Arcanum Interview, October 1999

Part 1

Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura is a newly-announced RPG set in an unusual world of fantasy and science where magic and technology co-exist, albeit not very harmoniously. It is a place where cities include castle keeps and factories, a world of Dwarves, Humans, Orcs and Elves, ancient runes and steamworks, magic and machines, flintlock pistols and flaming swords.

Arcanum is also the first title to be developed by Troika Games, LLC, a company started by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson. All three played principal roles in creating Fallout, widely acclaimed as the best RPG of 1997, and the team also includes other veterans of both Fallout and Fallout 2. As a consequence, we've spent the last several months waiting impatiently for the opportunity to learn what they're up to. Now that their game has been revealed, we found Tim, Leonard and Jason very eager to talk about it as well:

Jonric: Before we get into the game, let me ask a bit about the backgrounds you're bringing to it. First, our readers certainly know you were associated with Fallout, but could you tell a bit more about yourselves and your backgrounds in the games industry?

Tim: I started as a programmer back in 1982. I was in high school and worked at a local company that was making a bridge game for EA. Over the next few years, I made enough money to go to college, and I dropped out of the industry until 1992, when I went to work at Interplay Productions. For six years, I worked as a programmer on several titles, and my tenure there culminated with Fallout.

Leonard: I started as a freelance artist struggling to make a living and sort of fell into the game industry through some odd jobs I picked up here and there. Coincidentally, one of the first Interplay jobs I worked on was doing some paintings for Rags to Riches, Tim's first Interplay game. My paintings were rejected, and I swore to make Tim's life a living hell from that day forward.

When I was hired on full time at Interplay I worked on Stonekeep in a variety of art positions, from clean up art grunt to lead artist. Unfortunately, I wasn't given the opportunity to do much design, except for the creatures I was responsible for. From Stonekeep I went on to Fallout, where I was the Art Director/Lead Artist, as well as being heavily involved in design from the beginning of the game. We also helped get Fallout2 off the ground before leaving Interplay.

Jason: I've worked in the game industry for about six years now. I started as a contract artist for interplay working on USCF Chess. In 1994, I was hired at Interplay to work on the yet unnamed Fallout as an artist. Being the second person officially assigned to Fallout, I worked closely with Tim in designing the isometric engine. Near the end of Fallout, I had a hand in designing many of the areas in the game, well, actually, redesigning them is more like it. I was responsible for the Brother Hood, The Glow, The Hub with Feargus, and Adytum which I designed jointly with Leonard. After Fallout was shipped, Tim, Leonard and I worked with the Fallout 2 team in getting it started. After that I left Interplay and here I am.

Jonric: Please tell me something about yourselves as gamers. What genres and what games are your favorites?

Tim: I have been playing paper-and-pencil RPGs for 20 years now - gads! I started playing AD&D;, and it is still one of my favorite ones, along with GURPS. On the computer end, I have played a lot of games since the Atari 800 days. My favorite genres are RPGs of course, space combat sims, and 3D action and adventure games like Quake or Tomb Raider. I am currently into EverQuest and Thief.

Leonard: When Dungeons and Dragons was first becoming popular, I became very intrigued with it, and eventually got a set. The only problem was, I didn't know anybody who played . Let's just say it is extremely difficult to get the feel for how a D&D; game is supposed to run without ever having experienced one. I basically spent hours making characters with my friends, only to have them die agonizing deaths. I didn't play my first real role-playing campaign until I started to work at Interplay. It was a GURPS campaign that Tim was running, which basically led to me working on Fallout - in a roundabout way. Even though I never had the chance to play many paper and pencil RPGs, I've always had a fascination with them. As far as CRPGs go, I loved Wizardry 1, Eye of the Beholder, and Lands of Lore, and of course Stonekeep and Fallout.

Jason: In 1980 when I was 10, I received the D&D; Basic set as a gift. I loved it and spent hours creating characters, setting up combat situations and playing them out, but I couldn't find anyone who would play a real campaign. About a year later, I moved to a new school and met up with a group of guys who where really into D&D.; We would play every day at lunch in one of the classrooms. We were given the keys to it, which saved us from the jeers of the other kids and let us play in peace.

