[fable]

@Brynn, I wouldn't say it's anywhere near as good as the BG series, or PS:T. For one thing, you have close to zip control of your party in a battle. This means that hiring that great spellcaster won't do you much good, because they'll cast whatever spells they want, when they want, sometimes injuring others, too. This was the biggest failure of Arcanum noted in reviews when it came out.

Second, aside from Virgil, there's really hardly any dialog with party members comparable to BG2 or PS:T. Third, the graphics are decent, but not quite as good as the other games: all ogres, for instance, look alike, including those in your party, where you have certain color customizations available in BG2. Fourth, people offer quests to your group, whom they've just met, for absolutely no good reason at all. BG2 was particularly good in finding a rationale behind all the quests you've offered; there's none of that, here.

Fifth, balance has always been problematic in the game. It strongly favors certain kinds of spellcasters. (Harm is a game winning spell, and you can get it right at the start. It becomes insanely powerful as your character makes levels.) Sixth, the interface is a mess. The developers said they wanted to avoid putting a lot of information on separate screens, which was the case in BG2, but their solution frankly doesn't work well. Seventh, picking up endless items for mechanic types to make into items gets very wearing, very quickly.

On the other hand, its fun to configure your character. It's a huge, nicely built environment, with lots of quests and no apparent linearity. The Troika team did a great job of creating parallel paths for good and evil (something that Bioware hasn't really ever attempted). There's a nice atmosphere in the game, and a great deal of ingenuity in design. Personally I'd put Planescape: Torment far ahead of it, but Arcanum is still a good CRPG that's nice to play once in a while. Buy it if it's cheap, and with no great expectations.