Musing About Arcanum (why I love it)

I wasn't sure where to put this, so I suppose if it is in the wrong forum someone will move it there.

Anyway, for whatever reason I've been thinking about Arcanum quite a bit lately. Actually, I know why. I've been playing Fallout 3 again and one of the mods I'm using for it adds "character traits" which I understand were in the old Fallout games. I never played those, but I liked the idea of "perks" or backgrounds for the player that have negative and positive effects. It was a feature I always enjoyed in Arcanum. As a matter of fact I'm 100% positive the mod I'm using is taken from Arcanum. The "traits" (and a few perks) it adds are all re-named and re-written character backgrounds from Arcanum.

Here are a few excerpts:

23rd Century Schizo - You have a borderline personality. You have a remarkable indifference towards life, leading to an almost magical resistance to the elements (+25 elemental and radiation resistance). Your Perception is also heightened due to your paranoia (+2). However, you are rambling and alarming in your Speech, causing others to grow uneasy around you (-10 speech).

Agoraphobic - The only thing you hate more than the idea of going outside is staying outside. Once you leave the safety of a building, you take immediate penalties to your Agility and Intelligence (-1), but you gain +2 Strength from the fear.

Nietzschean Icon - Nietzsche said "That which does not kill me, strengthens me." You believe he was referring to you. Your life was been one of unfathomable adversity (-5 luck). It seems like every other month, something awful happens. Thankfully, you have taken your misfortune in stride, and have used your trials and tribulations to improve yourself in every way (+10 to all skills). This, said Zarathustra.


It's kind of comforting, I guess. Though I've never played the old Fallout games I always did get a kick out of the Brahmin in that museum and the poor lad sent on the quest to retrieve a "water gem".

As I play Fallout 3 (or Skyrim or many other modern games) I can't help but imagine what Arcanum might be like of it were created today. I can imagine something really great.

I don my character in a nice looking suit, a healing jacket over the top, with mechanized goggles and a miner's helmet. I stalk around in some abandoned mine, dark and silent save for the quiet howling of the wind and the distant sound of pebbles and earth shifting. Something lurches out of a distant wall, comes out of the wall, was part of it, and I raise my gun to fire. I go into combat mode maybe, something kind of like VATS or mabye it is all real-time. When I try to aim at it my vision gets all wonky, I fire off a round and the bullet goes wide. I fire off a few more and the damn thing explodes in my hands, knocking my character on his back in a hilarious ragdoll. Maybe I reload and try tossing some dynamite, but they fizzle and pop without any satisfying bang. My technological aptitude just isn't high enough and I have to high tail it out of there.

Making my way back through to the city I find cobble-stone streets and brick buildings. The ambiance is aglow with indecipherable chatter of crowds of people and the clip-clop of carriages filling the road. Street urchins scamper about and if I'm not attentive I might notice that when they get close my gold and small items in my inventory disappear. I've made friends with a few though; I freed them from the yoke of an abusive factory foreman and another I reunited with his long-lost parents. I visit a smithy to repair my gear and then I have to make my way through the orcish slums to find the magick quarter where I can identify some of my loot. I don't want to stay too long though because technological items can degrade over time in magickal areas and at night I might find myself the target of a vengeful mob.

That's what I'd like, but I know that isn't what I'd get. Bethesda has talent I think, even if they fall far short of the mark almost all of the time. The potential is there, but the will is not. They will always cater to the biggest audience (the lowest common denominator.

If by some miracle Bethesda or some other company did revive Arcanum I can already see what I'd hate about it: there would be so little subtlety or intelligence to it. They would take the magick vs technology dynamic and totally over-do it. The entire game would be some magick-techno war with legions of troops in bulky mechanized platmail on one side and mages in shimmering robes and gothic armor in the other. It wouldn't be like Arcanum proper, where the dynamic was primarily present in game mechanics and was neatly woven into themes in the story and setting. There weren't really any technologists or mages fighting one another; rather it was wood-cutters vs elves (and their way of life), industry vs preservation, modernization vs traditionalism. Unions against abusive employers, and greedy bankers and businessmen out to get rid of the mages not because they hated magick, but simply because they were in the way of profit. It felt believable and real and always spurred in me questions about Arcanums future.

In the world of Arcanum, magick was dominated by the old aristocracy as only they had the wealth and lifespan to master it. Technology promised to liberate all since any man could wield it, but it came at the cost of great forests, clean rivers, and overcrowded cities. Magick proliferated life and nature, but was elitist and exclusive.

Tarant, if it were depicted today wouldn't be a late 19th century London with a mages quarter and orcish laborers, instead it would be a city from "Sky Captain And the World of Tomorrow". Towering sky-scrapers and zepplins and probably the city guard would all be auto-matons. How else would we convey to modern players that is THE technology capital of the country?

I've discovered in the years since I first played Arcanum that I don't like Steampunk, and I don't like it because it is so exaggerated in any place I've ever seen it (except Arcanum). I think part of what makes Arcanum work so well as a setting is that it is actually fairly mundane. On the surface it is not filled with that much magick or technology. Shrouded Hills and Tarant, and even Quintarra, aren't all THAT exotic. Not until you look into the details. They could easily fit in the real 1885.

