So i finally got to finish Arcanum again, i have chosen to make a new char around the ideas i had in my first playthrough, which means playing a high tech Gunslinger. The main difference is that this time i neglected speech just to see what happens.
The game starts and i just find out i survived an incident revolving around a Zeppelin named IFS Zephyr, aside from me, in the ruins of the zeppelin, a gnome on the verge of death tell me to "find the boy and deliver him the ring", this alone leave me with all kinds of questions. To make everything harder, i have this annoying priest preaching nonsense in my ears at every step i take, name's Virgyl.
When i Finally got him to shut up, i got attacked by a random guy wearing an armlet, the armlet had the name of a shady organization named "the molochean hand", i finally left and went to a city named Shrouded hills where i got some information regarding the supposedly responsibles by crating the ring, a company named "P. Schuyler and Sons". Before i could leave i had promised to solve a problem regarding a ghost haunting the city's mine, helped the main bank against a bunch of bandits, found out more about Virgyl's misterious friend which left a letter for us in Shrouded hills's hotel and sold the ring to a sympathetic dwarf who revealed to be the gnome's son.
Before i could leave the city i had to deal with some puny bandits (nothing some molotovs couldn't handle) and then... the gnome attacked me? son of a bitch!! i murdered the bastard, i'm so sick of those damn assholes.
Finally after leaving shrouded hills i had chosen to go solve the mines's quest, which wasn't too hard. i only had to talk to the previous owner's sis to find out what actually happened. turns out the guy was a piece of shit. She mentioned a big town named Tarant and gave me the address of the current owner of the mines.
After some talking i walked a long way to Tarant (those slow overworld walks full of murderers attacking me, oh the pain), that reminded me how much i hated this game's combat. it is SO bad, it actually hurts. but yeah, i got to the technological marvel named Tarant, which for some reason have 1 or 2 steam engines through the entire town. Aside from that, Holy fuck theres a LOT to do here. In fact, i still don't know what happens if i choose to publish my story in the Tarantian newspaper.
After a LOT of questing going from find out a lady's missing painting to wiping a gang's territory clean (the stunningly high amount of content reminds me of New reno), i finally do what Joachim letter told me to. after reading the telegram he left in Tarant, the guy told me more about those shady assasins and told me to go to a city named stillwater as fast as possible. the first thing i tried to do was reaching the creators of the ring, but the guy operating the store wouldn't give me the rights to contact the true shop's owner, so i invaded the shop and ended up murdering everyone in there. I had no lead to stillwater and my only other tip was a letter naming a very known name in Tarant. so before i could do anything i decided to talk to the most important person in the region. the one responsible for the machinery in most of Arcanum, Gillbert bates.
Mr bates tell me a story about how he got involved with the dwarves of a clan named "the black mountain clan". I give him the ring and go after their place, the Black mountain mines (ohh boy).
Until this point i had not many issues with the game. the content is mostly good to great, but this place here ruins every playtrough i have. in this playtrough i did almost every quest i could, the only one left in tarant was a certain shady quest that i left for later, yet i was level 9 when i reached the mountains. The issue? level 30 golems that chew throught my party in seconds, it really is a pain in the ass and even after i returned and tried every quest in ashbury either, i got only to level 15.
I actually even managed to try and kill the automatron in order to get the basic PM, sadly Virgyl died during the process
After doing every quest in Ashbury and taking the dog which me i tried BMC again and... it still wasnt enough. my hand canon deal ok damage, but my dog quickly died to the golems and only my him was able to take them down (the dog is the strongest party member in the game i think), i went back to tarant, took Magnus with me, went to Derholm and took Jayna and then i FINALLY could go through the mines (at L20, because i needed to grind a bit). At the end i found a lot about what happened to the Dwarven clan, it turns out that they were banished to a prison colony within an island named "the island of despair" by an elven clan. When you tell that to mr bates he is understandably very confused and offer us a ship to go and investigate.
At this point i was very tired of the game, it really has a problem with pacing and it is very easy to see that once you notice that the BMC was out of place and the rest of the game is PISS easy now, with mostly low level enemies. theres absolutely no challenge to be had in isle of despair for example. i went in there, took the pit challenge, demolished the fighters, talked to the leader of criminals in that place, rescued a lady and got a new lead. another dwarven clan, those who supposedly sold the BMC, the clan named "wheel clan". the funny thing is that this time i lacked persuasion and therefore i was told that i need to somehow craft special spectacles if i wanted to find the clan. I thought a bit and found the spectacles's store in Black root. It was logical to ask the vendor to craft for me. However, going blind and doing things differently at times is fun because even if it was quite logical, it took me an hour or two to come to this conclusion lmao.
