How to ruin a good idea.
Aug. 13th, 2006 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenHave been replaying Arcanum lately, and reconfirming the impression I got the first time around: rarely has a game with this much good material been so bad.
Arcanum should've been a great game. Developed by three of the people responsible for Fallout, one of my all-time favourites, and it looked like it was going to have the same strengths plus steampunk and magic elements. The character creation system was flexible enough to allow a wide range of play styles: diplomat, melee specialist, firearms specialist, sneak-thief, artillery mage, healer mage, mechanic, pharmacist, and more. You could deal with a locked door by bashing it down, blowing it up, picking the lock, stealing the key, or asking somebody nicely to open it for you.
The technology was pretty cool - you could hunt for parts and build your own Tesla Gun - and the magic was quite well-developed. It had a detailed setting, an interesting central plot, several good side plots ranging from funny to tragic, and some fun NPCs (Gar, the World's Smartest Orc, was a lot of fun).
Unfortunately, the execution was lousy. It's like somebody was trying to prove a point by ruining as many good ideas as they could. Just a few examples:
- Remember what I said about a wide range of play styles? One little problem: the vast majority of XP is awarded for hitting stuff in combat. And by this, I don't mean "your party hitting stuff", I mean your character hitting stuff. A combat-specialist character will level up about three times as quickly as a social/thief/support character, which makes it hard for noncombat characters to develop even in their own specialties.
- Awful, AWFUL party AI. You can give your party members armour and weapons, but aside from your own character, you don't choose what they're going to equip. They decide that for theirselves, based primarily on criteria of "which would most annoy the player?" Cursed equipment is a favourite; so is magical stuff for technologically-inclined characters, and vice versa. (One of the principles of the game world is that magic and tech interfere with one another; a mage wearing all-tech equipment can easily get something like an 80% chance of critical failure on every attack.)
Add to this the fact that NPCs will spontaneously pick up stuff lying on the ground, and you find yourself constantly managing their inventories. Because Magnus the Dwarf would rather use a piece of scrap iron than fight with the nice axe that you get as a special quest reward...
It gets even worse when you actually get into combat. The standard battle tactic is not 'attack nearest enemy' or 'attack most wounded enemy', but 'run laps around the combat trying to get at an enemy on the opposite side of the melee'. NPC mages are reluctant to use many of their most effective spells, but perhaps that's just as well, because the friend-or-foe recognition isn't 100% reliable. I have repeatedly found myself having to kill off an elemental summoned by my own party members... while other party members heal the elemental as fast as I can pound on it, stopping only when they exhaust themselves and fall unconscious.
It got to the point where I found myself deliberately loading up party members with heavy equipment in order to reduce the number of action points they could spend in combat.
Oh, and good party members whine if you attack good-aligned NPCs. This would be far less irritating if NPC alignments made some sort of sense... more on that in a moment.
- Unsatisfactory quest resolutions. One quest in particular left a really bad taste in the mouth (and you might want to skip the next two paragraphs if discussion of sexual abuse is likely to cause you distress):
It turns out that the city's gnomes (wealthy but unpopular minority) decided they needed powerful bodyguards to protect themselves against racist attacks. I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say that a large number of human women disappeared (firstly wives and daughters of the gnomes' political rivals, then later anybody too poor to be missed), and some years later a lot of half-ogres mysteriously started to show up as bodyguards to the gnomes. One series of quests involves finding a bloodstained, deserted laboratory on an island complete with a journal that chronicles some of the intervening process (Josef Mengele would've been proud).
On your return to the mainland, you meet a gnome who tells you the rest of the ghastly details, while gloating that nobody's ever going to believe you. And that's where the plot ends. If you like you can hand the journal over to a newspaper editor... who turns out to be a fake, and vanishes with it. There's nobody else you can talk to about it; without the journal, you can't convince anybody of the conspiracy's existence, even if you've maxed out your charisma and persuasion abilities.
Oh, and if you try to give Exposition Gnome the painful death he so richly deserves, your party members complain... because apparently, he's good.
What the hell were they smoking when they designed this game? It really wouldn't have annoyed me half as much if it had just been a run-of-the-mill crappy game, but it keeps reminding you of how much better it could have been.
