someone pls make a video explaining how to play this crpg, i tried 4 times and im still unclear about much of the gameplay or ui. theres a million vids for classic fallout but none for this game for some reason
I had a friend who figured out that a player could mind control wild animals, bring them inside, mage lock the exits, and release control. The resulting mayhem was an act of nature and not murder.
My go to method was finding cursed artifacts and dropping them near the target, and sometimes they'd go over to pick it up and equip it and then die from the curse. Usually in their bed since they picked them up while heading off to their room to sleep.
@@MandaloreGaming You do not even need to kill them. I just sold the shopkeeper a "totally not a cursed artifact" with negative stamina regen. And robbing them blind after they equip it.
I did this often. When me and a buddy were playing co op he would just randomly say "wrangle up something and bring it here". The "here" usually being a shop or house my pal wanted to rob.
Mad respect to that elven guy who kept his "trees and forest" bit even after being brutally murdered and resurrected as a ghost. The ultimate comedian.
It's the capital of the elvish nation- and considered sacred. They generally don't share it's location with outsiders. (Some idiot surveyors from Tarant are actually in a nearby area- thinking they'll be chopping down all the trees. Turns out, the area is *sacred*, and any act of violence against a living thing- including trees- is met by the person performing the act dying horribly via curse. They don't listen to you and blow you off. needless to say, they die screaming, and no one had to lift a finger.) Really though, the fact that bears and bunnies are frolicking together peacefully with the eagles and fish should have let them know that something deeply supernatural was going on.
about a quest (birthing island) can anyone please tell me about the twin skull quest about the ogre birthing facility modded version. appearently it changes the ending of it. honestly it was stupid, from how many ogres there were, what people have said, what the higher ups have done, and the sudden dissapearance. couldnt the main character just come to a conclusion or be: racialy motivated to destroy it and immeadietly bringing it to aother kingdom to justify genocide; bring it to another kingdom to just end it and the higher ups only; use the GOD DAMN NECROMANCY on the replacement dude to tell you what happened or get a clue; or simply give the book away to a library with the context found out in like 50 years or after you somewhat mention its content
I remember reading about it but I think a specific backstory does get brought up in game, as a half ogre you get the option to pick a background that basically amounts to your mother being the ogre not your father and that they where actually married, during the half ogre breeding farms quest the investigator will ask you if you never thought it was weird how you and many of your kind ended up in orphanages, you get the option to respond by getting offended and telling him you knew your parents and they loved each other very much.
The idea of someone like Klug being the result of a loving, caring couple, rather than a grim, depressing eugenics experiment has absolutely made my day.
Shadowrun has elements of this. Magic and technology don't mix and having cyberware installed reduces your magical power and potential. Then you've got technomancers, who have the same restrictions as mages when it comes to cyberware but instead of flinging spells they can interface with technology using their mind and create digital familiars to do their bidding on the net.
The Tabletop RPG Mage: The Ascension takes the inverse approach. There are no fixed Laws of Physics; instead reality is molded by what people believe is real. If you know how to tap into the world's energy you can do pretty much whatever as long as what you want to do is thought to be believable by other eye witnesses. Thus, both magic and technology can only exist if people believe that that thing can exist and function.
@@khankhomrad8855 That explains so much about why that universe is always on the verge of an apocalypse. Literally anyone with a doomer mindset is making things that much more likely to cause the doom scenario. Which is self perpetual because the more people who believe the world is a terrible place where horrible things happen for no reason causes it to become even more of a terrible place where horrible things happen for no reason on an endless scaling up of awfulness
@@legojay14 yeah, pretty much. At least as far as Mage's lore is concerned. Vampire & Co are in a perpetual cycle of doom because, well, that's the mood that was chosen for the game.
You really gotta put emphasis on the word 'man' for full effect. "That's just like, your opinion, *maaan*". Bonus points if you say it in Shaggy from Scooby Doo's 1960's stoner-esque voice.
It is a testament to the quality of Arcanum that even though it has a borderline unplayable combat system is still ranks as one of the greatest RPGs of all time
TROIKA realy isnt the best when it comes to combat, same in Vampire Bloodlines, but oh boy do the deliver with the rest. Two of my favorite Games of all time.
To be honest I think that's the point, a RPG is about the world, you place in it and how you interact with it all, understanding that is what makes a good one, but these days it's been confused with making different builds in a combat system. Doing both is better, but the former is more important than anything else
About the gnome/half-ogre quest: Black Isle employees were huge X-Files fans. That's also what inspired them to add the Vault-Tec experiment conspiracy in Fallout 2. So a huge outrageous reveal that gets hushed up leaving the player helpless comes from that place because that's what always happens to Scully and Mulder on the show.
They definitely wanted that to be a cliffhanger because you could kill that gnome at the very end of that quest and use necromancy to raise his tortured soul from the dead and he still has no answers.
So, at the risk of being extremely crass, beyond adding shock value to the already horrifying concept of a fantasy eugenics breeding program, why do they use human women as mothers to the half ogres? It seems that reversing the genders would probably be far less risky to the mothers, and thus increase the viability of the horrifying eugenics industrial r*pe program.
I really appreciate the start letting you pick your character from this list of passengers, and when the game begins the one you chose is the survivor. On a second playthrough you could look back at your old character's dead remains and think "In another lifetime, old friend".
@@StephenBlane There's also Divinity Original Sin 2 (very fantastic RPG I'll say). The game starts with all of your characters getting imprisoned in a ship. You can choose to either: A.) Use a precon B.) Create your own character With the twist that all of the precon characters can join your party, and have an important place in the lore and setting of the game.
They did plan on making a sequel, 'Journey to the centre of Arcanum'. Obviously heavily inspired by 'Journey to the centre of Earth' by Jules Verne. It was supposed to be developed in the Source engine of 'Half-life 2' fame and much more off the wall than the 1st game, with Dinosaurus and such. Ultimately, we got the 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' instead and while that is an absolutely legendary game in it's own right, it still pains my heart. From the little we know of it, it truly sounds like the greatest game that never was.
That's actually kind of amazing that in the effort to create a sequel, they ended up creating an entirely different unrelated game, that became just as groundbreaking.
@@johnsonlee4285 They were and are the definitions of the artist's adage; through strife comes strength. They struggled so hard to make their passions come to life. They were basically gunslingers in dev work, artistic composition, and writing. And they probably pivoted several times more than we'll ever know. But they were set on a path to make ambitious, creative, passionate projects. And they refused to deny those itches if they had the way to make a game. Unfortunately, the way closed up due to funding because their strife also included not selling super well and the gunslinger dev work making for too steep of a dev budget. Ah well, godspeed beautiful creators.
IIRC the devs at Troika were planning on adding more meat to the stealth mechanics, with the general goal of making something that played like the original Thief games. Sadly they never really got past the pitch stage. I think one or two of their pitches have surfaced on various out-of-the-way forums over the years, but I don't know where any are posted offhand.
Troika is that company that, while I completely understand WHY they folded, it never stops hurting. They never made a single game that wasn't broken. I bought VtM:B on day one and the game was literally unbeatable. Kids today complaining about it being a bugged or glitchy game have no idea how good they have it. You'd get to a certain point and it would crash every time. it took a couple of months before there was even an official patch that just made the game beatable. I had to start over because you couldn't just apply it and move forward with your save. Also despite having a computer that at the time was well above every single recommended spec, it took literal minutes to load every single new area. Going from the hub to the Asylum? Go make a sandwich cause its gonna be a while. That said even in that absolutely broken, nearly unplayable state, it instantly became one of my favorite games of all time. Every Troika game was so full of potential. They let that potential blind them to bugs and polish but damned if that potential didn't shine.
I absolutely love how Mandalore sneaks in the Home Alone electrocution sound effect. I always forget about it until halfway through the video when it comes out of nowhere and makes me grin from ear to ear
Just like with Kerghan I really like how you can talk down The Master in Fallout 1 and his reaction to everything he did when you point it out. Troika was amazing in creating smart villains that were just too blinded by their own ambition.
Same with Lanius in New Vegas (made by Obsidian, which had some of the original people who worked on the first Fallout games). It’s interesting to use logic and point out the flaws in a plan to get the villain to back down rather than telling them they’re a bad person and hoping that you made the roll that’ll convince them to not be bad.
The fact alone that a Necromancer PC can resurrect followers as undead versions of themselves until proper resurrection makes this game amazing to me. I wish more games did things like this.
"Deacon I would like to remind you that I have seven strengths and the only way that I could save the hero of legend was by zombifying his corpse temporarily. Also you heart attack and inciting the mob is completely unnecessary" -when the DM doesn't check the wizards subclass
Divinity isn't as good as old CRPG, but it brings back CRPG aspects like multiple solutions to quest, sneaking and of course, spirit sight that allows for speaking with the dead and talking with animal brought back good memories of old CRPG. There's just some kind of childish joy from distracting an NPC by talking to them while using your party member to steal something behind their back, even better if the party member is an actual co-op player.
@@lc9245 I also like the subversion of expectations in Divinity games. Like that one quest outside the first city with the undead everywhere, but you can find undead city guards who still have their minds intact and are just trying to stay alive still, or as close to it as they still can. Fun times. That and loading explosive barrels into carryable containers and creating what equates to "Ye Olde Nuke" to throw at bosses.
I remember playing this game and finding out that throwing molotovs was a free action. Imagine you are the immortal doom of mankind and some orcess in a pretty dress waltzes into your lair and whips a bag of fire bottles at you, killing you instantly
As someone who played a lot of heroes of might and magic 2, 3, and 4, it’s crazy how close to home Sseth’s paraphrasing of the story is. It’s spot on at the same time as being a half truth.
@@aerosdacillo1227 Though its hard to tell sseth's politics, hes probably center left at least judging by his general statements and positions about things. Regardless of his politics, mandalore and friends are very much left wing, with the vast majority of his cohosts on pst being queer (actually I think him and brendan might be the only cishet consistant members). Hes also collabed multiple times with hbomberguy, a very famous and popular left tuber.
Everytime Klug talks to Virgil, I laugh. Virgil's voice actor did such an amazing job, he's great on evil playthroughs too, he gets really psycho. God I miss older games like this, that let you laugh and do dumb stuff just for the sake of it.
This game has so many great moments: right at the start when you examine the victims of the blimp crash, you will find out that they carry the names of the premade characters you can pick before the game…so basically you can pick/save any of the passengers… or just make your own charakter an make them all die in the crash
I haven’t played Arcanum, but “that quest” may be one of the darkest sidequests in any game I’ve heard of. “The queen birthed three before dying” was such a gutpunch of a statement. So much horror in such a small statement.
@@Rivershield The point of the quest is to feel angry and powerless, resolving it would make it another shitty holywood hero quest. Arcanum stands out, because it takes human conflict and cruelty serious in a fantasy setting, you can do good, but you're powerless in certain regards, no matter how powerfull you are.
@@wolfvonversweber1109 I see the merit in what the quest is trying to do, really. I wish more games would be that bold. That said, video games are entertainment and I'm not usually entertained by the idea of being powerless, definitely not in this particular type of way. I would find that quest easier to accept if it wasn't a high fantasy world and if your character was a regular dude like in Ghotic. But that isn't the case. This is an universe with a big power scaling in which you can face interdimensional threats. In this setting I find it hard to accept that you can't resolve an issue with a pathetic mortal race such as the gnomes when your character is effectively among most powerful beings in that world, and specially when you can still see the consequences of the quest. Yet, the game doesn't acknowledge your interference in those consequences? Sounds forced to me. If a game wants to have grounded conflicts, then likewise it should have grounded consequences that you can meddle with. If you are fine with the way things turned out it's your problem, but you shouldn't expect everyone to be like you.
Especially for a game like this, where it's most of the appeal. I laughed when he said "if you don't want spoilers, skip to here," which was like 20 minutes later and basically the end of the video.
Man I still remember an article in the Tarant gazette about some dude that tried to infuse a revolver with a fire spirit or something, since, you know, why wouldn't you want your guns to fire harder. It ended with an explosive result and killed the wielder. The relationship between magic and tech is so cool to explore, shame there aren't many stories that delve into it.
