Arcanum - Journey to the Center of Arcanum
- Thread starter HiddenX
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i am still crying
Interesting that they were planning to use the original Source engine for it. I wonder if it was still going to use an isometric view.
In an alternative timeline, after finishing Ultima VIII the Lost Vale, we would have played a better version of Ultima IX as Richard Garriott had enough time to finish it as he wanted.
Then the new Ultima Trilogy (X-XI-XII) would have been a huge success.
Ultima Online would have its sequel, Ultima Online 2, with all of its' simulation greatness, but with a real story and NPC quests.
Troika could be still here after Arcanum Journey to the Center of Arcanum, a sequel to Temple of Elemental Evil, and Black Isle would have continued Fallout 3 as a real follow up to Fallout 1-2.
After a while, Larian would get the Ultima licence from EA and Swen Vincke could continue the Ultima serie after Richard Garriott retirement.
Arkane Studio could get the Ultima Underworld IP, and Raphaël Colantonio could create Ultima Underworld 3, as well as Arx Fatalis 2.
...in an alternative timeline.
Then the new Ultima Trilogy (X-XI-XII) would have been a huge success.
Ultima Online would have its sequel, Ultima Online 2, with all of its' simulation greatness, but with a real story and NPC quests.
Troika could be still here after Arcanum Journey to the Center of Arcanum, a sequel to Temple of Elemental Evil, and Black Isle would have continued Fallout 3 as a real follow up to Fallout 1-2.
After a while, Larian would get the Ultima licence from EA and Swen Vincke could continue the Ultima serie after Richard Garriott retirement.
Arkane Studio could get the Ultima Underworld IP, and Raphaël Colantonio could create Ultima Underworld 3, as well as Arx Fatalis 2.
...in an alternative timeline.
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Drithius
Magic & Loss
It's nice to see Tim active on social media again; he retreated from it for a while.
Warmark
Sentinel
When I just clicked on the site right now and saw this new Arcanum game I was high fiving myself...then I read on 
Giovanni1983
Sentinel
I have to say, I fell into the same trap for 2 seconds. I thought there was a chance for a second Arcanum, what a joy that would be.
Such a shame we didn't get a second. Arcanum is one of my favorite games.
Such a shame we didn't get a second. Arcanum is one of my favorite games.
Well or not, peoples grow older and most often end with less fresh ideas, teams grow older with more difficulties to adapt to evolutions, teams change and new people could not be at same level, gameplay expectations change and an older gameplay can be hard to adapt to it, or older designers can have hard time to adapt to expectations changes, and many more.
I don't think that projects delayed and delayed tend end be good, or it's indie or small teams projects.
From comments I read about ToEE, Troika could have great ideas but most coding was out sourced and it generated many difficulties, could be different for Arcanum I don't know. I mean that as Troika was eventually it could only not end well, make a game isn't just designs ideas, it's a project that need be led to an end properly.
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- Oct 14, 2007
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I kind of glad they never made this sequel. The leap to 3D would feel like a betrayal to me (exactly like what happened with Fallout 3), and frankly, 3D graphics were NOT good enough at that point, no matter what they thought, they were still quite ugly. I still have hopes that someone might snap up Arcanum property from whoever is holding the rights to it now and make an isometric sequel. It won't be Troika, of course, but there really two things that made Arcanum stand out: good writing (of which several RPG teams are capable these days), and "you can do almost anything and it won't break the game completely" approach, which is much harder to pull off, what with everybody making untouchable story-important NPCs these days. That second part is REALLY hard. It makes scripting everything - dialogs, cutscenes - exponentially harder, because you should always keep in mind that pretty much everyone in the scene might have died before it began, and so you have to write a lot of additional lines and script different branches of cutscenes. But it should be doable - I think ATOM RPG, for example, at least attempts that approach (keeping it from Fallout 1-2)?
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If you want to loose roughly 30-50% of the texture quality that you had with a 2D Isometric game released a few years earlier then I guess you could call it "plenty good".
