Arcanum asked what would happen to a Tolkien-style fantasy world if it had an industrial revolution. Dragons share the sky with zeppelins, a railway runs between the cities, dwarves carry guns and mages ride on steam trains. In this world magic and machinery do not just compete; they interfere with each other, and every character the player builds sits somewhere on a scale between the two. It was the first game from Troika Games, the studio three of Fallout’s makers set up after leaving Interplay, and it carried Fallout’s habits into the new setting: a world seen from above, problems that can be talked, sneaked or fought through, and a character sheet that changes how everyone treats you.
Fast facts
- Developer: Troika Games, founded by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson.
- Publisher: Sierra; Havas in Britain, at £34.99.
- Released: August 2001, for Windows PCs.
- Play: isometric view; one character with recruitable companions; real-time or turn-based combat, switchable at any moment; multiplayer over a network or the internet.
Magic against machinery
Computer Gaming World’s first look at the game, in March 2000, set out the premise. About 70 years had passed since the start of the industrial revolution, and the land’s magic users now had to contend with people pursuing technology instead. “Dwarves with guns? Mages on steam trains?” the magazine asked. The game tracks where the player stands with a balance meter. “The more you commit to one particular school, the stronger you’ll be in that school,” the magazine explained, “but the more vulnerable and ineffective you’ll be in the other.” PC Zone’s preview put it more vividly: try to cast a fireball near someone holding a chaingun, and it “tends to fizzle”. The reverse is true as well, which is why, in a caption to PC Zone’s review, a mage taking the train is made to sit at the back in case they break it.
The two sides work differently. A magician learns spells, which Computer Gaming World described as 16 colleges of magic with five spells each. A technologist studies eight disciplines, each with seven degrees, which unlock schematics: recipes for combining things found in the world into new weapons and devices. Reviewing the finished game, Computer Gaming World’s Robert Coffey singled out the moment “your technologist character learns how to make a devastating elephant gun out of spare parts”.
Characters who change the game
The player chooses from eight races (human, dwarf, halfling, elf, half-elf, gnome, half-orc and half-ogre) and sets eight statistics. One of them is beauty, which decides how people react before the player says a word: build a very ugly gnome, Computer Gaming World warned, “and people may completely blow you off.” Optional backgrounds add strengths and weaknesses; a character “Raised By Snake Handlers” starts with 20 per cent resistance to poison.
Intelligence changes the conversation itself. A low-intelligence character gets simpler lines to say, and Computer Gaming World’s preview of a late test version captioned one exchange: “My idiot elf asks ‘Whut you say?’ as opposed to something with polysyllabic words.” The same preview found the reputation system “more robust than in Fallout’s”, tracking faction and race as well as good and evil: “A half-orc dabbling in chemistry would be hard-pressed to gather any useful information” in the anti-technology elven city.
Fights can run in real time or turn by turn, and the player can switch between the two at any point. Asked how they played, all three founders said they mostly fought in real time; Boyarsky and Cain switched to turn-based mode for the hardest fights. Asked how many hours had gone into the game, Cain replied: “A back of the envelope calculation revealed 100,000 man-hours. Oh my god.” He said that most of the game matched the original design document; the one feature he could name that had been dropped was roads on the world map.
Reviews
The game came out in August 2001, more than a year after Computer Gaming World’s first look had expected it. Reviewers liked the world and struggled with the game built around it.
- PC Zone gave it 84 per cent. Chris Anderson warned newcomers about the absence of a tutorial and found the graphics “very dated”, but summed it up as “no looker, but it has gameplay in spades”.
- Computer Gaming World’s Robert Coffey headed his review “The most fun you’ll ever have not having fun”. He praised a story “well told”, “smartly written dialogue” and its “Merlin-meets-Jack the Ripper cityscapes”, but listed design lapses that kept spoiling it: random encounters with the same wolves, bears and spiders, merchants who would only buy certain goods, no resting in dungeons, and a quest that would not register as done until “a quick custom patch” let him finish the game. Even so, he wrote, “there is more hardcore, satisfying character sculpting in this game than in any other on the market.”
- Edge found the steampunk setting “a refreshing change” but thought Troika had not noticed how far Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment had raised the bar. It disliked the “sprawling” rules, the fights and the inventory, where swapping a rifle “seven squares across” for an enchanted sword “five squares down” could be a puzzle in itself.
In America PC Gamer named it the best role-playing game of 2001.
Afterwards
Sierra was unsure about a sequel, and Troika moved on to The Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines before closing in 2005. The setting’s makers did return to steampunk. In 2023 inXile Entertainment announced Clockwork Revolution, a role-playing game led, Microsoft’s announcement said, by game director Chad Moore and principal designer Jason Anderson, “who just happen to have created one of the greatest steampunk RPGs of all time—Arcanum.”
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 188, March 2000, pp. 52–53: first look (publisher Sierra, developer Troika Games; zeppelins; 70 years since the industrial revolution; the balance meter and quotation; eight races; beauty; backgrounds; 16 colleges and eight technological disciplines; both combat modes).
- Laurence Scotford, Arcanum preview, PC Zone issue 95, November 2000, pp. 46–47: the fireball near a chaingun; real-time and turn-based combat; a release then planned for February 2001.
- Computer Gaming World issue 203, June 2001, p. 64: “Steampunk Fellows”, questions to Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson (combat preferences, 100,000 man-hours, roads on the world map), and the preview’s notes on reputation and low-intelligence dialogue.
- Chris Anderson, Arcanum review, PC Zone issue 106, September 2001, pp. 58–61: £34.99, Havas; no tutorial; 84 per cent; the train caption.
- Robert Coffey, Arcanum review, Computer Gaming World issue 207, October 2001, pp. 72–73.
- Edge issue 101, September 2001, p. 71: Arcanum review (PC; publisher Sierra, developer Troika Games).
- PC Gamer (US) issue 120, February 2004, p. 22: Troika as “the makers of Arcanum, our pick for the Best RPG of 2001”.
- Joe Blancato, “The Rise and Fall of Troika”, The Escapist, 26 December 2006 (web, secondary): released in 2001 “to good reviews (though many complained of niggling bugs)”; Sierra unsure about a sequel. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-troika/
- “Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): North American release on 21 August 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura
- inXile Entertainment, “Clockwork Revolution: Diving Deeper Into inXile’s Time-Bending Reveal Trailer”, Xbox Wire, 11 June 2023 (web). https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/06/11/clockwork-revolution-trailer-deep-dive/