The closest equivalent to Arcanum I can think of is probably Shadowrun. It's more cyberpunk than steampunk, but it too has a relationship between magic and technology. Though admittedly, Shadowrun focuses more on how altering your body makes you less magical, rather than magic messing up technology/technology dampening magic a'la Arcanum.
Would be nice if more fantasy games did have better technology than the crossbow. Couldn't care less what the fantasy liberals say, I want muskets with my orcs, elves, and goblins! Fantasy worlds shouldn't just stay in the age of string and wood I tell ya'! I got 2 hands and I wanna use 'em to pump and dump a musket ball right into some elf's skull!
I have the game manual on my bookshelf, mainly because of that recipe, although it is one of the best game manuals. I laughed when that popped up at the end of the video.
My older brother got me into gaming when I was little, and Arcanum was the first real RPG I've ever played. I remember being awed by the large map, the setting and the depth of the game. It was the RPG that turned me into an RPG lover. My brother passed away in 2018, and I still get a lump in my throat whenever I hear the Arcanum main theme 11:17
At least you will always have all those happy memories to cherish, I wish I had a few more of those with my brother. May your bro rest in peace and may you carry on well 🙏(srry if bad english)
My Dad (who passed away too early) played Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for hundreds and hundreds of hours. He discovered everything, including secrets and exploits, without internet and guides. I used to get angry at him because he was hogging the PC late into the night. Now I can't hold in the tears every time I hear the Oblivion theme song. Sorry about your loss of your bro.
Thank you everyone for the great replies. @spacelord420 I am sorry to hear about your dad. When it comes to Arcanum and many other games, my brother was exactly the same. Found tons of secrets and hidden quests in this game, all without internet or guides. There are quite a few game soundtracks that bring back so many memories. Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Elder Scrolls etc
I think it's a good time to remind everyone that, according to the lore, Arcanum halflings might be magically mutated gnomes, similar to how elves and orcs are magically mutated humans. This implies that, just like the union between human ad elf or orc produces a fertile and stable hybrid (half-elf or half-orc), the union between gnome and halfling can too result in hybrid, which I prefer to call "gnomeling". I Want To Beleive.
@@laurenkirby97 Well THAT's an interesting theory. I haven't ever gotten far enough in Arcanum to know if you're actually not just making things up or not too!
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe He's making things up. There are no real goblins in Arcanum, just tiny semi-goblins called kites (however, their sprite files are indeed called "goblin", as far as I know) and their lore is severely lacking. The kites in-game seem to be much smaller and frailer than gnomes and halflings. However, knowing that orc/elf hybridization conducted by gnomes resulted in mostly deformed progeny, the theory that kites are the descendants of ancient gnome/halfling hybridization can be reasonable. However, this is just fan/fun speculation, not based on anything (unlike gnomelings existance theory).
I mean - imagine hearing Kerghan's rambling about life's suffering AFTER going through THAT unresolvable quest...the way the universe of this game connects itself and, thus, produces meaning and sense is incredible. I would consider Kerghan's words way differently knowing the existence of the GNOMES EUGENICS LABS
Yeah, funny thing is Mandy left out one key (voiced!) companion who brings a completely new angle to Kerghans plan. In the end, he even joins Kerghan and fights against you if you choose to fight. This was especially bitter since I found this characters ancestral clan sword a few minutes ago in the Void and gave it to him during a pompous speech. 😂 This character is completely missable btw since you find him in a bonus dungeon that's part of a side quest.
Arcanum is, in my opinion, the biggest diamond in the rough in the game industry. It's loaded with bugs and jankiness while still being an absolutely amazing game. One that could've been so much more. All that jank won't stop me from doing playthrough #17 though.
@InsultComicChef It's partly because of just that. The graphics pull a lot of weight, so devs can skimp on the rest. Also it's a more competitive market. You can't just spend 8 years developing a great story without top of the line graphics to keep people interested. Of course there are exceptions, but usually only on the indie market, which generally isn't *as* infested with greed as the AAA one. Luckily we have modders, small studios (like Beamdog) and even GOG to make sure we can still play all the original classics. The stories are still just as good decades later, but now I can see the entire Baldur's Gate map without scrolling on my 5120x1440 monitor, lol.
Sadly there's a ton of those! Games that were great, despite their flaws and bugs and which didn't get sequels! From VtMBL, to Fallout New Vegas (better than anything Badthesda - note: Deliberate error! - did with the IP) to No one lives Forever (NOLF!)...damned, the second game of that series was great and sadly that is where it ended -.-
I also appriciate the "Villain"- even after all these years of sulking alone and thinking about bad sides of life he decides to listen to you and reconcider. Yeah, it's still unrealisticly fast for a viewpoint shift, but I am glad he wasn't a one-note DadGuy
I disagree about it being unrealistic. He probably had such conversation with himself several hundreds of times in the void and every time he convinced himself that his way is the best way or all he's been through is pointless. Then comes very charismatic and intelligent player character who repeats what he said to himself so many times and only then he realizes that it's actually the truth. Sometimes you have to hear someone else affirm your thoughts.
@@Nope-en9bo No, gnomes really deserve everything that happens to them. You profit off destroying cultures and ruining lives, you don't just shower it away.
“The queen birthed three before dying.” ...I was not prepared for this sidequest. As a side note, pay attention, current/aspiring writers. _This_ is how you write truly disturbing and repugnant atrocities. Give the perpetrators logical reasons for wanting to do it, show why they were able to get as far along as they did, and don’t let a desire to be more edgy overwhelm the audience’s instinctive empathy with an exaggerated ‘ick’ factor. Looking at you, Daemonculaba.
Yeah theres always a problem with either cranking up the ick or straight fetishising the rape. But that quest just looks at it logically and chillingly, man its fucked up but it aces the story telling.
write a problem, then write a organic, cheap, easy, rational but immoral solution to resolve said problem. then push it to it's extreme as a way to definitely resolve the original problem while making the solution extremely ethicaly-wrong. you've created a setting in which there's a powerful race of super-agressive conquerors that can't be stopped by conventional means? make a targeted-virus that render them infertiles as a way to put a slow but permanent stop for both their military-forces and passively genocide their civilization. (Krogans, Mass Effect) you've created a setting in which there's a non-stop invading force which can't be killed by conventional means or are too-strong to be? create a form of eugenic-recruitment that creates beings powerful enough to deal with said forces at a cost so terrible no-one aware of it would accept unless forced (the Grey-Wardens from "Dragon-Age", and the Witchers from "Witcher") that's how you do it: create a problem that either can't, or is very challenging to resolve with normal-means, then create a "ideal" solution with consequences so ethically wrong that they make you question in the first-place if it was coming-up with that solution at-all.
@@richardvlasek2445 Well, at least the motivations behind the daemonculaba make sense. CSM are always short on recruits, so experimenting on a method to accelerate the creation of SM, no matter how gruesome the execution, makes sense, specially if the ones behind it are Iron Warriors, the ones who value even their own members as expendable weapons of war, so at least there's some thought behind this. Still edgy and gross af to the point of being distasteful tho.
Watching his review: Yeah Seth's probably playing hard into his bullshit like usual. Whatever. After the island: Guess I can add "wishing a guy on youtube was just projecting his antisemitism on a game" to the reasons I'm going to hell
@@patricknaughton6636 considering he is Jewish origins... I know that you can be a self racist or whatever, I just see it in jest, same as I and probably others do
I was a part of the oldschool arcanum forum named "arcanumclub" in the 2003-2008. As far as I know that's the source of most community mods and improvements/bugfixes that were created for the Arcanum. Such a great people, love them :)
Okay, half-ogres quest is one if the most disturbing stories I had ever encountered in media. It is R Scott Bakker's level of disturbing, which... Says a lot. Edit: misspelled author's surname
It wasn't mentioned in the video, but one of the most important plot points for the game is that humans are the only race that can interbreed with the other species - though they never want to, except for when it comes to elves. It's intentional that every female character in that city is either a prostitute, or married to one of the gnomes.
@@SyndicateOperative well, it was kinda mentioned with flowchart of races and that there was no interbreeding with other races besides humans on the chart
@@SyndicateOperative which city? Tarant? Nah, there's the soothsayers, the herbalist, the magic shop owner, the guild member at the station, the ticket vendors, the tough lady in the Boil, and probably others I'm forgetting. Granted, there's no coded value for "NPC X is married to NPC Y," but even then the minimal representation we get is not as straight-forward as that.
Watching Sseth's Arcanum Review: "Haha wow, he's really playing up the gnome stuff for comedic effect" Watching Mandy's Arcanum Review: _"The only good gnome is a _*_DEAD_*_ gnome."_
I just love when Mandalore makes a review of a game that even Sseth reviewed. Makes me wanna watch them one after the other and compare them, they are so different yet they are both so good
Yeah it sent a somewhat younger me down a decades long path of chasing down as much live chamber music as possible - that feeling is unbeatable. The composer - Ben Houge - made high quality files and scores available on his website (assuming the links still work!) along with some interesting commentary
I bought the original box of this game. The manual was almost like a book. It was the only manual I read all the way through because it was written like a journal from an anthropologist. It was one of the most awesome reads for a game like ever.
I have a weird memory of this game. I was SO excited for World of Warcraft, and a kid at my school would tell me stories of playing the beta (his uncle worked at blizzard, as all these stories go) and I kept begging him to get me a copy to play. He finally brought a CD to give me. I get home and....it was this. I ended up liking it.
I wonder if the plot twist was really that the kid's uncle actually worked at a Babbage's, but his dad told him that his brother worked with "video games" one day and the kid was too dumb to realize or the uncle was too embarrassed to not lie to him so they both settled on the notion that he worked at a then popular developer, like Blizzard, as a lie so everyone could save face. Then you're challenging him to prove it, and so the kid challenges his uncle to prove it, and the uncle gives him Arcanum, which the kid REALLY does think is an early version of the next Warcraft, so he brings it to you in the fullest confidence.
I was wondering why this was a Halloween episode, after hearing about the Half-Ogre sidequest I can safely say this is the scariest game Mandalore has showcased thus far.
@@hacooray525 I had the same issue for a while, but it is worth it. Just pretend someone made it mocking edgy people, and not an edgy person thinking it was literally him, and it’s way better
@@hacooray525 Get some buddies and take a shot every time you feel the need to mute the TV to stop hearing Haze, you'll either have a blast or die from alcohol poisoning XD
I will never forget the time I was map-travelling, exited the map in the large early town only to find my character in te back room of the brothel with a sheep. It made it feel like my character had a life of his own and was completely strange. I loved this game in its day. I also find it impossible to get into it again.
I was watching an interview with Leonard Boyarski yesterday, and he was talking Arcanum and actually addressed the Gnome / Half Ogre conspiracy. He said he was big into X-Files at the time of writing and the alien hybrids / conspiracy influenced that part of the game. It was designed to be a dead end to be like an X-Files episode
That makes sense, but it is still profoundly unsatisfying. Not that everything needs to be satisfying. One of those events that makes you sit alone in a dark room and think for a while.
This game has my favorite "industrialized magic" setting of any fiction. I realize that's really specific, but it's such a cool concept, and I have trouble imagining any other property doing it better than Arcanum.
The Eberron setting for D&D is a pretty decent one. There, the magic IS industrialized. As in, they have corporations pumping out elemental-powered airships and tradesmen learning cantrips to improve their dry-cleaning skills. Oh, and the ensouled combat robots trying to find a purpose after magic WWI and the necro-nuke that ended it.
Dunno if this counts and I havent played Arcanum for any decent length of time but Thief 1 and 2 for me are pretty good for it, magic and tbf tech too had so much more of an occult and unknown vibe in that setting, like weirdly the less you know the more grounded it felt, guess it fit the theme of shadows and secrets and such.
Pillars of Eternity is set very early in the process. skip 1, it's significantly less good than 2, and everything you need to know about 1 is covered in the intro.