The story is interesting enough after BMC that it keeps you going, but the gameplay honestly already had exhausted me completely at this point, so i stopped playing for some weeks.
When i returned i went throught the Wheel clan, slashed throught their whole dungeon, convinced Loghaire to return to his throne and then i went to stillwater where i couldnt find Joachim, but after a lot of questing i got the location for Qintarra, the place where i would finally talk with the elves and get my answers.
in Qintarra, i asked to get an audience with their leader, but Raven, their leader's daughter said i had to do something for her first and here we go...
in this quest, you find an elf forest that is protected by some elf spirits, the elves will punish those who engage on violence, killing them as a punishment for spilling blood in sacred land, Raven tell us to remove some humans from that region, but we can't use violence and she will tell us to "think about a method" as if it was something you could come up with by being creative. The issue? without persuasion, theres only ONE solution to that quest. you have to annoy the humans as this will make them try to kill you, which result in the spirits of the forest being triggered. The most egregious issue is that its extremely badly coded as the spirits will most of the times attack you regardless of who started the fight EVEN if your character is alone and hadn't retaliated. Playing this blind will be a hassle as you have no idea how you could solve the quest and i certainly tried. I searched the whole map for the company who supposedly employed them, tried to use an invisibility gem to pretend i was a ghost and even exploit their supplies or try and convince the lizard warriors around that region to attack them... all was for nothing as they haven't thought of a possibility that the player may want to try any of those choices. Because of that, you have to go through what seems like a buggy exploit in order to solve the quest. its notably badly designed. i only found about that AFTER i finished this playtrough since i usually avoid looking at guides while i play.
But i digress. after going through all that shit i got an audience with the silver lady, which is the leader of the elves and well... she was as enigmatic as one would expect.
After a lot of problems, and after investigating Caladon in order to find a cursed book that supposedly killed all of its owners, i return to Raven and tell her all i know, not only getting her to cooperate, but bringing her to a mission with the objective of erradicating the dark elves. The dark elves are a group of elves which followed the teachings of the dark sorcerer Arronax, which believed the Elven council should dominate and enslave all races he deemed "inferior" to the elves. he was the responsible for the destruction of an ancient civilization called "Vendigroth". They had a very different philosophy from their close cousins and were banished from Qintarra by being outright evil.
After i killed all of the dark elves and freed some slaves, i got information regarding Arronax. which lead me to a journey to thanatos (a place in which i supposedly could find the body of Nasrudin, a place where i could maybe get my answer). the funny part? Nasrudin wasnt dead. This plot twist is known by now, but its still as mind blowing as it originally was. You spend all this time trying to defeat the big badie arronax because of a legend which could be interpreted as nominating you the reincarnation of this legendary elf and then... you find out you actually were just a guy that ended up involved in this large
conflict, it is brilliant. Nasrudin tells you a lot about his backstory and what happened to Arronax, his son.
After hearing so much about it, we have two final quests to engage at... but not before i return to Tarant and finally do the X files quest.
That quest is still Creepy, horrifying and amazing after all those years, the feeling of finding out the implications of the whole thing and how much they mean to the setting is unmatched when it comes to quest writing. When my PC found out what the gnomes did and how much of Tarant was involved in the whole thing, i couldn't help but help the orcs of bates's factory take over the city and burn it to the ground. Yes, even Bates ended up dying at the end. To be honest, he totally deserved.
The orc riot rep was a trait i also got in my first playtrough and for the exact same reasons, however, i recall getting this reputation trait way earlier in my first playtrough. it has extreme consequences as you get instantly hated by both Tarant and caladon, which are quite huge quest hubs.
After all that, i FINALLY went to vendigroth and got my hands at the Vendigroth device, a piece of equipment made specifically to seal Arronax forever. turns out Nasrudin figured it out that arronax could return from the dead, after he got sealed into the void, a place where only evil are banished, banished to an area where time can't progress and everything is eternal. The reason why The dark elves took the BMC dwarves is to use their expertise in technological development to make a machine that could bring people back from the void. Because Arronax was so evil, we have to stop this before Arcanum is doomed to eternal death.
