Slowtrain

The tragic thing about Arcanum is that with a little bit more time and attention and money from Troika and Sierra, it could have been an all time classic of rpg awesomeness, but after having gone 90% of the way they couldn't be bothered to go the last 10% and instead just dumped their unfinished product out the door.

I always thought that Spock was the origin of the popularity of pointed ears. He certainly made them a lot more famous than Tolkien did.

That's true. It was much worse than a pile of balls. But, as we've discussed, rpgs don't need good combat to still be worth playing, so the horrible combat was pretty irrelevant to my mind. I'm amazed Arcanum is getting such a love thread. Usually people are crapping all over it.

yeah... this don't make sense. troika's lack o' organizational acumen did indeed lead to many o' their development woes and their endemic tardiness in meeting deadlines, but arcanum's peculiar release were resulting in a relative unique story o' developer and publisher incompetence. anybody recall the translation debacle surrounding arcanum? arcanum were "finished" and set for a release date... but that date got pushed back months 'cause it were not translated into some inconsequential continental language... german or italian or somesuch. is understandable why sierra would not release the english version and delay the carpathian release, but the fact is that due to some ridiculous translation hold-up the publisher should'a foreseen, arcanum were having its release delayed not weeks or days, but months. arcanum lack o' polish were particularly startling given the fact that troika had far more time to bug-hunt pre-release than they had any right to expect. the problem with revisionist history is that some o' us were following the development as it happened. HA! Good Fun! IIRC, it was "finished" in June and released the following September. And it was still one of the most ludicrously buggy games ever made. As a consumer, it was highly aggravting to know that the game just sat in its buggy state for three months and then released without any attempt to make it playable. ANd the 1.7.4 patch wasn't released for another 2 months after that. Pretty bad.

Cool. One great thing about dlc is that it keeps publishers and developers invested in the original game long after release.

lol. I'm usually the one getting beaten on for supporting Arcanum. It was a pretty decent game. The worldbuilding was great, some of the quests were interesting, I liked the idea behind the character development system. But the flaws in the game were brutal. I still enjoyed it, but it was teeth-grinding at times.

Agreed. I don't know who Troika hired to playtest the game balance, but odds are they went down to the local zoo and had some chimpanzees play through it a couple times. Nothing else can explain how horribly and randomly unbalanced the game is in almost all areas.

When is this next patch being released?

Too bad it was so insanely buggy and unbalanced. Otherwise it could have been a classic. As it was it was still pretty good.

Well, if you do, don't say I never warned you!

Arguing with Volourn is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer: something that one should never ever do.

If you all ready super awesome great at the start, where do you go from there? Besides, for me it's the process of becoming great that is interesting. Being great is actually pretty boring and usually about the time I start a new character.

lol. WOrst manuals I have ever seen. They provide some interesting "travel-guide" sort of info, but are basically 0 help when it comes to do anything practical. I think it took me a week to figure out how to build a station and set it up to run on its own.

Yep, the story is there, but it's best ignored. I mean, follow it if you want, but the meat of the game is the sandbox play. If you're lookign for a linear, riveting narrative, go elsewhere.

There's time element involved. In order to buy ships, weapons, shield, gear, factories, transports, mines, lasertowers, stations etc, in other words in order to do any of things you can do in the game, you need money. Lots of money. It can take a long time building your infrastracture to raise the neccessary funds to really get involved in the wide open gameplay. If your're not into the development part of the game, you're going to find it boring. There are many ways to raise money, a variety of missions are available all the time from every station, you can hunt pirates for the authorities, you can smuggle illegal goods between sectors, you can capture ships and take them for your own or sell them off, you can set up remote minign operations on distant asteroids in dangerous sectors, you can capture galactic wildlife and sell it (illegal, of course). But regardless of how go about it, the games requiresa good deal of time to raise money. I would guess that a lot of people get bored during that time and never really see how wide open the game is. The manual. It's a pretty complicated game to learn. X2 is better than X3 but you need to down all the artificial-life updates. They make the universe feel like its a livign breathing place. http://www.egosoft.com/games/x2/info_en.php

Bigger ships beat smaller ships 90% of the time. There's a range of ship classes. Light fighters, medium fighters, heavy fighters, a variety of transports of various sizes and capabilities, and a range of heavier capital ships such as destroyers and carriers, plsu some others in betweeen. Every race has its own versions of the different ship classes and they all cost different amounts and have different capaibilities, they can be equipped with a variety of shields and weapons. You can dogfight in a heavy figher or cruise around in a destroyer that has banks of turrets and massive shields but can't turn to save its life or just outrun everything in super fast light fighter. Its pretty wide open. For the most part combat isn't too hard once you learn what to do, but it can be tough early.

