Please give me a summary

[Brynn]

Hello people,

could anybody please give me a summary on Arcanum? I've never played it, jut saw it on the shelf today (I was looking for Baldur's Gate, actually ) Is it similar or comparable to the BG - IWD series? Do you play with a party, too? Does it take place in Fearun? Or is it completely different? Please enlighten me

Thank you,

~Brynn

[Ares2382]

Ok Arcanum takes place in a totally new setting created specifically for this game. It's a world of magick as well as technology. So your character can be anything from powerful mage to an equally powerful gunslinger.

The character creation is not like BG so you don't have classes. You get points which you can spend on different skills and attributes. You do meet different people that can join you in a party, but you have no direct control over them like you do in BG series.

The really cool part about Arcanum, IMHO, is that you are not as restricted to play the role of the good guy. You can be comepletly evil and still pass the game, but through different means and with a different ending.

This game has an amazing replayability value in my opinion because of the different types of characters you can make, plus the many different way that you can play your character.

If you are looking for something like BG, then this is not it. But that being said in my book this game ranks in top 5 best RPGs of all time.

[tom the terribl]

Originally Posted by Brynn

Hello people,

could anybody please give me a summary on Arcanum? I've never played it, jut saw it on the shelf today (I was looking for Baldur's Gate, actually ) Is it similar or comparable to the BG - IWD series? Do you play with a party, too? Does it take place in Fearun? Or is it completely different? Please enlighten me

Thank you,

~Brynn

Arcanum is a full free game with one major quest and many, make that very many side quests that add loot and armor or weapons or addons to you. You can play singly or as a party of 2 to 6 depending on what character you play and what skills you choose. Leveling up you can place points to any skill as long as your qualified to do so.You start a new game with 5 points and from 100 to 400 in gold. You first set your points to what you want to be. Then you buy what you need to fight and protect yourself. Your choices are few but important. Get Virgil as your first NPC he will provide ongoing info. Consult your log book for refreshes and updates.

Talk to everyone in every shop and house. Talking is how you get side quests and this is how Aracnum gives you access to town that otherwise you'll have to search for. But many sites are all over Arcanum so take advantage of the World Wide map to travel using waypoints to bend your trip to uncover most sites.

Some quests must be in a specific order or progress will be stopped. Hard save before accepting a new quest or you may need to start over from a previous save.

Learn healing either thru magic or thru technical means. Get repair since you will probably have high intelegence IN anyway its only 5 more points for master in repair. If you choose to be an ogre forget the repair.

Don't get discouraged if your selection does'nt work so well. I've been playing Arcanum for 3 years and its one of the best roll playing game in the world. Let who you are reflect in the type of character you play.

The graphics are great. The NPC are numerous. An update to 1074 is available if needed, see the readme that with arcanum.

I like one mod in Arcanum. Its called level127. Instead of 50 levels the level 127 lets you continue earning points and add more skills making the game more fun to play. You can find this mod and the Arcanum update at www.sierra.com.

[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.

[The Z]

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but Fable's points are valid and I think there's a mod that dumbs down "Harm". IMO it's the closest thing to a Fallout-like game (in system and story not setting) that the gaming world's seen in awhile; although, I haven't played any new game in a year so I wouldn't know.

[Crunchy in milk]

If you've watched the walkthrough videos of Vampire:Bloodlines and wanted a little meatier example of what Troika rpgs are like, I think Arcanum is a good introduction. Its a fun game if you approach it without thinking of games like Baldur's Gate and just play it for what it is and I think you'll find that Bloodlines will play somewhat similarly. The character system is almost identical between the games with skill points, races (vampire clans) and even 'backgrounds'.

If you love being able to drag around 5 other player characters with your own player character, then Arcanum is not what you're looking for. I found BG2 too frequently a bore, forever managing all those npcs at once rather than focusing on the game and enjoying MY role in the story.

I loved the Arcanum character system, and I had the most fun in the game not using any npc's at all but challenging myself to complete the quests myself with a well built and equipped character. Something you can build along the way to meet the different quest demands.

In contrast the BG games where primarily party balance games, knowing who you're going to meet and build a character who does 'stuff' the npcs don't. I was having to share my adventure with braindead npc's who did far too much of the quests for me and interrupted me every hour on the hour to fish for compliments with some of the most inane dialogue I've ever read.

In a BG like game (D&D license) you're guaranteed to get inflexible quests that demand certain skills you don't have and battles you don't want to fight (I don't want to have to kill the ****ing dragon but you always MAKE me -BG2, NWN, HOTU...). The restrictive character system means branching out to develop certain skills yourself can be impractical so you either build the standard fare D&D hero, whom the majority of one-solution-quests cater for or drag along npcs and let them play the game for you.

Arcanum's quests tend to have multiple solutions to cater for different character builds, and its something Troika are touting rather loudly about Bloodlines too.

[Brynn]

Whoa, that took a bit to read

Thanks, this helped me to picture it. I think I'll try it - but first I'll try to get BG out of my mind so that I won't go looking for the same experience in this game, too.

All in all, it sounds good to me. Thanks again for the explanations

[tom the terribl]

One commentor said the display is not very good. But to get the maximum quality display run the game in 1024x768 and use the short cut that comes with Arcanum called "Arcanum Fullscreen". The display on a 19 inch or larger monitor is great.