Arcanum Arcanum is, by far, one of the worst *games* I've ever played... emphasis on "game" and not "RPG"

[Ash]

Jeez who cares.

Ah, the guy who holds Ultima Underworld as "the top of the barrel" in the RPG realm does not care for the design methods it invented (?) and the overall experience it sought to create. Gotcha.

The whole pseudo-simulated bags within bags grid system (also with a weight limit) was pretty damn cool.

 

[Excidium II]

UUW's inventory is just ultima cargo cult/mouse-centered fascination from the era.

Text tables are the best way to represent a list of things such as carried items, the end.

 

[Lios]

"here is a spoon, here is a plate of soup".
-Wtf am I supposed to do now shit game 2/10.

and if the spoon is broken use a straw motherfucker.

Spoiler

 

[Ash]

"ultima cargo cult"

So it was.

Text tables are the best way to represent a list of things such as carried items, the end.

In some respects, yes, others, no. Also icons can be much smaller than a line of text so you can render the whole/more of the inventory at once, not cluttering the screen and no scrolling. Want text description? Click/hover over the icon to display the text specific to that object. Give it up, listfag

 

[thesoup]

I will concur. Arcanum is worthless garbage.
Also Fallout is overrated (mediocre tbh) and Bloodlines is twilight for nerds.

Tell me an RPG that you actually liked. I am curious.

Also, "Bloodlines is twillight for nerds" ?

Yeah, it's edgy and has vampires. Maybe "twilight for nerds" is not entirely a right description, but I've always associated vampire fans with emos, goths, edgy morons and weirdo fetishists.

As for an example of a rpg I liked, I liked Underrail, voted it GOTY here.

 

[Owlish]

Have you even played Final Fantasy VII? Or any Final Fantasy, for that matter. They have very simple inventories, functional, no nonsense.

Fallout 1 doesn't have:

- An inventory where you can see a lot of things at the same time.
- An inventory that allows you to sort.
- And hell, if you are pushing me, I may as well say we shouldn't need to "examine" an item to get its description: any other game would place it somewhere in the UI.

It's a very poor inventory, and thank God it's a one-man inventory only, I can't imagine how bad it would be if we were juggling 6 party members at a time with hundreds of different items. I imagine, however, you would love to scroll past 100 items searching for that particular piece of armor, whereas in Final Fantasy you go to Equip and choose what you want to wear (and with nice numbers to see the different stats simultaneously, too!).

This retarded idea of "it's old so it's okay" makes no sense when the same year gave us FFVII. Not to mention I've seen people actually say they want isometric RPGs with a fixed camera, when fixed cameras are shit as opposed to something like Vagrant Story.

final fantasy is queer shit so kill yourself

 

[Agesilaus]

This post is a reminder that Arcanum is Torment Plainscape level bad.

 

[Cortex_Reaver]

Arcanum isn't even bad as a game, it's garbage as a piece of software. It feels like it needs two years minimum of extra development. The path finding and the combat "systems" feel like something that was thrown together by a couple of interns in a week.

 

[Beastro]

TBH I think of Arcanum had be better polished it wouldn't be so talked about today and the years to come.

Something about how deeply flawed it is makes people wanting more and obsessing about it in a way that wouldn't exist if it had been a game that didn't drive you to love it despite the bullshit.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Arcanum is good for telling what kind of RPG player you are:
- "Inventory and pathfidning are shit, combat is unbalanced, 2/10"
or
- "The world is huge and original, the quests are varied, the story and writing are very good, 8/10"

 

[Tramboi]

Excidium: Bullshit. You're missing the point. You've played underworld or System Shock 2, right? Grid-based inventories render all of the inventory at once, which in those games you can grab the icon, and move it from your inventory into the game world (to drop/throw in any direction) and vice-versa. Try doing that so smoothly with shitty lists that scroll for days.

I agree. Dungeon Master made this very immersive.

U7 bag mess was a cool approach too.

 

[Doktor Best]

No, the combat does not work like in Fallout at all. You had to keep your finger over the "start turn-based combat" button, that was terrible. Also everyone had a million movement points, so only very crude tactics were meaningful.

But let's talk about the things that were done well for a moment:

- the World is immersive. Tarant feels very much alive. The feud between magic and technology feels alive and makes sense.
- the Quest Design is diverse and intelligent. I still remember the feeling when I was entering the negotiation room in Caladon after spending half an hour studying the relative material and keeping notes. The best quests in other games usually remind me of Arcanum quests.
- Character Customization is mind blowing. Arcanum is probably the best game ever in that department. Drop your boring mages and play a gunslinger.
- Crafting is excellent.
- All the little things. Newspapers, reactivity, little secrets dispersed throughout. To be frank, I also liked the inventory.

