Bhaalspawn saga is canon. They even have a crap canonized novel about it after the game was made. Ishmael or something is the protagonist.
Jinxed: Pete wasn't being a dumb motherfucker.
As far as I'm concerned, graphics aren't what RPG's are supposed to be about. Arcanum featured graphics that weren't bad, but weren't stellar either.
They were dated. I'm not saying that graphics are integral to an RPG (they aren't.) but you can't expect a game to get mainstream appeal if it looks older than Fallout. The sprites were awful.
A lot more care was put into the actual setting and design of the graphics, not the technical part. The combat and character system thing is closely related, one comes out of the either and I see it as one point.
Going with a real time/turn-based hybrid was their mistake. It was Sierra's mistake for telling them to add a multiplayer component but it was also Troika's for thinking they could get away with something so shoddy instead of trying something new with a multiplayer implementation of turn based combat (localized combat zones for multiplayer, perhaps?).
The Arcanum community was pretty big back in the day. These weren't general Troika fans who loved fallout, but new fans who didn't even know who Troika was.
Irrelevent. Every games have their communities, even retarded games like Lionheart. When I shut down my Lionheart forum at RPG Planet and linked it to Ausir's site, people would e-mail me and complain about why I didn't host it locally.
You can't back up your claims to the full on this one exit, take it from me I worked for an Arcanum fan site for years and know that the part of the community grew up on Inn boards, some on the gamespy fan site, and some on TA.
Also irrelevent. The community was very small, in comparison to Fallout's, Baldur's Gates. It is comparable to Icewind Dale's tiny community, really. Their support makes very little difference in sales or official support. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't Chrisbeddoes the largest and possibly only remaining contributor to the Arcanum modding community?
There were really plenty of people who loved this game despite the shortcomings.
There are even more who didn't.
And its failure was mostly decided by Sierra's publishing rubbish. Saint Prov even wrote an article about that when he still worked for TA.
Fair enough, but inspite of this, the game would likely still have been a merely 'ok' seller instead of a big hit.
You're not going to convince anyone who was or is part of the Arcanum community about the stuff you just sniffed off from your finger exit.
Nice insult. Try making a relevent point sometime in the next decade, Jinxed.
