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It is amazing how things can change so radically in such a short period of time when we look at the proceedings in the electronic entertainment industry. Not more than a few years ago people were singing elegies after the newly departed genre of Computer RPGs, may their souls rest in peace. Even the sudden and forceful assault of the devil called “Diablo” could not change this fact, for Diablo was just an imposter, an action game in disguise of a RPG. So RPGs were really dead. Then something sinister rose from its grave and that thing had taken over the whole gaming community by nuclear power. It was called “Fallout”. Today “Fallout” is “Mad Max” of the electronic entertainment industry. So it was some kind of a mild shock when a fair amount of the original “Fallout”’s creators left the mother’s womb, namely Black Isle Entertainment. And while Black Isle was busy producing adaptations of “Wizards of the Coast” games, it looks like the renegade ones, now named “Troika Entertainment”, were busy trying to produce the next epic in C-RPGs. And after conquering the first person shooter genre with “Half-Life”, “Sierra” looks forward to attack the C-RPGs too.

“Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura” is the rather suspicious name of the first game produced by the fledgling Troika. It opens with a short movie in which a knight in red armor walks with a gleaming blue sword in his hand. His walk is immediately interrupted by a simple gunshot. Despite of being simple and short, the movie perfectly does its job as an introduction to the unique “Arcanum” setting.

The world of Arcanum is a classic fantasy setting, complete with elves that confuse being superior with being homosexual and dragons with a very short temper. Now lot’s of those fantasy setting have a simple logical problem. The technology in these settings never improve. This is perfectly understandable in a setting like Margaret Weis’ and Tracy Hickman’s “Darksword”, where a tremendous power such as magic is available to everyone. But the inability of inventing anything that is more complicated than a sword is completely unexplainable in normal fantasy settings. Arcanum does no such sin. In fact Arcanum is a fantasy world that has recently lived an industrial revolution, which spawns a series of serious global problems such as big cities, pollution and Orcs demanding rights to form worker unions. All the fantasy races we know are now trying to adapt to big city life style in a victorian 1800s setting. Electric street lights help steam engines cast their shadows on old temples of magical Gods. Forget grand scale wars. For “in these new times each man has his own personal war.” Welcome to the world of Arcanum, to the newly started silent war between magic and retro technology.

The first thing Arcanum tries to impress you with is audio. And it succeeds. The main menu greets you with the Arcanum Main Theme, one of the many tracks(more than twenty if I’m not mistaken) out of Arcanum OST. Nearly all of those wonderful tracks were performed live by a string quartet and gives the right feeling for the setting, except for the action scenes where the music just happens to appear too dull.

The menu eventually leads you to character creation screen. Arcanum allows you to pick one out of many pre-prepared characters. But of course the real fun is creating your own. The usual “select-race-select-sex” screen would have nothing interesting if there wasn’t an option called “Special Background”. Although this looks like a new idea it actually replaces the perk/flaw system in Fallout. The main idea is making you select a pre-set package of perks and flaws instead of picking them manually, which in turn prevents you from abusing the perk/flaw system. So you cannot create a fighter character and take “cannot cast spells while peeing flaw” to get more weapon skills. Character portraits are really well done here. Definitely a plus. And last but not least, being female character is not a cosmetic choice this time. Some options available to females are completely different.

Next is the main character creation screen which gives you five character points to distribute among various numeric aspects of your character. One or two points are also earned every time you gain a level in the game, so don’t worry you can raise all of those things later. Arcanum really gives you lots of options in character creation process, for all of the skills and characteristics really effect the game in one way or another. For starters there are eight different characteristic scores. The usual Strength, Constitution and co. There is the Hitpoints and the Fatigue which is as important as Hitpoints for the sole reason that every single action in the game drains Fatigue. Next, there are four different categories each containing five skills. Each skill has five ranks that can be raised by character points and three “knowledge ranks” that can only be raised by actually finding a teacher, which a quest in itself, because an apprentice can be found anywhere there are only two experts and one master for any given skill in the game world.