True horror in games like this I feel, come about when you see or hear things that people do to each other where all humanity is stripped away. "The queen birthed 3 before dying" is a horrifying line for all the correct reasons- it's written like a machine, despite the scientist whom did it being human. It's clinical and sterile. You're cataloguing horrors like ticking boxes off a sheet- but the game makes it clear that he also just, goes home at the end of the day and feels like he's doing great work. THAT RIGHT THERE, is truly excellent horror- the ability to take something human and conceptually show, that YOU or anyone ELSE could possibly become like that, or do something similarly terrible and just think it's a slow fucking Tuesday or somehow will be best at the end of it all. Sometimes the uncanny valley is a human, who really isn't anymore.
The Banality of Evil edit: man, I quoted the subtitle of Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial *before* I noticed all the anti-semitic quotes in the comments here... Way too many people are just too gleefully spouting literal Nazi-shit, but it's paraphrased with "gnome" replacing "jew", so it's supposedly okay (It's not)...
I think the horror is not that "you" become the evil, but that evil itself exists in such a "normal perceived" nature. I.e. this evil think it is doing something good or normal (which is interesting but tbh not out of the norm of just basic reality given Nazis existed and they enjoyed what they were doing and thought it was good). It seems this banality of evil stuff always pops up when in truth it's not that special or unique, it's just basic writing 101 and depending upon how or what a writer wishes to convey may be used or in contrast they may utilize an unknowable evil which could mean something else. That the ultimate evil of arcanum reaches their conclusion on why ending the war is good is an example of how something originally ancient and creepy/lovecraftian is instead just a eons old entity reaching a sane nihilistic conclusion on what actually saving someone in that context means (i.e. ending existence).
From a outsider perspective (never played arcanum or dragon age) using orcs for a racial oppression story is the better choice. In most fantasy orcs have a simple mindset but just want to get on with their lives. Meanwhile elves are either dancing hippies mixed with too noble for you snobs so sorta deserve whatever is coming their way. Again never seen or played dragon age but if I wanted to make a racial allegory in my dnd game I would use orcs
@@BigPuddin BioWare infuriates me that way because the terrible allegory thing shows up in BOTH their major IP’s way too much. I know multiple people who unironically thought the point of the mage storylines was “dangerous people should be locked up and surveyed 24/7” and frankly I can’t blame them for reading it that way because of how poorly done the whole thing was.
This video hits different after watching all of Tim Cain's videos on the game That he has the source code still and knowing that it still compiles and he'd be happy to do stuff with it if he was allowed to makes me so sad
Amongst all the stuff going on in this story, I love the touch that Bates did, in fact, not invent the thing which launched him to tech-genius power, but saw it elsewhere. Probably best they didn't call the Black Mountain Clan the Xeroxians, though.
One thing I've always had in my mind for such a setting : an alchemy factory ! On the one hand, kewl ! Cheap healing potions for everyone ! On the other hand, this is the industrial revolution era, ecology is still a long time away... Let's just say the sewers should be an endgame area...
From what I understand, there are two builds which breaks things hard. A pure agility build with daggers of speed (or whatever they are called). This let's you to turn on turn based combat, enter stealth, open a door and backstab everyone, then leave before the first body drops. The second is the pure charisma build which let's you overwhelm everyone with an army.
Oh, they are way more broken builds than just these two. On side of magic, you have very well scaling, and very spamable basic spells. On mid ground good backstab allows to prrety much 1-shot everyone. Or max dexterity, and enjoy absurd attack speed on all weapons. On tech side, you can craft literal machinegun and fire it like 20 times in single turn ( tho you will spend fortune on ammo or ingridients for it ).
it only takes like three levels in the right branch of technology to build the fire axe, which will carry you to the end of the game. the first level necromancy offensive spell scales with magic aptitude, so you can take that as your only offensive spell and spam kill anything in the game.
My one complaint about the conspiracy quest was the alignment of those responsible being good, like at least make em neutral if they weren't directly involved
@@TaCo0oCaT I mean the one who tries to tell you "Well maybe this isn't real and you should just forget about it" is marked as good, when he's clearly engaged in the coverup. And any gnome with a bodyguard has to die.
@@TaCo0oCaT If it helps along with how ironic it is, one of the recruitable characters a gnome who possesses some unsavory skills to go with his gunslinging. If you take him along to Ogre Island and find the truth there, he actually shows disgust with said discovery. It really says something, that someone belonging to the same race who has no problem killing people due to his occupation, is shocked at what his own people were doing hidden away on that cursed little island.
There were newer rumors about a potential sequel/remake, the art campaign to get mandalore to do this video got a lot of attention, and many remake/remaster studios have been bringing it up as a game they'd love to see remade. It had a lot of eyes/searches trending this year, so making content on it makes sense.
Panari reminds me of the concept of Atomic Priesthood. When the context behind the danger is lost to time, the awareness of that danger is maintained through ritual and myth.
They are still around, in InXile and Obsidian. Working on games like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, The Outer Worlds, Wasteland 2. And people with similar ideas are in and around these games, and games like them, still. Troika was basically just a continuation of Interplay, when Interplay changed. It doesn't matter what company name is behind these games, not really. The trademarks are really not important at all. With Fallout, they wanted to make a sequel to Wasteland, but didn't have the IP, so called it something else. Then, when Bethesda owned the Fallout brand, they made Outer Worlds and Wasteland 2. I do hope we'll get to see more exploration of the Arcanum IP. Or perhaps a return to this same world with another name. It doesn't really matter which one it is.
@@Taeerom Tyranny and the first Pillar of Eternity are basically half of a game, while the Outer Worlds is a mediocre game that had the luck of coming out around the same tipe fallout flopped. They are not even close to living up to their supposed legacy.
Idk what enthusiast makes the russian subtitles for Mandalore's videos, but their translation are always superb, with good adaptation of all jokes and everything. If by chance the person who translates it, reads this comment, please know - you're my hero
Ох, не знаю, смеяться или плакать от того, что, даже спустя годы, большая часть комментариев про субтитры начинается с "Не знаю, кто их делает, но..." 😂Но спасибо! Рад слышать, что время не было потрачено впустую!
@@ValentineGrimCC ну, в описании видео переводчиков не указывают, а в других источниках не знала, как и искать :) в любом случае, спасибо огромное вам! обзоры на особо ерепенистую адвенчуру и загадку друдов были бы много хуже без вашего труда. как сестра по переводческому делу, желаю всяческих успехов!
@@sylonogwailou Usually, but not always. And degree of alteration varies. Sometimes, it's just the matter of replacing one foreign element with a local counterpart (store chain, for example), while the joke itself stays the same. Other times, a completely different joke has to be made to illustrate the same point (most often, when there is a play on words).
@@ValentineGrimCC Ваше время никогда не бывает потрачено впустую, я открыла для себя Мандалора 3 года назад и продолжаю его смотреть (правда в большей части уже без русских сабов) благодаря вам, т.к. в то время у меня был очень косой английский. Спасибо!
It is no exageration or hyperboly that all evils in the world are endorsed and commited by gnomes. A gnome feels no empathy , no remorse, no common hummanity that separates us from simple beasts. The only love that a gnome feels, if you can desribe it so, is that for money. - Leader of the Merchants Guild
That comment from Mandalore about the hardest hitting line from a villain made me think about the guy from Dishonored. "I have a surprise for you. I'm begging for my life. I just want to leave this city and vanish from the memory of its inhabitants". This line will stay with me until I finally develop Alzheimer and stop remembering anything.
I basically have never stopped playing it since 2004. It's always installed, my sister and I even played the multiplayer a lot. Multiple modules. It's a piece of childhood that interestingly holds up in quality, with superior writing, quest design and pacing which is great for a sort of open world.
I am not a very big nostalgic glasses guy so I usually have a hard time going back to retro games I played as a kid. Not too long ago i picked this back up and just got sucked right back in and did a whole playthrough. There really is something special about it to me.
In most games, becoming a master of persuasion means just adding a final point. In Arcanum, it means gaining the position of an ambassador, successfully leading diplomatic negotiations between a major but declining nation and a massive Unified Kingdom where you might help the noble and proud but failing kingdom survive while retaining lot of it's independence and dignity even though many of it is having a tough time finding place in the modern world, break it entirely and let it be absorbed entirely by Union as history forgets it ever existed on Unified Kingdom unrelenting march toward future heralded by you in this moment, try to strike the best compromise possible to please both sides or just screw the entire thing and take massive bribes. Need there be said more?
The ultimate tragedy of Arcanum's setting is that there is a peaceful afterlife. It means you can't make the gnomes suffer as much as they deserve. Edit: Hi Vercingetorix. Still living rent-free in your head I see. :)
Arcanum is one of the best rpg's I've ever played. Everything in it feels real without being condescending. The game doesn't try to educate you on racism, ableism or sexism, you experience it and form your own opinion. The setting is unique. The music helps the atmosphere. Even the architecture is correct and different in many places. I really hope there will be a remaster/ remake someday as it is truly painful to play on Win10.
I loved this game back in the day and really wished they had made more games in this setting. The setting and story gave it such a unique feel. I have always loved games or stories that have mixed fantasy and technology to see what would happen should the two have been part of the world. Thanks for the nostalgia!
There's a game called Sovereign Syndicate in this setting, coming out soon. Though it appears to be going the direction of Disco Elysium in the way the game is played. Not sure if there is actual combat.
The smart ogre reminds me of the character Droggelbecher from the underrated point and click adventure "Edna breaks out", he just says "Droggelbecher" but if you visit him with a special random object he starts telling a intelligent story until he notices it... Also very funny interaction 😂
I love this game so much tbh. I remember playing it back in the early 2000s and it and VtM: Bloodlines were huge influences in my decision to become a game artist. Hell, I even have the Troika Games logo tattooed on my arm, for which I had to message Tim Cain and ask if he or anyone else had a copy of the logo in high enough resolution to be usable! He messaged the other founders and one of them did. I got it on the proviso that I sent a photo of the finished tattoo afterwards. :)
They were really the pinnacle of intelligent RPG gaming... Wishing they didn't lose their time on "Temple of Elemental Evil" which is a shitty game, but they tried to be the first to implement 3rd ADD rules.
They had a lot of great ideas but were incompetent devs who left their players to clean up their messes. Happens once, it can happen to the best of us, forgive and forget. Happens three games in a row, maybe you should think of a different line of work. Fast-forward to the Skyrim era, where releasing a game half-baked has been normalized, so perhaps they were just before their time.
When I first played this game with a mate back when I was like 10, we "invented" a way to turn a barrel-filled cellar in Tarant (also a home to a few mechanized spiders) into an "item bank", which became really useful for tech characters, as you could store huge amounts of materials and later combine them into a ton of grenades or other high-powered and expensive items.
@@kaizokuAUTO Salt Factory is pretty decent, actually talks mostly about the gameplay mechanics in a lot of depth and story (as in the actual in game story and sidequests and not "what it really means"), granted his videos are very long.
This was my favorite game as a kid. The setting was so rich with lore and intriguing plots and characters I couldn't stop thinking about it when I would go to school. Above all though, the soundtrack blew my socks off. I still listen to it quite often to relax and let my mind wander.
@@georgie9303 they're making new Wasteland games, right? Shame they probably will never touch on some cool societal aspects like a cabal of ethnic disruptors or miscegenation in the current age market
BTW backstab build is fucking OP in this game, you one-shot almost anything with it using only basic cheap dagger and can hit like 8(don't remember exactly) times in one turn and enemies just can’t hit you cuz they lose you out of sight right away.
Everything is OP in this game. A pure mage annihilates everything with a harm spell. A throwing weapons user melts everything from the very start with just a boomerang. Persuasion lets you skip pretty much any quest. The variety is endless.
@@Spellweaver5 Pure mage has mana problems, you have to carry a ton of mana potions. I played almost every build in this game, backstabber is the strongest one combat-wise so far, but you have to suffer in the early game a little bit before all the sneak, backstab and melee skills are maxed out.
I just reentered the game to check the damage, it's like 80-90 dmg per backstab hit (without the crit) and with the crit god knows how much, but it's one-shot 90% of the time + you can hit enemy indefinitely since you can attack, sneak away, attack again, you won’t get a single point of damage this way.
