Sequels That Should Have Been: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscurer

Nobody makes steampunk games. No one. One of fantasy literature’s most venerable settings, the magical world on the brink of industrial revolution, has produced a scant sixty one games worthy of mention on Wikipedia, and some of these are huge stretches. Professor Layton? Banjo Kazooie? Seriously.

And yet the themes of steampunk have produced some of the most evocative fantasy worlds. The Thief series, Final Fantasy VI and VII, the upcoming Bioshock Infinite, and cult hits like Torchlight, P.B. Winterbottom, Jak and Daxter, and others used this setting to produce game worlds like none other.

The steampunk game, though, the steampunk game, was Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Made by many of the minds behind the Fallout games at ill-fated Troika Games, Arcanum was an isometric RPG which gave you an unparalleled amount of freedom of action. You could do pretty much anything, build an incredible variety of characters, meets scads of interesting party members and non-playable characters, and experience a world like none other in gaming.

Of course, Arcanum followed the traditional Troika narrative (now the traditional Obsidian Entertainment narrative): the game was released buggy, feature incomplete, and, quite frankly, it was a mess. The game met great critical acclaim, and it sold pretty well, but in terms of quality it was all over the place.

That is, it was until the fans came in to clean it up. Fan patches have made the game into the fantastic, rich experience it was made to be, putting it up there on the epic isometric RPG Mount Rushmore with Baldur’s Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout. It’s the kind of game that feels like seeing a great painter’s work in person: it feels like the world is slathered three dimensionally and if you reached out you could physically touch the canvas.

A sequel was in the works, according to Leonard Boyarsky in 2006 (thanks, Wikipedia dad!), and would have looked something like Troika’s masterpiece, Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption, done in the Source engine. Imagine a steampunk Elder Scrolls and you’d be there. Imagining the industrial city of Tarant, the centerpiece of the game’s civilization, as an open world three dimensional wonder is mind boggling. Arcanum’s strength was its depth: the city felt like a real, vibrant place, filled with people and ideas. Areas felt lived in, supporting real people. This depth in three dimensions is still the holy grail of the Western RPG.

It could go the other way, too. The crucial thing, as I say, is that it’s deep. Give us characters like the emotionally conflicted Virgil, items like the infamous bullet deflecting top hat, and problems we can solve by killing the questgiver and raising their spirit with the dark powers of necromancy, and it won’t matter what the game looks like. Give us the smart parts of the game, too, like quests involving labor unionism, racism, and classism, and it’ll be even better.

What matters is that it’s smart. Arcanum was a game of such smarts that have really never been equaled, and it’s sequel could be amazing for being as intelligent, as fundamentally literate as the original. Arcanum feels even more like settling down with a good book than Planescape: Torment does.

That’s the experience that I’d want a sequel to produce. An Arcanum sequel would have to tell us a good story, something I don’t believe would be difficult for a company like Troika’s spiritual successor, Obsidian. Maybe it could have been the game that would have gotten Troika the respect it deserved—maybe if they’d made the mythical Journey to the Center of Arcanum we would be talking about Troika with the same hushed reverence we reserved for Bioware.