After getting the device, finally its time to go and beat the guy to death
After we finally get to the void... well, it turns out Arronax actually wasnt the villain, instead it was another enemy of the council, a necromancer named Kerghan which impersonated Arronax to manipulate the Dark elves in order to make his return possible.
I always found this ending really weird as Kerghan comes out of nowhere as a villain and he don't really ties well with the main plot and the whole thing revolving around nature vs supernatural. he wants to pretty much force people to abandon all life since he sees life as something horrendous that brings nothing but pain. His resolve is rather weak and if you have high Persuasion, convincing him is extremely dull compared to the situation with Richard grey in Fo1.
I lack persuasive skills so i "convinced him" with my sniper rifle.
We get the ending slides, lots of towns ended up in death, Cumbria fight against tarant and wins again (which should be easy really since well.. tarant isnt supposed to exist anymore) and a bunch of terrible things happen to everyone but Shrouded hills.
At the end, i had a rough time, but let's start with the pros.
+ side questing is mostly well done, which is not a surprise considering who was behind this game.
+ bunch of build choices
+ interesting premise for a setting
+ storyline gets quite interesting
+ lots of in-universe lore
+ in-town navigation is really great due to the new features such as the waypoint system.
+ Itemization is AMAZING. it has a lot of options for weapons: magick versions, tech versions, different kinds of armors, items for skillcheck based gameplay such as Fallout's,etc... crafting and getting different recipes and equipment is fantastic and it adds a lot to the game, even when most things are not as well done, itemization is consistently great. the worse part about it is that you might get the best equipment in the game quite fast because of the BMC grindfest.
Now... let's do the cons:
-combat sucks and theres no other way you could perceive it. The game has 2 modes, a turn based mode that works like fallout, in which your actions are governed by action points, using items on the inventory cost AP and so does moving or attacking, theres also a newly introduced Real time mode, in which theres no turns or action points and everybody hits each other at light speed, this was introduced in order to make combat more dynamic.The problem with the combat can be split within 3 parts: its buggy, it lacks feedback and the new fatigue system is HORRIBLE.
Why its buggy?: the fatigue system doesnt work on real time, which means you can abuse the system by exploiting the fatigue system in order to win easily. Aside from that bug, enemies sometime will get stuck in certain positions, the combat turn will keep loading forever without anyone acting on turn base mode and sometimes enemies will simply become invisible.
Why it lacks feedback?: the action point system is back for turn based, however not only the number of action points spent when walking is not highlighted anymore when the player hoover the mouse over an area (you have to pay attention and count the icons that become red once you hover the mouse over a certain position as those icons indicate the consumption of AP), but weapons and items can be used with minimal AP, even if they spend more AP to be used (if Player A should spend 4 AP to shoot a pistol, while 1 Ap they still can shoot the same pistol regardless of remaining AP), not only this is weird but very non-intuitive when you already have to count your AP in order to move on the map.The animations are also lacking, theres no difference in animation when you hit or miss anymore, which means you depends on a message saying an enemy dodged or you missed, those won't show up everytime which well, is VERY confusing when you need this feedback to fight without wasting your time looking at health bars.
Why the fatigue system sucks?: You just never have enough to fight. you either have to destroy your enemies too fast or carry a ridiculous ammount of potions to make up for the lack of fatigue. Obviously taking actions and moving your character cost AP, what makes it WORSE is that a bigger ammount of AP is lost when an enemy hit your character, which is ridiculous since for the most part, enemies won't hit you once per turn. This will quickly make your character faint (which is what happens once you hit zero AP), fainting during combat is certain death 99% of the times, so you'll be tempted to abuse the fatigue exploit and use real time to keep your fatigue high, once you notice that everything is horribly chaotic in real time and you can't keep up with the actions that are taking place on the area. Its a horrible system and for the most part its the worst element of combat.
