The legendary Troika Games was founded by three legendary developers upon three great principles: design, art, and code; they made three broken masterpieces. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura is one of them. There was a reason why Troika went bankrupt: you can't rely just on great ideas alone; you also have to implement them well and manage your resources. Arcanum has a fantastic premise: a magical world going through an industrial revolution. And the setting is the only good thing about this game. All the rest is just painful.
I've tried this game a couple of times years earlier, and I can't do it anymore. My first two runs were gunslinger. It sounds cool, but the gameplay is awful, or more awful than usual. I'd suggest staying away from guns on your first playthrough. Some say that tech builds are the most fun way to play the game. I don't know. Arcanum is an exercise in tedium. The UI in general, and the inventory system specifically, is cumbersome. For tech you have to juggle inventory a lot between your companions, because you can't hold much, not by weight, but by volume. You can't stack your ingredients, and notes and quest items are huge. So, the less you have to interact with inventory management, the better. The camera is locked to your party for some reason. At first, it was just annoying, but when you travel to Tarant, which is a massive city, it becomes a real problem. Navigation is plain bad, and it will test your patience.
The third time I said to hell with guns, I would just whack enemies with my sword and be done with it. I imagined a human, maybe a doctor, who sees the changes in the world and would embrace technological progress, the new way of living. But technology is just tedium. Magic can do everything tech can, and even more. It’s easier and even more fun, for example, conjuring spirits of the dead. And the combat… oh god, the combat. The publisher Sierra, after Diablo’s success, insisted on real-time battles in the middle of production. So now we got two broken systems. Fantastic!
Character creation and progression are not as fun compared to Fallout with its perks. Upon creation you only have five points for everything. That’s not enough to make a distinct character. It’s only possible if you choose an extreme background paired with extreme races.
You’d think the writing would at least be great. Nope. It’s serviceable, but nothing special. They spent countless hours writing different flavors of dialogue for drunk or stupid characters, and different greetings for different races. But there is no depth to it, at least in the first third of the game. For persuasion you need to orient yourself in a dialogue tree, not just pick options with [persuasion] in them, which is great. So, the writing is fine, it’s okay, I just expected much more. Quests are meh. I guess all the interesting stuff is further into the story. But why should you torture yourself with this boring gameplay just to finally be hooked on good writing, pacing, and quest design far into the game?
The game is unfinished and poorly balanced. It has a gorgeous OST — beautiful, moody string quartet. It has great immersive manual. But it should have stayed in development at least a year longer: to make one good combat system, to finish the UI, and to smooth out pacing and balance issues. I wish there would be a remake, but it won’t happen.
