Arcanum - worth a punt?

[DraQ]

Content is one thing, but sometimes the container matters as well and as far as those go Tarant is absolutely awful.

Your opinion seems to be that, despite how much content it contains in the form of quests and activities for the player to pursue, Tarant is terrible because it doesn't look nice enough.

I think there's nothing left to discuss.

Would you play an RPG with great content but all the models and animations done by Prosper?
Would you play PS:T with all the graphics replaced by MLP visuals?
And this is worse - Tarant's problem isn't just looks - area layout is as much gameplay as it is visuals.

 

[Dreaad]

I don't get you sometimes DraQ . You are really really picky about certain things. Like Tarant is so bad you can't play Arcanum or get any enjoyment from it..... but you're willing to put up with and praise Skyrim with a 'capital' city of 20 people and a civil war between 50 guys. It's almost like some sort of bias. Don't know about you, layout and all, but I found Tarant far more believable than any city in Skyrim or Morrowind.

I mean if you can suspend your realism logic for one, why not the other? Is it just some inner feeling you have that isometric games must be more precise somehow?

 

[RK47]

Go back to analyzing tire tracks, comrade.

 

[DraQ]

I don't get you sometimes DraQ . You are really really picky about certain things. Like Tarant is so bad you can't play Arcanum or get any enjoyment from it..... but you're willing to put up with and praise Skyrim with a 'capital' city of 20 people and a civil war between 50 guys. It's almost like some sort of bias. Don't know about you, layout and all, but I found Tarant far more believable than any city in Skyrim or Morrowind.

I mean if you can suspend your realism logic for one, why not the other? Is it just some inner feeling you have that isometric games must be more precise somehow?

• Skyrim's "cities" aren't overwflowing bags of content Tarant is described as, they are places you drop by to buy, sell and pick up quests. They are serviceable as such and despite being shrunk beyond borders of absurdity they actually look and feel workable enough. Arcanum OTOH is much less of a "derp around wilderness killing bandits/draugr/etc. hiding out in dark places" adventurer simulator game and needs much stronger cities as its gameplay revolves a lot around population centers.
  
• Tarant isn't significantly larger than Balmora (let alone Vivec) in terms of the number of POIs, and the number of POIs is much more meaningful measure of size than area - we remember individual places not how far apart they are, this is what allows TES III and V to work at all and this is also the reason why Oblivion was so bland despite being slightly larger than Morrowind and why Daggerfall's world wasn't nearly as impressive as it looked on paper and screenshots.
  
• When it comes to believability Tarant is anything but - like I said its architecture and layout are nothing like pretty well defined expectations - around 1/3 of total area wasted on open canals bordered with wide boulevards, wide, flat ground level buildings (completely unlike not just Victorian city but any city ever), vanishingly small residential areas, Boil opening straight into higher class district, etc. Even some Oblivion "towns" are more believable than that (and that's bad).
• IIRC Arcanum isn't a compressed gameworld unlike every TES from Morrowind onwards, so it needs to be held up to the standards of Daggerfall rather than Morrowind or Skyrim. You could rebuke that by saying that Tarant is such an exquisitely handcrafted place that all the magic would be gone if its creators used DF's approach, except it is not so it would not.

 

[Neanderthal]

Aye there's no doubt that Arcanum's visuals are mostly arse (limited budget and time?) so far, but i'm finding the moment to moment gameplay, narrative and questing is more than making up for that. The statue quest I completed in Ashbury for instance, that was a new one on me and oddly satisfying, the dialogue choices weren't too obvious. The castle that I ground through however, bit bloody boring. Still had a couple of new companions to liven things up in Dog and Geoffrey, and there were some interesting folk around Ashbury.

The plot is really beginning to interest me now, the Black Mountain clan aren't on the Black Isle, so where did they bloody go and who took em? Got to see the Dwarf king apparently. The ancient tech littering the Black Isle also intrigued me, and obviously accounted for the lack of teleportation, is this Dwarf stuff? Can I decide the future of Cumbria, and reinstate its rightful king, gonna bloody find out, already kept Blackroot in the kingdom so it makes sense. Also i'm now a champion pit fighter (with a little help from harm.)

 

[DraQ]

I really hope I'll learn to like Arcanum at some point, but so far it's been really good at rebuffing my attempts.

Aye there's no doubt that Arcanum's visuals are mostly arse (limited budget and time?)

They could have easily gotten as much as they needed by cutting the derpy fantasy bestiary by over a half or concentrating their efforts on fewer locations.

Anyway, my other main problem is that moment-to-moment gameplay isn't that good either and gets downright awful if you play as gunslinger (seriously, whose idea was to omit ammo types, ammo capacity and reloading in a game containing weapons as different as flintlocks, revolvers and primitive machineguns?).
I'm pretty sure in the end enduring all this shit would have paid off - as long as I wouldn't choke on my own vomit which is the kind of risk I'm reluctant to take.

