Go to here and check out the bottom of the page. I'm glad EB gave me a bag when I bought it - I'd be more embarrased to carry this thing around in the open than I would Black Tail.

The magic-casting gimp in the center is the highlight.

Sorta goes with the "we paid our artists $5 an hour" theme the game has going for it. Bleh. Fallout was so beautiful. What the hell happened?

I don't know, the game looks fine to me. I like the style inside the manual and in-game, but it really looks like the box was done by someone else.

As far as Fallout being beautiful: have you looked at the game lately? Lo-res and ugly.

The graphics in and around this game are definitely not the game's strong suit. I've played a bit more of the game than I think the demo had (only played the crash site in the demo-dunno if it had more areas) and so far I like it alot. Good stuff includes: great character creation and roleplaying opportunity it seems; several tricky aspects to combat and combat options/strategies that pull me in for "just one more combat"; and, the difficult decision about allocating character points-to stats, skills, spells or tech. I believe this game will suck up major chunks of my life for the next couple of months.

What I don't like are all the little things that aren't polished. The games runs only so-so on my 1.2 GHz Athon/GeForce 2, 512 MB RAM machine. Spelling and grammatical errors in the manual and game. Missing table of contents (and of course no index!) in the manual. A strategy guide (from the Prima folks) refers to the yet to be issued patch as "if you want to do X you must get the patch", where "X" is a variety of game content or gameplay.

And speaking of the patch, I find the patch situation incomprehensible. How can a game that went gold in early May, still not have a patch! At least the gameplay/bugs patch should have been ready the day this puppy hit the sales floor.

It is nice and all that new features and enhanced GUI will be in the patch, but to have bugs, glitches and poor performance from a game that the developers have had that long to patch seems wrong.

I agree. There's no reason why a patch shouldn't have been ready for this game if it needed one, and it apparently does.

I think it's ridiculous that people expect a patch the day the game hits the shelves. I expect my game to WORK the day it hits the shelves. They shouldn't know that it needs a patch THAT soon, and still release it...

But, yeah, if it's that incomplete, there shoudl be one by now.

Runs fine on my AMD 350. :) Good thing I never got around to upgrading.

I agree that a game should not need a patch out of the box. It's just that Arcanum has been code complete since May, so there's been ample time to have a patch ready.

Granted. I agree. I was mostly addressing this statement:

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Quote:

At least the gameplay/bugs patch should have been ready the day this puppy hit the sales floor.

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Who IS that oddly painted woman on the front of the box, anyway?

BTW, does anybody know if Arcanum has voice acting on par with the first Fallout? Reading the credits in Fallout now... like David Warner, Tony Shalub, Richard Mull, Keith David, Richard Dean Anderson (Isnt that Macgyver?!?)

Wow this Fallout manual is the best! Damn, I thought Fedex would have delivered Arcanum on Wednesday... I oughta sue those people from Compuexpert, there late a day!

Also, the lady on the box cover is a hotty. And that mage dude, what a dork!

etc

"I agree that a game should not need a patch out of the box."

Or, as with Settlers IV, in the box. The game includes a patch on the CD. Which makes no sense, no matter how you look at it.

-Ron

?

I didn't know that...

What the...?

One of the performance issues involves 64MB video cards, which apparently cause a periodic delay (you get the little stopwatch cursor thingy). Dunno why it took them this long to figure it out, but that's one thing that'll be fixed in the patch.

I suspect that after they went code complete in May, they used the time between then and now to listen to what all the press types who received full golds had to say. Our comments were apparently listened to, because a lot of what is addressed in the patch seems to reflect what many of the folks who have been playing the game these past weeks have been saying. And I also think they used the press folks as beta testers ;-)

Still, I too wonder why they didn't have the patch ready to go now (I think they had already sent the code to manufacturing long ago). It was at one point going to come out simultaneously with the game, according to Sierra PR, but a day or so later they back tracked and said it would come out a week or so after release. Sierra PR had also said, initially, that the patch would invalidate saves (a matter of interest only to folks with the pre-release golds, if the patch came out simultaneously with release) but then they changed and said the new, delayed patch would not invalidate saved games. Oddly, someone from Troika posted in our forums saying that the patch never was going to invalidate saves, so I have no idea what the hell is going on ;-).

For what it's worth, the game as released seems to have fewer bugs than Fallout did.

As far as the patch - the game appears to be perfectly playable. It appears to just tie up a few loose quest ends, add the full-screen view mode, etc., etc.; nothing world-shattering.

Which is probably how it should be: the game works out of the box. At least, it does for me. ;0

>>One of the performance issues involves 64MB video cards, which apparently cause a periodic delay...

That problem was a result of how the game cached itself in the video card memory; supposedly, Troika had a fix for that problem back in May. I suspect that the problems getting the patch out the door have more to do with Sierra than they do with Troika.

--Billy

If the game has been done since the spring, what have the developers been doing since then? Sitting on their hands? Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I remember continually trying to iron out even the smallest bugs when there was any sort of lull in the release schedule. Most developers would kill to have an extra couple of months to smooth things over. Granted, code freeze can be a good thing, but who ever heard of a four month code freeze?

- Alan

According to Troika, that's just what they were doing. That's why there's a fairly substantial patch with a bunch of enhancements coming out in a week or so. As to the question why they didn't have it done by now, I have no idea. I suspect Sierra wasn't going to let them issue a patch before the game came out, and it's even possible that the publisher didn't want to have a simultaneous patch because they were concerned such a thing would have a negative PR impact. I don't know. But Troika at least says they've been using this time to iron stuff out.