The only big con of this build is that it is really only playable in the Fast Turn Based mode, but since all the animations are skipped, it can be even more fast then real-time mode
I always love it when in fantasy RPGs after hearing the villain's whole speech and being offered to join in you can just go "lol no" then dome them in the head with a pistol.
I remember playing an half Ork technologist female debutante who became a luddite across the journey! One of the best memories I had in a videogame! 😁 About speed of combat I guess it's due to modern computers being too fast. BTW the soundtrack is absolutely magnificent: check it on your tube!
“A gnome would sooner sell their own mother into slavery for a pouch of silver than do a single good deed in their entire gaping hole of an existence” -everyone’s favorite African warlord
I’m hoping we’ll get a Halloween insanity special like Anonymous Agony or Mystery of the Druids. But even if we don’t, I’ll still love ya Mandalore!!! Marathon: Infinity was already pretty damn insane, anyway.
I absolutely love it when stories do the magic alongside science and engineering stuff, showing how they would interplay and showing what things would be different/more or less useful because of the existence of magic
Right. Still haven't played Arcanum, but at least now I know what Sseth meant when he said that all evils of this world are endorsed and commited by gnomes
Even if it never gets an hd touch-up, will cherish and love this game for decades to come. Always a nice video to rewatch and immerse one's self in the nostalgia it radiates.
I'm absolutely fascinated with this setting. The idea of the old, established order of powerful mages and clans finding themselves in a present where their might, prestige and accumulated experience is at best irrelevant or at worst relegates them into some sort of third class citizen role has so many implications and possibilities. Same goes for what that same wrinkle does to races that inherently more suited to one pursuit over another. Races that, over generations, may have worked towards becoming better at magic and now find themselves outperformed by their previous inferiors. Races that have been suppressed for ages due to their lacking aptitude for magic that now suddenly find themselves in a position where they can directly work towards excluding magically gifted people, making them pay. It's an amazing setting.
@@TsunamiWombat I still liked PoE nonetheless. Just a bit miffed at how phoned in the fortress feature was when the game came out, but otherwise it was a ton of fun! You're right though, the setting felt a tiny bit... Off. Maybe it was just because I experienced it so much later. A decade of playing in various fantasy worlds might've rubbed off a bit of the shiny, bright-eyed wonder.
For my first playthrough I made a half-orc gunslinger but got fed up of telling every human I met that I really wasn't as disgusting as I may look. Felt too real ya know.
I fucking played once and I dont want to play it ever again, I love it. Also since I was a human necromancer as well, the ending was perfect. Almost scarily canon. The setting\music and tone is absolute perfection, the manual lore with the naturalist bent on tolkien\D&D races is genius, it immediately sets the mystery of how some races were affected by magic and others dont,in some far away mystical time full of universe bending warlocks... I dont doubt the sequel would be on the arcanum equivalent of WW1 and it would be insane. In the current environment, I dont think this game would ever fly.
That gnome side quest seems like it should be a main quest and not just a side quest. That seems like something you'd see in a fantasy Deus Ex, a group of shadowy elites controlling world governments through the use of gruesome eugenics programs.
It is no exageration or hyperboly that all evils in the world are endorsed and commited by gnomes. A gnome feels no empathy , no remorse, no common hummanity that separates us from simple beasts. The only love that a gnome feels, if you can desribe it so, is that for money. - Leader of the Merchants Guild
Arcanum on GOG - gog.la/arcanumHDfund
The Unofficial Patch - terra-arcanum.com/drog/uap.html
HALLOWEEN COMES
Now you've made me want to hear to your take on Divine Divinity...
Unless I've failed to find it.
I hope that ukrainian miracle worker is safe :(
My guy you should play dungeon Seige 2
You start the story by accidentally merc-ing for Wagner group and you get captured by Ukraine
@@cecillawrenson7327 you beat me too it 👍
someone pls make a video explaining how to play this crpg, i tried 4 times and im still unclear about much of the gameplay or ui. theres a million vids for classic fallout but none for this game for some reason
I had a friend who figured out that a player could mind control wild animals, bring them inside, mage lock the exits, and release control. The resulting mayhem was an act of nature and not murder.
My go to method was finding cursed artifacts and dropping them near the target, and sometimes they'd go over to pick it up and equip it and then die from the curse. Usually in their bed since they picked them up while heading off to their room to sleep.
@@MandaloreGaming You do not even need to kill them. I just sold the shopkeeper a "totally not a cursed artifact" with negative stamina regen. And robbing them blind after they equip it.
@@MandaloreGaming ah the poison apple technique, works every time (eventually)
I did this often. When me and a buddy were playing co op he would just randomly say "wrangle up something and bring it here". The "here" usually being a shop or house my pal wanted to rob.
@@MandaloreGaming
Mad respect to that elven guy who kept his "trees and forest" bit even after being brutally murdered and resurrected as a ghost. The ultimate comedian.
Momma didn't raise a quitter, and he ain't telling you shit.
This made me realize what committing to a bit can do and that gar is best and who is right in most things
Another step closer to Comedy Heaven
It's the capital of the elvish nation- and considered sacred. They generally don't share it's location with outsiders.
(Some idiot surveyors from Tarant are actually in a nearby area- thinking they'll be chopping down all the trees. Turns out, the area is *sacred*, and any act of violence against a living thing- including trees- is met by the person performing the act dying horribly via curse. They don't listen to you and blow you off. needless to say, they die screaming, and no one had to lift a finger.)
Really though, the fact that bears and bunnies are frolicking together peacefully with the eagles and fish should have let them know that something deeply supernatural was going on.
about a quest (birthing island)
can anyone please tell me about the twin skull quest about the ogre birthing facility modded version. appearently it changes the ending of it. honestly it was stupid, from how many ogres there were, what people have said, what the higher ups have done, and the sudden dissapearance. couldnt the main character just come to a conclusion or be: racialy motivated to destroy it and immeadietly bringing it to aother kingdom to justify genocide; bring it to another kingdom to just end it and the higher ups only; use the GOD DAMN NECROMANCY on the replacement dude to tell you what happened or get a clue; or simply give the book away to a library with the context found out in like 50 years or after you somewhat mention its content
I love the inclusion of guns in fantasy games. To quote Ross
"Guns are magical. I point at creature and it dies"
The perfect one-purpose wand for every aspiring Magic Man and those too shy to utter a death hex in front of people!
The Middle Ages had cannons since the thirteenth century.
Ross?
@@winggweeps I'm guessing Ross Scott. Guy who makes "Game Dungeon". Love his stuff.
and there is Migh&Magic RPGs with laser guns and absurd rate of fire that put MG-42 into shame
I remember reading about it but I think a specific backstory does get brought up in game, as a half ogre you get the option to pick a background that basically amounts to your mother being the ogre not your father and that they where actually married, during the half ogre breeding farms quest the investigator will ask you if you never thought it was weird how you and many of your kind ended up in orphanages, you get the option to respond by getting offended and telling him you knew your parents and they loved each other very much.
The idea of someone like Klug being the result of a loving, caring couple, rather than a grim, depressing eugenics experiment has absolutely made my day.
"How dare you sir, my mother was a strong, proud woman and my father was into that!"
The idea of magic causing localized disruption of physical laws is a deeply interesting idea for me. Need to find more fiction that does this.
Not exactly the same, but in the Dresden Files books technology usually goes on the fritz when close to a magic user.
Shadowrun has elements of this. Magic and technology don't mix and having cyberware installed reduces your magical power and potential. Then you've got technomancers, who have the same restrictions as mages when it comes to cyberware but instead of flinging spells they can interface with technology using their mind and create digital familiars to do their bidding on the net.
The Tabletop RPG Mage: The Ascension takes the inverse approach. There are no fixed Laws of Physics; instead reality is molded by what people believe is real. If you know how to tap into the world's energy you can do pretty much whatever as long as what you want to do is thought to be believable by other eye witnesses. Thus, both magic and technology can only exist if people believe that that thing can exist and function.
@@khankhomrad8855 That explains so much about why that universe is always on the verge of an apocalypse. Literally anyone with a doomer mindset is making things that much more likely to cause the doom scenario. Which is self perpetual because the more people who believe the world is a terrible place where horrible things happen for no reason causes it to become even more of a terrible place where horrible things happen for no reason on an endless scaling up of awfulness
@@legojay14 yeah, pretty much. At least as far as Mage's lore is concerned. Vampire & Co are in a perpetual cycle of doom because, well, that's the mood that was chosen for the game.
Final speech check still makes me laugh. It literally boils down to "...that's just, like, your opinion, man."
"Ah shit, I guess you are right. Would you be so kind to put me down with that magic device/magic gun?"
You really gotta put emphasis on the word 'man' for full effect. "That's just like, your opinion, *maaan*". Bonus points if you say it in Shaggy from Scooby Doo's 1960's stoner-esque voice.
@@coyote4326 like bill burr when he talks about mcdonalds breakfast
big lebowski reverence. LOVE IIIIT
@@zealous944 The Big Lebowski ... everytime it's mentioned, someone will rewatch it.
It is a testament to the quality of Arcanum that even though it has a borderline unplayable combat system is still ranks as one of the greatest RPGs of all time
TROIKA realy isnt the best when it comes to combat, same in Vampire Bloodlines, but oh boy do the deliver with the rest.
Two of my favorite Games of all time.
@@henriklarssen1331 temple of elemental evil is the opposite great combat and a story that might is well not existe
It really deserves a remake, even if it's just as a mod for an existing game.
That's Troika for you. Great story, lore, and setting. Gameplay that makes you want to rip your pubes out.
To be honest I think that's the point, a RPG is about the world, you place in it and how you interact with it all, understanding that is what makes a good one, but these days it's been confused with making different builds in a combat system. Doing both is better, but the former is more important than anything else
About the gnome/half-ogre quest: Black Isle employees were huge X-Files fans. That's also what inspired them to add the Vault-Tec experiment conspiracy in Fallout 2. So a huge outrageous reveal that gets hushed up leaving the player helpless comes from that place because that's what always happens to Scully and Mulder on the show.
They definitely wanted that to be a cliffhanger because you could kill that gnome at the very end of that quest and use necromancy to raise his tortured soul from the dead and he still has no answers.
So, at the risk of being extremely crass, beyond adding shock value to the already horrifying concept of a fantasy eugenics breeding program, why do they use human women as mothers to the half ogres? It seems that reversing the genders would probably be far less risky to the mothers, and thus increase the viability of the horrifying eugenics industrial r*pe program.
Or they were Jpilled
The concept of the helpless protagonist is very Lovecraftian, so perhaps it's origins go beyond X-Files even
@@OneMoreDesu for sure, but the coverup where you return and all evidence has disappeared is very Xfiles in its specific delivery.
I really appreciate the start letting you pick your character from this list of passengers, and when the game begins the one you chose is the survivor. On a second playthrough you could look back at your old character's dead remains and think "In another lifetime, old friend".
A few other games did this too, the ones that come quickest to mind are Path of Exile and Dragon Age Origins.
Note ‘‘em if you got ‘em.
@@InternetHydra Thanks! I'll have to give those a go!
@@StephenBlane
There's also Divinity Original Sin 2 (very fantastic RPG I'll say). The game starts with all of your characters getting imprisoned in a ship. You can choose to either:
A.) Use a precon
B.) Create your own character
With the twist that all of the precon characters can join your party, and have an important place in the lore and setting of the game.
@@ES21007 Some of my friends have played that, I'll have to get it now!
Thanks!
Never really thought about how you'd expand upon an opening sequence like that of Borderlands 2, but here we are
51 minute review of a classic fantasy RPG by Mandalore, I'm all in
Packing a bowl
@@rofflesvanwagon packing the cones right now
Whisky firday evening and hour of mandalore lifes good
Check out SethTzeentach's video for some short term hilarity
All I remember about this game was the cool cover art.
They did plan on making a sequel, 'Journey to the centre of Arcanum'. Obviously heavily inspired by 'Journey to the centre of Earth' by Jules Verne.
It was supposed to be developed in the Source engine of 'Half-life 2' fame and much more off the wall than the 1st game, with Dinosaurus and such.
Ultimately, we got the 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' instead and while that is an absolutely legendary game in it's own right, it still pains my heart.