One of my friends in the group had quite a few Avalon Hill games, which I loved to play, my favorite being Gladiator. His father had a computer where we played a space combat game and wrote a very simple program that would generate all of the dice rolls for creating a new character for D&D.; The two of us would spend hours talking about the games we would make for the computer only if we had one of those new "Apple" computers. And when I was 12, I got my very first computer, an Apple IIe. I spent hours playing and trying to create basic games on it. These occurrences, I would have to say, are the genesis of my interest in games and computer games.

I love all kinds of games, but I tend to go though phases. In the mid '80s, I was really in to RPGs, then I started playing a lot of flight sims and after that I was into strategy, primarily real-time strategies.

Jonric: What in your background has most influenced you as a game maker?

Tim: Most of my influences come from the paper-and-pencil side, especially the old Judge's Guild AD&D; modules. They were just chock full of good ideas.

Leonard: For better or worse, my conception of what I want to do in a CRPG comes almost exclusively from years of envisioning what would make a good computer RPG, and not as much from playing them. I've always been interested in creating interesting worlds that people would love to explore.

Jason: Being that we are making RPGs, I would have to say my biggest influence would be D&D.; Unlike Tim, I did not play many other paper and pencil RPGs. On the computer side, there are too many to mention; I would have to say that just about any game that I have liked has crept into my game design ideas in one way or the other.

Jonric: Who are the other members of the development team?

All: Chris Jones has worked on numerous games including Rags to Riches, Star Trek: Judgement Rites, Stonekeep, M.A.X., Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and Fallout. Chris was Co-Lead Programmer, along with Tim, on Fallout. He is working on our graphics engine.

Jesse Reynolds is working on our animation system. He has previously worked on Stonekeep, Fallout, and as Lead Programmer on Fallout 2.

Chad Moore is doing character animation at the moment, and also wrote the Unlikely Affair story for us. He previously was lead artist/designer on Interplay's Red Asphalt. He also worked on the end movie for Fallout 2.

Sharon Shellman works on our movies and is our business person. She previously worked on Fallout and in Blizzard's cinematics department before coming to work at Troika.

Mark Harrison is working on our object system and world editor. He previously had done work on Stonekeep and Fallout before joining Troika. Yong Park came to us pretty much right out of the Art Center College of Design, and has never worked in the game industry before this. He is working on our inventory objects and a lot of our bigger set pieces - things like the elven tlans.

For more detailed bios on the whole team, check out Troika's web site at www.troikagames.com

Jonric: Cool, now lets' talk about Arcanum. To begin with, what's the basic premise or concept of the game and the game world? Where did this concept come from, and what attracted you to it?

Tim: the world of Arcanum is the result of a basic question: why are fantasy games always mired in some quasi-14th century medieval period? In other words, we were curious why the Industrial Revolution never arrived in the AD&D; Forgotten Realms or in Tolkien's Middle Earth. This led to much discussion of the roles of dwarves, gnomes, elves and all of the demi-human races in such a world. Some would resist it, others would embrace it, and others would simply be swept aside. And the core of the discussion was always the same question: what would happen to the magic?

Leonard: The world of Arcanum is basically a Tolkienesque fantasy world with the industrial revolution thrown into the mix. We wanted to see if we could do in a fantasy setting what we did in Fallout, which was to take a familiar setting and turn it on its head and inject some unlikely, unexpected style into it.

As far as where the idea came from, we were kicking around the idea of doing a standard fantasy game, but it really didn't click until we hit upon the mix with the 1800s-style world. I don't think we're happy with doing something unless we can twist it enough to make it our own.

