Arcanum - Matt Chatt Retrospective

Matt Barton takes a look at Arcanum in his latest video.



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Game was so great. But I encountered bug that prevented me from moving forward . Some missing person I had to talk to or give quest back. Anyway I stopped playing in hope for some patch that will fix it. And I don`t think it ever came. Shame

Radorin said:

Game was so great. But I encountered bug that prevented me from moving forward . Some missing person I had to talk to or give quest back. Anyway I stopped playing in hope for some patch that will fix it. And I don`t think it ever came. Shame

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Killing the Elven healer in Shrouded Hills early on breaks your game, as well as teleporting to the Elves without talking to the healer first.

Great game to play around with, annoying to finish.

edit: you absolutely have to talk to her to make the game go on. So even if you just get her hostile (you steal from her and knock her out or run away), you're out of luck. Funny thing is, summoning her spirit does not work here. Pretty huge oversight, considering there are usually alternative ways to do pretty much anything main quest related.

Great game. Other than the game breaking bugs, the balance was seriously off between melee/ranged/tech/magic. Mods fixed most of those problems though.

Game was broken, so hardly great - but I still have fond memories of it.

Vampire - Bloodlines was broken at release too. Mods and patches have made that into one of the baseline RPG's. In fact most "classics" were bug ridden messes at release. Arcanum is well worth a reply nowadays.

I never had any issue with Bloodlines, at least not with the official patches.

Arcanum remains largely unfinished and extremely broken in terms of mechanics - even with official patches.

Odd, I never had any issues playing through the entire game way back in 2004 or so. I remember downloading a level cap remover but can't remember if I even patched my original disc copy or not. It took me a few tries after I first bought it before it clicked with me. Then, a couple years later, I decided to revisit it and I was hooked. I think I finished the entire game in about a week.

The only problem I remember running into was I needed some sort of key to get into some Dwarven caverns for some important quest, but apparently it wasn't part of the main story because I never figured out where to get that damn key (or whatever type of item it was that I needed) and still finished the game. Eventually I came to believe it was a bug that broke that quest.

Anyway, great game, I really liked it. It had some wonky combat and I wasn't super impressed with the end, but the overall experience was worth it to me. I played as a sword-wielding, magic-focused elf, if I remember correctly, and I always thought it would be fun to go back as a gun/rifle-toting dwarf technologist, but haven't gone back for anything beyond character creation and the intro scene.

Matt's videos honestly don't need to be an hour long.