What that means is that when the heavily magickal or technological enemies or items DO appear they are special. It's a treat to see machined platemail or mechanized arachnids, or to stumble upon an old forgotten tomb filled with magickal monstrosities.

You have those little moments where they mix just perfectly, like the dark elves at the excavation site. I always loved that little scene because it is something that can or has happened in the real-world, but it has just the right amount of fantasy flavoring. Instead of Indians attacking settlers on the frontier we have angry elves protecting their ancestors' remains. A local gang of outlaws plan to rob the bank, only a few blocks from a steam-engine that the local alchemist wants demolished before it puts him out of business.

The land of Arcanum is exotic, but it remains familiar too. It doesn't become so fantastic that you can't relate to it anymore. Those bits are saved for the ending slides, so that you only glimpse them enough to set off your imagination. Less is more.

Arcanum is a beautiful little gem, but a flawed one and a small one. There is so much more that could be done now, but for the reasons I listed above I don't think it would happen. Today games are too forgiving, they discourage real exploration and won't punish the player for anything. There are few choices and no consequences. What good ideas or writing they do have is often buried deep and even then unrealized due to time and budget constraints. Arcanum ran afoul of time and money too, but at least it wasn't afraid to let you make bad choices. It required experimentation to master and persistence to discover. It was pretty clever.



So, I just felt like getting that off my chest.

 

So, what you're telling us is that your encumbrance is zero?

 

A nice image that you've got there, but, if we look at the facts, no mater how good Fallout 3 was, Bethesda wasn't able to capture the original Fallout feel, it went from a comedic-and-gritty post apocalyptic RPG to a FPS bullet festival.

I'm not saying that their take is wrong, but they failed to capture the thing that made the original FO's great, and with that idea of yours, I can't but imagine a really fast paced, first person arcanum game, life regen et al, probably taking some artistic direction from their Dishonored game, maybe even some mechanics.

Judging from modern gaming concepts, it would be almost impossible to make Tech vs Magic conflict, since the gaming trend today seems to be that of making the player experience all the game has to offer in one playthrough, effectively giving the ability to make a Mage/Technologist viable without penalties.

However I'd also love to see my character; a Techie Halfling, in stunning full colour three-dimensions, wearing his mechanical trinkets and dispatching an army of kites with a hunting rifle.

 

Re:

Yes, and it makes me quite speedy. I prefer gunslingers because I like to travel light. (Magnus is kept around to carry the heavy stuff)

I can't agree or disagree with this since I didn't play the originals. I do try to look at Fallout 3 objectively though and I'm quite aware of its flaws. I find it fun and I enjoy the atmosphere though. There are even a few specific places where I enjoy the story and gameplay. Like I said, Bethesda has talent but you ahve to hunt for it. They either don't realize it or they actively try to hide it. I don't know.

When I imagine a modern Arcanum game I think Bioshock might be a better basis from which to start, but I only played that briefly. Certainly the game shouldn't be a shooter, it should not require twitch reflexes like an FPS. Hell, I'm curious to see what a turn-based game in a fully 3D environment might look like. I can imagine something cool, but, that's not what would happen. Then again I don't mind the FPS RPG's at all. I think they work jsut fine, at least so long as you have a dedicated modding community to add depth to the game.

It would be tricky though, namely because of the whole guns vs melee thing. I think that's harder than magick vs tech. That said, you are spot on that no modern RPG would force you to pick one side or the other. Hell, nowadays you are lucky if you even have to pick between one faction or the other. Skyrim is a horrible example of this kind of thing.

 

Never wanting to miss out on a chance to discuss Arcanum, I was put off by the wall of text. Now I know how you all feel when I post.

You nailed it. It seems the key to high quality is subtlety.

I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with this direction. It might come across as heavy-handed as you stated above, but the contrast might also do some good in developing the world. This could be pulled off effectively.

Analogues and themes such as these could be realized by a dedicated and creative team. They would have to in order to build a living world.

Despite the modern trends in game design, an Arcanum reboot could certainly take a different tack for an experience truer to the original. I cannot imagine what a revisit to Arcanum would look like these days, but that's due more to lack of vision on my part. One only has to look to Firaxis' XCOM to see how a classic experience can be retooled with high fidelity.

 

Can't wait to see a first/third person, rpg/shooter set in the lands of Arcanum. It would of course only use the same three voice actors for everything. Bethesda should get on this fast.

 

And, don't forget that everything is your exactly level, regardless of your chosen status and godly gear.

And Virgil dies more by your hand than by enemies.

 

Obsidian should make a kickstarter after Project Eternity to buy rights back for Arcanum and make a proper sequel.

 

I think it's difficult to make a subtle 3D game; unlike a film where much less needs to be explicit in a game almost everything needs to be relayed in an easily digestible manner to the player - I think very few people like the challenge of thinking a bit deeper into the motives of NPCs. There also becomes a fine balance where if a developer leaves too much to the imagination they're accused of being lazy, and if they spell things out too much then people think they're being unoriginal; it's very difficult to forge a happy medium. Besides that, people now expect a great deal of content and for every single minor quest to have some quirk that is interesting is a very difficult standard to meet.