Jason: In a nutshell we are taking a Tolkienesque world of dwarves, elves, wizards and warriors and thrusting it into an industrial age. This concept began when Tim said he wanted us to try our hand at a more traditional fantasy RPG for our next game. I was all for it, but Leonard had other plans. He was fine with the Tolkien-like elements, but he wanted to throw something else into the mix - like he did in Fallout with its retro forties/post apocalyptic mix. Thus he suggested that we bring the classic fantasy RPG world into an industrial age. Needless to say, I thought it was a really cool idea. One of the things that really attracted me to this concept is that, to my knowledge, it hasn't been done yet in a CRPG.

Jonric: What would you consider to be the principal influences on the overall game concept and design? And what about the graphic look or style of the game?

Tim: We had started with the typical fantasy genre, primarily influenced by AD&D; and hence Tolkien, and the historical events that happened in England 1700 and 1800s. We read several accounts of the times, detailing the effects of industrialization on that society. Some were positive, like increased production, economic prosperity, and faster and more efficient distribution of products. Some were negative, like pollution, deforestation and labor abuses. Then we applied those effects to the fantasy world, trying to account for the presence of magic and a demi-human population. The result was a world one technological step closer to our own but unlike any society in our own history.

Even though several people have asked, Shadowrun was not really an influence. I knew of the game, but I have never played it.

Leonard: Personally, as far as concept and design, I feel our main motivation is very simple - to make a great CRPG, with all the depth and story we could pack into it.

Once we came up with the idea for the game, the look and style naturally grew out of that. We've spent quite a bit of time thinking about our world in terms of style. Such things as how the presence of Elven craftsmanship would affect the style of the Victorian era, or how Dwarven craftsmanship would affect the look of the machines are topics that we discuss often around here.

Jason: The principal influences are Tolkien/D&D; fantasy and our own desire to put a unique twist to that setting, hence the industrial age. As for the design, we wanted to take a deep, classless system, as found in the Fallout games, and take it to a new level. Graphically, we are going to try to show the contrast of the many different areas of the game. For instance, how the dirty, gritty, soot laden cities contrast from the fresh, beautiful greenery of the elven tlan villages or the kingdoms that have thrived in this new industrial revolution in contrast to the kingdoms that have fallen to the wayside.

Jonric: Arcanum's inclusion of both magic and technology is unusual, so let me ask about these two topics. First, what's the nature of magic in Arcanum, and how will the magic system work?

Tim: Magic is broken down into 16 colleges. Each college defines the type of subject matter that its spells can effect. So the Mental college contains spells that affect the mind, the Divination spells bring information to the caster, and Meta spells affect other spells. The full list of colleges are Conveyance, Divination, Elemental Air, Elemental Earth, Elemental Fire, Elemental Water, Force, Mental, Meta, Morph, Nature, Necromantic Evil, Necromantic Good, Phantasm, Summoning and Temporal.

Within each college are five spells of increasing power. First level spells are relatively inexpensive to purchase and to cast, while the fifth level spells are quite powerful, such as resurrection or death spells, but very expensive to buy and to cast. Within a college, each spell must be purchased in order, so to get the level 5 spell, all four lower spell must be purchased.

Jonric: OK, and how are these spells acquired, and how are they cast?

Tim: Spells are purchased with character points. The player starts with a pool of these to spend to make a character, and he has to spend these on stats, skills, spells and technological degrees. As the character adventures and gains levels, he will gain additional character points to spend. We envision some characters buying many low-level spells in a lot of colleges, while other characters will have the most powerful spells in just a college or two.

Spells are powered by the caster's own energy. Each spell drains the caster's fatigue, and when that fatigue reaches zero, the caster will fall unconscious. Fatigue is recovered fairly quickly, but it can be drained by other means as well, like running, fighting, or even walking while heavily encumbered. A caster will have to watch his fatigue at all times.

Jonric: Great, now let's look at technology. What overall tech level and what kinds of technology will be found in the game? And how will the technology system function?

Jason: The level of technology in Arcanum is what you would find at the turn of the century. Futuristic, but within the context of the late 1800s, so it's very Jules Verne-like. Steam engines, revolvers and muskets are common in the world of Arcanum. But the player will be able to find and create extraordinary pieces of technology such as fully automatic mechanized guns, mechanical creatures, and stat boosting therapeutics. There are literally dozens of technological items to be discovered in this world.

