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Arcanum Arcanum is a bit shit tbh

Commissar Draco

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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
I was pretty saddened that tech & magic couldn't gel. I wanted a magical machine gun or mega boomstick that rained out fireballs.

You get this shit in every Jap RPG Game Comrade, the Arcanum is unique in forcing some choices&consequences on player although I must admit it that technological play through is literally slog, they should add train statuion to Shrouded Hills after all its advanced enough to have its own steam powered factory or at very least allow you to buy/rent some mules to carry your stuff and then built you own car/tractor/APC/Blimp/Steam boat.

I would also start game in Caladan and then addd section on Blimp and put the Tarant to the last 2/3 of game maybe crashing blimp behind mountains so you need get help of elves for mages and dwarves if you technologist to find pass/get under mountain but i understand that game was rushed although its not as near awful as Encased is.

You do visit a few fun locations and got tons of quests and companions post Tarant after all.
 

KeighnMcDeath

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I guess that's fair. I have played a few JRPGs and even Rougelikes JRPGs that had magical firearms. Different is good and it didn't lessen my enjoyment in the tech paths.

As to the limited crafting.... I LOVED IT! This led me to enjoy crafting in MMOS as well. I already enjoyed tactical games like heroes of MM, Warcraft, Madters of Magic, etc. I would have enjoyed even more complexity in the crafting tree.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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I was pretty saddened that tech & magic couldn't gel. I wanted a magical machine gun or mega boomstick that rained out fireballs.
Sounds closer to a setting where advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, or perhaps the sort of magitek found in Final Fantasy VI.

gpw5es.jpg
 
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Arcanum had great potential and a fantastic instruction manual.
On release it didn't really work. So buggy. I abandoned my first playthrough after the map became hopelessly corrupted gibberish and I couldn't find where I needed to go.

After playing it with all the fixes and everything, it's like a mediocre lovechild of baldur's gate and fallout. The combat could not be any more shallow.

The crafting was a gimmick, and one that really drew me in. The magic vs tech thing is completely pointless.

The fact that choosing certain races or backgrounds means entire towns go hostile on you for no reason is retarded.
I literally fell asleep exploring Tarant.

I get the fanboys though. The setting and the instruction manual detail a very interesting world that is very open to theorycrafting. Some people fall so in love with their theorycrafting they ignore that the game doesn't have any of that shit in it (Cough Star Citizen Cough). The gambler's fallacy keeps a great many mediocre products alive.

Obligatory 2021 poster bait. I just can't trust someone barely old enough to drive talking about what is boring or not. If you are old enough to drive why did it take so long to post here? Checkmate. I'll let myself out.
I was too busy having sex with your mom to post here, obviously.

The fact that choosing certain races or backgrounds means entire towns go hostile on you for no reason is retarded.

No, that's fuckin awesome. Every RPG should do that.
Sure, it's great when the game soft locks due to a character creation choice. I'm sure lots of people played through their "Half ogre mysteriously is aggroed by entire town" games and didn't just reload until it didn't happen. It obviously wasn't supposed to work that way but certain scripts didn't work right when your reaction was below a certain threshold, so randomly during the "Stop the bank robbers" quest, with a low rep, sometimes the entire town aggroes you, and most of the time they don't. Because, on top of its other problems, this game was a horrible buggy mess. A top hat and monocle only gets you so far.

In conclusion, I agree with OP, in that Arcanum is indeed a bit shit.
 

gaussgunner

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+ The language of the game no swear words, people calling themselves Ser and Madam, very little degeneracy and not much Political correctness, the (((Gnomes))) are called as greedy bastards who created Oligarchy after their revolution, Orcs lives not matter and you can aid the Kingdom of Cumbria to recover and kick their asses in next war.

Its shocking how RPG writing:decline: ed in those 20 years.

And in the Tarant library there's a pair of books on The Orcish Question.... and it's almost as long as Mein Kampf :lol:
 

Rean

Head Codexian Weeb
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Strap Yourselves In
The fact that choosing certain races or backgrounds means entire towns go hostile on you for no reason is retarded.

No, that's fuckin awesome. Every RPG should do that.
Sure, it's great when the game soft locks due to a character creation choice. I'm sure lots of people played through their "Half ogre mysteriously is aggroed by entire town" games and didn't just reload until it didn't happen. It obviously wasn't supposed to work that way but certain scripts didn't work right when your reaction was below a certain threshold, so randomly during the "Stop the bank robbers" quest, with a low rep, sometimes the entire town aggroes you, and most of the time they don't. Because, on top of its other problems, this game was a horrible buggy mess. A top hat and monocle only gets you so far.

You know what, you're right, there is both a problem with the individuals who decide to play a monstrous race, as well as the inherent game design which allows you to pick such races. They should have limited character creation to 3 races.
 
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The fact that choosing certain races or backgrounds means entire towns go hostile on you for no reason is retarded.

No, that's fuckin awesome. Every RPG should do that.
Sure, it's great when the game soft locks due to a character creation choice. I'm sure lots of people played through their "Half ogre mysteriously is aggroed by entire town" games and didn't just reload until it didn't happen. It obviously wasn't supposed to work that way but certain scripts didn't work right when your reaction was below a certain threshold, so randomly during the "Stop the bank robbers" quest, with a low rep, sometimes the entire town aggroes you, and most of the time they don't. Because, on top of its other problems, this game was a horrible buggy mess. A top hat and monocle only gets you so far.

