Sequels That Should Have Been: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscurer
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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. |
Alas, poor Arcanum, we hardly knew ye.
Your combat and leveling system may have been grossly unbalanced (pre-fan patched, of course), but few if any games have achieved such heights in world-building.
Another notable thing about Arcanum: I think it’s the *only* commercial game to feature a score entirely done with string instruments (with the brilliant exceptions of the Dwarves’ theme (percussion) and the Elves’ theme (wind)).
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Arcanum is for me the best RPG of the new millenium. And probably the best RPG of all time, despite being such a mess, with some strange design choices like the toggle option for real-time or turn-based combat. Balance was horrible, graphics looked like crap even when it came out, the music was overbearing, but you know what? I didn’t care.
No other RPG created a world that you could interact with however which way you pleased, do whatever you wished, and the game was ready and could handle anything you could imagine doing in it. You could kill everyone and still finish the game. The amount of scenarios Troika wrote into the game that let you turn Tarrant into an Orc city, you could even kill Joachim, you could get away with anything in this game. It was a true RPG sandbox, and a real sandbox unlike the “pretender” sandbox games you see these days like the Grand Theft Auto series that are sandboxes in a simplistic way, but not in a role-playing way.
Fallout 2 is the only game that came close, being Arcanum’s spiritual predecessor, but Arcanum took freedom and adaptability of narrative new extremes, setting a bar that nobody has managed to topple even to this day. And the sad fact is, nobody even seems to want to try.
I often say that Arcanum was a game that came well before its time. In the late 90’s going into the new millenium people were all about shinier graphics and sleek gameplay. The Playstation 2 had just hit the shelves and people were enamored with next gen technology and graphics, and the PC arena was locked in the ridiculously hardware arms race that produced better and faster GPUs every month it seemed. In this climate, Arcanum boldly came in with dinky graphics that didn’t even look as good as Diablo 2 did a decade before, with an interface and control scheme so clunky it made playing Command and Conquer with a gamepad feel intuitive. While the game got critical acclaim and managed to sell fairly well, it didn’t really turn Troika into a rockstar developer studio, and we all know how that ended a few years later after Vampire: Bloodlines.
But today, Arcanum would undoubtedly thrive. It’s a strange climate today where you still have things like the Xbox One and the PS4 pushing the cutting edge in AAA games, and the PC arena pumping out behemoths like the GTX Titan, but at the same time there’s a thriving market for indie games that unabashedly choose to be retro, to look old school, and to play old school, breaking free from the shackles of big developers constrained by sharedholders looking to produce the next big AAA megahit.
Arcanum’s game design would have made a kiling in this climate, but yet we see developers like iNxile trying to make the spiritual succesors of Wasteland/Fallout, Baldur’s Gate and Torment, and largely not really “getting” it. Sure they write a good story, sure they have the ugly old school look and the turn-based combat down, but none of these new crop of indie RPGs understand what made a game like Arcanum great. It seems nobody does.
Give me a game that lets me do anything and everything I want, and have the world react and change to my actions accordingly. That’s all. I will buy your game and market to everyone that listens. Give me Arcanum’s spiritual successor.