There are eight disciplines of technology: Anatomical, Chemistry, Electrical, Explosives, Gun-Smithing, Mechanical, Smithy, and Therapeutics. Each discipline will have seven degrees within it, which can be obtained by spending character points. With each degree obtained, the PC will gain knowledge in that given discipline. Gaining knowledge enables the PC to read more advanced schematics. Schematics are technical drawings the PC can get in the game, that will show an item that can be created, and what two objects the PC will need to obtain in order to create it. For example, the PC uses their points to gain the first degree of Mechanical, which is Trainee. This gives the PC the knowledge to read the Spike Trap Schematic. The two items necessary to complete the spike trap are a railroad spike and a large spring. If the PC has both items, he can put them together to create a spike trap. He can then place the spike trap on the ground and any creature stepping on it will take damage.

Jonric: The next obvious question is about the conflict between magic and technology. How and why do basic natures conflict? And how will that conflict be handled, both in the game and in the game engine?

Tim: This is one of my favorite aspects of the game. Magic and technology do not mix, at the most basic level. Magic works by bending physical law, allowing an effect to occur that would otherwise be impossible. For example, when a caster produces a lightning bolt, he is causing - through an act of will - electrons to flow from one spot to another despite the fact that the electric potential of the destination may be equal or higher than the source. This is in clear violation of physical law, but the caster has suppressed that law, locally and temporarily. Thus, magic is a way to tell the universe "Do what I want!" It is very powerful but very personal.

Technology is the exact opposite. Technology relies on physical law to operate, and the use of a technological item or skill serves to reinforce the physical law on which it operates. When a technologist shoots a gun, he is relying on the chemical properties of the gunpowder to create a controlled explosion in the gun's chamber and propel the bullet forward. By using this gun repeatedly, he is actually strengthening those chemical properties, making them harder to subvert through magic.

Therefore, magic and technology oppose each other. Magic is constantly bending or suppressing physical law, while technology is reinforcing those same laws. Obviously, both cannot succeed when directed at the same physical law. Hence, there is conflict.

Jonric: With these two forces being opposites, what will be the major advantages of each?

Tim: Technology's biggest advantage over magic is that it does not draw on the user's personal power. You can shoot a gun until you are out of bullets, and you will not be fatigued like a caster throwing fireballs. Of course, the caster can recover fatigue by resting, but technology has one more advantage in that regard as well: bullets, as well as other technological items, can be mass-produced. Magic's biggest advantage is that it is quite powerful and varied in its effects. Some of its effects, such as teleportation or summoning, may NEVER be duplicated by technology. And the knowledge of spells makes the caster personally more powerful, while a technologist is only as powerful as the gadgets he currently possesses.

Jonric: These two forces seem fundamentally different in terms of how they work. How are you handling the way they inter-relate?

Tim: Jason came up with a great way of handling magic and technology in the game engine. Your character begins with a zero in Magic and Technological Aptitudes. As she buys spells, she gains points in Magic Aptitude, and when she buys tech skills and degrees, she gains points in Technological Aptitude. The balance between these Aptitudes determines how magical and technological effects work in your presence. Note that the character starts balanced between these two aptitudes, and can only stay balanced by spending the same number of points for magic and technology.

When your character uses a magic item or spell, or a tech item or skill, the game engine checks your balance and adjusts the efficiency of the item or skill in question. For example, imagine you find a gun. If you shoot it at someone and you have a high Magical Aptitude, the gun may misfire and cause a critical failure. A similar result may happen if you fire the gun at someone who has a Magical Aptitude. His aptitude could cause the gun to misfire.

Likewise, imagine someone throws a spell on you, and you have a high Technological Aptitude. The spell may fail, or it may go off at a reduced power, or you may get a bonus to your saving throw against the spell. These effects will be handled by the engine automatically and may be to your disadvantage; imagine that it was a healing spell and you were almost dead.

