Arcanum is hard for people to get because its strengths don't distill into the buckets that they've forced themselves into thinking with. Its main plot is a shoddy hack job - like IWD2's, except that one had the excuse of being written in a day. Its setting, in terms of the 'concept', isn't particularly brilliant. The point is everything else that flows between those shitty buckets.
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Neanderthal you might want to skip the rest of this post, I'd hate to ruin the fun you're having with spoilers.)
Are Arcanum's elves or dwarves amazing and unique on paper? No. Do they have amazing delivery? Yes. When you first meet Magnus, it's easy to tell how alone and out of place he is in a place like Tarant, even though he never gives such a sob story - right down to how you find him alone in a back alley. He does pummel you with this schtick about Dwarves and their last names... only for basically the third living dwarf you meet, in the Isle of Despair, to tell you that's typical city dwarf bullshit. Bates builds up the dwarves as technological wunderkinds, and they are, but the kind of technology you find in their architecture and their dungeons are very different from the way Bates has used the steam engine for Tarant. Nobody tries to beat you over the head with a huge tome about the History of the Elves And Their Distinguishing Features. Instead, the quests and other situations are used to communicate the kind of small, interesting details - e.g. how Elves do not marry, and how they struggle to understand even the
point of murdering another elf.
What about the struggle between magic and technology? Firstly, points for taking a theme that RPGs have hardly ever really taken up, before or after, and making it central to the entire setting. Secondly, additional points for driving the point home right from the beginning. You see the downed vertiplane thing at the crash site; you meet Arbalah and his ability to curse and bless. You meet Jongle who introduces you to the whole split, and straight away the decision to support magic or technology is also intersected with a decision to kill an innocent and mentally half-grown dwarf, basically a child... and then you also get chances to double-cross Jongle. You get a sense of the regional geopolitics and the historical incline of technology over magic purely by looking at run down Dernholm (the shittiest looking place in all of Arcanum) and doing the Black Root mayor quest. It is also worked into the character system and the aptitudes in particular. When you realise Virgil's healing doesn't work well on you, and that you might need a technological healer like Jayna, or when the trains won't accept you because you're too magical, you're running head first into the sheer incompatibility between the two that puts them in conflict all over the world.
I haven't even mentioned the obvious All-Star quests in Arcanum which, for their nuance, can easily make any Top 10 list of RPG quests. The Siamese Twins mystery. The Caladon negotiation/assassination double-whammy.
Arcanum is awesome without having an emotional main plot and even with its notably clunky design, because fuck you, Arcanum does not scale to your level.
