role-playing

I hope that Sierra makes some sort of sequel for this game, and addresses the issues from Arcanum, because they have a potential legendary game on their hands. But this game fails to live up to its potential. Arcanum is fun, but it's disappointing in some areas too.

The highlight of this game is its innovative skill point system for character development and enhancement. It is kind of overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will really like it. Your character can spend skill points in a ton of different attributes and abilities. They basically center around basic world skills like haggling and lockpicking, technology skills (which allow you to build weapons and potions from junk), and magic (i.e. casting spells).

The technology skills are especially interesting. You buy a gallon of fuel, find a rag in the garbage can, and if you have the expertise, you combine it into a Molotov cocktail. Or, you find a couple of roots and make them into a healing potion. With the technology skills, you are basically finding or buying low value items, and making them into high value items. The items that you can build increase in usefulness as you allot skill points to them. So, at the beginning of the game, you can only refine ore, but later on you might be able to build a fancy set of plate mail.

I was very happy with the nonlinear plot line, and the huge world with its numerous sidequests. This game rivals Baldurs Gate in those fashions. I also enjoyed the music. It is perfect at setting the 19th Century role-playing scene.

But, I found a few things to be very disappointing about this game:

1. The cosmetic aspects of the game, like graphics, animation, and sound effects, are very mediocre. This game underacheives badly for one that is so young. Normally, I don't care all that much, but it this case, it really detracts from the game. The detail level of the characters and scenery is minimal. Every building in almost every city look largely the same. Cinematic cutscenes are nonexistent. Somewhat dated games like Baldurs Gate and Planescape:Torment still have much better cosmetics. If you didn't know better, then you would think that Arcanum was released five years ago.

2. The inventory system for this game stinks!!! This is especially annoying for this game, because utilization of junk like metal springs and tobacco leaves plays such an integral part, so you have to carry tons of stuff with you. Even simple tasks like switching weapons with one of your followers are tedious if your inventory is getting full.

3. You can't control the actions of your followers, nor can you control how they develop. This was the biggest disappointment to me. Half of the game's strategy goes out the window here. You can't build up one guy to be a thief type character, and build up another guy to be a battle tank. Even if you could, your followers just rush head on into melee at the beginning of every battle, so clever tactics go out the window too. This means that ranged weapons, like bows and guns, are hardly useful. Pretty much ever battle ends up as a melee hack-and-slash fest. After a while, the battles in this game get very repetitive.

I hope that Sierra makes another Arcanum, with some of these issues addressed. It is a creative game. It just has a few things to work on.

I enjoyed playing this game. It allowed a lot of freedom in character development, the plot was good, and there was a vast world to cover. The game system was great, creating characters allowed more freedom than any other game I've played, and, unlike almost all other games, being evil wasn't to hard of a path to follow. This game exceeded my expectations by a lot, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs.

I gave it four stars because of a few things: (1) Long range was handled awfully, and a good bowman could go through all of their 100 arrows in about 15 seconds. (2) Magic looked the least glamorous of any option, with small red, green, and purple puffs or vague glows surrounding a character. A lot more time could've been spent on graphics. (3) There was no pause button. What's up with that?

Those are the negatives. However, dealing with them is very simple, and you get used to it quickly. Buy the game, and you will enjoy it.

Ok let me start by saying this is a very good game, you have tons of quests and your charter is very customizable.

Ok ived read alot of reviews on this site and they all seem to say this game has long load time well it dosen't. It dose however have alot of stops in the game(while your battleing or try to cast alot of spells in a row) but if you have alot of ram you won't have that problem.(when i first got the game i had only 256 mb ram and had alot of stops while playing, but after i upgraded to a 1 gb of ram i didn't have the stoping problem anymore.)So if you computer is decent like mine you shouldn't have any major problems playing this game.