-Since the combat is horrible, dungeon crawling has a very limited chance of being good, which for the most part doesnt happen as it is as terrible as you could expect. Let me properly explain:
Not only are dungeons extremely long and the design is very repetitive (the same layout for the Boose mines in Shrouded hills will be reused as the template for most dungeons in the entire game, which will wear the player out extremely quickly) but the distribution of enemies is insane. there are enemies EVERYWHERE, where as theres barely no puzzles to solve, you won't have a nice pacing between navigation, puzzle solving and combat, Instead you'll be dealing with a bunch of trash mobs that will keep attacking you in hordes and trying to exhaust your resources in the cheapest way possible. On top of that, a lot of those places have enemies of a large difference in level on the same spot, such as the BMC mines in the early game, which will place early game enemies such as level 8 imps alongside level 30 golems. Since the combat is so bad and dungeons are nothing but combat, it feels like a ridiculous chore.
- the A.I in the game is also quite terrible. Enemies are mostly simple coded like Fallout, which means they'll rush at the player disregarding their gear and run away if their HP is low, the problem is that pathfinding is significantly worse, so they'll stumble at each other very easily and at times, if you are close to an entrance or exit door, enemies might just stop and stare at you while you punch them to death.
- Aside from the enemy A.I, the party A.I is also quite bad. i don't know why, but this game removed the tactical interface introduced on Fallout 2. Tim cain may had have a distaste for Fallout 2 since he left during the development, however he SHOULD take notes from what that game did well and troika really haven't, they mostly ignored Fallout 2's changes while doing a game that is more party based than FO2 ever was. Well, as a result you can expect your Magick inclined party member to keep constantly casting a heal spell in your full tech PC to no effect, until they exhaust their fatigue bar completely.
- The main quests do decline significantly in quality after Tarant.
-One thing that i still haven't said is that this game is terribly buggy and its very easy to find not only annoying bugs, but game breaking ones. I found all kinds of weird bugs in some of my playtroughts such as being stuck in the isle of despair's pit by trying to use my spells at there, the game suddenly lagging to an almost unplayably slow speed and forcing me to reset the game or even the most common and frequent ones such as the infinite loading clock of doom, which always show up in the worst moments. Even my endgame slides had a hard time working.
- The nature vs magick system feels arbitrary and theres a bunch of very badly written in-universe elements. When cumbria war started, technology was starting to resurface, kickstarted specially by Bates's inventions, which means they were using less developed equipment against years of magical research, this includes but its not limited to: scrolls of summoning to increase the armies to ridiculous degrees with Golems, familiars, animals and the ability to summon spirits and demons, on top of that, Cumbria had the ability to ressurect the dead with cheap ressurect spells and scrolls that are well developed and researched between students, they could also charm their enemies, dominate their minds, shape the battleground with poison, manipulate the wind, turn people into stone, heal allies way easier than the technologists, cure people from all sources of poison, double their speed, paralyze people, kill their enemies and then make them return as undead warriors and somehow, those invincible killing machines with powers provided by the gods that only had to deal with the cost of being a bit tired after casting their spells (which could be countered by potion consumption), managed to LOSE????
I posted something related to that in Rpgcodex some days ago, but the funny part is that at the time i gave some slack for people trying to defend Cumbria war by saying that theres not a whole lot of mages in Cumbria's army. the issue? theres an ending in which the war happens again and Cumbria actually wins against even better developed weapons...
At some point they even introduce a small vial that can make even the Bulkiest character come back from the dead (due to the sheer necesssity of "balancing" the game), no repercussions or cons. and its extremely cheap for what it does either, making it quite acessible even if its pretty much the elixir from the gods. The first time i found this i was VERY confused. How does this work? how could they engineer technology that could ressurect the dead, making it acessible even to the lowliest of the human lifes, people who have no way of casting spells, the common folk!!! which implications such a big thing have on the setting? why nobody in-game talks about it??? I knew the game didnt have in-game descriptions for equipment but i also knew that Schematics actually had a little description presenting how a particular tech works and well.... After 2 hours i spent trying to find that schematic, i finally put my eyes at its description, which reads as follows:
REANIMATOR:
"[This schematic is printed on a strange sort of paper, and looks to be very old. The writing is faded almost beyond recognition.] Experiments upon the life force..... regenerative chemical compounds...... unbelievable results...... completely revived and functioning normally..... advances.... Vendigrothian science......"
Arcanum has lots and lots of good ideas. it seems inspired and at times it comes too close to achive its full potential. However, due to the huge ammount of design issues, bad pacing, setting inconsistencies, awful combat and repetitive dungeon crawling, i can't help but feel like it was a half-crafted game that is no more than a bunch of good ideas which unfortunately are quite badly executed.