These adjustments can be quite variable. Let's say you find a sword that gives you a 20% bonus to hit. You will only receive this bonus if your Magic Aptitude is high enough. A lower aptitude may only yield a 15% or 10% bonus, and if your Technological Aptitude is high enough, you may receive no bonus at all!

What I like the most about this system is the variety of characters you can make. You can try to be a fence-sitter, and either spend no or equal points in Magic and Technology. The advantage is that you can use both magic and technology. However, someone who specializes in Magic will use magical items better than you, and vice versa, that person would resist technology better than you would.

Jonric: Sounds very interesting. Jason, is there anything you can add?

Jason: When Leonard first said he wanted to bring the element of technology into a fantasy game, I started trying to think of a way that it could be handled in a gaming system. One thing that has always been a problem with magic in CRPGs is that although magic users often start out weak, by the middle of the game they are by far the most powerful class of character. With this in mind, I set out to design an equal, but powerful opposition to magic. Technology was the obvious choice.

The idea that I came up with uses an aptitude scale between magic and tech ranging from zero (perfectly balanced) to either 100 magic (purely magical) or 100 tech (purely technological). Each PC begins the game in balance (at zero). How the PC chooses to spend his character points, whether on basic (neutral) skills, magic spells, or technological disciplines, will affect the PC's balance in the world. The PC's balance effects how the world reacts to him. For example, the higher a character's magic aptitude, the less reliable tech items will become and the more often they will foul up when he tries to use them or gets near them. Conversely, the higher a character's tech aptitude, the weaker magic items and spells in his vicinity will become.

Jonric: Moving on to another important topic, how will character creation work, and what character choices will the player have at the beginning of the game?

Tim: We give the player a wide choice of race and gender. The race will change some of his beginning stats and affect the reactions of NPC's. Gender has less effect, but it can make some quests easier or harder. We are a skill-based system, so you do not have to pick a class. Instead, you begin with a set number of character points to spend, and you can always reduce some stats to get more points to spend elsewhere. We have four physical stats (Strength, Constitution, Beauty, and Dexterity) and four mental stats (Willpower, Charisma, Intelligence and Perception). We have over a dozen related derived stats. For example, Strength determines starting hit points and weight allowance, while Constitution affects starting fatigue points and poison resistance.

Jason: If a person wishes to create his own character, the first thing he will be asked to do is choose a race and a gender. You can choose to play any of the seven following races: Human, elf, dwarf, halfling, half-orc, half-ogre, gnome. Once your race is chosen, you pick a background, or create your own. A background is a short explanation of your character's history. Each background will provide both an advantage and a disadvantage for the character. After a background has been chosen, the player can then adjust their character's attributes. The attributes are:

• Health - your character's life force.
• Fatigue - this is the stamina of the PC which affects combat, running and spellcasting.
• Four physical stats - strength, constitution, dexterity and beauty.
• Four mental stats - intelligence, willpower, perception and charisma.
• Sixteen Skills - broken into four sub-categories: combat, thieving, social and technical.
• Sixteen colleges of magic - with five levels of spells in each.
• Eight disciplines of technology - with seven degrees of knowledge each.

The player will be given a pool of character points and a base character to build from. All of the base character's stats are average. During character creation, and only during character creation, will the player be able to lower any of the character's stats to regain points, which will be added to the total pool. The player can then spend the points any way that they choose. Once the character's attributes have been adjusted, it's time to buy equipment. Once equipment has been bought the game begins.

Jonric: Can you explain a bit more about the character background feature that was mentioned?

Tim: You can also select a character background. While this is optional, it is a fun way to create a more detailed character. Each background is accompanied with some effects on the character. For example, we have a background called "Raised by snake handlers" which says the character is the child of traveling circus performers and from an early age played with snakes. The many bites he received scarred him terribly, reducing his Beauty, but raised his resistance to poison.

The player is also free to edit the text of the background, changing the story to something more fitting for his character. In the above example, you could rewrite it to say the character was a budding technologist who had a terrible lab accident, with the effects on Beauty and poison resistance being the same.

