Defeating Kerghan in 1 Turn

They should have ade Stringy Pete and Sharkman the final bosses.

 

I think the hardest fights in pure, unmodded Arcanum would have to be Stringy Pete, the Cursed Paladin guarding the scourge and to a lesser extent, the Lord of the Damned. With the right strategy, they all become easy, but if you go for pure melee with a middling level weapon rather than a pyro technic axe, they can be challenging.

The fact that the AI can be so consersative when it comes to spell casting and item use really doesn't help to make any of them to big of a threat.

 

But why would you want to do that?

It just makes it boring.

 

Paladin yes, Pete no. I don't think he does any damage once you take away his Arcane sword.

[EDIT]

This lack of decent foes is showing just how much this game needs a Sharkman.

 

Well, they couldn't have been too powerful, provided there are no diplomatic ways of geting through without fighting. There's no way you can *talk* the cursed paladin to let you just take what you came for and go home. Kearghan and pete allow a diplomatic way around so they could've been harder. But still, not as hard as creatures get in Car-arcanum.

The point is, the game must be playable and finishable with not-so-perfect characters or simply not combat oriented ones. While kerghan is no match for a stun/backstab char high on haste potion and tempus fugit, an average pure dodge/meele half-orc might have a problem there. If the fight was as hard as it would seem, and the former would have had a problem there, the latter might just as well reload to the point he wasted all the characher points on something else than backstab/str/dex. Also, requiring a strong char to beat stringy pete is quite enough, requiring a munchkinized char for that woud simply not do.

However, i love games that aren't so totally tolerant of crappy characters, forcing the player to make his char good at something, be it magick, persuasion or combat of some sort. But not like oblivion or your average D&D game, that actually focuses on combat and employs other elements as eye candy. While sword cuts hurt, being hit by a plasma-cored fireball should be dealdy, to let the mage, who can only cast it so many times per day, equally matched against a warrior swinging a battle axe.

 

Well, there's only so much you can do to make it more interesting...
Make an enemy have 10k HPs, so you have to keep whacking and gulping fatigue potinos not to feint, make him do a lot o damage, so you have to drink a healing potion every other turn, or both. Maybe damage armor and weapons and posion the PC.

But all that is just plain annoying and makes the game seem unblanced.
A char with 20 str/dex and maxed meele should be quick to dispatch whatever stands in its way. Kind of like a mage summoning 5 deamons or casting disintegrate or a techiie blowing stuff up with grenades and plaastique.

 

I hate Disintergrate. Sure you win, but you don't get any loot.

 

Yeah, if Kerghan always had that regenerative shell on and you had to find another way to kill him, that could be interesting.

 

Well, I guess the idea they used in fallout was quite good, to be able to force the place to self destruct without any fighting involved. The boss fights could have been harder this way, for the people who are into this stuff.

The difference here is that in arcanum you'd have to be ultra persuasive or decide to join kerghan to finish the game, in fallout you go the quiet way around without any special skills. Watch the speedrun if you don't know what I mean. Don't watch if you haven't played through fallout at least twice tough.

Unfortunately, it only worked as an idea, becouse the boss fights were nothing special in both games. It'd be fun if Kerghan was sooo overpowered, the player would have to run away and lay traps or make a couple of ambushes to take him out. But he couldn't have been, becouse it had to take place on a boss area from wich he can't follow you. I dunno if it's possible to get out of there after you piss him off.

Yeah, making fights so hard they have to be complicated is the key, but that implies other problems, like dealing with different char types. What's easy for a backstabber on haste, is a hell of a chellange for a techie laying traps and nearly impossible for an average fighter/gunslinger with no other fighting skills. Making boss fights too hard for an average player is a good way to piss off people and get flamed in reviews.

Now I'm getting nostalgic, when I think of how the fights in the eye of the beholder series looked like, or even the good old dungeon master. Sure, that was just a long dungeon crawl focused on fighting, finding keys and pressing buttons, but at least the boss fights were worth preparing for. Nowdays they make games too easy, with boss enemies often being way easier to beat than things you had to fight to get to them.