Basically its an open-world/sandbox universe with a dynamic economy controlled by the AI. X2 is better at this than X3. The universe consists of hundreds of sectors connected by jumpgates. There are 5 sentient races that control their own groups of sectors plus many sectors that are unexplored, uncontrolled, held by pirates, aliens etc and so forth. Every race has stations in each sector that produce a variety of goods from basic energy to food supplies to high level manufactured goods. As a semi-independent you deal with all the races, those who don't hate you that is, and build your own factories, trade goods, protect your investments from attacks etc and so forth. You can choose to fly around in a fast scout fighter, a transport, a heavy carrier and all sorts of other ships, and you'll generally swap off between different ships as you take on different missions etc. Obviously a heavy carrier costs a lot more than a scout fighter, so you have to spend a long time building your infrastrcuture before you can afford one. SO it can be a slow moving game.

The X games are much more a building sim than a space combat sim. You build factories in sectors and produce materials for a variety of purposes and begin to build your credit. It can take a long long time to get rolling. That being said, the building thing is only one part of the game. The game universe is huge and there's tons of stuff to explore. There's a lot of ships to buy, everything from light scout fighters to giant carriers that can hold 100 ships. Plus there's pirates and other assorted enemies and you can fly around and capture ships and blow up stations and do pretty much whatever you want. There's a story as well, but most people who play the games ignore it, since it's pretty unneccessary.

I agree with you (and others) who accuse the game of simplistic combat, but eh, its an rpg. Rpgs rarely have good combat, which is understandable since combat is usually only one aspect of the gameplay. For a shooter or a tactical combat game then, yes, combat better be good. But there've been plenty of solid rpgs from Bloodlines to FO3 that had pretty terrible combat but were still fun to play. So, while I see the point, I also don't see the point. If you see what I mean.

It mostly comes down to if your personal taste is reflected in the stylistic and mechanic choices a developer makes. FOr me Witcher was one of the more enjoyable rpg experiences I've had. Only Daggerfall, Fallout, and Wizardy 8 were more enjoyable as far s rpgs go.

X-Universe is great. But its more a building and development and expansion sim than a space combat sim, though there's plenty of ship to ship combat of all sorts. X universe games are more like Master of Orion 2 played from a first person perspective than anything else.

Yep. I totally agree. Entire genres of game have vanished: everything from squad tactical combat to flight sims because everyone just wants to make that one super generic game that will appeal to all and sell billions. Frankly, I blame Blizard for f'ing everything up. But eh, my only point re: BW is that they're not the only ones doing it. They're just better at it.

I agree with your point, and think it's a pretty good analogy. The only thing I would say in defense of Bioware, and its not really a defense more like an observation, isn't the "universal food" syndrome endemic to video game development as a whole at the moment, rather than just BW in specific? Bioware may be pushing it harder than say Bethesda, but that's because BW is a better developer than Bethesda and more capable of setiing out a desired goal and working to achieve it. Now of course, I'll never be able to look at a BW game and not think of Soylent Green.

All this long waiting, all the hype, all the boobs and cool proverbs, and then it turns out to be a bad and outdated game. FOr a game that's been in development this long, one needs to cut it some slack. A ths point there's no way it can be cutting edge, unless the current developers want to start the development cyclwe all over again. But just because a game, especially an FPS, isn't cutting edge, doesn't mean it can't be fun. Painkiller comes to mind. Also, DUke 3d was pretty non-cutting edge compared to Quake 2 but still held its own for fun gameplay.

M&M 6 harkens back to a different style of crpg altogther than Fallout and BG. I'm not positing one as better than the other, but it's a very different aproach to the concept of a crpg. If you're interested I might recommend Wizardry 8 also as a starting point, although it has problems that you might find offputting as well. Still if you can get M&M 6 and WIz 8 cheap, you've got nothing to lose by trying them. Those would definitely be the two entries I would pick from both franchises to try out.