From the little we know of it, it truly sounds like the greatest game that never was.
That's actually kind of amazing that in the effort to create a sequel, they ended up creating an entirely different unrelated game, that became just as groundbreaking.
@@johnsonlee4285 They were and are the definitions of the artist's adage; through strife comes strength. They struggled so hard to make their passions come to life. They were basically gunslingers in dev work, artistic composition, and writing. And they probably pivoted several times more than we'll ever know. But they were set on a path to make ambitious, creative, passionate projects. And they refused to deny those itches if they had the way to make a game. Unfortunately, the way closed up due to funding because their strife also included not selling super well and the gunslinger dev work making for too steep of a dev budget.
Ah well, godspeed beautiful creators.
IIRC the devs at Troika were planning on adding more meat to the stealth mechanics, with the general goal of making something that played like the original Thief games.
Sadly they never really got past the pitch stage. I think one or two of their pitches have surfaced on various out-of-the-way forums over the years, but I don't know where any are posted offhand.
Troika is that company that, while I completely understand WHY they folded, it never stops hurting. They never made a single game that wasn't broken. I bought VtM:B on day one and the game was literally unbeatable. Kids today complaining about it being a bugged or glitchy game have no idea how good they have it. You'd get to a certain point and it would crash every time. it took a couple of months before there was even an official patch that just made the game beatable. I had to start over because you couldn't just apply it and move forward with your save. Also despite having a computer that at the time was well above every single recommended spec, it took literal minutes to load every single new area. Going from the hub to the Asylum? Go make a sandwich cause its gonna be a while. That said even in that absolutely broken, nearly unplayable state, it instantly became one of my favorite games of all time. Every Troika game was so full of potential. They let that potential blind them to bugs and polish but damned if that potential didn't shine.
@@happygimly6061 From Black Isle, to InXile, Troika, and Obsidian. The names may change, but the jank never truly leaves.
I absolutely love how Mandalore sneaks in the Home Alone electrocution sound effect. I always forget about it until halfway through the video when it comes out of nowhere and makes me grin from ear to ear
If we look hard enough, I'm sure he's still hiding EVE ships somewhere.
At this point, we are dogs to pavlov whenever Mandy puts the electrocution SFX
20:45
Makes you grin but not laugh out loud
Or any gachimuchi sound effects
Just like with Kerghan I really like how you can talk down The Master in Fallout 1 and his reaction to everything he did when you point it out. Troika was amazing in creating smart villains that were just too blinded by their own ambition.
Same with Lanius in New Vegas (made by Obsidian, which had some of the original people who worked on the first Fallout games). It’s interesting to use logic and point out the flaws in a plan to get the villain to back down rather than telling them they’re a bad person and hoping that you made the roll that’ll convince them to not be bad.
Not LaCroix, that man just got played.
@@animeotaku307 I think it fails with Lanius, personally.
How so?
Sseth describes the end of this game the best: "Only in Arcanum can you convince the antagonist to kill himself out of love for the world he hates."
*Laughs in Planescape: Torment's ending choices*
"Cute."
Well sorta mass effect one. Except Sarin doesn't hate the universe.
You mean Mandalore without his meds?
You can do that in Mass Effect 1 as well with Saren.
@@monkeysk8er33 saren doesn't hate the universe tho
The fact alone that a Necromancer PC can resurrect followers as undead versions of themselves until proper resurrection makes this game amazing to me.
I wish more games did things like this.
You would enjoy Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous then
My friend and I abused the heck out of this goofing in the sadly too short multiplayer.
"Deacon I would like to remind you that I have seven strengths and the only way that I could save the hero of legend was by zombifying his corpse temporarily. Also you heart attack and inciting the mob is completely unnecessary" -when the DM doesn't check the wizards subclass
Divinity isn't as good as old CRPG, but it brings back CRPG aspects like multiple solutions to quest, sneaking and of course, spirit sight that allows for speaking with the dead and talking with animal brought back good memories of old CRPG. There's just some kind of childish joy from distracting an NPC by talking to them while using your party member to steal something behind their back, even better if the party member is an actual co-op player.
@@lc9245 I also like the subversion of expectations in Divinity games. Like that one quest outside the first city with the undead everywhere, but you can find undead city guards who still have their minds intact and are just trying to stay alive still, or as close to it as they still can. Fun times.
That and loading explosive barrels into carryable containers and creating what equates to "Ye Olde Nuke" to throw at bosses.
I remember playing this game and finding out that throwing molotovs was a free action. Imagine you are the immortal doom of mankind and some orcess in a pretty dress waltzes into your lair and whips a bag of fire bottles at you, killing you instantly
“Woe, arson be upon ye.”
Woah, that's hot.
... Literally.
Molotov and petrol bombs are OP. Just hope to God the midget carrying them doesn't whiff a throw and obliterates your lines.
@@cryamistellimek9184 *"WOE! SPICY BOTTLE BE UPON YE!"*
God, we really need a remake. Being actually able to see a pretty orcess toss a million molotovs at once needs to be high def.
I can't believe that literally all of Sseth's jokes about the half-ogres and gnomes were completely honest.
>jokes
As someone who played a lot of heroes of might and magic 2, 3, and 4, it’s crazy how close to home Sseth’s paraphrasing of the story is. It’s spot on at the same time as being a half truth.
thats why SSeth is a good Game Journalist unlike IGN and WOke journalist
@@aerosdacillo1227 just gonna be here and say that if you unironically use the word woke, you are the object of sseths ridicule.
@@aerosdacillo1227 Though its hard to tell sseth's politics, hes probably center left at least judging by his general statements and positions about things. Regardless of his politics, mandalore and friends are very much left wing, with the vast majority of his cohosts on pst being queer (actually I think him and brendan might be the only cishet consistant members). Hes also collabed multiple times with hbomberguy, a very famous and popular left tuber.
Everytime Klug talks to Virgil, I laugh. Virgil's voice actor did such an amazing job, he's great on evil playthroughs too, he gets really psycho. God I miss older games like this, that let you laugh and do dumb stuff just for the sake of it.
This game has so many great moments: right at the start when you examine the victims of the blimp crash, you will find out that they carry the names of the premade characters you can pick before the game…so basically you can pick/save any of the passengers… or just make your own charakter an make them all die in the crash
Holy shit, that's fucked.
_noice_
interesting way of seeing it :)
He mentioned that in the video.
Encased does the same thing, it’s pretty cool
I didn't realize that my custom character was multi-track drifting in this trolley problem I didn't know was a trolley problem.
I haven’t played Arcanum, but “that quest” may be one of the darkest sidequests in any game I’ve heard of.
“The queen birthed three before dying” was such a gutpunch of a statement. So much horror in such a small statement.
I don't even remember that quest. Maybe I never come across it.
@@accountwontlastlong1 I think you never were supposed to
I would be so mad that you can't resolve the situation that I would drop the game after it.
@@Rivershield The point of the quest is to feel angry and powerless, resolving it would make it another shitty holywood hero quest.
Arcanum stands out, because it takes human conflict and cruelty serious in a fantasy setting, you can do good, but you're powerless in certain regards, no matter how powerfull you are.
@@wolfvonversweber1109 I see the merit in what the quest is trying to do, really. I wish more games would be that bold.
That said, video games are entertainment and I'm not usually entertained by the idea of being powerless, definitely not in this particular type of way.
I would find that quest easier to accept if it wasn't a high fantasy world and if your character was a regular dude like in Ghotic. But that isn't the case.
This is an universe with a big power scaling in which you can face interdimensional threats. In this setting I find it hard to accept that you can't resolve an issue with a pathetic mortal race such as the gnomes when your character is effectively among most powerful beings in that world, and specially when you can still see the consequences of the quest.
Yet, the game doesn't acknowledge your interference in those consequences?
Sounds forced to me.
If a game wants to have grounded conflicts, then likewise it should have grounded consequences that you can meddle with.
If you are fine with the way things turned out it's your problem, but you shouldn't expect everyone to be like you.
The final review of the Arcanum trifecta between Sseth, Warlockracy and now Mando. My life is complete.
Don't forget Indigo
I love the "Mandalore is gonna explain the lore for you" segments
Mandy's gonna give it to ya
He's good at it. And fun to listen to.
Especially for a game like this, where it's most of the appeal. I laughed when he said "if you don't want spoilers, skip to here," which was like 20 minutes later and basically the end of the video.
He gives you the shitty reddit-tier summary and normies like you gobble it up
@@iranoutofusernameideas7438 Still more coherent and informative than most reviewers put effort into making
Man I still remember an article in the Tarant gazette about some dude that tried to infuse a revolver with a fire spirit or something, since, you know, why wouldn't you want your guns to fire harder. It ended with an explosive result and killed the wielder. The relationship between magic and tech is so cool to explore, shame there aren't many stories that delve into it.
Technically that gun fired harder...
On his creator...
Rookie mistake, gotta get an earth elemental to reinforce the metal.
Magic version of "Bubba's pissin hot handloads"
The closest equivalent to Arcanum I can think of is probably Shadowrun. It's more cyberpunk than steampunk, but it too has a relationship between magic and technology. Though admittedly, Shadowrun focuses more on how altering your body makes you less magical, rather than magic messing up technology/technology dampening magic a'la Arcanum.
Would be nice if more fantasy games did have better technology than the crossbow. Couldn't care less what the fantasy liberals say, I want muskets with my orcs, elves, and goblins! Fantasy worlds shouldn't just stay in the age of string and wood I tell ya'! I got 2 hands and I wanna use 'em to pump and dump a musket ball right into some elf's skull!
The madlad actually did it... he followed the Arcanum manual banana bread recipe.
might buy it just for the recipe
Is it any good?
@@MrMaradok It's fucking delicious. One of my buddies still makes it to this day.
Its a right of passage for a player of the game.
I have the game manual on my bookshelf, mainly because of that recipe, although it is one of the best game manuals. I laughed when that popped up at the end of the video.
My older brother got me into gaming when I was little, and Arcanum was the first real RPG I've ever played. I remember being awed by the large map, the setting and the depth of the game. It was the RPG that turned me into an RPG lover. My brother passed away in 2018, and I still get a lump in my throat whenever I hear the Arcanum main theme 11:17
Sorry for your loss, he must have been a good brother to show you such an excellent game.
At least you will always have all those happy memories to cherish, I wish I had a few more of those with my brother. May your bro rest in peace and may you carry on well 🙏(srry if bad english)
I have had the same experience as you, only it started with Amiga 500 games for me. I still miss him greatly... Wishing you all the best.
My Dad (who passed away too early) played Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for hundreds and hundreds of hours. He discovered everything, including secrets and exploits, without internet and guides. I used to get angry at him because he was hogging the PC late into the night. Now I can't hold in the tears every time I hear the Oblivion theme song. Sorry about your loss of your bro.
Thank you everyone for the great replies. @spacelord420 I am sorry to hear about your dad. When it comes to Arcanum and many other games, my brother was exactly the same. Found tons of secrets and hidden quests in this game, all without internet or guides. There are quite a few game soundtracks that bring back so many memories. Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Elder Scrolls etc
I think it's a good time to remind everyone that, according to the lore, Arcanum halflings might be magically mutated gnomes, similar to how elves and orcs are magically mutated humans. This implies that, just like the union between human ad elf or orc produces a fertile and stable hybrid (half-elf or half-orc), the union between gnome and halfling can too result in hybrid, which I prefer to call "gnomeling". I Want To Beleive.
It's the origin of goblins
@@laurenkirby97 Well THAT's an interesting theory. I haven't ever gotten far enough in Arcanum to know if you're actually not just making things up or not too!
I have used Gnomelings in several D&D campaigns in any edition that makes gnomes too extreme of a clunky oddity.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe He's making things up. There are no real goblins in Arcanum, just tiny semi-goblins called kites (however, their sprite files are indeed called "goblin", as far as I know) and their lore is severely lacking. The kites in-game seem to be much smaller and frailer than gnomes and halflings. However, knowing that orc/elf hybridization conducted by gnomes resulted in mostly deformed progeny, the theory that kites are the descendants of ancient gnome/halfling hybridization can be reasonable. However, this is just fan/fun speculation, not based on anything (unlike gnomelings existance theory).
