for years i've heard about how awesome this game is, and as a longtime fan of the fallout and bg series, i had to jump on board once i saw it was on gog.
my problem is this: the game assumes you'll read the entire manual from front to back, and really doesn't explain much. and of course, this being a digital game, the manual is just a pdf file, so i can't take it around the house and read it at my leisure like i used to back in the day. not only that, its 190 damn pages! no way in hell i'm reading that all on my computer screen. not to mention the fact that i can't keep it open on my desk for quick reference like i used to older games.
that said, i started the game and created a character. since the game doesn't explain what "small" armor is for, i bought armor that didn't fit and had to make it all the way to shrouded hills in my skivvies. fine. but here's the problem: i can't f****** hit anything! everytime i enter combat i always have a 25% chance to hit, and yet seem to miss 90% of the time. so put points in combat abilities, right? i try that, and it doesn't help anything, aside from giving me an extra attack with which to miss critically and fall on my ass per turn.
i understand old school RPGs were all about the manual, i really do. i've never come across this problem before though, as all the other games i've downloaded from GOG were games i played in my youth, so it was simply a matter of recalling information. i really really want to enjoy this game, but it seems it doesn't want to be enjoyed by anyone who hasn't read and fully digested the entire manual. and like i said, by nature of its medium, length, and my own outside commitments, i'll never make it through a 190 page manual on my computer screen, that i can't consult mid-game.
bottom line is, after waiting years to even play the game, after struggling for weeks to install the game, after battling the interface, spending 15 minutes learning how to use lock picks, dying during my first encounter with EVERY enemy so far, breaking all my weapons by MISSING, spending all my money on armor that doesn't fit, destroying the bridge supplies and dying time after time after time after time after time fighting that goddamn gnome on the bridge, i give up.
never in my whole life did i ever think i'd ever quit a game i so desperately wanted to enjoy because it's too complex for me, and the manual too dense to read. i almost feel like i should hand in my Old-School RPG Gamer Membership Card, i've failed so miserably at this game.
anyhow. oh well. just thought i'd share that before uninstalling and heading back into the stygian abyss, UU style...

Arcanum is definitely quite complex, more so than the Fallout games, but if you don't want to read the whole manual there are some good resources online that could help. For example, the general tips on this page are pretty good:

http://www.angelfire.com/hero/tjekanefir/arc.htm

I think there's also some guides for new players that have been posted on these forums, but I can't find them at the moment.

I'm pretty sure that your trouble with combat is due to your having put points in the wrong place... if you got an extra attack you probably put a point into Dexterity, when you actually should have put it into melee skill. With zero points in melee you will be absolutely useless in melee combat. Many players recommend putting one point into Melee no matter what your actual character build is, just so you can hold your own in a fight if necessary. Dexterity is very useful once you have some combat skill, but the skill is most important.

An easy character to try if you want to play without having to read the manual too much is a standard melee fighter, and then you can add some magic or tech after you get farther into the game. A standard melee fighter just needs melee skill, Dexterity, and strength.

well over the course of my 4 or so failed characters, i know at least one of them i put a point in melee. only 1 though cause i keep reading everywhere that strength and dex are the most important stats. and yeah...still 25%. and it's weird that dexterity in this game affects attacks per round, when in pretty much every other RPG i've EVER played, it determines to hit %. kindof ridiculous that in this world dexterity = speed. but nevertheless...i appreciate the help, but i've uninstalled it already, never to look back.

You don't need to read the whole manual. Most of the stuff in there is setting fluff (surprisingly well written fluff, and quite enjoyable to read, but not necessary to grasp the mechanics of the game). I'd suggest printing off the chapters on character creation and the game interface, and reading those as a starter. They aren't too long. The chapters on tech and magic are useful if you're building a character of the corresponding type, but can be ignored otherwise.

There are also two pages near the end that you'll want to print off for quick reference - the glossary (tells you what all the in-game acronyms mean) and the keyboard shortcut list.

The game is not that hard to grasp once you understand the fundamentals, but there's really no way around it - you need to read the manual, or at least some equivalent explanation.

And yeah, you're going to be a bit of a gimp in melee combat until you have at least two points in the melee skill, at least in my experience. Don't worry about taking a point out of your stats to do it - you can use level-ups to bump those up later.

