armoring and arming myself with cool stuff I made! Unbeatable.

 

[BloodyPuppy]

I just bought it. Looking forward to playing it, sounds like a lot of fun, especially the different backgrounds.

 

[Bulderbak]

Also, I just love going tech. I get such a kick out of armoring and arming myself with cool stuff I made! Unbeatable.

How true! People who are saying techies are underpowered clearly never new how/why/where to use the technological gadgets and stuff. Hell you can do just fine a very large portion of the game with a nice amount of strength(easy to come by as a techie) and the machined gauntlets as a weapon. Pretty fun to just punch the living shit out of everyone.

 

[SuAside]

The fact that I could kill the final boss with such a low-level spell like harm is just ridiculous!

and why is that?

the game might have terrible balance issues, but the fact that the power of a spell grows with your power doesn't make it ridiculous. it would actually be quite logical from my point of view.

 

[UniversalWolf]

The early firearms are a joke (punching does more damage than a flintlock pistol),

but that's not really much of a problem. starting from the gun you get from the doc, it's going fine.

I disagree. You can shoot creatures in the head six times with the early firearms and not kill them. I'd say firearms lag behind magic and way behind melee weapons until you get to, say, the Hand Cannon, and by that time Magick has overtaken everything.

I used my first fate point to steal the Sharp Shooter's Pistol from the gun dealer in Tarant, and that was acceptable for a few levels, but it's effectiveness deteriorated rather quickly.

Is playing as a sniper even possible? The Looking-Glass Rifle and the Long Range Pistol suggest it should be, but one-shot kills to the head seem very rare.

and the later ones use so much expensive ammo you can find yourself running out of money and ammo.

what?
1) you manage to run out of MONEY? fuck, this is the game where you take junk and turn it into gold if you're into Tech.
2) run out of ammo? i think you're doing it wrong.

What I'm talking about is playing the game through for the first time, or even the first few times, when you have no idea how to metagame. My first tech character (my second character overall) was an uncharismatic good-guy gunslinger. I didn't go around robbing stores, and I didn't know that with one point of Herbology I could generate plentiful gold by picking flowers in the woods. I spread my tech levels around in different areas (which makes logical sense and ought to be a feasible path of development) without focusing on Gunsmithing.

Eventually I got to a point where my Sharp Shooter's Pistol wasn't cutting it as a weapon anymore, and the only gun I could make that was effective was the Repeating Rifle. The Repeating Rifle used ammo so fast I would run through 500 rounds after killing maybe twenty or thirty zombies. Even making my own ammo, I was losing money.

Actually there are several weapons like that: guns that sound great when you get the schematics, but in practice they consume so much ammo that they're totally impractical. The Machine Rifle is one. I made one of those and used up 600 rounds to kill two groups of zombies. Making your own bullets costs about 2 gold per round, so that's around 1200 gold to kill maybe a dozen zombies with no loot.

The biggest buzz-kill with that character was that, after I found the schematic for Bronwyck's Gun, I went out of my way to allocate the points so I could build it - only to find out that it's completely worthless and ineffective.

It's just silly that a Firearms Master has to shoot a wolf five times with a pistol to kill it - and that's five hits, since monsters with Dodge avoid the bullets half the time.

With Harm or Lightning Bolt or Disintigrate, on the other hand, you have weapons that deal lots of damage, never miss, and the ammo - fatigue restoring potions - is ridiculously cheap and plentiful.

Now that I have more of a grasp of how tech works (in other words, I learned how to exploit the rules to my advantage), I focused on Gunsmithing to the exclusion of everything else until I got the Elephant Gun, which is a respectable weapon.

True, there are Magick colleges that are less effective than Force, but I'm comparing the best firearms to the best spells, and in that sense Magick is vastly more powerful than Firearms. And if you choose Firearms you have no choice but to use the best ones or you won't stand a chance. With Magick there are lots of different ways to be combat effective (like summoning elementals or demons).

Anyway, Tech is still more fun.

 

[Slaughter Manslaught]

It's just silly that a Firearms Master has to shoot a wolf five times with a pistol to kill it - and that's five hits, since monsters with Dodge avoid the bullets half the time.

I think the problem is that the way firearms work in Arcanum is simply bizarre. You don't manualy reload weapons, firearms fire absurdly fast and they are absurdly weak. Firearms should've been slow to fire and slow to reload, but extremely deadly and more acurate than bows. And more aimed shots would be great.