Yes, it is lacking in some departments (importantly in combat), but are you going to just throw away all the above advantages? I won't, I love it. Nobody has been able to recreate some of its best parts.

Pretty much sums it up. Its worst parts are far inferior to Fallout, but its best parts easily outshine it.

Gesendet von meinem GT-I9000 mit Tapatalk 2

 

[Baron Dupek]

Arcanum is cool game on paper and better stay that way. Played few times, finished once and glad it's behind me.
Just another "great on paper, poorly executed". Just for once hire competent ( I mean- fast working duct tapers) programmers...

No filter for selling items. Having your inventory cluttered with stuff and looking for that one single item that the vendor *may* want to buy is ridiculous. Jesus Christ, why not darken the items he won't buy so I don't have to hover over every single item?

You show your stuff to the merchant, you point at this and that item with your finger/cursor, he agree to buy it or not.
Seems like Arcanum tried to be too realistic in this aspect...

Rate my RPGs to play list btw.

And here is my response.
Forgot to fill the DKS, but it will be same thing as any "Larian dropout syndrome" like any their title.

 

[Delbaeth]

There's probably a GURPS Arcanum somewhere.

Actually, it's GURPS Steampunk, and GURPS Steam-Tech.
And, there were two GURPS Castle Falkenstein books too.

 

[Shadenuat]

Arcanum's inventory is worse than in JRPGs? What?
Arcanum's inventory is one of nicest inventories made in RPGs, and it does have a sort button.

Also, AFAIK when you hover over placket on the house with adress, the place automatically gets checked on your map.

 

[Metatron]

The thing about Arcanum is it's not just mechanically broken, I for one would be willing to overlook these problems if it offerred a superb storyfag experience to compensate for it.
But sadly the story is boring unless you're really dying for anything steampunk with a dumb twist at the end and content-wise the whole thing just falls apart after Tarant (which is after 1/3th of the game or so) when you just start running from empty location a to even emptier location b on the world map with barely anything (interesting) but the main quest anymore. Doesn't help that everything looks butt ugly (few games feature such shitty art direction) and combined with the horribad combat the dungeons are a gigantic bore offering nothing more than filler-combat. For a game that has supposedly awesome world-building according to the fanboys one should expect something more than a decent opening area and first city and then absolutely nothing anymore.
It's not even very good at the parts is supposed to be good, takes more than a couple of neat gimmicks (best game evar cause newspapers!!) to make a decent game. Arcanum isn't.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Arcanum is good for telling what kind of RPG player you are:
- "Inventory and pathfidning are shit, combat is unbalanced, 2/10"
or
- "The world is huge and original, the quests are varied, the story and writing are very good, 8/10"

i.e. you're an rpg player or an adventure gamer

 

[made]

Ban Irenaeus. Emphasis on "ban".

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Arcanum is a game for people of taste, who can appreciate the ideas, forgive the execution

Fucking a monkey in the ass is for people of taste, who can appreciate the idea of anal sex and forgive the execution.

Well intended does not mean well executed. If I only wanted to 'appreciate the idea' I would've read the design documents and be done with it. I want to actually enjoy playing the game, which I can't, because the gameplay is horrendous.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Arcanum is a game for people of taste, who can appreciate the ideas, forgive the execution

Fucking a monkey in the ass is for people of taste, who can appreciate the idea of anal sex and forgive the execution.

Well intended does not mean well executed. If I only wanted to 'appreciate the idea' I would've read the design documents and be done with it. I want to actually enjoy playing the game, which I can't, because the gameplay is horrendous.

What was the point of that post, other than demonstrating that you associate games with bestiality?

Replying to one part of an argument while ignoring the full argument means shit.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

What, that you appreciate and praise a game that you don't even like to play?

 

[Sranchammer]

If you don't appreciate Arcanum, then you're no better than a Jacobin to me.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

And what if I appreciate the 'idea' of Arcanum rather than appreciating actually playing it?

Appreciating it in theory rather than actual practice, so to say?

 

[Fowyr]

You can tell many things about Arcanum's story, combat and C&C, but just read OP.

You have to manually rearrange it yourself when the game should rearrange it itself when picking up an item.

Nuff said. Lucas9 is complete and utmost dumbfuck.

 

[AwesomeButton]

What, that you appreciate and praise a game that you don't even like to play?

Yes. I liked playing it a lot some years ago. So it was a good game for me back then, otherwise I wouldn't have played it. If I install the game today, it will be the same game, but I probably won't enjoy it as much. But I wouldn't blame the game for that fact. Pretentious shits complaining about pathfinding and inventory claim the opposite, the game is bad because they don't like it today.