You need to put at least one point to Melee to actually start hitting something - also, at the beginning it's important to use a lantern as it reduces the CTH penalties for early characters considerably. I'm playing a firearms technologist, but I'm still having enough points put into Melee to be a Melee Expert, I think Melee is too important to just ignore it.

faq for new players

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/914155-arcanum-of-steamworks-and-magick-obscura/faqs/63974

i can honestly say i have ever read the manual, and i dont find it complex at all :p

what specifically do you not understand?




i personally have never bothered with melee, because i have multiple melee companions who also serve as packmules, ensuring i am never out of ammo.

also, i recommend putting 1 point in explosives. you buy a bucket of fuel from a merchant and collect rags from trashcans, and voila 20+ grenades that you can use for easily killing hard-to-hit magic enemies, or just knocking people back.

also putting 1 point in traps is good, that way you can combine large springs and ailroad spikes, both of which you find in trashcans all the time, to make boobytraps (1 spike+1 spring=3 traps) which are a great way of softening up tough magic enemies that you cant shoot to death.

molotovs and spike traps, together with potions of haste, made the dwarf clan mines a breeze.

98% of your comment made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. this game is far too obtuse for its own good, so i've quit. fuck it. i'm going back to new vegas.

Some games are not for every1, its often not the game's fault though :)

ummm....


the only way you could have not understood 98% of what i posted is if you dont speak any English :/


i mean New Vegas isnt THAT simple, you still put points in things when you level up right?? i was under the impression there was even a crafting system of sorts :p

yeah, f:nv is far from a simple game, but like i said, i grew up playing the fallout games so their role-playing system of skills perks traits and SPECIAL is ingrained in my memory. and yeah, there's a ton of crafting, but it's a minor aspect of the game, and it's not a system where, if you don't understand it, you're totally screwed. unlike arcanum. thanks for the help guys though.

Too bad you didn't like Arcanum. It does have a steep learning curve, and requires patience. And anyone unwilling to read at least part of the manual is likely to struggle. If you can get past all that Arcanum is an excellent game.
I played all of the Fallout games, and love them to death. But IMO Arcanum is a much deeper and far more involved game. As it should be, since it is made by the original Fallout devs, and builds on the experience gained from making Fallout 1 & 2. Me personally, I love the old school complexity and huge manual Arcanum has (as did all the CRPGs back in the day).
But, as someone else posted, it isn't for everyone..

THe thing about Fallout NV is that its as complex as you make it, my cousin who's 9 can successfully play it, i bet he would even beat the game if he owned it himself, where to put points is so simple and intuative that no reading or understanding is required basicly :)

Im not saying the game is for dumb people though, im just saying the game doesnt require you to make smart choices, even though it might allow it


Il share my first experience with arcanum myself here: i believe i was a bit older then 10 and i had goten it for christmas by my big brother, the game excited me instantly, as its just the type of graphics i tend to fall in love with, i did the first zone, then started walking towards shrouded hills following the map...
After 10minutes of walking without meeting ANYTHING i was starting to think "wtf is this shit", but i continued, and i continued, another half an hour went by and i was like "fuck this, im playing darkstone! (which was another rpg i had newly aquired)
A coupple of days went by, and i came back to the game, thinking "it was really cool until i had to travel, it cant POSSIBLE be designed like that, so i went into the game, brought up the map (as virgil had suggested so long ago, and i attempted to find a quiktravel way (which was common in games at the time))
But i couldn't find none, except i learned that i could map out where i was going on the map, BUT I DIDNT MOVE ANYWHERE. So i walked for another 30 minutes, then put the game on the shelf for a WHOLE YEAR.
When i finally picked up the game again, i started 100% fresh, and allthough it took me another 2minutes, i finally learned the traveling system, from that point on, me and arcanum was in love, we were now one. That was until "the wheel clan experience".
You see, in the unpatched version, once you reached that part of the quest, the game crashed...and crashed... and crashed, not consistently, the places it would crash were COMPLETELY random, and it would also corrupt your saves.
So i patched, but i still had to start over... (which actually was a blessing, for I now understood how to design my charechters etc for efficiency, and didnt drop points in random places)