 

[UniversalWolf]

It's just silly that a Firearms Master has to shoot a wolf five times with a pistol to kill it - and that's five hits, since monsters with Dodge avoid the bullets half the time.

I think the problem is that the way firearms work in Arcanum is simply bizarre. You don't manualy reload weapons, firearms fire absurdly fast and they are absurdly weak. Firearms should've been slow to fire and slow to reload, but extremely deadly and more acurate than bows. And more aimed shots would be great.

Yeah, the whole firearms system is strange. I'd say it's a half-step backwards from Fallout. Then again, Magick is probably too simplified.

The game has undeniable faults, but that doesn't change the fact that it's great.

Now if someone would make Arcanum 2 and simply fix the faults and inadequacies without changing the stuff that makes it great...

...unlike you know what.

BTW, I decided to try another gunslinger since my last one had such an ignominious end. This time I used my first Fate Point to steal a Hand Cannon, which is the penultimate Gunsmithing schematic. It doesn't feel overpowered at all to have an advanced weapon at such an early stage. I can usually kill normal rats with one shot, but orc bandits still take three or four. That's probably about right for a firearm, eh?

If I were to tech-rush Gunsmithing so I could make my own Hand Cannon, it would take forever, and I would have crap combat skills for a long time.

 

[BloodyPuppy]

Well I just started playing. It's a fun game (combat sort of sucks though) but I really enjoyed character creation. Really well done and satisfying.

 

[Von Drunky]

Firearms are not that bad that you must steal the Hand Cannon, unless its part of your character concept. I would just work for it.

Whenever I stole the Hand Cannon early in the game, i felt really dirty and cheap and i would use it till the end of the game. I don't think I ever bothered making the Elephant Gun in all my replays.

 

[UniversalWolf]

Firearms are not that bad that you must steal the Hand Cannon, unless its part of your character concept. I would just work for it.

Whenever I stole the Hand Cannon early in the game, i felt really dirty and cheap and i would use it till the end of the game. I don't think I ever bothered making the Elephant Gun in all my replays.

Elephant Gun is a solid weapon. Usable throughout most of the game, but not overpowered.

I don't feel dirty at all for stealing the Hand Cannon, except that I had to know where it was from a previous playthrough in order to get it. I didn't cheat, afterall; I simply used a Fate Point, which is perfectly above board.

For all the effort to get to Firearms Master, the Hand Cannon does what I would expect a gun to do. There's no way it's even going to last me to the end of the game as my main weapon. If I have the points I'll probably work toward getting the Tesla Gun.

Interestingly, batteries are much cheaper per round than bullets.

If you want a legal character that is utterly overpowered, try a backstabber with the Stun spell (the second spell in the Mental college). You can kill almost anything at level one. I assume you don't want a character like that, because if stealing the Hand Cannon made you feel dirty, a backstabber with Stun will make you feel like an old, worn-out whore.

 

[Lexx]

Drog has released a new version of his unofficial patch. Also I saw that the soundtrack is now available in high quality and this is pretty uber cool.

 

[UniversalWolf]

Drog has released a new version of his unofficial patch. Also I saw that the soundtrack is now available in high quality and this is pretty uber cool.

I also recommend Drog's hi-res town maps. They actually make a big difference when you switch to the large map view.

Incidentally, I played yet another game as a gunslinger. This time I took all the gunslinging NPCs along with me - Franklin Payne, Sebastian, and Vollinger. I'm sorry but firearms are hugely underpowered and significantly more expensive compared to...let's see...any other attack form in the game. The Hand Cannon's effectiveness starts to tail off significantly in late mid-game, and there's really only one better firearm (Droch's Warbringer), and you can only ever get two of them without cheating. It's also interesting that every one of the Firearms NPCs is too weak to use rifles, so Tesla Guns are out.

I would not say the Firearms route is too hard, though (unless you're playing as a goodie-goodie who never steals anything, in which case you can literally run out of money and be unable to keep yourself supplied with ammo). I'd say that the other attack forms are too easy. Firearms seems about right in terms of difficulty. They're just hugely flawed in terms of mechanics. Despite all this, they are fun.

 

[Black]

A little bump with good news from Drogg.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=30955

 

[Lexx]

So, he is working again on his patches.


I will try the resolution patch as soon as possible.

 

[SuAside]

oh dear god, i'm in love!

and yeah, i too thought Drogg had given up his modding work. great news for the community that he hasn't.

the man is an insane modding machine...