Arcanum, a top-down RPG from the now-defunct Troika Games, was simultaneously one of the most interesting, and most broken games I have ever played. Set in a world that blends the trappings of high-fantasy (elves, dwarves and magic) in the middle of an industrial revolution, Arcanum opened with a zeppelin your character was traveling in being shot out of the sky. You wake up amid the wreckage in a field, and are quickly attacked by scavenging wolves. Prior to this, you can build your own character, picking from a range of statistics and background stories, all of which have a big impact on the game.
In an early playthrough, I decided to create a pure bruiser of a character. A half-ogre with an intelligence score about as low as it could go, but strength in abundance. Every decision was made to maximize the damage dealing potential of the beast. This is a departure from my usual sort of character, but Arcanum was a game that rewarded this sort of experimentation. Most of the time. Stepping from the wreck of the zeppelin, I equipped a giant axe. A wolf was nearby — time to see what this guy can do. The first swing of the axe was promising, double-digit numbers flying off of the wolf. On the second swing — the second swing ever, mind you, before I had even bothered to save the game — my half-ogre critically missed, cutting himself in half. Game over.
This should have been immensely frustrating, but really, this was why you played Arcanum. You ignored the ugly-even-for-the-time graphics, all the oddities, the crashes and the technical faults for experiences like this. A brain-dead half-ogre falling on his own axe thirty seconds into the game. What other game would let you roll a character too stupid to actually play it?
Later, I made a character that could actually make it out of the starting area and was completely absorbed in what turned out to be quite an interesting story. The world of Arcanum was huge, and free to explore — I think I spent hours roaming the world in what amounted to ‘extreme berry-picking.’ The landscape was littered with little secrets to find. Stumbling into a cave one time, I chuckled to find a rabbit surrounded by dead bodies — a throwaway Monty Python reference. The rabbit attacked, I won, and left the cave.
Hours and hours later I received an assignment in the main quest to go … kill a rabbit hiding in a cave. Not good. In order to proceed any further in the game, I needed to kill an already dead rabbit. And that was the end of my experience of Arcanum.
This sort of game-stopping glitch used to be frequent. Perhaps due to my natural curiosity I can recall stopping many games in their tracks, backing myself into an inescapable corner by performing some task or another out of the intended order. In recent years developers have gotten much better at avoiding this issue. Today, I would expect that this mandatory rabbit would either not exist in the cave until I took on the quest, or less-elegantly, would re-spawn. It’s pretty hard to argue that this isn’t a huge improvement — but part of me does still look back fondly on those rough-and-tumble days of brain-dead ogres and adventurers left standing, blank-faced, in front of someone asking them to go and kill a rabbit, refusing to believe that they’ve already done it.
The good old days?
