Side Quests Go!

I am slowly reaching the end of Arcanum. I know this because I've been using the FAQs. Yeah, I admit it! On the other hand, I don't want to do the standard puzzle game ultimate technique of spamming every item up against every other item just to see if does something interesting.

This one quest involves seeing something in a room, going to another building in the town, then going to a different town (although there's no way of knowing you need to do this), before going to another town to get some plot information before heading back to the first town. Um? Really? That's not obvious. I don't care who you are, you aren't going to come up with that plot logic.

Let alone another quest which involves going to a set of places around the country in a particular order... and it takes a lot of work to find out the order, interpret it, find the places, what keys they need... sod that!

I'm interested in the story, not in randomly wandering around. Although there isn't much of that left. One last quest or two, and then I'm heading off on the last part, no going back... so I'm not going just yet. Time to start striking off those side quests... which will involve a lot of walking around, but at least I'm going to know where to go and what to do when there.

And I'm not seeing a lot of replay here. I've put a lot of hours into this and, after changing characters, it's been fun. But it's long, and I have other games to play. This does mean that I won't experience all the technological aspects or all the magical aspects (or any of the magical aspects). I've dumped all my points into my basic stats and skills. And even then, there's more I could pump up.

One more annoying thing about skills. In this game, you can be magical or technological inclined, but not both. And if you are one, then the other doesn't work. Simply picking skills like "disarm trap" makes me technological, so now the magical healing my party can do doesn't work on me. Nuts.

(An interesting cheat could be to pump up all the stats/skills/etc at the beginning, then seeing how quickly you can do a run through. Or possibly go through and kill everyone because... well, you can.)

Not that I have plans for the next game to get into. Possibly something without an isometric view, that's just annoying...

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