Arcanum, a spiritual follow-up to Interplay’s Fallout games, was released in 2001 by Troika. Set in a steampunk/fantasy world with a Victorian-era aesthetic, Arcanum is an open-ended CRPG with extensive character customization options and a huge game world to explore.
The player starts the game as a passenger aboard the IFS Zephyr, a zeppelin on its maiden voyage. During its flight, it comes under attack, and crashes outside the village of Shrouded Hills. The player, and a gnome named Radcliffe are the only two survivors, and Radcliffe dies shortly after the crash, living long enough to hand the player a silver ring and a vague message to deliver it to “the boyâ€. Things soon become more complicated as the player dodges multiple assassination attempts, is held up as the reincarnation of the Panarii religion’s messiah, and becomes embroiled in a much larger plot.
Gameplay is highly similar to Tim Cain’s previous masterwork, Fallout, and features open-ended exploration, extensive interaction with NPCs, freeform character creation, and largely replaces the moral compass of most RPGs with a magick vs. technology affinity, which will change depending on how heavily invested the player becomes in one school or the other, with high rewards for becoming a master of one, but consequences in the form of permanent weaknesses to the other. Combat is either turn-based or real-time, depending on which the player prefers, with the turn-based system similar to the original Fallout games and the real-time system resembling action-RPGs like Diablo.