 

[Neanderthal]

No denying at times it tries its hardest to alienate the player, there's a lot of rough edges on it. I mean traps are just a fucking nightmare, you'd think that you could detect them within a certain distance, nope, one square away only. So if you want to disarm or avoid them it's a case of walking and testing out every square of ground, who the bloody hell thought that would be anything but tedious? Still behind all this obfuscation there is ambition and real depth and richness to the setting, with unique quests and fresh interesting content, and thats whats kept me enthralled so far.

Oh thanks for amulet tip Tigranes.

 

[Tigranes]

Theres a very interesting thing you can do with that dwarf king in a future playthrough.

You will soon be at stillwater. Make sure you take the elfs quest and do it to the full conclusion. Best easter eggish quest around.

 

[Old One]

Tarant's problem isn't just looks - area layout is as much gameplay as it is visuals.

I don't think Tarant looks bad. I would define looking bad as something that bothers me most of the time as I'm playing it. Neverwinter Nights looks bad.

Gameplay isn't a problem specific to Tarant, it's a problem with the system as a whole. It's definitely bad. It frequently bothers me. On the other hand it has some good points too. For example the way general thievery works in Arcanum is better than the way it works in most games. You can't simply waltz into every house and rifle through drawers as the fancy strikes you (a la Baldur's Gate) - not until you get heroic stealth and lockpicking skills anyway. Robbing stores is also pulled off far better in Arcanum than it is in other games - if it's pulled off at all, that is. Some games make stores robbery-proof because otherwise you get horrible exploitation like you see in Fallout 2. In Arcanum a normal thief character does best to plan his heists. He should wait until dark, pick the lock on the outer door while the city guards aren't looking, sneak into the shop's back room, pick the lock on the store inventory chest (and BTW success at lockpicking isn't guaranteed, since you can jam the lock if you fail), then find an escape route which can be either the front door or a window or anything else handy.

The point is, Tarant can be interacted with in more interesting ways than other cRPG cities. I've even set bombs on side windows to stores in order to blow them out so I could come back later and have an easy way to sneak in and out. I've never seen another game city with detail like that. And that's another good point about Tarant: it's more or less rewarding to explore the city depending on what kind of character you've made. Thieves and technologists can have a much better time there than magicians.

Area layout has never struck me as a particular problem. At least, I've never found myself wandering around Tarant thinking, "wow, this area layout is really poor."

 

[Backstabber]

Robbing stores in Arcanum is way too easy, just pickpocket the key from the shopkeeper and you're somehow allowed to take all his stuff, no real stealth required

 

[Neanderthal]

FUCK ME SIDEWAYS! Arronax just appeared on Morbihan and fucking schooled me, sat me and me crew on me arse like I were a drunken babby. Not like I expected though, seemed tranquil and composed, I expected rage and screaming but this seemed far more unsettling. Really good encounter. He didn't seem to know whether I was Nasrudin reborn or not, could be a weakness?

Going down into an ancient temple, Geoffrey thinks it's of the Derian Ka, them folks who Schuyler's were connected to, Necromancers by sounds of it.

One thing I like about this game is the power level, i'm approaching 30 and though i'm good at magic and persuade, with a fair bit of melee and defend, i'm in no way able to get anything else. Really got to work at a good build.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I had scarred myself and -1 to beauty. Everyone was talking about how ugly I was. Got to a medic and healed. Where are these choices in modern games?

Fable series has this.

 

[Snufkin]

Robbing stores in Arcanum is way too easy, just pickpocket the key from the shopkeeper and you're somehow allowed to take all his stuff, no real stealth required

But then you have to pick the lock to open chest right? Spell is too loud and picking locks will require high lockpicking skill.

 

[Sranchammer]

Caladan will rise again!

 

[Backstabber]

But then you have to pick the lock to open chest right? Spell is too loud and picking locks will require high lockpicking skill.

From what I remember, some store keys (Like Ristezze's, for example) do actually allow you access to the chest, while others (like Tarant's General Store) don't. The unlocking spell is far better than lockpicking because it only requires one point and if you do it from far away, no one will hear you anyways.

 

[Leitz]

I'm playing Arcanum for the first time and the worst part about Tarant is that it's a giant FedEx quest town. It feels like the devs made this city exclusively for cheap Exp, so the player can level up for the more difficult areas.
However the game doesn't force you to stay, it gives you other opportunities to grind and you can take the train to other places right away.

Nietzsche: "Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by"; works in this game, so everything's cool.

 

[hivemind]

I know there is a whorehouse in this game.

The important question that will determine the gender of my replay character is:

Can you whore yourself out as a female??

 

[oscar]

There's a few occasions when you can actually. Can't remember if there's a beauty requirement or something.

 

[hivemind]

Half elven supermodel incoming.

 

[JarlFrank]

There's a gentlemen's club that doesn't ordinarily allow women but you can... "persuade" the owner of the club to grant you membership.

Also you can do a house visit quest for the brothel's mistress - go to some guy's place, have sex with him, get money and XP.