I would give it a 4/10
The game starts and i just find out i survived an incident revolving around a Zeppelin named IFS Zephyr, aside from me, in the ruins of the zeppelin, a gnome on the verge of death tell me to "find the boy and deliver him the ring", this alone leave me with all kinds of questions. To make everything harder, i have this annoying priest preaching nonsense in my ears at every step i take, name's Virgyl.
When i Finally got him to shut up, i got attacked by a random guy wearing an armlet, the armlet had the name of a shady organization named "the molochean hand", i finally left and went to a city named Shrouded hills where i got some information regarding the supposedly responsibles by crating the ring, a company named "P. Schuyler and Sons". Before i could leave i had promised to solve a problem regarding a ghost haunting the city's mine, helped the main bank against a bunch of bandits, found out more about Virgyl's misterious friend which left a letter for us in Shrouded hills's hotel and sold the ring to a sympathetic dwarf who revealed to be the gnome's son.
Before i could leave the city i had to deal with some puny bandits (nothing some molotovs couldn't handle) and then... the gnome attacked me? son of a bitch!! i murdered the bastard, i'm so sick of those damn assholes.
Finally after leaving shrouded hills i had chosen to go solve the mines's quest, which wasn't too hard. i only had to talk to the previous owner's sis to find out what actually happened. turns out the guy was a piece of shit. She mentioned a big town named Tarant and gave me the address of the current owner of the mines.
After some talking i walked a long way to Tarant (those slow overworld walks full of murderers attacking me, oh the pain), that reminded me how much i hated this game's combat. it is SO bad, it actually hurts. but yeah, i got to the technological marvel named Tarant, which for some reason have 1 or 2 steam engines through the entire town. Aside from that, Holy fuck theres a LOT to do here. In fact, i still don't know what happens if i choose to publish my story in the Tarantian newspaper.
After a LOT of questing going from find out a lady's missing painting to wiping a gang's territory clean (the stunningly high amount of content reminds me of New reno), i finally do what Joachim letter told me to. after reading the telegram he left in Tarant, the guy told me more about those shady assasins and told me to go to a city named stillwater as fast as possible. the first thing i tried to do was reaching the creators of the ring, but the guy operating the store wouldn't give me the rights to contact the true shop's owner, so i invaded the shop and ended up murdering everyone in there. I had no lead to stillwater and my only other tip was a letter naming a very known name in Tarant. so before i could do anything i decided to talk to the most important person in the region. the one responsible for the machinery in most of Arcanum, Gillbert bates.
Mr bates tell me a story about how he got involved with the dwarves of a clan named "the black mountain clan". I give him the ring and go after their place, the Black mountain mines (ohh boy).
Until this point i had not many issues with the game. the content is mostly good to great, but this place here ruins every playtrough i have. in this playtrough i did almost every quest i could, the only one left in tarant was a certain shady quest that i left for later, yet i was level 9 when i reached the mountains. The issue? level 30 golems that chew throught my party in seconds, it really is a pain in the ass and even after i returned and tried every quest in ashbury either, i got only to level 15.
I actually even managed to try and kill the automatron in order to get the basic PM, sadly Virgyl died during the process
After doing every quest in Ashbury and taking the dog which me i tried BMC again and... it still wasnt enough. my hand canon deal ok damage, but my dog quickly died to the golems and only my him was able to take them down (the dog is the strongest party member in the game i think), i went back to tarant, took Magnus with me, went to Derholm and took Jayna and then i FINALLY could go through the mines (at L20, because i needed to grind a bit). At the end i found a lot about what happened to the Dwarven clan, it turns out that they were banished to a prison colony within an island named "the island of despair" by an elven clan. When you tell that to mr bates he is understandably very confused and offer us a ship to go and investigate.
At this point i was very tired of the game, it really has a problem with pacing and it is very easy to see that once you notice that the BMC was out of place and the rest of the game is PISS easy now, with mostly low level enemies. theres absolutely no challenge to be had in isle of despair for example. i went in there, took the pit challenge, demolished the fighters, talked to the leader of criminals in that place, rescued a lady and got a new lead. another dwarven clan, those who supposedly sold the BMC, the clan named "wheel clan". the funny thing is that this time i lacked persuasion and therefore i was told that i need to somehow craft special spectacles if i wanted to find the clan. I thought a bit and found the spectacles's store in Black root. It was logical to ask the vendor to craft for me. However, going blind and doing things differently at times is fun because even if it was quite logical, it took me an hour or two to come to this conclusion lmao.
