Now I just need them to get Planescape and BG2 and I'll be in heaven!
chrono_traveller on
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
edited January 2010
Im gonna start playing through this one again but it's really hard not to use the OP magic in the game. Really hard. Locked doors, golems, anything can be disintegrated. Temporal Spells that pretty much prevent anyone ever getting a chance to attack you (combined with the level 1 fire spell). It's just too easy to beat with magic.
Arcanum is one of those games I don't touch for years, then find it under a pile and go "woah, why havn't I finished this yet?"
Then I install it and after 6 hours I want to slit my wrists. There should be some kind of award for somehow managing to make a massive Steampunk world seem bland and insipid.
Ed321 on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
You arent doing it right, to have fun you can either
a) be a social retard (background) that forces dumb speak with everyone but be a magikal genius
this is fun because
- its not hard to kill stuff. even if it is tech, you are so magically inclined that it breaks from your presence.
-The reactions to dumb-speak are hilarious
b) Be a sauve bombs and guns guy
- everything early on will melt in opposition to a Molotov cocktail,
- everything later on will die to headshots
- lots of party members to soak dmg.
I'm sure he actually hates it. I enjoyed it at release but my last few attempts to get into it have been met with boredom and frustration.
I actually had the reverse reaction. When I first got it, I ran into so many bugs that I didn't get very far. I put it down for several months, came back, patched it all up, and had a blast. Tried recently to play it again, but found out my CDs are borked.
Though, Tube is normally good at giving reasoned responses to most things, at least in my experience. Kinda out of character to straight up hate something in an appreciation thread. Especially one he started.
chrono_traveller on
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
I can give pretty brief run down of why I think this is a bad game. If it were just a bad game it wouldn't irritate me as much, but it has the germ of some brilliant ideas in there.
*the combat system is unbelievably bad. In turn based it's simply dull, and all PC abilities are massively powered down. In real time it's a matter of trying to click on the enemy as fast as you can because abilities have no coolodown so spamming Harm is the strategy of choice for mages.
*there's no game balance, at all. When I reached the point in the plot at which I was thrown into a dungeon to fight golems who could one hit kill my entire party I was annoyed, when I realised that hitting them broke my weapons I realised the game was stupid. There are solutions, like getting the dog and doing various other pieces of metagaming, but you shouldn't have to resort to a guide that tells you the exact things to get in order to play through early game dungeons.
*the graphics and art design are dull. It's hard to talk about them without using crap descriptors like "dull", but the game is ugly and no fun to look at. It's not an engine limitation, Fallout still looks good to this day. It's a matter of design.
*The interface is atrocious. Even something as simple as walking around town is a hassle. If you want to get from one end of the city to another you have to move the camera along, click, move the camera, click, move the camera ad nauseam. You have to do this to go anywhere. They could have dragged the interface from "the worst I've ever seen" to merely "very bad" by simply unlocking the camera
*I can't speak for how good the plot is, because I didn't get particularly far into it, but it certainly didn't grab me from the start. It felt like my character was simply dropped into the world with no real reason to go on a quest
*the game bugged out on me and it became so irritating to keep playing that I simply stopped. Maybe one day I'll try again
*The party AI is abysmal
I'm sure there was more but it's been a month or so since I played it. It's bad enough that I'm actually willing to challenge the people who claim that it's a good (or even excellent!) game because it contains so many glaring and objective flaws that it takes some pretty brash apologism to even describe it as adequate.
The combat, balance, graphics, interface, party AI, and bug level in Fallout is horrendous too. I'd agree that Arcanum manages to do the almost impossible and surpass Fallout in that regard (except party AI which is better in Arcanum I'd say) but it's not like it's an order of magnitude worse. Really, if you want to play a Troika game for its intricate combat mechanics, go play ToEE. Arcanum is about running around as a dwarf with a tophat and a monocle shooting elves in the face with your mechanical spider medic shooting drugs into you whenever it feels like it.
Arcanum is about running around as a dwarf with a tophat and a monocle shooting elves in the face with your mechanical spider medic shooting drugs into you whenever it feels like it.
It managed to make doing so not fun. Arcanum is a game that sounds much better on paper than it actually is.
I played it to conclusion twice and quite it enjoyed it, when it first came out. Tried to install it about five times since then, ended up quitting before reaching the first big city.
