by MrPopo Sat Jan 24, 2015 12:08 am
1. Painkiller - PC
2. Front Mission 4 - PS2
3. Wasteland 2 - PC
4. Arcanum - PC
Well, I powered through. I think the way to best describe this is an attempt at doing Morrowind in the Fallout engine, but with a bunch of bad UI decisions tossed in.
The game's universe is very intriguing and I'd love to see more games set in this sort of aesthetic. You've got fairly standard looking villages and then the cities are more upscale with that Victorian look. They also did a good job with how much the dialog varies based on things such as your sex, your race, and where you are on the magic/tech spectrum.
The magic/tech thing is another great idea, if a bit unbalanced. The more tech you know the worse you are at magic. The more magic you know the worse you are at using tech. It lets your characters specialize and I feel like a second playthrough would play very different from the one I just finished. Another thing the game does very well is that there are a ton of solutions to your problems. Especially when it comes to the main quest it feels like it is very hard to lock yourself out of continuing; I think you would really have to be trying to screw yourself over.
Now for the bad. I've talked about how bad the UI is in the RPG progress thread. The camera control combines the worst parts of Diablo-style fixed and Baldur's Gate-style free cameras. The game offers both turn based and real time combat, but the real time has major problems (the game runs very fast and you're constrained by animation times) while the turn based stacks things way in favor of the player (you always start first since you control when you enter and once you realize speed is the god stat you can easily attack 10-15 times depending on your weapon, more if you chug a speed potion). Another downside of the combat is your companions are identical to Fallout's; you can't control them and they tend to do dumb things. The best companions have healing skills to give you a little boost in combat, but they don't really do a dedicated medic role.
Another major issue is the size of the world. Now, normally a big world is a good thing, as Morrowind demonstrates so well. But Morrowind has a lot of good decisions in terms of world and interface design that leverage that large world. In Arcanum the size of the world ends up getting in the way of everything. The first problem is that you don't know any NPC names until you talk to them, which when combined with every NPC having actual dialog written for them means it's an utter pain in the ass to track down quest targets and to discover quests in the first place. The next problem is that you don't get the ability to do real discovery like you do in Morrowind. If you're very lucky when you're moving on the world map you might trigger a waypoint that you can explore, but the radius on it is very small. Another issue is that if you're not within a designated area (such as a town) then you don't get the ability to get a map view of your immediate surroundings. What really makes this suck is how many times waypoints will drop you off with your target being out of view; if you start walking the wrong way you won't realize it for a while. This makes a lot of the "track down someone" quests extremely hard to pull off without a guide, since they usually involve wilderness areas.
Finally, the ending is kind of anticlimactic. You fight the final boss, kill him dead, then you get a very brief cutscene of you escaping the last dungeon and then it immediately goes into "here's the results of your sidequests"; you don't even get a "thanks to you evil has been stopped" or something similar beforehand.
This game is deeply flawed, but it also has a lot of really good points. I made a point of avoiding walkthrough help for the most part, but for the times I used it I didn't feel like I cheated myself out of an experience. The strength of the game is in the writing, so if you want to give it a try I'd say don't shy away from GameFAQs so you can experience as much of the content as you want.

Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.