The story is interesting enough after BMC that it keeps you going, but the gameplay honestly already had exhausted me completely at this point, so i stopped playing for some weeks.
When i returned i went throught the Wheel clan, slashed throught their whole dungeon, convinced Loghaire to return to his throne and then i went to stillwater where i couldnt find Joachim, but after a lot of questing i got the location for Qintarra, the place where i would finally talk with the elves and get my answers.
in Qintarra, i asked to get an audience with their leader, but Raven, their leader's daughter said i had to do something for her first and here we go...
in this quest, you find an elf forest that is protected by some elf spirits, the elves will punish those who engage on violence, killing them as a punishment for spilling blood in sacred land, Raven tell us to remove some humans from that region, but we can't use violence and she will tell us to "think about a method" as if it was something you could come up with by being creative. The issue? without persuasion, theres only ONE solution to that quest. you have to annoy the humans as this will make them try to kill you, which result in the spirits of the forest being triggered. The most egregious issue is that its extremely badly coded as the spirits will most of the times attack you regardless of who started the fight EVEN if your character is alone and hadn't retaliated. Playing this blind will be a hassle as you have no idea how you could solve the quest and i certainly tried. I searched the whole map for the company who supposedly employed them, tried to use an invisibility gem to pretend i was a ghost and even exploit their supplies or try and convince the lizard warriors around that region to attack them... all was for nothing as they haven't thought of a possibility that the player may want to try any of those choices. Because of that, you have to go through what seems like a buggy exploit in order to solve the quest. its notably badly designed. i only found about that AFTER i finished this playtrough since i usually avoid looking at guides while i play.
But i digress. after going through all that shit i got an audience with the silver lady, which is the leader of the elves and well... she was as enigmatic as one would expect.
After a lot of problems, and after investigating Caladon in order to find a cursed book that supposedly killed all of its owners, i return to Raven and tell her all i know, not only getting her to cooperate, but bringing her to a mission with the objective of erradicating the dark elves. The dark elves are a group of elves which followed the teachings of the dark sorcerer Arronax, which believed the Elven council should dominate and enslave all races he deemed "inferior" to the elves. he was the responsible for the destruction of an ancient civilization called "Vendigroth". They had a very different philosophy from their close cousins and were banished from Qintarra by being outright evil.
After i killed all of the dark elves and freed some slaves, i got information regarding Arronax. which lead me to a journey to thanatos (a place in which i supposedly could find the body of Nasrudin, a place where i could maybe get my answer). the funny part? Nasrudin wasnt dead. This plot twist is known by now, but its still as mind blowing as it originally was. You spend all this time trying to defeat the big badie arronax because of a legend which could be interpreted as nominating you the reincarnation of this legendary elf and then... you find out you actually were just a guy that ended up involved in this large
conflict, it is brilliant. Nasrudin tells you a lot about his backstory and what happened to Arronax, his son.
After hearing so much about it, we have two final quests to engage at... but not before i return to Tarant and finally do the X files quest.
That quest is still Creepy, horrifying and amazing after all those years, the feeling of finding out the implications of the whole thing and how much they mean to the setting is unmatched when it comes to quest writing. When my PC found out what the gnomes did and how much of Tarant was involved in the whole thing, i couldn't help but help the orcs of bates's factory take over the city and burn it to the ground. Yes, even Bates ended up dying at the end. To be honest, he totally deserved.
The orc riot rep was a trait i also got in my first playtrough and for the exact same reasons, however, i recall getting this reputation trait way earlier in my first playtrough. it has extreme consequences as you get instantly hated by both Tarant and caladon, which are quite huge quest hubs.
After all that, i FINALLY went to vendigroth and got my hands at the Vendigroth device, a piece of equipment made specifically to seal Arronax forever. turns out Nasrudin figured it out that arronax could return from the dead, after he got sealed into the void, a place where only evil are banished, banished to an area where time can't progress and everything is eternal. The reason why The dark elves took the BMC dwarves is to use their expertise in technological development to make a machine that could bring people back from the void. Because Arronax was so evil, we have to stop this before Arcanum is doomed to eternal death.