In some ways, it was easier to create an older game because both the expectations were lower and because games were graphically worse too. Older games were allowed to be more artsy, and poorer graphics meant that people could transpose what they imagined things would seem like if you put them into real life onto the game itself. With most games and their purty graphics that's not possible.

Besides, I'm not sure who would even want to touch Arcanum now as it is pretty niche meaning it lacks broad-based appeal and beyond that any changes that developers would want to make would always be bemoaned by the game's cult following. I'm not saying it's out of the question, just unlikely.

 

It could be, but I think it is unlikely to be done well. For it to work it would have be uncommon. What I mean is, you can't visit here often or maybe you only get to see this great wonder very late into the game. It has build-up that way. However this means a game that is more linear.

Plus, it might just be my personal taste talking, but I find it cliche and predictable. Tone it down some. What I described is too fantastic to be believable.

Maybe. I want something very immersive. Arcanum is immerse, but I find Fallout 3 or Oblivion or Skyrim a bit more-so if only because I'm right there in the world and I can see it from my character's perspective. While playing Arcanum I'm just a little bit more detached.

Something I've missed since last playing Arcanum is the lack of level-scaling. Arcanum is actually challenging. You can go anywhere and do anything, but the game doesn't pull any punches. If you want to gun down gore guards at level 10 you better be quick on your feet, bring lots of ammo, and take advantage of everything available to you. The reward is worth it though. It feels so good to level up in Arcanum.

I don't think it's hard to have depth and intelligence and also have broad appeal. However it seems that all too often when a company shifts towards broad appeal they don't make more than a token effort to write anything. A favorite series of mine, Mass Effect, fell victim to this. With each game it lost depth but got a bit more popular. However I don't for a second thing that the broad appeal was because it got less intelligent.

What made it sell better was that it had more explosions and smoother combat. Neither of those things necessarily preclude deep characters with complex motivations. So I don't see why we can't have the best of both worlds. I think the problem is that the game companies are emulating the wrong films and games to chase after a profit. I understand why they need to make that money and I don't object to that, but I think they take the wrong approach.

Skyrim, actually, I think does a very good job portraying its two primary factions (Stormcloak Rebel and Imperial). Most people will only see what's on the surface and make a simplistic choice if they make any choice at all. However anyone who wants to actually think about it is given plenty of information; you just have to take your time and hunt around and actually ponder things.

I agree though that it was easier with older games. There was less risk involved because they cost so mcuh less to make. The quip about voice actors above is indicative of this. NOwadays you need to voice act everything and every well or people bitch about it. Those voice actors take up money, time, and disc space.

 

Actually the topic here and in many other places, is not about player decisions, as many games present, but of an actual consequence to that decision.

In Skyrim, you could choose any of both factions, but at the end the only thing you got was different armour sets, different quest givers and battles on different spots.

When I joined a faction it was because I wanted to belong to it, I expected to be chased down by guards in enemy cities, to be able to become a member of the faction and the game world reacting to it.

Another good example of this point is Saints Row 3, you are faced with many choices throughout the game, but at the end, the only real difference if you chose A or B is in the items/companions your character has.

Arcanum, in the other hand manages to do something different. You want to become a magician, and the game reacts, it tells you:
"oh, ok, so you're a mage huh?,then you can't use this, and this, and that, and those characters won't like you and you won't be able to do this or that quests."
And then, you as the player need to face it, and it's Ok, because is a choice you made and you have to play it like that. It's a roleplaying game, so there is no need to become a Rogue/mage/warrior/alchemist/druid/monk/King/necromancer/etc... all in one playtrough.

We can compare two games from the same franchise:
Morrowind and Skyrim.
In Mw, if you joined the Thieves guild, you, at some point, would interfere with other guilds, and not only by meeting other members, but by getting to a point where you could either stay with the thieves guild or the fighters guild. So at the end, your choices mattered.

In Skyrim however, there is no choice in that, you follow the fully linear questline of a faction, then of another and so on, the only choices are but gameplay options, wether you want to be a werewolf, or get this or that, but the game-affecting choices are gone, and that's not what we want.

We want to have a game that reacts our choices, not one that rewards them like a teacher to a kindergartener when he learns to read.

We want real choices in a malleable world.

 

I have a mod for Skyrim that makes it so guards in enemy cities will attack you. It also attempts to restore a lot of cut content from the Civil War (it was originally much bigger). Buggy as hell though, so I took a break.

Arcanum, and many older games, have the right idea. Though perhaps the execution is a bit blunt (assassinating the King, say).

It really does irritate me in Skyrim how the game seems to be set-up to encourage you to join every faction in one play-through. I just find it too silly from a story-telling perspective. Are we really supposed to believe this person was the head of every guild, slew the dragon, and a host of other things? It's just too much. Though that touches on another pet-peeve I have.


As was said before I wouldn't be surprised if a theoretical Arcanum re-make or re-boot or revival didn't have the same magick/tech divide. Or maybe YOUR character would be unique, able to wield both. After all, we don't want the player to feel locked out of content...