Bit of a shame really it had its moments. Playing a half ogre helped, i just hit things a lot. Leveled teleportation magic because, "why not". Ended up a master in persuasion and lockpicking i think. Still really fun to pick pocket a shop key, sneak into the back room, wait untill the shopkeeper left and then stealing EVERYTHING.
Aaah. I might try installing it again. With a walkthrough to help.
Also not sure if it was mentioned but there are more than a few mods. http://www.terra-arcanum.com/ Can't vouch for any of them but they have a high resolution patch and whatnot.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
I played it to conclusion twice and quite it enjoyed it, when it first came out. Tried to install it about five times since then, ended up quitting before reaching the first big city.
Bit of a shame really it had its moments. Playing a half ogre helped, i just hit things a lot. Leveled teleportation magic because, "why not". Ended up a master in persuasion and lockpicking i think. Still really fun to pick pocket a shop key, sneak into the back room, wait untill the shopkeeper left and then stealing EVERYTHING.
Aaah. I might try installing it again. With a walkthrough to help.
Also not sure if it was mentioned but there are more than a few mods. http://www.terra-arcanum.com/ Can't vouch for any of them but they have a high resolution patch and whatnot.
The shopkeeper theft thing is so unbalanced though (cause I use disintegration to do so). Seriously, that spell has got to go.
It's physically painful to do this, but I agree with pretty much everything Tube says there. If someone came on these forums and told us that a number of Black Isle's best and brightest had got together to make a lengthy old-school steampunk RPG a lot of folks would go wild. But the game itself just...I'm not even exaggerating here...over time it actually starts to make me sleepy.
I find it sad that this game sold more copies than Vampire: Bloodlines, which is imho undoubtedly Troika's best work (apart from the bugs).
As is usually the case with a (deeply) flawed game I happen to love, I really can't rebut the negative things about Arcanum. The combat system is indeed shit. Balance is nonexistent. The world is bland; imaginative, yes, but hardly picturesque. Difficulty spikes so hard it should be criminal. The interface is at best unhelpful and at worst just plain sloppy.
I wish I could say something that objectively offsets even a great deal of that, but what I do love about the game isn't something everybody will. The plot is quality and the writing gets better as you go, but you have to get that far and that sure as hell isn't easy. I can't fairly point to the story aspect and say 'that was worth it.' I love the world, but it is poorly presented.
If I'm honest, I think it's because it's hard. It's going to try its absolute best to kick your ass and it will probably succeed and make it look easy. I'm tenacious like you wouldn't believe, and something like this has an almost sick way of appealing to me. You absolutely are just another guy dropped into a huge, dangerous, uncaring world, and simply forging ahead and doing what everybody tells you to do is the quickest way to get killed. You can try fighting your way out of a conversation, but you better bring your A game because you can bet your enemy is bringing his. You can try wandering out into the middle of nowhere just because your quest marker is pointing that way, but it's on you to have more than a smoking jacket and a dagger when trouble shows up.
It is a game that starts you as a small, weak, insignificant little nothing, and getting more than a few feet out of town means being ready like you've never, ever had to be.
Don't get me wrong, I love the setting and I do think the story - once everything's been cleared up - is well done. All told, though, it's the adventure I appreciate the most. It was hard and unfair and it made you work for every square inch of real estate you crossed. Somehow, I loved it. Sometimes in spite of this, but sometimes because of it.
So no, it's not a game I can recommend, or at least not without a score of warnings beforehand. I can't even say with a straight face that it's a good game, though I claimed as much (for me) in the Game of the Decade thread. You want an objective defense, I don't have one. What I can say is it found a very special, very unique way of appealing to me. Whether it will do so for anybody else... hell, I don't know. Probably not. But that's how it is.
augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
edited January 2010
I just want to get my cigar chomping gentleman-Ogre off the ground one time. And wrap my hard around the fucking insanity of the schematics menu. And then not get so bored by Tarant that I quit.
It is a game that starts you as a small, weak, insignificant little nothing, and getting more than a few feet out of town means being ready like you've never, ever had to be.
One that strikes me when thinking back about the game is that I never really felt powerful outside of my single mage playthrough and even that took a long time to achieve.
This is despite the fact that my thief character breezed through most of the game without even bothering to change out of his smoking jacket simply because stealth made him invincible. The game just lacked the visceral feedback.
I'm just glad STALKER is to a point where I can recommend it without apologizing for it profusely like I would have in 2008. Still not for everyone, but it doesn't take a post like the one from Stolls any more.