Jonric: And will there be any way for players to jump in and start playing immediately?

Jason: For people who want to get right into the game there will be approximately twenty pre-generated characters to choose from. After choosing a pre-generated character, the player is taken straight into the game.

Part 2

Last week, we had the pleasure of bringing you Part 1 of an extensive and very informative Arcanum interview with Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, the three founders of developer Troika Games, LLC. However, there was a still a lot of ground to cover, which we did in the second part of our discussion.

Jonric: Let's jump right into it. How does the character development system work during the game, and what options does the player have?

Tim: All of the stats and skills in the game work on a ranking system, from 0 to 20, with 10 being the average. You spend your character points to raise these ranks. Stats cost significantly more to raise than skills, but skills are limited to a maximum rank based on their default skill. For example, the Dodge skill defaults to Dexterity, meaning you begin with Dex/2 as your default Dodge skill rank, and Dodge cannot be raised to a rank higher than Dexterity. If you want Dodge higher, you'll have to raise your Dexterity.

The skills are broken into 4 categories: Combat, Thieving, Social, and Technological. The four combat skills are Melee, Throwing, Bow and Dodge. The four thieving skills are Pick Pocket, Find Traps, Silent Move, and Conceal. The four social skills are Healing, Gambling, Persuasion, and Haggle. Finally, the four tech skills are Firearms, Lockpick, Repair and Arm/Disarm Traps. Spells and technological degrees were described earlier. In general, these cost more points to buy to higher levels.

Jason: For each level gained the PC is given a number of character points. Using these points, the player can buy up any of his character's attributes: health, fatigue, stats, skills, spells and technological degrees.

Jonric: Given the conflicting nature of magic and technology, is it difficult to develop a balanced character with decent abilities in both?

Tim: As far as building a balanced character with magic and tech, yes, you can build a great character that is balanced with both. As I mentioned above, you would have a great advantage too, being able to use both. But you would not be as good in either as a particular specialist.

And remember the characters that are spending points in magic and/or tech have that many fewer points to spend on basic stats and skills. You could build a warrior with high strength, great combat skills and lots of hit points, and he would give the mages and technologists a run for their money. :-)

Jason: This system is very open-ended, allowing the player to have complete control over the development of his PC. The player can make a PC who is fully magical, fully technological, adept at both, or has nothing to do with either (thief, barbarian, diplomat, etc.) We want the player to have complete developmental control over his PC, in true RPG format.

Jonric: What is the basic storyline? Who are the key characters, and what's the ultimate objective?

All: We are not prepared to answer this yet.

Jonric: Fair enough. How about the basic structure of the game? Are there any linear elements?

Tim: Our game is designed a long a story arc, which is by itself linear. In other words, you must pass through plot points A, B, C in order. However, exactly how you solve plot point A is up to you and your character, and there will be many solutions for the player to choose - and I am sure creative players will find solutions we never thought of. I believe there are 15 or so of these major plot points, but they are major events and will take some time and thought to solve.

Jason: There's the main story arc, which contains approximately15 quests. Each of those quests will have multiple solutions. We have gone to great lengths to ensure that any type of character can complete the game. A combat-avoiding thief is just as viable of a character as a hardcore mage or warrior. Each will be able to complete the quests and finish the game. The only linear element is the main story. There will be a lot of secondary quests that the player will have the option to complete in order to gain more character points and advance his character.

Jonric: Is there anything more you can say about these side quests?

Tim: There are hundreds if not thousands of side quests that you can play. The difference between these quests and the story plot points are that you do not have to complete any particular side quest to complete the game. However, some of the major plot points may be difficult or impossible unless your character has reached a certain level, so you will have to do side quests to gain experience and items. You just don't have to do any particular one.