You know what, you're right, there is both a problem with the individuals who decide to play a monstrous race, as well as the inherent game design which allows you to pick such races. They should have limited character creation to 3 races.
They could have just coded their game properly so having lower than average reaction scores didn't break the plot. Otherwise reloading and trying again wouldn't have worked. If that's not an option, then yes, I'd say they should only include races and backgrounds to ones that work with their buggy code.

If this was a concious design choice that was supported in game it'd be one thing, but it's clearly not. It's like failing a pickpocket in Baldur's Gate 2. Oh sure, I'll just keep playing with the whole town aggroed on me, this is obviously the devs intended experience for parties who actually use their thieves.

It's not as if you can't play as an ugly uncharismatic monster, but because the game is a buggy piece of shit, that's another failure point for all the poorly written scripts in the game, so you'll have to reload more often when things just randomly break down.
 

Darth Canoli

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They could have just coded their game properly so having lower than average reaction scores didn't break the plot. Otherwise reloading and trying again wouldn't have worked. If that's not an option, then yes, I'd say they should only include races and backgrounds to ones that work with their buggy code.

If this was a concious design choice that was supported in game it'd be one thing, but it's clearly not. It's like failing a pickpocket in Baldur's Gate 2. Oh sure, I'll just keep playing with the whole town aggroed on me, this is obviously the devs intended experience for parties who actually use their thieves.

It's not as if you can't play as an ugly uncharismatic monster, but because the game is a buggy piece of shit, that's another failure point for all the poorly written scripts in the game, so you'll have to reload more often when things just randomly break down.

I think they nailed it, in a game where racism or at the very least racial bias is omnipresent, playing a ugly orc has consequences, even an ugly & not charismatic elf.

I wish more games did that but of course, it's missing orc towns to make this king of characters viable, well, there is Arcanum slums but it's small and you can't buy shit there.
 

gaussgunner

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BG 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Arcanum
Yes, and its not even a close competition.
I have a question about that. I didn't play many new games from about 1995-2005 because at the time it felt like a decade of decline when normies were getting into gaming and internet, but I've been catching up on some gems from that era. I still haven't played BG, BG2, PS:T, but I've played "spirtual successor" Pillars of Eternity and I fucking hated it, especially the RTS-and-Diablo-inspired realtime combat and the walls of badly written text. The BG2-inspired hand-drawn bitmap scenes didn't impress me much. I prefer Arcanum's tiled graphics, larger maps, less story, less linearity, more variety of characters and shit, and half-assed turnbased combat. For all its faults, it's grown on me... it's the only CRPG I've played from that era that I really like. So my question is, is there ANY reason for me to play BG2?
 

dumbuglyorc

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It's like failing a pickpocket in Baldur's Gate 2. Oh sure, I'll just keep playing with the whole town aggroed on me, this is obviously the devs intended experience for parties who actually use their thieves.

It's not as if you can't play as an ugly uncharismatic monster, but because the game is a buggy piece of shit, that's another failure point for all the poorly written scripts in the game, so you'll have to reload more often when things just randomly break down.

You are objectively wrong, motherfucker.

Baldur's Gate 2 is a shit game where your game is fucked in such a situation, so you have to reload, but in a game like Arcanum, where you cannot lock yourself out of the winning condition, if you reload for any reason other than your character lying dead in a gutter, you're playing it wrong.

:obviously:
 
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BG 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Arcanum
You left out a number of >>>> but yeah.

Honestly though they barely share a genre. Sure, they're both RPGs, and sure, Arcanum has a real time with pause thing half assed into it, but arcanum feels closer to fallout than BG1/2. It's like a crappier fallout with magic and swords and even more bugs. Also monocles and top hats. It probably is the best RPG that includes monocles and top hats.
 

Drazhya

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My strongest memory of this game is getting every little thing I needed to construct a set of large steampunk plate armor and slap it on a half-ogre... and it just looked like chainmail. No unique model.
 

octavius

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My strongest memory of this game is getting every little thing I needed to construct a set of large steampunk plate armor and slap it on a half-ogre... and it just looked like chainmail. No unique model.

Did it make you want to crush something to goo?
 

Drazhya

Novice
Joined
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Messages
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My strongest memory of this game is getting every little thing I needed to construct a set of large steampunk plate armor and slap it on a half-ogre... and it just looked like chainmail. No unique model.

Did it make you want to crush something to goo?

Too long ago to remember, really. Bothered me enough to remember it happened, at least.
 

Darth Canoli

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My strongest memory of this game is getting every little thing I needed to construct a set of large steampunk plate armor and slap it on a half-ogre... and it just looked like chainmail. No unique model.

Wasn't a plate armor, it was a chainmail but you can build a huge plate armor for your ogre and it'll look like:

A plate armor...

And you can even use a plate armor (only the regular size though) to build an automaton.
 

lossantos

Educated
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Jul 6, 2021
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Both Planescape Torment and Arcanum is a shitty game for imbeciles who have never read a fucking book in their lives. These two overrated bullshits make them scream like "great script and dialogue man".
 
Joined
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Codex Year of the Donut
arcanum's strength was never its dialogue, it was world building/setting
I can't even remember most of the story or characters, but I do remember most of the locations, interesting tech items, interesting spells, etc.,
 

agris

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Still not excidium
 

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