So thanks to GOG and this thread I'm back to playing Arcanum again, and losing an extra hour or two's sleep each night. Thanks guys.
Anyway, it is oft mentioned that the balance in the game is broken. Specifically mages get to wander round going zot! and everything dies, while techies end up trying to beat rats over the head with the pistol they just emptied. This definitely killed my enthusiasm for the game on the original release. Well that and all the save-killing bugs. (The fan patch seems to have cleared that up too)
This time round I went dwarven techie after a spot of evil mage to warm up. Only now do I realise that with one point of persuasion you can get all the way to the first city with minimal combat (which Virgil can handle). With all the non-combat quests available you can easily hammer up the early levels and pick up the relative handful of extra points you need for combat skills.
Magic still rules, but it isn't a chore (more than usual) to experiment with various tech options so long as you take that persuasion option with a bit of int.
So, I'm downloading this from GoG at the moment and I'm wondering what patches I'll need to download and install in order to get the most out of the game. It is a Troika game, so I am expecting bugs..
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
So, I'm downloading this from GoG at the moment and I'm wondering what patches I'll need to download and install in order to get the most out of the game. It is a Troika game, so I am expecting bugs..
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GODDAMNIT SULIK GIVE ME THAT SPEAR I TOLD YOU NOT TO USE IT
Fallout 1 didn't even let you set tactics and you had to pickpocket items from your companions to get them back.
I found out the hard way that Tycho considered himself proficient in the use of rocket launchers when I was very close to a deathclaw.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Lime'd and fix'd.
But, seriously, your whole thought should be considered limed.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
ZOMG!
Now I just need them to get Planescape and BG2 and I'll be in heaven!
And not drowning in your own salty tears of boredom.
Mrt, why are you going to play it again if you find it so boring?
Then I install it and after 6 hours I want to slit my wrists. There should be some kind of award for somehow managing to make a massive Steampunk world seem bland and insipid.
I was being sarcastic towards him.
You arent doing it right, to have fun you can either
a) be a social retard (background) that forces dumb speak with everyone but be a magikal genius
this is fun because
- its not hard to kill stuff. even if it is tech, you are so magically inclined that it breaks from your presence.
-The reactions to dumb-speak are hilarious
b) Be a sauve bombs and guns guy
- everything early on will melt in opposition to a Molotov cocktail,
- everything later on will die to headshots
- lots of party members to soak dmg.
Ah, sorry 'bout that. Sarcasm meter must be broken.
Though, now you have me questioning whether Tube was just trolling us or was being serious that he hated Arcanum.
This is why we need the RPG amnesia ray. So you can forget everything you remember about a specific RPG and then explore them all over again.
I actually had the reverse reaction. When I first got it, I ran into so many bugs that I didn't get very far. I put it down for several months, came back, patched it all up, and had a blast. Tried recently to play it again, but found out my CDs are borked.
Though, Tube is normally good at giving reasoned responses to most things, at least in my experience. Kinda out of character to straight up hate something in an appreciation thread. Especially one he started.
Okay I've totally changed my mind. Installing right now. :P
I just figured that out. I'm a bit slow today. Too much work looking at code.
Which is too bad because there's really good stuff after that.
*the combat system is unbelievably bad. In turn based it's simply dull, and all PC abilities are massively powered down. In real time it's a matter of trying to click on the enemy as fast as you can because abilities have no coolodown so spamming Harm is the strategy of choice for mages.
*there's no game balance, at all. When I reached the point in the plot at which I was thrown into a dungeon to fight golems who could one hit kill my entire party I was annoyed, when I realised that hitting them broke my weapons I realised the game was stupid. There are solutions, like getting the dog and doing various other pieces of metagaming, but you shouldn't have to resort to a guide that tells you the exact things to get in order to play through early game dungeons.
*the graphics and art design are dull. It's hard to talk about them without using crap descriptors like "dull", but the game is ugly and no fun to look at. It's not an engine limitation, Fallout still looks good to this day. It's a matter of design.