Gnomes have nothing to do with anything human.
I mean - imagine hearing Kerghan's rambling about life's suffering AFTER going through THAT unresolvable quest...the way the universe of this game connects itself and, thus, produces meaning and sense is incredible. I would consider Kerghan's words way differently knowing the existence of the GNOMES EUGENICS LABS
Yeah, funny thing is Mandy left out one key (voiced!) companion who brings a completely new angle to Kerghans plan.
In the end, he even joins Kerghan and fights against you if you choose to fight. This was especially bitter since I found this characters ancestral clan sword a few minutes ago in the Void and gave it to him during a pompous speech. 😂
This character is completely missable btw since you find him in a bonus dungeon that's part of a side quest.
Arcanum has such incredible depth, so happy to see you're covering it.
Gib nazralath.
I need a Bloom sequel.
Love your work.
Oh man I love your work, happy to see you here!
The start to middle of Arcanum does have a lot of depth but you can really tell they rushed it middle to end.
I love the art of Mandolore undergoing a Phrenology inspection through his helmet
Im sorry, where?
@@jackreid2664 49:58
@@andrearossi6564 thanks
Arcanum is, in my opinion, the biggest diamond in the rough in the game industry.
It's loaded with bugs and jankiness while still being an absolutely amazing game. One that could've been so much more.
All that jank won't stop me from doing playthrough #17 though.
AMEEENNN!
Hell yeah!
I feel like by plythrough 17 it's a wank
@InsultComicChef It's partly because of just that. The graphics pull a lot of weight, so devs can skimp on the rest.
Also it's a more competitive market. You can't just spend 8 years developing a great story without top of the line graphics to keep people interested.
Of course there are exceptions, but usually only on the indie market, which generally isn't *as* infested with greed as the AAA one.
Luckily we have modders, small studios (like Beamdog) and even GOG to make sure we can still play all the original classics. The stories are still just as good decades later, but now I can see the entire Baldur's Gate map without scrolling on my 5120x1440 monitor, lol.
Sadly there's a ton of those! Games that were great, despite their flaws and bugs and which didn't get sequels! From VtMBL, to Fallout New Vegas (better than anything Badthesda - note: Deliberate error! - did with the IP) to No one lives Forever (NOLF!)...damned, the second game of that series was great and sadly that is where it ended -.-
I also appriciate the "Villain"- even after all these years of sulking alone and thinking about bad sides of life he decides to listen to you and reconcider.
Yeah, it's still unrealisticly fast for a viewpoint shift, but I am glad he wasn't a one-note DadGuy
DadGuy, haha.
@@RuneKatashima
Gonna leave it like that.
God dammit
I disagree about it being unrealistic. He probably had such conversation with himself several hundreds of times in the void and every time he convinced himself that his way is the best way or all he's been through is pointless. Then comes very charismatic and intelligent player character who repeats what he said to himself so many times and only then he realizes that it's actually the truth. Sometimes you have to hear someone else affirm your thoughts.
@@thisisnighthawk2713
Somewhat- irl it usually is quite slower, depending on the open mindedness
@@thisisnighthawk2713 That's a nice thought. I never considered that. Thanks!
So…so Sseth’s hatred of gnomes wasn’t a meme.
Nope. It really wasn't.
It was kind of an understatement if anything really.
@@Nope-en9bo Oh come now most gnomes in the game are fine.
@@Nope-en9bo such levels of gaming were not expected by me.
@@Nope-en9bo No, gnomes really deserve everything that happens to them. You profit off destroying cultures and ruining lives, you don't just shower it away.
“The queen birthed three before dying.”
...I was not prepared for this sidequest.
As a side note, pay attention, current/aspiring writers. _This_ is how you write truly disturbing and repugnant atrocities. Give the perpetrators logical reasons for wanting to do it, show why they were able to get as far along as they did, and don’t let a desire to be more edgy overwhelm the audience’s instinctive empathy with an exaggerated ‘ick’ factor.
Looking at you, Daemonculaba.
W40k shout out approved brother. Such a creepy story.
Yeah theres always a problem with either cranking up the ick or straight fetishising the rape. But that quest just looks at it logically and chillingly, man its fucked up but it aces the story telling.
write a problem, then write a organic, cheap, easy, rational but immoral solution to resolve said problem.
then push it to it's extreme as a way to definitely resolve the original problem while making the solution extremely ethicaly-wrong.
you've created a setting in which there's a powerful race of super-agressive conquerors that can't be stopped by conventional means?
make a targeted-virus that render them infertiles as a way to put a slow but permanent stop for both their military-forces and passively genocide their civilization.
(Krogans, Mass Effect)
you've created a setting in which there's a non-stop invading force which can't be killed by conventional means or are too-strong to be?
create a form of eugenic-recruitment that creates beings powerful enough to deal with said forces at a cost so terrible no-one aware of it would accept unless forced
(the Grey-Wardens from "Dragon-Age", and the Witchers from "Witcher")
that's how you do it:
create a problem that either can't, or is very challenging to resolve with normal-means,
then create a "ideal" solution with consequences so ethically wrong that they make you question in the first-place if it was coming-up with that solution at-all.
@@allmight9840 he is not shouting out daemonculaba lmao the entire thing seems like it was written by garth ennis purely for cringe shock value
@@richardvlasek2445 Well, at least the motivations behind the daemonculaba make sense. CSM are always short on recruits, so experimenting on a method to accelerate the creation of SM, no matter how gruesome the execution, makes sense, specially if the ones behind it are Iron Warriors, the ones who value even their own members as expendable weapons of war, so at least there's some thought behind this. Still edgy and gross af to the point of being distasteful tho.
The more detailed review makes Sseth's comment that "the only good gnome is a dead gnome" a lot more understandable.
And his comment of "Half-Ogres: Products of systemic ****"
Watching his review: Yeah Seth's probably playing hard into his bullshit like usual. Whatever.
After the island: Guess I can add "wishing a guy on youtube was just projecting his antisemitism on a game" to the reasons I'm going to hell
@@patricknaughton6636 Should mention that Seth is an Ashkenazi Jew
So he's got Jew Joke privileges
@@patricknaughton6636 They'll always tell you what happened to them, but never why.
@@patricknaughton6636 considering he is Jewish origins... I know that you can be a self racist or whatever, I just see it in jest, same as I and probably others do
I was a part of the oldschool arcanum forum named "arcanumclub" in the 2003-2008. As far as I know that's the source of most community mods and improvements/bugfixes that were created for the Arcanum. Such a great people, love them :)
Arcanum Club was Russian, you are strictly forbidden to appreciate anything Russian on UA-cam these days, or you will get canceled.
@@alexmelik4030 man grow up and do what you want, just use your brain to decide not to do something stupid and you'll be fine
@@vintheguy their comment was sarcastic.
Okay, half-ogres quest is one if the most disturbing stories I had ever encountered in media. It is R Scott Bakker's level of disturbing, which... Says a lot.
Edit: misspelled author's surname
It wasn't mentioned in the video, but one of the most important plot points for the game is that humans are the only race that can interbreed with the other species - though they never want to, except for when it comes to elves.
It's intentional that every female character in that city is either a prostitute, or married to one of the gnomes.
@@SyndicateOperative well, it was kinda mentioned with flowchart of races and that there was no interbreeding with other races besides humans on the chart
@@SyndicateOperative which city? Tarant? Nah, there's the soothsayers, the herbalist, the magic shop owner, the guild member at the station, the ticket vendors, the tough lady in the Boil, and probably others I'm forgetting.
Granted, there's no coded value for "NPC X is married to NPC Y," but even then the minimal representation we get is not as straight-forward as that.
Who's Scott Bekker? Google turned up some tech professional
@@Stingraysquad Canadian dark fantasy writer
Can't wait to see how this ties into Marathon!
Or EYE: devine cybermancy
@@protato911 Well, we did start out in a void.. Everything makes more sense the more I ponder.
It won't be happening in *this* fantasy game.
@@protato911 i mean, did you see the bows? That's the fuller auto of medieval fantasy.
@@MandaloreGaming We're getting the Myth review then eh?
Watching Sseth's Arcanum Review: "Haha wow, he's really playing up the gnome stuff for comedic effect"
Watching Mandy's Arcanum Review: _"The only good gnome is a _*_DEAD_*_ gnome."_
326 Kobolds approve this message ;7
... And counting !
if you didn't realized that after Sseth's Review, something is wrong with you
Nothing wrong with that message.
Isn't the afterlife in Arcanum pleasant?
Necromance them up for maximum suffering.
Kill them. Kill them all!
34:56 this image of your inventory having potions and skulls next to a double barrel is the most perfect thing ever
I just love when Mandalore makes a review of a game that even Sseth reviewed. Makes me wanna watch them one after the other and compare them, they are so different yet they are both so good
Mandalore took his pills and decided to make a new one
@@koyomi1508 When you truly love something you always return to play it again.
Warlockracy too
Ssethalore is getting dementia again
They are the duality of man
That string quartet bit at the start of this game is no joke, the reason I picked up the Cello. The soundtrack is so staggeringly underrated.
Yeah it sent a somewhat younger me down a decades long path of chasing down as much live chamber music as possible - that feeling is unbeatable. The composer - Ben Houge - made high quality files and scores available on his website (assuming the links still work!) along with some interesting commentary
Mandalore is such a good reviewer, he reviewed the same game twice!
Thank his forgetting of those anti-Sseth meds!
I bought the original box of this game. The manual was almost like a book. It was the only manual I read all the way through because it was written like a journal from an anthropologist. It was one of the most awesome reads for a game like ever.
Also: Banana bread recipe. I still have the thing, it's awesome.
I have a weird memory of this game. I was SO excited for World of Warcraft, and a kid at my school would tell me stories of playing the beta (his uncle worked at blizzard, as all these stories go) and I kept begging him to get me a copy to play. He finally brought a CD to give me. I get home and....it was this.
I ended up liking it.
I wonder if the plot twist was really that the kid's uncle actually worked at a Babbage's, but his dad told him that his brother worked with "video games" one day and the kid was too dumb to realize or the uncle was too embarrassed to not lie to him so they both settled on the notion that he worked at a then popular developer, like Blizzard, as a lie so everyone could save face. Then you're challenging him to prove it, and so the kid challenges his uncle to prove it, and the uncle gives him Arcanum, which the kid REALLY does think is an early version of the next Warcraft, so he brings it to you in the fullest confidence.
I was wondering why this was a Halloween episode, after hearing about the Half-Ogre sidequest I can safely say this is the scariest game Mandalore has showcased thus far.
Anonymous Agony's review for me. It's the only one i just can't bring myself to finish
@@hacooray525 I had the same issue for a while, but it is worth it. Just pretend someone made it mocking edgy people, and not an edgy person thinking it was literally him, and it’s way better
@@hacooray525 Get some buddies and take a shot every time you feel the need to mute the TV to stop hearing Haze, you'll either have a blast or die from alcohol poisoning XD
@@AVerySexuallyDeviantOrange or watch it out of respect for the VAs, they did a good job
@@hacooray525you're just not skeletonized enough
I will never forget the time I was map-travelling, exited the map in the large early town only to find my character in te back room of the brothel with a sheep.
It made it feel like my character had a life of his own and was completely strange. I loved this game in its day. I also find it impossible to get into it again.
How was your character doing that if you were map travelling?
I was watching an interview with Leonard Boyarski yesterday, and he was talking Arcanum and actually addressed the Gnome / Half Ogre conspiracy. He said he was big into X-Files at the time of writing and the alien hybrids / conspiracy influenced that part of the game.
It was designed to be a dead end to be like an X-Files episode
That makes sense, but it is still profoundly unsatisfying.
Not that everything needs to be satisfying. One of those events that makes you sit alone in a dark room and think for a while.
@@michaelmoore2679Except the Gnomes aren't Evil by game coding standards.
By dev standards.
Was that the Tim Cain video? I really love his channel
ye@@ashleywilliams4896
This game has my favorite "industrialized magic" setting of any fiction. I realize that's really specific, but it's such a cool concept, and I have trouble imagining any other property doing it better than Arcanum.
