Evil in Arcanum (and sheer WTF of it)

I'm not going to even talk about quest stuff. Like getting good karma for giving Glady's the ring even when killing Archibald or Magnus loving those damn pigs so much. Wish he would come out of closet really. I'm okay with that as there is always Belle for him. :roll:

Joking and all that aside, what bothers me more are some of the characters. Particularly Z'an Al'urin and Torian Kel. I understand them starting as evil due to their past, but I don't get why they stay evil and most importantly won't join (non-persuasion master ofcourse) good players. In Torian's case that can be (cheaply) explained by some necromancer's brainwash programming, but Z'an Al'urin is a mystery to me.

Neither of the characters seem to be very evil at all. I mean Z'an Al'urin openly questions the Dark Elven ways and Torian Kel just seems very neutral warrior who just likes to fight. Sure he likes bloodshed and killing, but not because he is cruel sadist, but rather because he is a warrior at heart and not much else really. He also has very noble quest to save his poor fallen brothers and it's pretty hard to see it as evil even though in the end only means to do it are rather extreme.

 

Personally I'd say that the developers gave them the wrong alignment, or perhaps that they needed to fill out the "evil team" a bit and just decided to give Zan and Torian evil alignments because one's a dark elf and the other's a warrior of the Derian Ka.

 

Probably this, I guess. It would have been interesting if they would have made them "goodable" and "evillable" like Virgil and perhaps that was original intention (it would make sense), but time constraints got into way and the compromise was to make them evil, but good.

 

That's always been my feeling on it. For balance reasons they felt they needed some followers exclusive to the Evil Side and picked those two because they 'sort of' worked. It does work well, for re-playability I mean.

That said, I really wish I could more easily have them and Geoffrey and all the good characters for a play-through. You get so much story and Z'an and Magnus even get special dialogue with Loghaire.

 

I'm pretty sure Torien Kel will side with Kerghan when you get there. I think Zan Aluran is one of the most interesting characters in the game, but I also really like Raven. Unfortunately those two don't work together very well. If Dante is willing to look past Gar's appearance, Raven should be able to look past Zan's place of origin.