Arcanum wiki?

Almost 8 years after release of such an expansive game so full of permutations, I'm surprised there's no wiki on it yet.

And yeah, I've seen Troikapedia, but that's no wiki, that's more like a review page with hypertext and a link to the manual. I've seen games only 3 months after release with fully comprehensive wikis written and organized to Wikipedia standards. There are games pre-release that have complete structure laid out in stubs. No wiki for Arcanum after all this time?

Too busy? You and I both know that the more important and impending the deadline, the more likely you are to squeeze out just a little more time to post.

Too lazy? Some of the best wikis have been written by small handfuls of independently lazy.

Surely there are enough people interested in showing off what they've spaded out, those interested in finding secrets in places they thought were already familiar to them. Even the ones who completely object to a wiki will eventually come around to correct some information, or roll back bias with fact.

 

You build the wiki, and I'll fill what little random crap I know.

 

Arcanum isn't so popular as the other games.I think that's why it doesn't got a wiki.

 

And yet it maintains this forum, as well as one other? As well as there still being mods and patches released for it?

 

Well I mean it's not so popular as WoW, or CS...Arcanum has..like 2 forums?CS has...omg like 1000 and more..

 

Same here. I just couldn’t comprehend DE talking about CS gas in this context.
Although, I am tempted to use it on the subjects of his post.

 

It's really sad that CS overshadowed the Action mods, it's really just a bland spin-off, Valve just didn't give them the same support because they developed across multiple game engines instead of dedicated to Valve, such as CS did. It's too bad the team split up; I really wanted to see them win the UnReal contest with AUT.

 

I know this is insanely late...

Although this is incredibly late, I've recently dug out my copy of Arcanum, and upon searching for "Arcanum Wikia" in the internet, this is the only relative related page, and if any of those on here, who speak of why there is no wikia, I'm contemplating making said wikia. I've already set up the general wikia page, and have added a few pages, but I'll definitely need help with this, so if you're interested just reply here. And we'll get started together/I'd grant you adminastrator privilges.

 

Nobody gives a shit. Arcanum is a pretty obscure game. And even the fans agree that it's a very flawed game. We all mostly have a love/hate relationship with the game. I mean, the gameplay is total shit, but somehow we still enjoy playing it, I guess it's the nostalgia factor.

 

Behold Drog, Ruiner of Dreams and Piss Despenser for Parades. Don't be too disheartened by Drog's response QuiteAbitLate, he's like that with a lot of people, and welcome. Currently people are going over the rules and background of the game for a PnP project here. I'd imagine there might be significant overlap for designing a wikia and designing a PnP game so you might want to give it a look. I would help to do a wikia but I don't know much about the mechanics of the game so I wouldn't be a great deal of help, I always find gamebanshee has a lot of info on Arcanum so maybe you could start with that.

 

While Arcanum is one of my favourite games of all time, I don't think there is enough interest in the game to justify the effort it would take to create a wiki.

I gladly help anyone I can in the Hints & Tips forum because I know someone benefits from the response. Creating a wiki, on the other hand, means investing a lot of time and work to write something hardly anyone will read.

 

If I'm not otherwise mistaken it would seem the interest in Arcanum is picking back up. There are a least more new people coming here with things related to modding or stuff they're helping Crypton with, and here's someone with an interest in writing the wiki. People are either finding the game after many years of fermentation, or picking it up fresh on GOG or Amazon or something. Game Banshee doesn't know everything, and honestly I'm listed as a source on Reddit from about 6 months ago, albeit with a startling lack of formatting. People want to know about this game.

 

I was gratified to read in a PC game magazine some five or six years ago that Arcanum was voted the most replayable game of all time, and I'm still replaying it.

It's not that I don't think Arcanum deserves a Wiki, I just wonder if Wikipedia deserves Arcanum.

 

We all know that Skyrim is at least 9999x better than Arcanum. Who are we kidding, honestly? Arcanum has very little content compared to modern RPGs. I mean, just compare how many lines of dialog does Virgil (the most fleshed out follower in Arcanum) have compared to, let's say, Dragon Age's Alistair.

 

Creating the Wikia

So, is there noone interested in helping me create this wikia, because I am actually so surprised that people are still posting so much on these forums - I assume it's because people are still interested in Arcanum, and creating a wikia would be fun.

 

I don't know, I still think Arcanum is more re-playable than say Skyrim. There is little variation in terms of how you can design a character in Skyrim - they will pretty much be either a mage, assassin or warrior with little difference to anyone else's mage, assassin or warrior - whereas Arcanum has many different permutations when it comes to producing unusual characters; mainly due to the magick/tech system, the amount of races and the sheer number of available backgrounds.

I felt a lot of the quests in Arcanum weren't as formulaic as many mainstream fantasy RPGs, and also Arcanum has hidden depths whereas the majority of games today don't make you dig too deep to find discover something new - it's pretty much laid bare from the start. I also know that when I'm done with Skyrim I'll be properly done with it; I doubt I'll ever play on it again because I know I won't be able to produce another unique experience from playing through another time like I could do with Arcanum. As for Dragon Age, I can't speak for that as I never played it though I did hear good things - what put me off getting it is there didn't seem to be a great deal of character variation again (three races and not very many backgrounds).

I guess you may say I'm putting Arcanum on a pedestal but if another game came along with the same amount of customisation as Arcanum I'm sure I'd enjoy it equally as much. Really I think the point of RPGs is to be able to play something different each time you start the game again, not just something that's kind of different but still doesn't significantly vary from your last umpteen playthroughs.

I think lack of free time might prevent the majority of people helping out who normally would QuiteAbitLate. Maybe we should start luring the young and care free as well as the unemployed to this forum to help out on projects such as this; offers of puppies and candy usually help.