Not all 3D engines were created equal though. That first iteration of the Source engine (Half-Life 1) aged pretty badly imo.
Drithius
Magic & Loss
This is all hypothetical, so somewhat a waste of breath, but let's posit that an Arcanum sequel got greenlit by Sierra. We can theorize that it would be developed and get released around the same time as Dark Messiah of Might & Magic (which both Arkane and Troika put pitches in for). Now let us look at a couple screens from this title:
Technology was moving at a very rapid pace then; both developers and consumers were excited for the new frontier. Would such a sequel be the same mechanically as its predecessor? Of course not, but it would have had the potential to be more than fine graphically.
Technology was moving at a very rapid pace then; both developers and consumers were excited for the new frontier. Would such a sequel be the same mechanically as its predecessor? Of course not, but it would have had the potential to be more than fine graphically.
I agree it would of looked fine.But it would of lost a lot of detail that was possible in a 2D game at the time. Although to be fair - Arcanum wasn't the best at the time - it heavily reused assets i.e. most houses were copy and paste etc. It did have good detail on things like the trains and the airship crash etc. However it was vastly inferior to the works of art that Bioware was pumping out.
Dark Messiah was released in 2006. Morrowind was released in 2002 and I would of expected a sequel to have come out 1-2 years of the release in 2001. If you are proposing the sequel would of come out in 2006 then I would quite likely agree with you.
Most people around this time had 64MB GPU's. That limited the capability of what they could do texturally significantly - which is why Morrowind looks like it does. Not a lot of texture variety. By the time of Dark Messiah things had improved a lot of course. Around 2005 people started to have 512MB of vram and vastly more cpu/gpu grunt. To create something like BG2 in a 3d engine with the same level of detail i.e. replicating the cities like-for-like just wasn't possible at the time. Not too mention how long it would of taken and how expensive it would of been - a 2d game (at that level of detail) is far less work. Arcanum? Possible I guess.
Of course whatever they created would look good though. Gothic 2 looked good. But it had nowhere near the detail of 2D games of the time. It used a very limited set of textures for buildings and terrain etc. The games that looked the best in that era were games like SS2 which were set in a environment that didn't require a million different textures. Texture swapping from disk in 2002 (and even 2006) was one of the reason games used to run at around 20fps!
Dark Messiah was released in 2006. Morrowind was released in 2002 and I would of expected a sequel to have come out 1-2 years of the release in 2001. If you are proposing the sequel would of come out in 2006 then I would quite likely agree with you.
Most people around this time had 64MB GPU's. That limited the capability of what they could do texturally significantly - which is why Morrowind looks like it does. Not a lot of texture variety. By the time of Dark Messiah things had improved a lot of course. Around 2005 people started to have 512MB of vram and vastly more cpu/gpu grunt. To create something like BG2 in a 3d engine with the same level of detail i.e. replicating the cities like-for-like just wasn't possible at the time. Not too mention how long it would of taken and how expensive it would of been - a 2d game (at that level of detail) is far less work. Arcanum? Possible I guess.
Of course whatever they created would look good though. Gothic 2 looked good. But it had nowhere near the detail of 2D games of the time. It used a very limited set of textures for buildings and terrain etc. The games that looked the best in that era were games like SS2 which were set in a environment that didn't require a million different textures. Texture swapping from disk in 2002 (and even 2006) was one of the reason games used to run at around 20fps!
DMoM&M wasn't released until 2006, and that was made with the second iteration of the Source engine not the first.
I guess it depends exactly when the hypothetical sequel was developed and what version of the Source engine was used. Most games back then didn't have 5-6 year development cycles.
Even if it used the later version of that engine though, I still don't think it would have aged nearly as well as a good 2D engine.
I guess it depends exactly when the hypothetical sequel was developed and what version of the Source engine was used. Most games back then didn't have 5-6 year development cycles.
Even if it used the later version of that engine though, I still don't think it would have aged nearly as well as a good 2D engine.