So about 4 days went by and i was back in the wheel clan spot (on my old game i never managed to enter the wheel clan)
I tried and tried to figure it out, but i couldn't, THERE WERE SIMPLY NO ENTRANCE.
I mean, i was carrying the item to reveal it, but nothing helped, so after a while i dropped the game, and i wasn't to pick it up again for like 8 months.
So 8 months went by, i picked up teh game again started 100% fresh, what was so amazing to me, was designing the charechter just got more and more exiting, for this time i truely read through all the descriptions, analyzed what bonuses i wanted and didn't want, i ended up making a half orc combatMage.
Now you can believe me when i said i felt dumb, when i realised all i had to do was equip the glasses to see the entrance this time :o, it took me 12 days to complete the game with maxlevel aquired :)

I believe the thing about arcanum, is its a older game, a lot of the old games required a bit patience to learn the game, there wasn't neccecarily a tutorial which could teach you everything in 10minutes, which is the case with most new games in my experience (even though not all of them includes this tutorial) a tutorial for arcanum would be a huge textbomb, even if embeded into the game, i'd consider people who picked this game up in their childhood lucky, as children tend to have a more sense of "adventure" when learning games, not neccecarily reading through it all, but rather trying, and trying and trying.
Arcanum cannot be picked up by impatient adults for the first time in my oppinion

I find Arcanum not to be hard, but rather to be boring, actually. I made a thread here where I asked if the game would actually become more interesting after a while, and I got several responses - thanks again, guys, I really did appreciate all the feedback - saying that it would, you just need to get through this...and that, and oh, actually, you should also get through the most boring part of the game as well. I mean...really, if something requires me to struggle through a boring premise and does not change after that either, well, I`d rather do something that I actually enjoy.

Do not misunderstand what I`m saying, I do not find Arcanum to be a bad game. I love the character creation, and the many different ways you can build your character. And I did try a lot of different characters. Mage -overpowered as fuck, especially if you`re doing necromancy-, thief/tech combination, charismatic gunslinger with a lot of party members etc., and I roamed around the world in the game, did some sidequests, progressed with the main plot, but I failed to see why the game was regarded as awesome (apart from the character system). Every city I have visited was basically the same, with the same establishments, just with different names and a different layout. The writing for both major and minor NPCs felt uninspired and generic. The quests I encountered were textbook RPG tasks, with no real twist or atmosphere to them. I also found the music to be very annoying, and had to turn it down. It was nice for a few minutes but became rather repetitive and aggravating after a while.

I personally do not know what to make of Arcanum. I like the idea of the steampunk world, but I`d actually prefer if there were less generic fantasy elements in it, because under the steampunkish disguise, the game still feels a bit like a generic RPG to me. On the other hand, it also feels like the devs wanted to sqeeze a lot of different things into the game world, but did not have time to properly develop everything, therefore most of the time the game just feels like a mishmash of ideas rather than a fully realized product and lacks a certain "focus" or "theme".

Guess I understand the point of tsgnurk, that if you had got Arcanum when you were still young and had more free time/less obligations to fulfill then you would have found it a more rewarding experience. As an "impatient adult", however, I find that I cannot get any real enjoyment out of it, therefore I decided to spend my cherished free time with something else. I might pick it up again months or years later though, because it does have a few aspects that I really like and cannot find in other RPGs that I prefer over it. But for the moment I have rather contradictory feelings about the game.

I stand by my statement (in that other thread you mentioned) that the main plot gets a lot more interesting. But you have to get farther in the game before that stuff starts to appear. Even in the early stages there was stuff that I liked, though, especially the way the different races were handled. Dwarven and Elven societies are both remarkably different from the human cities, but I was disappointed that there wasn't more done with gnomes and halflings.

Side quests are indeed fairly standard, although there are lots of ways to solve them, only a few of which will likely be available to any given character. You mentioned you tried several different character builds... but did you try actually doing different things? Did you try being evil? Mercenary? Forgoing material reward in the name of virtue? The game really adapts to roleplaying in different ways, rather than just different character mechanics.

That said, your complaints are valid, and if you're not enjoying yourself enough to press on then you probably shouldn't. Arcanum definitely demands more investment from the player than many games do.