I was reading the Top 70 RPGs post and once again the old lie rears its head - Arcanum is a buggy mess, unbalanced, flawed, etc.
Pretty much all of those things are true - Arcanum was fairly buggy before Drog's patch, its combat system was obviously horribly rushed and is completely imbalanced, the dungeons are full of filler combat with little regard to enemy placement, the enemies themselves rarely do anything more special than melee attack, the later stages of the game feel strangely empty, etc. The game was clearly rushed. Fortunately the game is very well written, has a unique and imaginative setting, and a non-linear approach to quests, which completely save it from being just a mediocre Fallout clone.
Yes, after you've finished it, and after you've read 3 guides and 10 forum threads about it, it's somewhat easy to create a character that isn't challenging to play, but this is true about almost every game.
1) Arcanum's combat system isn't easy to break. It's trivial to break. You don't need a guide to discover broken combos, it takes minimal experimenting to find them. I discovered how abusive haste was with 25 AP on my first playthrough before ever looking at a single guide. I discovered harm spam on my second.
2) Arcanum is full of traps - things that completely waste character points. Completely off the top of my head, there's the entire Find Traps skill, the Beauty stat, several spells that just don't work, several spells that are criminally underpowered, and a few entire tech branches that are useless.
3) In spite of all of those traps, the game is still really, really fucking easy. Most of the challenge just comes from figuring out things like Quench Life being bugged, or that Summon Ogre will gimp your xp, or whatever. Once you find a build that is even remotely effective, you will steamroll every encounter in the game.
Few other games have combat systems this broken. Off the top of my head I can't even think of any. Even at its most broken, there's always a risk of criticals bypassing armor in Fallout 2 and at most you'll kill 3 or 4 people a turn, whereas in Arcanum I can play a mage and literally kill every enemy on the screen before they have a chance to move regardless of numbers.
Magic is easier to grasp than tech but it's not more capable at all. I've created tech firearms characters that had an easy time from start to finish without any party members. If you think tech sucks you just haven't figued it out yet.
It's true that it's completely possible to break the game as a tech character (as I stated above, breaking the game is trivial). It's also true that breaking the game as a magic user or just a pure melee character is much easier and requires less effort. Mages generally have more character points to waste (you only need 18 WP and about 10-15 spells) and straight melee builds just crush anything in the game by around level 20. There is a reason why players generally prefer magic over tech in Arcanum.
Arcanum simply isn't special in its brokenness and this meme needs to go away.
No. You need to go away. Get out of here.