Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura Interview

AT: Are there any features in Arcanum that may be considered as new, or rather, revolutionary for the RPG genre?

LB: Besides the handling of Magick vs.Technology in our engine, we also have a few other things that haven't been seen in a computer RPG previously:

Auto leveling - for novice players, the game will distribute your points for you so you won't have to. This keeps the complexity of the game to a minimum for those people that simply want to experience the story or the action without having to micromanage their character. This feature can be turned on or off throughout the game, as well.

Fate points - Given for difficult or "defining" quests (ie, for a good player, an extremely virtuous quest or for an evil player an extremely evil quest). Utilizing these points enables the player to override the engine for an action, say forcing a critical success the next time you use your pickpocket skill (even if you've put no points into it)

Backgrounds - backgrounds are a further way to customize/individualize your character. They give your character a history, as well as some advantage and disadvantage you would otherwise be unable to get. For example, "Raised in the pits" gives you a bonus to your Strength, Dexterity, and all combat skills, but gives you a major penalty to your intelligence.

Reactivity of NPCs - In Arcanum, non player characters care a lot about the player's race, his beauty, his charisma, his skills, his reputations, etc. We have tried to make the world extremely reactive to all the choices you make as a character, and people will comment on quite a few of them, as well as change their behavior towards you accordingly.

AT: The inclusion of both real-time and turn-based combat modes is very commendable, and it will make the game more approachable for players in general. Do you intend to institute any other features, of this sort, in order to enhance the gameplay?

LB: Besides Real Time vs. Turn based, we have:

Auto attack vs. click fest:

These are two drastically different ways of playing the game. Auto attack has the player continue to attack a target without having to click for every attack. Click once, the player character will continue attacking the target you have picked until the target is dead or something more deadly attacks you. Click fest (as we like to call it) is twitch based. You need to click for every attack. Obviously, this mode is much more action oriented.

Automatic switching of damaged/out of ammo weapons:

If the weapon you currently have equipped becomes severely damaged, or you run out of ammo, the player character will automatically switch to his next best weapon. This is pretty standard for shooters, but hasn't been done a lot in RPGs.

Ability to create you own modules EASILY:

We are including the tools we used to create this game, so the end user will be able to create his own modules with as much complexity as he wants. From a simple dungeon crawl to a full-blown single player RPG, we hope to see a variety of user made modules posted on the net. Of course, the more complex the module, the more complex to create, but our tools are very accessible. A novice can create a dungeon crawl map in virtually no time at all.

AT: Could you tell us more on the multiplayer features?

LB: Our goal with the multiplayer aspect of Arcanum is to open up the multiplayer aspects of an RPG to as wide a style of playing as we did in the single player game. Here are some of the more important innovations we have made to this end:

Quests: The quest engine understands whether one or more people are working on a quest, and can deal with someone else solving a quest you have active in your log book. The multiplayer module we ship with the game will have more streamlined interactions than the single player story, mainly for playtesting/development time reasons, but the engine could easily support a multiplayer game with as many twists and turns and all the complexity of the single player game (though I'd hate to be the one to have to test it J)

NPC interaction: NPCs will remember the different players they encounter, and their reaction to them.

Party size: We don't restrict one person to playing the hero, and everyone else acting like his followers. Everyone can literally go their own way in the multiplayer game. I can be off looting someone's mansion while my friend is sweet-talking them out front. People can play competitively or cooperatively, or the whole thing can be a big death match. Something I like to do in multiplayer is to stay a step or two ahead of someone else playing, and kill an NPC in their path. If timed correctly, a guard will happen upon them just as they reach the corpse, and assume they are the killer. Hours of fun for all!

As far as the size of the multiplayer games, we're targeting up to 8 players right now, but in theory, if your bandwith/server is up to the task, the upper number is 250 players (I reiterate this is THEORY, it hasn't been tested). We don't expect that to happen, but it could be possible with the right equipment. In other words, we're not capping the number of players - that is up to the server.

And then of course, there's the ease of making your own modules, which I've already mentioned...

AT: Can you give us some more info on Arcanum 2 (hey, it's worth a shot)?

LB: No. It's a secret....

AT: The most interesting innovation in Arcanum, which opposes other RPGs, is the combination of the classic fantasy skills with technologies and skills from the period of Industrial Revolution. Have you got any similar plans for Arcanum 2, going even further into the technology of the 19th and 20th century?

LB: You wouldn't believe what we're going to do with Arcanum 2...(neither would we, as we're still tossing around various ideas....)!

AT: In future, do you intend to stick with the Fallout kind-of isometric 3D view, or are you going to start using a more advanced 3D engine?

LB: Remember, we started Arcanum with no system, no engine, nothing. So we made the choice to focus on the role-playing aspects as opposed to trying to create the most fantastically innovative 3d engine ever seen. In our experience, you have to choose one or the other as your focus if you are making a truly in depth RPG. But now that we have our system, how our quests/scripting works, how interaction between characters and the world works, etc., who is to say where we will go engine-wise from here? With what we've created for Arcanum, we have a great RPG skeleton to build on top of in the future.