Satori said:
Oh you simply must, I quit around three times, generally after the time Aronax appears to you, knocks you out and gives you a warning to back off. It's worth continuing if only to meet one of the best 'villains' in gaming. Just roll a mage and take harm, teleport and disintegrate to speed the process along.
Also I've never understood everybody's gripe with the golems; sure the first time you encounter them you didn't expect your weapons to turn to scrap but that's why you always pack a lesser backup weapon or two; it's standard practice in all games for crying out loud.
If it's so great, then why did you quit those three times prior to finally completing it? If you have to will yourself to finish the game, then you're probably not having a good time with it. Monocause made some great points - it's undeniable that a lot of love went into Troika's games (and I too, loved Vtm:B), but there are many occasions where Arcanum simply isn't fun to play. You can talk all you want about the passion that went into that game, but at the end of the day if it isn't fun, well, then that doesn't do much for me. I guess that makes me a pleb, but if a game doesn't entertain me, then I have no desire to play it.
I really loved the ideas Arcanum had, and I was really excited about making a tech character since you're almost always stuck with a mage in 99% of RPG's, so I was eager to make a character much different than I experienced in other games. Your advice on rolling a mage is all well and good, but the reason that I was interested in Arcanum to begin with is because I didn't
want to roll yet another boring-ass mage - I wanted to be a mad inventor with bizarre death rays and awesome gadgets. While the crafting system was definitely robust, the comparative weakness of technologists made those dungeon slogs even more irritating.
I think that the frustration from the golems comes from the fact that they can be very annoying to deal with early on if you are a gunslinger/diplomat like I was because they'll just tear you to pieces as soon as they close the distance with you. Couple that with spending a lot of bullets to take those fuckers down and not being aware that there's a bullet schematic and you have an exercise in tedium involving going back to and from the nearest town and hitting all the pointless random encounters along the way so you can buy bullets. To make matters worst, since I had a high technological alignment, most of Virgil's spells wouldn't work on me, but he'd still be trying to heal me on account of the shoddy AI.
Now, I hear ya: why didn't you go get Jayna in Dernholm to be your tech healer? Well, I was playing blind so as not to spoil myself, but more importantly, I shouldn't have to rely on meta-knowledge to make the game less tedious.
Also, part of the problem is Arcanum's repair system; I'm hard pressed to think of a game other than System Shock 2 where repairing things made a game better. Crafting things in RPG's is fun and Arcanum is certainly no exception, but repairing things items is almost always a tedious pain in the ass. If you're playing with a melee build, it's a pain in the ass to take out your shiny sword, wack something, have it go to shit just as soon as you've entered the dungeon, then you have to go through three or four crappy spare weapons from your backpack.