You wouldn't know what location design IS in Arcanum (apart from Tarant) - You admitted to not playing it IIRC.
I have played it to the point where I reached Tarant, derped around it a bit, IIRC was hit by a quest bug of some sort and visited some other location.
I would still like to play it through some day, but when I think about it, I immediately see blocky, soulless Tarant (and no, not in a "its soulless by design, hurr...." kind of way), garbage combat, especially gun mechanics, and shit tier filler enemies that only dilute worldbuilding.
If you cannot into mechanics make a fucking visual novel or something.
In Fallout 1 you have some bad locations as well and considering the relatively small size of the game, it's telling something. Vault 15 might work from story perspective - though even then it fails at shoving as how an empty ex-vault could look like. OTOH from gameplay perspective as sort of a dungeon it's bad. Three tiny levels or corridors and rooms with almost nothing (+ some rats).
Haven't noticed significant problems with V15 other than it not having the kind of size and living space needed for its population, but that's easy to dismiss as videogame scaling and if criticized the critique should start at V13.
The other thing to mention is that there is no location as big and ambitious, with so much content, as Tarant - in Fallout.
Quantity != quality.
And I don't give a fuck about content if location feeling profoundly wrong prevents me from enjoying it.
What is also worth considering is that creating a location with some huts, some simple houses and similar stuff is easier than "showing" a supposedly big, civilised city.
True, but there have been contemporary and earlier games doing much better job at that. And "gamedev is teh hard" is not a valid excuse.
Overall Fallout wins in graphic department but Arcanum isn't terrible.
It kind of is because it tries to improve on Fallout's graphics, uses more advanced tech and more resources, yet ends up looking worse.
There are good thins about it alongside the bad one. The look of items and inventory or portraits - not only pretty good but adds to the atmosphere.
True, but I'm probably going to spend more time looking at the world graphics than in my inventory (if not, there are some BIG issues with inventory system).
A few nice done locations, etc...
Which you won't see if you quit around Tarant.
In Fallout as simple as they are, they actually work and the combat itself is enjoyable.
Fallout actually has pretty bad combat (even though it uses some very valuable concepts), but it can still be fun and feels right - firearms are fired and reloaded, enemies get Swiss-cheesed etc.
Not so much in Arcanum. I guess this is the same problem as with the graphics. In Arcanum they tried to be more ambitious than in Fallout where it comes to combat (magic, the RT/TB hybrid,...).
RT/TB hybrid was a ludicrously misguided idea from the start, combat UI is much worse (try performing called shots without consulting the manual), failing to carry over or replicate capacity and reload mechanics from Fallout was... I don't know what, TBH - maybe evidence of entire team suffering simultaneous stroke?
