I cannot recall an exact build, but I will say a pure combat build is probably overkill.
Or rather, a pure melee build is overkill. Arcanum is cornucopia of build possibilities, and just working on swordsmanship is a very efficient way of expending points. Emphasize dexterity to get more hits per round as oppose to strength which only lets you do more damage per whack. Also, the balanced sword is one of the best you can get for this reason.
Another way to play is to go for high Charisma, that way you can get a lot of NPCs to do your fighting for you. Ultimately, fighting is unavoidable at a lot of areas, so it does not really pay to avoid combat skills altogether.
I decided to finally give this game a shot, after buying it at release and never progressing past the initial crash site.
What are the necessary mods/patches I should apply? I don’t want a lot of extra stuff, just stable bugfixes and balancing… and maybe a graphics patch?
Also, it’s kind of hard to tell what archetypes each of the starting characters are. Two said they were magic oriented, and one said it was gun oriented. The others were kind of vague. Is this the kind of game where you can pretty much build whatever you want, regardless of what your starting stats are?
Get the last official patch from here. It should be Patch 1.0.7.4 (English).
You really want the last unofficial patch as well. It doesn’t add anything in that wasn’t in the game in the first place, but it does fix a bunch of broken content. Scads of it, actually.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, I believe there’s a separate high-res patch too. Also optional: a map pack that I think improves texture resolution on the in-game map. I don’t recall any other graphics patches. Look around and let us know what’s new.
You probably want the Unofficial Arcanum Patch and maybe also the High Resolution Patch and the High Quality Townmaps, all of which are available from http://www.terra-arcanum.com/downloads/
I’ve found that you can definitely build pretty much any character you want and can also change your mind half-way. The only aspect you should probably decide relatively early on is if you want go into magic or technology as those two stats are diametrically opposed and increasing you magical aptitude will lower you tech rating and vice versa.
I would suggest that you ignore the pre-made characters in favor of your own creation. There are some significant choices to be made in character creation.
Don’t you need to throw melee in there too? I thought the trick in this game was to specialize in one of the three instead of generalizing. Then again, it was way too easy for me late in the game, so dabbling in either magic or tech would’ve helped.
I wouldn’t say melee was very compelling, other than the strange joy of hitting monsters with a sword. I went that way because Arcanum seemed like a dizzying enough experience without trying to dig into potentially-complicated magic and technology. Maybe they’re not that bad. I don’t know.
Don’t forget it might take some time to get into the game. It really didn’t click for me for 15-20 hours. By then I had absorbed the world and combat and the interface and made sense of the quests and locations. Before then it was both overwhelming and not very interesting.
It’s still not an all-time favorite, but it had enough of that Troika/Fallout charm to satisfy in the end.
It’s been a while, but IME you have enough character points to get good at more than one thing (although obviously not all of them) and also both magic and technology have ways to make you better at melee, be it by increasing the effectiveness of magical equipment, providing low-level buff spells or by letting you build your own weapons like electrically-powered shock prods. Nor does the choice of magic or technology constrain you in other areas of character development, you can be a credible melee, ranged or diplomatic character with either.
I wish I could get into Arcanum. I tried it when it came out, and something about the fact that magic and tech were mutually exclusive really bugged me, to the point I stopped just a couple hours in.
I think that I felt I’d been sold the game based on the intersection between the two, and when I realized that I had to choose one or the other, it lost a lot of its appeal.
Hah, that’s interesting you guys came into it with that notion. Magic vs. technology seems like a common theme due to the conflict. Was there something about the pre-release hype that made you think it’d be an intersection of the two?
That’s kind of an example of how lost I was in Arcanum, coming into it blind. I doubt I picked up on that theme for a long time.
It was more of being overwhelmed with the choice, and not wanting to obligate to one path if the other was more compelling… and having no frame of reference as to which would be better.
I’m still torn, but decided to just say F it and go magic so I can just play the damn thing.
It’s more that I find the technology tree very interesting, but it seems like you have to gather tons of materials all over the place and use a fiddly UI to make everything you need.
Magic seems a bit more straightforward but with a lot of variety as well.
Most of the things you need for tech are found in every trash can in Tarant. Don’t worry about finding materials. your choice between magic and technology is definitely significant but both paths lead you to be ridiculously powerful in the latter areas of the game.
I’ve never finished the game. I end up playing it like an open world game and it always feels like I’m doing stuff that I shouldn’t be. Seriously right after Tarant I probably explore over half the map, there are secret passages through the mountains.
Arcanum did SO MANY things right. It’s still one of my favorite RPGs (which is my favorite genre, so extrapolate that) ever. Excellent writing, good story, awesome setting, and one of the best thieves’ guilds of any game I’ve played. (Yes, I judge an RPG on its thieves’ guild.) Sneaking down an alley, picking the lock on a window, crawling in said window, and lifting everything in the house without waking the owner was always a blast.