In Arcanum there are two power trees and as you might possibly have guessed, they are Technology and Magick. The Magick stuff lets you choose from among sixteen magick colleges each containing five spells. Once you have learned every single spell in a school you may even choose to become a master. Technology mainly gives you the power to construct useful items and weapons out of rubbish. And believe me an engine driven battle axe is can be more powerful than the infamous fireball. If you are intimidated by the huge amount of options Arcanum lets you choose a character template which make the computer manage the character points you earned. Good idea for the lazy ones.

The tiring but fun character creation process ends with the infamous equipment purchase screen and off you go, the game begins.

The plot is generally well written. Eventhough it may appear as to cheesy at the start the story takes some unexpected twists and turns. Basically you are the sole survivor of a zeppelin crash. A gnome hands you a mysterious ring just before he dies and tells you that you must find “the boy” and give him his ring. Then Virgil a priest of the Panarii religion tell you that you must be the reincarnation of the great elf Nasrudin who, in the Age of Legends fought the evil Arronax to save the world. As you can guess the prophecy has it that Arronax would return and so would Nasrudin, to fight him again. And with this your quest begins.

Arcanum’s in-game depth is remarkable. There are far too many quests to count and most of those are only optional. But the real incredible trait of the game is that it actually adapts to your character. The main plot itself shifts with your playing style. The alignment stuff is the most important example of this. In the game nearly all of the quests can be solved with more than one method. And depending on your approach to problems and the choices you make in your dialogs the game rates you alignment. The remarkable thing is that evil characters also have a game to play. And evil campaign turns out to be an entirely different game with entirely different places to visit. This gives a real replay value to the game.

One might think these traits would make Arcanum the best RPG ever. Well sadly the answer is no. With the game screen fixed to 800x600 resolution and with graphics similar to Fallout, Arcanum is far from being a classic. Even Fallout’s graphics were outdated at the time. But now in the year of 2001 you want to see the armor you wear represented on your screen-ego. Terrible in-game graphics is not the end though. The animation is funny too. So visually the game is nowhere near the place it should be. But if that does not bother you the interface surely will. Those inventory controls, quick use slots, automaps and journals are all of course good idea. But they are executed terribly. To be able to use the traveling map you have to walk out of the town each time. The maps have no pathfinding feature. Items are dropped without your approval.

Combat is novel too. From the two modes of combat you the real-time mode that tries to simulate Diablo is so useless that you will never use it. And the turn-based mode executes so late that it’s sometimes very mind-hostile. In no portion of the game can you control your party members, which would be nice if their AI scripts were done good. But instead they rush into combat so mindlessly that the most important part of the combat usually consists of trying to harness your party members.

Experience is earned in many ways one of which is of course combat. A combat character really earns lots of XPs so you might say it’s easier to finish the game with a combat oriented character. There is a level cap though. No character in the game can exceed Level 50. Which brings the question why they used the same system for NPS too. How can the great wizard Nasrudin be a Level 50 Wizard while you can reach 50 Level simply by traveling around and slaying people.

If you can still close your eyes to these shortcomings the bugs will not let you play the game. Even the main quest sometimes becomes completely uncompletable by bugs.

You might of course expect from a game that has so primitive graphics to run very smoothly. But this isn’t the case. Even if you have a high-end machine Arcanum frequently slows down and even crashes.

Still it’s a good game with a very well written background and a good story. The multiplayer module is also well done with different quests and different locations. There is also a worldbuilder utility for you to make your own worlds.

Arcanum may not be a classic but it’s surely a game worth playing.

PROS: Wonderful and original setting- Rich and detailed background story and main plot- Lots of options and flexibility- Editor Utility to create your own game- Excellent soundtrack-

CONS: Outdated visuals- Terrible coding causing slowdowns all the time- Lots of logical and technical bugs- Poor interface