Arcanum is one of the things I don't want to be reminded of, and I'm thankful of the fact that my copy is pirated. My problems with lie not with the graphics; they lie with the horrible, horrible, horrible combat system.
Real-time = my character dies before she can even do anything.
Turn-based = I die of boredom before the characters could so much as be within each other's range.
Now, if it were possible to avoid combat completely and talk your way through the whole game (like Planescape: Torment, whose combat is, at the very most, optional), I wouldn't have given up on it. I would've been hooked to it, in fact. But alas, it didn't take me long to run away screaming after my third battle or so.
Morrowind was good for the first few hours, and then I came to realize just how horrible the mapping and navigation are. Never touched it ever since. In summary:
The Bad
- You need a very, very good PC to run it without suffering lag
- Repetitive combat
- Enchanting is evil
- Mapping and navigation are surely from the hellish pits of Baator
- Most NPCs have no personality
- Certain combos can make the game way too easy. I didn't intend to do it, but my second character was wiping out a whole cave of smugglers at level six.
- No focus in storyline
- Repetitive quests
- Vague directions given by NPCs - "go fetch me an egg from the third stone to the south of the eggmine from here, never mind the fact that the game has no compass and the landscape looks all the same."
The Good
- Lovely graphics
- Lots of freedom
- Uhm, that's about it. Oh, very nice graphics, as I said... I have to say something nice about it, now haven't I?
- Yes, very nice graphics.