After getting the device, finally its time to go and beat the guy to death
After we finally get to the void... well, it turns out Arronax actually wasnt the villain, instead it was another enemy of the council, a necromancer named Kerghan which impersonated Arronax to manipulate the Dark elves in order to make his return possible.
I always found this ending really weird as Kerghan comes out of nowhere as a villain and he don't really ties well with the main plot and the whole thing revolving around nature vs supernatural. he wants to pretty much force people to abandon all life since he sees life as something horrendous that brings nothing but pain. His resolve is rather weak and if you have high Persuasion, convincing him is extremely dull compared to the situation with Richard grey in Fo1.
I lack persuasive skills so i "convinced him" with my sniper rifle.
We get the ending slides, lots of towns ended up in death, Cumbria fight against tarant and wins again (which should be easy really since well.. tarant isnt supposed to exist anymore) and a bunch of terrible things happen to everyone but Shrouded hills.
At the end, i had a rough time, but let's start with the pros.
+ side questing is mostly well done, which is not a surprise considering who was behind this game.
+ bunch of build choices
+ interesting premise for a setting
+ storyline gets quite interesting
+ lots of in-universe lore
+ in-town navigation is really great due to the new features such as the waypoint system.
+ Itemization is AMAZING. it has a lot of options for weapons: magick versions, tech versions, different kinds of armors, items for skillcheck based gameplay such as Fallout's,etc... crafting and getting different recipes and equipment is fantastic and it adds a lot to the game, even when most things are not as well done, itemization is consistently great. the worse part about it is that you might get the best equipment in the game quite fast because of the BMC grindfest.
Now... let's do the cons:
-combat sucks and theres no other way you could perceive it. The game has 2 modes, a turn based mode that works like fallout, in which your actions are governed by action points, using items on the inventory cost AP and so does moving or attacking, theres also a newly introduced Real time mode, in which theres no turns or action points and everybody hits each other at light speed, this was introduced in order to make combat more dynamic.The problem with the combat can be split within 3 parts: its buggy, it lacks feedback and the new fatigue system is HORRIBLE.
Why its buggy?: the fatigue system doesnt work on real time, which means you can abuse the system by exploiting the fatigue system in order to win easily. Aside from that bug, enemies sometime will get stuck in certain positions, the combat turn will keep loading forever without anyone acting on turn base mode and sometimes enemies will simply become invisible.
Why it lacks feedback?: the action point system is back for turn based, however not only the number of action points spent when walking is not highlighted anymore when the player hoover the mouse over an area (you have to pay attention and count the icons that become red once you hover the mouse over a certain position as those icons indicate the consumption of AP), but weapons and items can be used with minimal AP, even if they spend more AP to be used (if Player A should spend 4 AP to shoot a pistol, while 1 Ap they still can shoot the same pistol regardless of remaining AP), not only this is weird but very non-intuitive when you already have to count your AP in order to move on the map.The animations are also lacking, theres no difference in animation when you hit or miss anymore, which means you depends on a message saying an enemy dodged or you missed, those won't show up everytime which well, is VERY confusing when you need this feedback to fight without wasting your time looking at health bars.
Why the fatigue system sucks?: You just never have enough to fight. you either have to destroy your enemies too fast or carry a ridiculous ammount of potions to make up for the lack of fatigue. Obviously taking actions and moving your character cost AP, what makes it WORSE is that a bigger ammount of AP is lost when an enemy hit your character, which is ridiculous since for the most part, enemies won't hit you once per turn. This will quickly make your character faint (which is what happens once you hit zero AP), fainting during combat is certain death 99% of the times, so you'll be tempted to abuse the fatigue exploit and use real time to keep your fatigue high, once you notice that everything is horribly chaotic in real time and you can't keep up with the actions that are taking place on the area. Its a horrible system and for the most part its the worst element of combat.