The code was sent off for localization in May so any changes Troika made since then couldn't be implemented until now.

"David Warner"

The omnipresent David Warner, you mean.

"Tony Shalub"

Shalhoub, a brilliant actor IMHO. His sitcom last year sucked. But he was great in it.

"Richard Dean Anderson (Isnt that Macgyver?!?)"

It is, he was also Killian in Fallout.

-Andrew

So... I don't think this needs a big spoiler alert or anything, since it's in the first town... but don't read below if you're going to bitch at me later.


----------stuck-----------
Ok, so I cleaned out the mine, the temple, I've got 2 different towns I could go to now... but I can't get past the guys at the bridge. They said I can skip the $1000 toll if I destroy the other bridge in-progress. Ok, sure. I certainly can't whoop these guys - I've tried and died repeatedly.

So, I went over to the wood piles of building supplies. I figured I'd burn it down and whipped out that pack of matches I found... but I can't find a way to use them. I also cannot just attack the piles. I see no way of accomplishing this.

So... how do you get past the buggers at the bridge?

Start combat mode and then hold down the alt key when you click on them to force attack the supplies. You'll probably want to use some cheapo melee weapon for this, as clubbing inanimate objects really does a lot of damage to weapons.

Pack of matches in my hand... and I have to break boards with my sword?

-1 star

Yeah, I'm not sure why they throw in wierd items like matches if I can't use them. At least let the pyromaniac background character burn down a house with them.

This is a general tip, but applies to the guys at the bridge--make molotov cocktails. You need to learn the schematic first, but after that you combine gas (which you have to buy) with rags (which you find in trash cans).

--Billy

I got past with some magic (the 'slow' spell whatever it's called), a found stun grenade and by picking up a certain less than sober half-ogre and giving him a decent weapon. My character's a friggin' killer with thrown weapons and decent with sorcery already. Just got 'apprenticed' in prowl too. He's shaping up to be quite an assassin.

There are probably as many ways to get past these guys as there are character concepts. It's just a matter of finding the right path. Anbody tried talking to the human theif with a 20 beauty female character yet? ;)

You guys are starting to peak my interest in this game...

Come on, guys!! I still haven't finished BGII yet!

I'll definitely be looking into this one, though...

I could burn down the building!

Oh, I forgot and this is my last spoiler here...if you talk to the Constable and ask the right questions he'll reveal there's another bridge to the north. Sure enough, if you just want to get out of town keep heading 'up' until the blue globe blinks on. Watch out for wolves but it's much easier.

The book of matches is a prop not an item. Read what it says on it.

"Pack of matches in my hand... and I have to break boards with my sword?"

Ever tried to set a 2x4 aflame with a match?

BTW, the best approach to taking out the bridge ruffians is to hit them with a molotov or a stun grenade (you may have both, at this point in the game, unless you already used them). Molotovs do lots of damage. That's how I got by them.

"You guys are starting to peak my interest in this game...

Come on, guys!! I still haven't finished BGII yet!

I'll definitely be looking into this one, though..."

Yeah, Murph, I'm with you. I figure that by the time I finish TOB, Arcanum will be a bargian bin item. If not, I can always try to finish Planescape first. =)

"I suspect that after they went code complete in May, they used the time between then and now to listen to what all the press types who received full golds had to say. Our comments were apparently listened to, because a lot of what is addressed in the patch seems to reflect what many of the folks who have been playing the game these past weeks have been saying. And I also think they used the press folks as beta testers ;-)"

Fuck. I just bought this game, and now I'm tempted to not install it and just wait for the inevitable first patch. I really regretted being an early adopter on Fallout: Tactics because there were some MAJOR bugs in the game. One example: the APC becomes unusable after you get to the third base camp. Happened to both me and a friend on totally different computers.

More and more it seems like the smart thing to do is buy games about 2 months after they hit store shelves. The price may be reduced, plus the patch is out, so the game is actually playable and reasonably bug-free...

"More and more it seems like the smart thing to do is buy games about 2 months after they hit store shelves. The price may be reduced, plus the patch is out, so the game is actually playable and reasonably bug-free..."

My buying patterns have evolved to follow the industry's pricing game. Very rarely I will buy a game as soon as it comes out (I think the last one was Baldur's Gate). Usually, I will buy a game in the second week, when the market development funds become available to put the game on sale. If I miss that week, or I'm not absolutely dying to have the game, I wait for the second round of MDF, usually around week 4 or 5. If the game isn't selling at that point, I start trolling the bargain bins for it instead. The last two work the best since generally the patches are out by that time.

"My buying patterns have evolved to follow the industry's pricing game."

Another reason to wait-- if you get stuck, someone has already written a walkthrough for you. I got stuck big time in Fallout: Tactics on something STUPID (the generators with huge HP and regeneration-- I couldn't tell if I was damaging them, and I didn't understand the concept of regeneration used there), and had to sit on my friggin' hands for a week waiting for someone to reach that point and write it into a walkthrough. It was really frustrating.

Generally I concur. Unless you are gonna physically DIE unless you have the game NOW, I'd wait at least 1 month, possibly 2, before buying. This could be tough on marquee titles, though. There's no way I could wait on DNF or Return to Wolf.

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More and more it seems like the smart thing to do is buy games about 2 months after they hit store shelves. The price may be reduced, plus the patch is out, so the game is actually playable and reasonably bug-free...

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