 

[DraQ]

Gameplay isn't a problem specific to Tarant, it's a problem with the system as a whole. It's definitely bad. It frequently bothers me. On the other hand it has some good points too. For example the way general thievery works in Arcanum is better than the way it works in most games.

Well, as you said it's not all the systems because crime system (I never really got to test it, but its a recurring theme in people's opinions) seems pretty stellar, so is general interactivity or much maligned effects of striking something harder than your weapon (of course gunplay in particular is beyond awful, but that's beside the point).

The thing is that area layouts pretty much dictate general dynamics and both your opportunities and hazards when fighting or stealing or doing all kinds of other things. For example with better layout you could consider not just getting through window, but for example a second-story window. Getting there would be a completely different affair than getting through ground floor window which is barely distinguishable from door - for example you'd have to find the route, possibly using rooftops, you could have general population being naturally suspicious towards people skulking around on the roofs, so either stealth, or disguising yourself as chimney-sweep would be in order. You could utilize unreachable higher ground in combat or as cover when escaping and so could the enemies. And so on.

So yeah, Tarant's layout not only fails to convey the notion of a fucking industrial revolution city, but is also woefully lacking in gameplay opportunities - imagine and compare a sort of 2D Dishonored or Deus Ex.
Or even FoT which actually exists and where you can climb onto a roof to pelt enemies with bullets.

I'm playing Arcanum for the first time and the worst part about Tarant is that it's a giant FedEx quest town. It feels like the devs made this city exclusively for cheap Exp, so the player can level up for the more difficult areas.

B-but muh content!

 

[Neanderthal]

Cleared three dungeons today, first the ancient temple of the Derian Ka, where I found another god altar (making notes of where these are) and finally found a talking skeleton whom whispered that he longed to know flesh again. He talked of bathing in Dragon's blood so I went off to the resting place of the last Dragon I half explored earlier, here I found the journal of a creature called Kraka Tur, a half Man - half Dragon who terrorised the world until Nasrudin and the Elven council banished him. No Dragon blood though. Checked my map and found a dungeon labelled the Dragon Pool, felt like a right fucking dipshit casual, went there cleared it out and got the Dragon blood.

On returning to the skeleton I bathed him in the blood, flesh knit itself to his bones and he was reborn, thanking me profusely. Intrigued (obviously) I asked him his background and he introduced himself as Torian Kel, a warrior of the Grey Legion, bound to unlife by the Derian Ka and raised along with ten thousand others to fight the Molochean Hand. THE FUCKING ASSASSINS WHO'VE BEEN PURSUING ME! The Hand were once servants of the Derian Ka but had rebelled for some reason and the two factions seem to have wiped themselves out in the ensuing conflict.

This was thousands of years ago, but obviously both still exist as the Hand still pursues me, and not only are the Schuylers of the Derian Ka, so is fucking Geoffrey my companion! I have to have this Torian Kel join me, his voice acting is bloody pure and spine chilling while his background and state of being is obviously so fucking interesting. Really enthralled by this turn of events, and the depth of all this lore that surrounds me, and that i'm interacting with.

First fucking class.

 

[General Maxson]

This makes me want to reinstall Arcanum, so much stuff I have missed... Too bad Drog stopped updating his unofficial patch, it was great.

 

[Tigranes]

If you keep Torian Kel right to the end, there's a nice little find that speaks to the lore.

 

[Carrion]

So yeah, Tarant's layout not only fails to convey the notion of a fucking industrial revolution city, but is also woefully lacking in gameplay opportunities - imagine and compare a sort of 2D Dishonored or Deus Ex.

That's pretty harsh considering that Arcanum is still one of the best top-down/iso games when it comes to doing stuff in different ways, surpassing for example the original Fallouts at times (although it's generally not quite as consistent, having plenty of unimaginative and straightforward combat areas that drag it down a bit). Especially in cities you often have the speech, combat and stealth options, large areas that offer multiple access points to each building, different ways to get past locked doors (picking the lock, using explosives, casting a spell on it, bashing it open, using a pickpocketed key, entering through a window or an alternate entrance etc.) and other obstacles, as well as primitive NPC schedules, which allow you to come up with some outside-of-the-box solutions and succeed with wildly different builds.

Sure, the use of Z-axis and less formulaic layouts could've allowed for more creativity, but to be fair, the norm in RPGs is usually one or (if you're lucky) two doors to each house with no alternative entrances, very little or zero gameplay use of the Z-axis even in games that are full 3D, and indoor areas that are loaded separately from the surrounding outdoor areas (so that the guy standing outside the front door won't come to investigate even if an H-bomb goes off in the living room, unless he's specifically scripted to do so). I just don't see much point in bringing up stuff like not being able to walk on rooftops when similar criticism applies to almost every RPG ever (even those that allow climbing or other similar actions), the exceptions usually being games that are heavily focused on individual areas and levels (such as Deus Ex or JA2 and other tactical games) rather than a continuous world. In this context Arcanum doesn't fare all that badly.

Then again, it's been a few years since I last played the game, so maybe I just remember the best parts and have forgotten about the worst ones. In any case the best parts are pretty damn good.