-Since the combat is horrible, dungeon crawling has a very limited chance of being good, which for the most part doesnt happen as it is as terrible as you could expect. Let me properly explain:
Not only are dungeons extremely long and the design is very repetitive (the same layout for the Boose mines in Shrouded hills will be reused as the template for most dungeons in the entire game, which will wear the player out extremely quickly) but the distribution of enemies is insane. there are enemies EVERYWHERE, where as theres barely no puzzles to solve, you won't have a nice pacing between navigation, puzzle solving and combat, Instead you'll be dealing with a bunch of trash mobs that will keep attacking you in hordes and trying to exhaust your resources in the cheapest way possible. On top of that, a lot of those places have enemies of a large difference in level on the same spot, such as the BMC mines in the early game, which will place early game enemies such as level 8 imps alongside level 30 golems. Since the combat is so bad and dungeons are nothing but combat, it feels like a ridiculous chore.
- the A.I in the game is also quite terrible. Enemies are mostly simple coded like Fallout, which means they'll rush at the player disregarding their gear and run away if their HP is low, the problem is that pathfinding is significantly worse, so they'll stumble at each other very easily and at times, if you are close to an entrance or exit door, enemies might just stop and stare at you while you punch them to death.
- Aside from the enemy A.I, the party A.I is also quite bad. i don't know why, but this game removed the tactical interface introduced on Fallout 2. Tim cain may had have a distaste for Fallout 2 since he left during the development, however he SHOULD take notes from what that game did well and troika really haven't, they mostly ignored Fallout 2's changes while doing a game that is more party based than FO2 ever was. Well, as a result you can expect your Magick inclined party member to keep constantly casting a heal spell in your full tech PC to no effect, until they exhaust their fatigue bar completely.
- The main quests do decline significantly in quality after Tarant.
-One thing that i still haven't said is that this game is terribly buggy and its very easy to find not only annoying bugs, but game breaking ones. I found all kinds of weird bugs in some of my playtroughts such as being stuck in the isle of despair's pit by trying to use my spells at there, the game suddenly lagging to an almost unplayably slow speed and forcing me to reset the game or even the most common and frequent ones such as the infinite loading clock of doom, which always show up in the worst moments. Even my endgame slides had a hard time working.
- The nature vs magick system feels arbitrary and theres a bunch of very badly written in-universe elements. When cumbria war started, technology was starting to resurface, kickstarted specially by Bates's inventions, which means they were using less developed equipment against years of magical research, this includes but its not limited to: scrolls of summoning to increase the armies to ridiculous degrees with Golems, familiars, animals and the ability to summon spirits and demons, on top of that, Cumbria had the ability to ressurect the dead with cheap ressurect spells and scrolls that are well developed and researched between students, they could also charm their enemies, dominate their minds, shape the battleground with poison, manipulate the wind, turn people into stone, heal allies way easier than the technologists, cure people from all sources of poison, double their speed, paralyze people, kill their enemies and then make them return as undead warriors and somehow, those invincible killing machines with powers provided by the gods that only had to deal with the cost of being a bit tired after casting their spells (which could be countered by potion consumption), managed to LOSE????
I posted something related to that in Rpgcodex some days ago, but the funny part is that at the time i gave some slack for people trying to defend Cumbria war by saying that theres not a whole lot of mages in Cumbria's army. the issue? theres an ending in which the war happens again and Cumbria actually wins against even better developed weapons...
At some point they even introduce a small vial that can make even the Bulkiest character come back from the dead (due to the sheer necesssity of "balancing" the game), no repercussions or cons. and its extremely cheap for what it does either, making it quite acessible even if its pretty much the elixir from the gods. The first time i found this i was VERY confused. How does this work? how could they engineer technology that could ressurect the dead, making it acessible even to the lowliest of the human lifes, people who have no way of casting spells, the common folk!!! which implications such a big thing have on the setting? why nobody in-game talks about it??? I knew the game didnt have in-game descriptions for equipment but i also knew that Schematics actually had a little description presenting how a particular tech works and well.... After 2 hours i spent trying to find that schematic, i finally put my eyes at its description, which reads as follows:
REANIMATOR:
"[This schematic is printed on a strange sort of paper, and looks to be very old. The writing is faded almost beyond recognition.] Experiments upon the life force..... regenerative chemical compounds...... unbelievable results...... completely revived and functioning normally..... advances.... Vendigrothian science......"
Arcanum has lots and lots of good ideas. it seems inspired and at times it comes too close to achive its full potential. However, due to the huge ammount of design issues, bad pacing, setting inconsistencies, awful combat and repetitive dungeon crawling, i can't help but feel like it was a half-crafted game that is no more than a bunch of good ideas which unfortunately are quite badly executed.
I would give it a 4/10