*The interface is atrocious. Even something as simple as walking around town is a hassle. If you want to get from one end of the city to another you have to move the camera along, click, move the camera, click, move the camera ad nauseam. You have to do this to go anywhere. They could have dragged the interface from "the worst I've ever seen" to merely "very bad" by simply unlocking the camera
*I can't speak for how good the plot is, because I didn't get particularly far into it, but it certainly didn't grab me from the start. It felt like my character was simply dropped into the world with no real reason to go on a quest
*the game bugged out on me and it became so irritating to keep playing that I simply stopped. Maybe one day I'll try again
*The party AI is abysmal
I'm sure there was more but it's been a month or so since I played it. It's bad enough that I'm actually willing to challenge the people who claim that it's a good (or even excellent!) game because it contains so many glaring and objective flaws that it takes some pretty brash apologism to even describe it as adequate.
It managed to make doing so not fun. Arcanum is a game that sounds much better on paper than it actually is.
Bit of a shame really it had its moments. Playing a half ogre helped, i just hit things a lot. Leveled teleportation magic because, "why not". Ended up a master in persuasion and lockpicking i think. Still really fun to pick pocket a shop key, sneak into the back room, wait untill the shopkeeper left and then stealing EVERYTHING.
Aaah. I might try installing it again. With a walkthrough to help.
Also not sure if it was mentioned but there are more than a few mods. http://www.terra-arcanum.com/ Can't vouch for any of them but they have a high resolution patch and whatnot.
The shopkeeper theft thing is so unbalanced though (cause I use disintegration to do so). Seriously, that spell has got to go.
I find it sad that this game sold more copies than Vampire: Bloodlines, which is imho undoubtedly Troika's best work (apart from the bugs).
I wish I could say something that objectively offsets even a great deal of that, but what I do love about the game isn't something everybody will. The plot is quality and the writing gets better as you go, but you have to get that far and that sure as hell isn't easy. I can't fairly point to the story aspect and say 'that was worth it.' I love the world, but it is poorly presented.
If I'm honest, I think it's because it's hard. It's going to try its absolute best to kick your ass and it will probably succeed and make it look easy. I'm tenacious like you wouldn't believe, and something like this has an almost sick way of appealing to me. You absolutely are just another guy dropped into a huge, dangerous, uncaring world, and simply forging ahead and doing what everybody tells you to do is the quickest way to get killed. You can try fighting your way out of a conversation, but you better bring your A game because you can bet your enemy is bringing his. You can try wandering out into the middle of nowhere just because your quest marker is pointing that way, but it's on you to have more than a smoking jacket and a dagger when trouble shows up.
It is a game that starts you as a small, weak, insignificant little nothing, and getting more than a few feet out of town means being ready like you've never, ever had to be.
Don't get me wrong, I love the setting and I do think the story - once everything's been cleared up - is well done. All told, though, it's the adventure I appreciate the most. It was hard and unfair and it made you work for every square inch of real estate you crossed. Somehow, I loved it. Sometimes in spite of this, but sometimes because of it.
So no, it's not a game I can recommend, or at least not without a score of warnings beforehand. I can't even say with a straight face that it's a good game, though I claimed as much (for me) in the Game of the Decade thread. You want an objective defense, I don't have one. What I can say is it found a very special, very unique way of appealing to me. Whether it will do so for anybody else... hell, I don't know. Probably not. But that's how it is.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Someday when I have the time.
One that strikes me when thinking back about the game is that I never really felt powerful outside of my single mage playthrough and even that took a long time to achieve.
This is despite the fact that my thief character breezed through most of the game without even bothering to change out of his smoking jacket simply because stealth made him invincible. The game just lacked the visceral feedback.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Anyway, it is oft mentioned that the balance in the game is broken. Specifically mages get to wander round going zot! and everything dies, while techies end up trying to beat rats over the head with the pistol they just emptied. This definitely killed my enthusiasm for the game on the original release. Well that and all the save-killing bugs. (The fan patch seems to have cleared that up too)
This time round I went dwarven techie after a spot of evil mage to warm up. Only now do I realise that with one point of persuasion you can get all the way to the first city with minimal combat (which Virgil can handle). With all the non-combat quests available you can easily hammer up the early levels and pick up the relative handful of extra points you need for combat skills.
Magic still rules, but it isn't a chore (more than usual) to experiment with various tech options so long as you take that persuasion option with a bit of int.
it does with the high res mod and interface bar, and some squinting.
http://www.terra-arcanum.com/downloads/
get everything by drog black tooth
One of my best Arcanum characters was both retarded and ran around absolutely everywhere naked.
Some of the reactions from the NPCs in that game have stuck with me ever since, such as:
"How dare you barge in here waving your syphilitic piece at me!"
Which I still yell on occasions when people enter my room without knocking.