The Eberron setting for D&D is a pretty decent one. There, the magic IS industrialized. As in, they have corporations pumping out elemental-powered airships and tradesmen learning cantrips to improve their dry-cleaning skills. Oh, and the ensouled combat robots trying to find a purpose after magic WWI and the necro-nuke that ended it.
Dunno if this counts and I havent played Arcanum for any decent length of time but Thief 1 and 2 for me are pretty good for it, magic and tbf tech too had so much more of an occult and unknown vibe in that setting, like weirdly the less you know the more grounded it felt, guess it fit the theme of shadows and secrets and such.
Iron Kingdoms/warmachine
Trails series (Trails in the sky, trails of zero, trails of cold steel...)
Pillars of Eternity is set very early in the process. skip 1, it's significantly less good than 2, and everything you need to know about 1 is covered in the intro.
True horror in games like this I feel, come about when you see or hear things that people do to each other where all humanity is stripped away.
"The queen birthed 3 before dying" is a horrifying line for all the correct reasons- it's written like a machine, despite the scientist whom did it being human. It's clinical and sterile. You're cataloguing horrors like ticking boxes off a sheet- but the game makes it clear that he also just, goes home at the end of the day and feels like he's doing great work. THAT RIGHT THERE, is truly excellent horror- the ability to take something human and conceptually show, that YOU or anyone ELSE could possibly become like that, or do something similarly terrible and just think it's a slow fucking Tuesday or somehow will be best at the end of it all.
Sometimes the uncanny valley is a human, who really isn't anymore.
Underrated comment. I could not agree more. This whole thing has dr Mengele vibes.
The Banality of Evil
edit: man, I quoted the subtitle of Hannah Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial *before* I noticed all the anti-semitic quotes in the comments here...
Way too many people are just too gleefully spouting literal Nazi-shit, but it's paraphrased with "gnome" replacing "jew", so it's supposedly okay (It's not)...
Great point! One problem Gnomes aren't human they are an infestation.
I think the horror is not that "you" become the evil, but that evil itself exists in such a "normal perceived" nature. I.e. this evil think it is doing something good or normal (which is interesting but tbh not out of the norm of just basic reality given Nazis existed and they enjoyed what they were doing and thought it was good). It seems this banality of evil stuff always pops up when in truth it's not that special or unique, it's just basic writing 101 and depending upon how or what a writer wishes to convey may be used or in contrast they may utilize an unknowable evil which could mean something else. That the ultimate evil of arcanum reaches their conclusion on why ending the war is good is an example of how something originally ancient and creepy/lovecraftian is instead just a eons old entity reaching a sane nihilistic conclusion on what actually saving someone in that context means (i.e. ending existence).
@@Astra7525 Found the gnome lover
God the way arcanum handles the orcs compared to whatever TF Dragon age was trying to say with the elves…I’m just so glad Arcanum exists.
DA Origins will always be one of my favorite games, but yeah. The whole mages and elves allegorical quandary fuckshittery was stupid and hokey.
From a outsider perspective (never played arcanum or dragon age) using orcs for a racial oppression story is the better choice. In most fantasy orcs have a simple mindset but just want to get on with their lives. Meanwhile elves are either dancing hippies mixed with too noble for you snobs so sorta deserve whatever is coming their way. Again never seen or played dragon age but if I wanted to make a racial allegory in my dnd game I would use orcs
@@BigPuddin BioWare infuriates me that way because the terrible allegory thing shows up in BOTH their major IP’s way too much.
I know multiple people who unironically thought the point of the mage storylines was “dangerous people should be locked up and surveyed 24/7” and frankly I can’t blame them for reading it that way because of how poorly done the whole thing was.
Blame the more recent releases, DAO isn't at fault
@@dogehkiindogeborn5339 DAO and DA2 and Mass Effect very much does this what are you talking about?
This video hits different after watching all of Tim Cain's videos on the game
That he has the source code still and knowing that it still compiles and he'd be happy to do stuff with it if he was allowed to makes me so sad
Arcanum 2 in 2026 it came to me in a vision
@@boomstickYT I believe.
@@boomstickYT
I Want to Believe.
*X-Files theme plays*
Amongst all the stuff going on in this story, I love the touch that Bates did, in fact, not invent the thing which launched him to tech-genius power, but saw it elsewhere.
Probably best they didn't call the Black Mountain Clan the Xeroxians, though.
One thing I've always had in my mind for such a setting : an alchemy factory !
On the one hand, kewl ! Cheap healing potions for everyone !
On the other hand, this is the industrial revolution era, ecology is still a long time away... Let's just say the sewers should be an endgame area...
Okay hear me out: Runic programming. Okay, I guess that's just golems with extra brackets and really awful debugging, but still...
@@aymann7234 R++
What operating schematic do you carve? Wizdos? Magesoft? GNU Lightnux?
@@gmradio2436 Is your Personal Helper Of Not Eldrich on Android or I-assist ?
@@pierre-mariecaulliez6285 I use Critana.
From what I understand, there are two builds which breaks things hard.
A pure agility build with daggers of speed (or whatever they are called). This let's you to turn on turn based combat, enter stealth, open a door and backstab everyone, then leave before the first body drops.
The second is the pure charisma build which let's you overwhelm everyone with an army.
Harm scales with magical aptitude, so it ends up pretty broken as well, especially as you can cast basically as fast as you can click.
the most op build is mage spamming basic, 1st tier death magic spell as fast as you can click :')
Just max dex and you're golden for many situations.
Oh, they are way more broken builds than just these two. On side of magic, you have very well scaling, and very spamable basic spells. On mid ground good backstab allows to prrety much 1-shot everyone. Or max dexterity, and enjoy absurd attack speed on all weapons. On tech side, you can craft literal machinegun and fire it like 20 times in single turn ( tho you will spend fortune on ammo or ingridients for it ).
it only takes like three levels in the right branch of technology to build the fire axe, which will carry you to the end of the game. the first level necromancy offensive spell scales with magic aptitude, so you can take that as your only offensive spell and spam kill anything in the game.
For everyone stumbling upon this video some time in the future: Drog is alright and to this day, still wrangling the games engine into compliance.
Good to know.
Thank you!! Where to look for him?
@@ProjectXA3 Drog has no social media. He only semi-regularly posts on the site where he shares his unofficial patch.
@@boneman-calciumenjoyer8290 Damn, that's based. Big respect to the man.
My one complaint about the conspiracy quest was the alignment of those responsible being good, like at least make em neutral if they weren't directly involved
Where all gnomes responsible or just a select few?
@@TaCo0oCaT I mean the one who tries to tell you "Well maybe this isn't real and you should just forget about it" is marked as good, when he's clearly engaged in the coverup. And any gnome with a bodyguard has to die.
It honestly feels unfinished with how it ends. We should have been able to resolve it and bring justice for those who died.
@@TaCo0oCaT If it helps along with how ironic it is, one of the recruitable characters a gnome who possesses some unsavory skills to go with his gunslinging. If you take him along to Ogre Island and find the truth there, he actually shows disgust with said discovery.
It really says something, that someone belonging to the same race who has no problem killing people due to his occupation, is shocked at what his own people were doing hidden away on that cursed little island.
Pretty sure the point is that, like most corporate and political powerbrokers, they're full of good intentions -- "don't be evil."
I feel like this game has been reviewed more times in the past year than it has since its release.
There were newer rumors about a potential sequel/remake, the art campaign to get mandalore to do this video got a lot of attention, and many remake/remaster studios have been bringing it up as a game they'd love to see remade.
It had a lot of eyes/searches trending this year, so making content on it makes sense.
Right??? Cult classic confirmed
I feel like this game has more reviews than people who actually reached the end.
Ssethtzeentach, Warlockracy and now Mandalore, yesssss
@@WingMaster562 we need more, Ross Scott, Grimbeard and many more to appreciate this forgotten gem
The true mark of Spooky Season, the Goosebumps theme followed by Mandy's lovely voice.
Panari reminds me of the concept of Atomic Priesthood. When the context behind the danger is lost to time, the awareness of that danger is maintained through ritual and myth.
FInally! such an underrated gem. R.I.P Troika, pity the game was never truly finished, much like VTMB for that matter...
The Troika curse 🎃
the company name means triplet and they made 3 games before going under.
I'm still salty that Bethesda outbid them and they could never make their Fallout sequel.
I wish i could see the alternate timeline where Troika Games never went under. What games we lost...
They are still around, in InXile and Obsidian. Working on games like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, The Outer Worlds, Wasteland 2. And people with similar ideas are in and around these games, and games like them, still.
Troika was basically just a continuation of Interplay, when Interplay changed. It doesn't matter what company name is behind these games, not really. The trademarks are really not important at all. With Fallout, they wanted to make a sequel to Wasteland, but didn't have the IP, so called it something else. Then, when Bethesda owned the Fallout brand, they made Outer Worlds and Wasteland 2.
I do hope we'll get to see more exploration of the Arcanum IP. Or perhaps a return to this same world with another name. It doesn't really matter which one it is.
@@Taeerom Tyranny and the first Pillar of Eternity are basically half of a game, while the Outer Worlds is a mediocre game that had the luck of coming out around the same tipe fallout flopped. They are not even close to living up to their supposed legacy.
During the dark days of the CRPG drought someone described Arcanum's theme perfectly when he said it was "an ode to a now gone era of CRPGs.
Idk what enthusiast makes the russian subtitles for Mandalore's videos, but their translation are always superb, with good adaptation of all jokes and everything. If by chance the person who translates it, reads this comment, please know - you're my hero
Ох, не знаю, смеяться или плакать от того, что, даже спустя годы, большая часть комментариев про субтитры начинается с "Не знаю, кто их делает, но..." 😂Но спасибо! Рад слышать, что время не было потрачено впустую!
@@ValentineGrimCC ну, в описании видео переводчиков не указывают, а в других источниках не знала, как и искать :) в любом случае, спасибо огромное вам! обзоры на особо ерепенистую адвенчуру и загадку друдов были бы много хуже без вашего труда. как сестра по переводческому делу, желаю всяческих успехов!
Is there a rewording in Russian to make a joke work?
@@sylonogwailou Usually, but not always. And degree of alteration varies. Sometimes, it's just the matter of replacing one foreign element with a local counterpart (store chain, for example), while the joke itself stays the same. Other times, a completely different joke has to be made to illustrate the same point (most often, when there is a play on words).
@@ValentineGrimCC Ваше время никогда не бывает потрачено впустую, я открыла для себя Мандалора 3 года назад и продолжаю его смотреть (правда в большей части уже без русских сабов) благодаря вам, т.к. в то время у меня был очень косой английский. Спасибо!
"And remember: a good gnome is a DEAD gnome."
-Mandalore, probably.
-SsethTzeentach, definitely
-Kanye West, 2022
Man, after the play by play of that half-ogre sidequest, yeah, that's something I can agree with.
@@Davion197 kinda tired but I’m about to go DEATH CON 3 on gnomes tomorrow!
It is no exageration or hyperboly that all evils in the world are endorsed and commited by gnomes. A gnome feels no empathy , no remorse, no common hummanity that separates us from simple beasts. The only love that a gnome feels, if you can desribe it so, is that for money.
- Leader of the Merchants Guild
I used to play this with my grandpa, the computer we had our save on burned up in a fire but I still have the memories.
That's one cool grandpa
That comment from Mandalore about the hardest hitting line from a villain made me think about the guy from Dishonored. "I have a surprise for you. I'm begging for my life. I just want to leave this city and vanish from the memory of its inhabitants". This line will stay with me until I finally develop Alzheimer and stop remembering anything.
What guy is that again?
@@javier11544 truth be told its from the dlc. Its Daud, the leader of the whalers.
@@buoyant_friend3937 no, that line's in the base game too, you just play as him in the dlc
@@buoyant_friend3937no Alzheimer. I not allow it to get u.
The OST and environment draws me back every few years. Absolutely SO charming. What an experience.