Arcanum should've been a great game. Developed by three of the people responsible for Fallout, one of my all-time favourites, and it looked like it was going to have the same strengths plus steampunk and magic elements. The character creation system was flexible enough to allow a wide range of play styles: diplomat, melee specialist, firearms specialist, sneak-thief, artillery mage, healer mage, mechanic, pharmacist, and more. You could deal with a locked door by bashing it down, blowing it up, picking the lock, stealing the key, or asking somebody nicely to open it for you.
The technology was pretty cool - you could hunt for parts and build your own Tesla Gun - and the magic was quite well-developed. It had a detailed setting, an interesting central plot, several good side plots ranging from funny to tragic, and some fun NPCs (Gar, the World's Smartest Orc, was a lot of fun).
Unfortunately, the execution was lousy. It's like somebody was trying to prove a point by ruining as many good ideas as they could. Just a few examples:
- Remember what I said about a wide range of play styles? One little problem: the vast majority of XP is awarded for hitting stuff in combat. And by this, I don't mean "your party hitting stuff", I mean your character hitting stuff. A combat-specialist character will level up about three times as quickly as a social/thief/support character, which makes it hard for noncombat characters to develop even in their own specialties.
- Awful, AWFUL party AI. You can give your party members armour and weapons, but aside from your own character, you don't choose what they're going to equip. They decide that for theirselves, based primarily on criteria of "which would most annoy the player?" Cursed equipment is a favourite; so is magical stuff for technologically-inclined characters, and vice versa. (One of the principles of the game world is that magic and tech interfere with one another; a mage wearing all-tech equipment can easily get something like an 80% chance of critical failure on every attack.)
Add to this the fact that NPCs will spontaneously pick up stuff lying on the ground, and you find yourself constantly managing their inventories. Because Magnus the Dwarf would rather use a piece of scrap iron than fight with the nice axe that you get as a special quest reward...
It gets even worse when you actually get into combat. The standard battle tactic is not 'attack nearest enemy' or 'attack most wounded enemy', but 'run laps around the combat trying to get at an enemy on the opposite side of the melee'. NPC mages are reluctant to use many of their most effective spells, but perhaps that's just as well, because the friend-or-foe recognition isn't 100% reliable. I have repeatedly found myself having to kill off an elemental summoned by my own party members... while other party members heal the elemental as fast as I can pound on it, stopping only when they exhaust themselves and fall unconscious.
It got to the point where I found myself deliberately loading up party members with heavy equipment in order to reduce the number of action points they could spend in combat.
Oh, and good party members whine if you attack good-aligned NPCs. This would be far less irritating if NPC alignments made some sort of sense... more on that in a moment.
- Unsatisfactory quest resolutions. One quest in particular left a really bad taste in the mouth (and you might want to skip the next two paragraphs if discussion of sexual abuse is likely to cause you distress):
It turns out that the city's gnomes (wealthy but unpopular minority) decided they needed powerful bodyguards to protect themselves against racist attacks. I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say that a large number of human women disappeared (firstly wives and daughters of the gnomes' political rivals, then later anybody too poor to be missed), and some years later a lot of half-ogres mysteriously started to show up as bodyguards to the gnomes. One series of quests involves finding a bloodstained, deserted laboratory on an island complete with a journal that chronicles some of the intervening process (Josef Mengele would've been proud).
On your return to the mainland, you meet a gnome who tells you the rest of the ghastly details, while gloating that nobody's ever going to believe you. And that's where the plot ends. If you like you can hand the journal over to a newspaper editor... who turns out to be a fake, and vanishes with it. There's nobody else you can talk to about it; without the journal, you can't convince anybody of the conspiracy's existence, even if you've maxed out your charisma and persuasion abilities.
Oh, and if you try to give Exposition Gnome the painful death he so richly deserves, your party members complain... because apparently, he's good.
What the hell were they smoking when they designed this game? It really wouldn't have annoyed me half as much if it had just been a run-of-the-mill crappy game, but it keeps reminding you of how much better it could have been.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-13 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-13 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-13 05:31 pm (UTC)It was really stupid.