I basically have never stopped playing it since 2004. It's always installed, my sister and I even played the multiplayer a lot. Multiple modules. It's a piece of childhood that interestingly holds up in quality, with superior writing, quest design and pacing which is great for a sort of open world.
I am not a very big nostalgic glasses guy so I usually have a hard time going back to retro games I played as a kid. Not too long ago i picked this back up and just got sucked right back in and did a whole playthrough. There really is something special about it to me.
In most games, becoming a master of persuasion means just adding a final point.
In Arcanum, it means gaining the position of an ambassador, successfully leading diplomatic negotiations between a major but declining nation and a massive Unified Kingdom where you might help the noble and proud but failing kingdom survive while retaining lot of it's independence and dignity even though many of it is having a tough time finding place in the modern world, break it entirely and let it be absorbed entirely by Union as history forgets it ever existed on Unified Kingdom unrelenting march toward future heralded by you in this moment, try to strike the best compromise possible to please both sides or just screw the entire thing and take massive bribes.
Need there be said more?
The ultimate tragedy of Arcanum's setting is that there is a peaceful afterlife. It means you can't make the gnomes suffer as much as they deserve.
Edit: Hi Vercingetorix. Still living rent-free in your head I see. :)
You can if you're a necromancer.
send them to the void.
Well, you can kill them and then summon their spirits to suffer in the mortal plane for eternity.
FUCK, i was thinking about playing and killing every gnome with a bodyguard i saw, buy you are right
@@Ivan.TheCrazy hey ferb, I know what we are going to do today!
Holy shit the "let me switch to real time" part with this giant guy with a claymore running around and smacking babies had me rolling.
The fact that Mandalore has reviewed this makes me hope we could potentially see a Bloodlines video at some point in the future.
Yes please.
we'll see if he does Temple of Elemental Evil as well
Sounds like the beginning of a Troiktober series of reviews if Mandalore does review ToEE and VtMB.
Arcanum is one of the best rpg's I've ever played. Everything in it feels real without being condescending. The game doesn't try to educate you on racism, ableism or sexism, you experience it and form your own opinion.
The setting is unique. The music helps the atmosphere. Even the architecture is correct and different in many places. I really hope there will be a remaster/ remake someday as it is truly painful to play on Win10.
One of my favorite games of all time!
Only game I can walk around as an intelligent Half-Ogre, and people being reasonably surprised at my eloquence.
I loved this game back in the day and really wished they had made more games in this setting. The setting and story gave it such a unique feel. I have always loved games or stories that have mixed fantasy and technology to see what would happen should the two have been part of the world. Thanks for the nostalgia!
There's a game called Sovereign Syndicate in this setting, coming out soon. Though it appears to be going the direction of Disco Elysium in the way the game is played. Not sure if there is actual combat.
The smart ogre reminds me of the character Droggelbecher from the underrated point and click adventure "Edna breaks out", he just says "Droggelbecher" but if you visit him with a special random object he starts telling a intelligent story until he notices it... Also very funny interaction 😂
Well, first off, Gar is not an ogre, he's an orc. Second, he's not an orc, he's a human.
@@i_am_ergo ok 〰️☺️〰️
I love this game so much tbh. I remember playing it back in the early 2000s and it and VtM: Bloodlines were huge influences in my decision to become a game artist. Hell, I even have the Troika Games logo tattooed on my arm, for which I had to message Tim Cain and ask if he or anyone else had a copy of the logo in high enough resolution to be usable! He messaged the other founders and one of them did. I got it on the proviso that I sent a photo of the finished tattoo afterwards. :)
They were really the pinnacle of intelligent RPG gaming... Wishing they didn't lose their time on "Temple of Elemental Evil" which is a shitty game, but they tried to be the first to implement 3rd ADD rules.
They had a lot of great ideas but were incompetent devs who left their players to clean up their messes. Happens once, it can happen to the best of us, forgive and forget.
Happens three games in a row, maybe you should think of a different line of work.
Fast-forward to the Skyrim era, where releasing a game half-baked has been normalized, so perhaps they were just before their time.
When I first played this game with a mate back when I was like 10, we "invented" a way to turn a barrel-filled cellar in Tarant (also a home to a few mechanized spiders) into an "item bank", which became really useful for tech characters, as you could store huge amounts of materials and later combine them into a ton of grenades or other high-powered and expensive items.
finally figured out why i like your videos so much! they are simply much more skillfully written than most other essay or review channels
Most essay channels are just dudes sniffing their own farts.
@@Sergei_Ivanovich_Mosin any other recommendations?
@@kaizokuAUTO Salt Factory is pretty decent, actually talks mostly about the gameplay mechanics in a lot of depth and story (as in the actual in game story and sidequests and not "what it really means"), granted his videos are very long.
@@Sergei_Ivanovich_Mosin thanks !
This was my favorite game as a kid. The setting was so rich with lore and intriguing plots and characters I couldn't stop thinking about it when I would go to school. Above all though, the soundtrack blew my socks off. I still listen to it quite often to relax and let my mind wander.
Yeah this soundtrack is incredible just hearing the main menu music gives me goosebumps and such a incredible underrated game
Bro.. it's been years.. electrocuted Marv screaming still cracks me up every time 😂
I love listening for it in every video!
Troika is truly the greatest scuffed game developer ever. Its ashame the disbanded
Some of them went over to InXile and are making a steampunk RPG right now
@@georgie9303 they're making new Wasteland games, right? Shame they probably will never touch on some cool societal aspects like a cabal of ethnic disruptors or miscegenation in the current age market
@@Shiroi0moi **Googles miscegenation**
Oh, you're THAT type of redditor. Thank goodness the FBI keeps tabs on people like you.
@@purplebatdragon erm... a redditor would be a coomer race mixing enthusiast, such as yourself. I'm more of an epic /pol/ chud
@@Shiroi0moiyeah that's sad
BTW backstab build is fucking OP in this game, you one-shot almost anything with it using only basic cheap dagger and can hit like 8(don't remember exactly) times in one turn and enemies just can’t hit you cuz they lose you out of sight right away.
Everything is OP in this game. A pure mage annihilates everything with a harm spell. A throwing weapons user melts everything from the very start with just a boomerang. Persuasion lets you skip pretty much any quest.
The variety is endless.
@@Spellweaver5 Pure mage has mana problems, you have to carry a ton of mana potions. I played almost every build in this game, backstabber is the strongest one combat-wise so far, but you have to suffer in the early game a little bit before all the sneak, backstab and melee skills are maxed out.
I just reentered the game to check the damage, it's like 80-90 dmg per backstab hit (without the crit) and with the crit god knows how much, but it's one-shot 90% of the time + you can hit enemy indefinitely since you can attack, sneak away, attack again, you won’t get a single point of damage this way.
The only big con of this build is that it is really only playable in the Fast Turn Based mode, but since all the animations are skipped, it can be even more fast then real-time mode
You can even play as magical ogre and just spam stun spell and then beat their unconscious asses one by one with huge axe.
I always love it when in fantasy RPGs after hearing the villain's whole speech and being offered to join in you can just go "lol no" then dome them in the head with a pistol.
I found it more compelling when the villian straight up said, "i'm sorry"
Shodan: I can improve you, make you more... efficient. We can rule. Together.
Goggles: Nah *blows her away*
Greatest ending to a story ever. 😛
Mandalore, you're the gift that keeps on giving. This is THE game from my childhood!
At first i was like "hey thats weird, mandalore already made a review on this game" and then i remembered that he did, but only as his alter ego
True Gamer is inside of all of us.
Hey Hey people
I remember playing an half Ork technologist female debutante who became a luddite across the journey!
One of the best memories I had in a videogame! 😁
About speed of combat I guess it's due to modern computers being too fast.
BTW the soundtrack is absolutely magnificent: check it on your tube!
“A gnome would sooner sell their own mother into slavery for a pouch of silver than do a single good deed in their entire gaping hole of an existence”
-everyone’s favorite African warlord
And now we know why, thanks to Mandy
Glad somebody called out the Gnomes finally.
Looks like they follow the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Nothing is more important than your health... except for your money.
“To have relations with a 3 year old orc girl is like putting a finger to the eye.” - gnomish rabbi
LMAO@@Ezio999Auditore
I’m hoping we’ll get a Halloween insanity special like Anonymous Agony or Mystery of the Druids. But even if we don’t, I’ll still love ya Mandalore!!! Marathon: Infinity was already pretty damn insane, anyway.
We will, he's working on jt
Wasn't it The Ring?
We might actually be getting Ring/Ring 2.
These two videos are how I found this channel; I'm keeping my fingers crossed for more haha
I absolutely love it when stories do the magic alongside science and engineering stuff, showing how they would interplay and showing what things would be different/more or less useful because of the existence of magic
Your closed captions guy is the GOAT. 10/10.
Right. Still haven't played Arcanum, but at least now I know what Sseth meant when he said that all evils of this world are endorsed and commited by gnomes
I finished this game 16 tines and I was obsessed when it came out, I am happy that nowadays it is remembered yet again. Drog patch is a MUST tho.
This is, no joke, some of your best work. Really enjoy the contrast between the two playthroughs and what the differences say about the game. Awesome.
Even if it never gets an hd touch-up, will cherish and love this game for decades to come. Always a nice video to rewatch and immerse one's self in the nostalgia it radiates.
I'm absolutely fascinated with this setting.
The idea of the old, established order of powerful mages and clans finding themselves in a present where their might, prestige and accumulated experience is at best irrelevant or at worst relegates them into some sort of third class citizen role has so many implications and possibilities.
Same goes for what that same wrinkle does to races that inherently more suited to one pursuit over another.
Races that, over generations, may have worked towards becoming better at magic and now find themselves outperformed by their previous inferiors.
Races that have been suppressed for ages due to their lacking aptitude for magic that now suddenly find themselves in a position where they can directly work towards excluding magically gifted people, making them pay.
It's an amazing setting.
Obsidian TRIED to ape/recapture this with Pillars of Eternity but it didn't quite work out as well.
hey hey, read discworld, fhe later books do this!
You sound like you just love how you can make Elves pay because they were better than you in the past(and now.)
@@dicemm5544 Around elves, watch yourselves.
@@TsunamiWombat I still liked PoE nonetheless.
Just a bit miffed at how phoned in the fortress feature was when the game came out, but otherwise it was a ton of fun!
You're right though, the setting felt a tiny bit... Off.
Maybe it was just because I experienced it so much later. A decade of playing in various fantasy worlds might've rubbed off a bit of the shiny, bright-eyed wonder.
For my first playthrough I made a half-orc gunslinger but got fed up of telling every human I met that I really wasn't as disgusting as I may look. Felt too real ya know.
Same with me. But it got less annoying after i bought a Smoking Jacket on a tailor shop that gave me boost on appearance XD !
I love how this rpg gives you the minority experience
Minority experience? Free college? Welfare? That’s like very easy difficulty. Casual.
@liamsteam walsh Brown race cope as always.
@@Ezio999Auditoreat a mask off moment. "Those damn browns!! 😡" ... 😂
I fucking played once and I dont want to play it ever again, I love it. Also since I was a human necromancer as well, the ending was perfect. Almost scarily canon. The setting\music and tone is absolute perfection, the manual lore with the naturalist bent on tolkien\D&D races is genius, it immediately sets the mystery of how some races were affected by magic and others dont,in some far away mystical time full of universe bending warlocks... I dont doubt the sequel would be on the arcanum equivalent of WW1 and it would be insane. In the current environment, I dont think this game would ever fly.
That gnome side quest seems like it should be a main quest and not just a side quest. That seems like something you'd see in a fantasy Deus Ex, a group of shadowy elites controlling world governments through the use of gruesome eugenics programs.
It is no exageration or hyperboly that all evils in the world are endorsed and commited by gnomes. A gnome feels no empathy , no remorse, no common hummanity that separates us from simple beasts. The only love that a gnome feels, if you can desribe it so, is that for money.
- Leader of the Merchants Guild
Just ask them about their hidden little island.
I really though Sseth was exagerating. Only now do I see the wisdom in his words.
Epstein didnt gnome himself
The gnome cries out in pain as he strikes you
The gnome will tell you what happened to him but never why.