By the way, we went to great pains to develop a story arc that does not have time limits or required items to complete. This is to avoid the problem of people discovering that something they did a while back will prevent them from completing the game. We are not saying it will not be harder to complete some plot points if you lose a particular item, just that it will still be possible. And for side quests, since they do not have to be performed to complete the game, this restriction does not hold. For example, if a baron asks you to rescue his kidnapped daughter, and she dies during the rescue, that quest cannot be completed unless you resurrect her. And if she died in some permanent way, like falling into lava or being disintegrated, that quest can never be completed.

Jonric: How would you describe the game world? What are the key game locations, and what inspired them?

All: We are not prepared to answer this yet.

Jonric: Alright, then let me ask about something else. Will weapons, armor and other items play a significant role in Arcanum? And is it correct that characters will be able to build weapons?

Jason: Arcanum will have the standard assortment of items like swords, shields, potions, armors, magical scrolls, and so on and so forth. And yes, weapons and armor play a significant role in Arcanum. As for building weapons, a tech based PC will be able to do this with schematics once he has reached the appropriate degree in that discipline.

Jonric: Arcanum is reported to offer both real-time and turn-based combat. Why did you decide on this?

Tim: There seem to be two irreconcilable camps of RPG players. The real-time players like the fast-paced action, while the turn-based players like the strategy and the separation of the player's skill from the character's. Even on our own team, we have people who will probably only play in one mode. So we decided to make the game playable both ways.

Leonard: We wanted the fast pace you could get from a real time game, but we loved the feel we got out of turn based combat in Fallout, so we just decided to include both. I could see quite a bit of switching back and forth, actually - I don't want the tedium of killing a hundred rats in turn based combat, but on the other hand, I might want a chance to stop and strategize against an extremely tough opponent.

Jason: One of the biggest complaints we received on Fallout was that it was turn-based. I know people who bought Fallout and didn't even make it out of the rat cave before they gave up and shelved the game, because they felt it was too slow. Another reason to have real-time combat is that Arcanum will have a multi-player aspect, and turn-based combat does not lend itself well to computer multi-player gaming.

However, we wanted to have turn-based combat available as an option, for those players who prefer to have more control over their characters in combat situations. Turn-based allows a player to be more thoughtful and strategic when in combat. Turn-based is also helpful to people who want to play a high dexterity character, but aren't super fast at clicking the mouse themselves.

Jonric: Very interesting. And how will the combat system actually work?

Tim: Basically, your Dexterity stat determines your Speed derived stat. In real-time play, the Speed stat determines how fast your character can perform actions. The higher the stat, the faster you can do things; we literally adjust the frame rate on your animation. In turn-based play, the Speed stat determines how many action points you have to spend in one turn, and every action costs a predetermined number of points.

Other factors can affect character speed in both modes. For example, weapons have speed factors, making a sword faster than an axe, for instance. The nice thing about this system is it is consistent, so fast characters are faster in either mode than slow characters. And the player can switch modes during play, so you can experiment with which mode you like best.

Jonric: What are the major difficulties in having both, and how are you going to overcome them?

Tim: The hardest part of having two combat modes is balancing two combat systems, both of which rely on the same underlying stats. By basing both systems on character Speed, I think we have avoided a lot of issues that might have arisen..

Jonric: Are there many different opponents, and what are some of the more interesting or unusual ones?

Jason: We are looking at the upward of two hundred monsters. There will also be a number of unique monsters but I don't want to give them away right now..

Jonric: How important are NPCs in the game? How do they help or hinder you?

Tim: NPCs are very important. They are a source of rumors and quests and items, and sometimes they can provide skills that you do not have. Having some NPC party members can be a good thing, because you can take monsters that you could not kill alone, and they can watch your back while you are busy going through inventory or picking a lock. However, there is a downside. Sometimes, they will attack some critters on sight, or flee during battle and attract the attention of more monsters. Finally, some NPCs will leave the party depending on your actions, alignment or reputations, and that could happen at inconvenient times.

Jonric: How many of them can join the player's party? What's the maximum party size? Will the player control the entire party?

Tim: There is no fixed upper limit to the player's party size, but there are some restrictions. The character's Charisma will determine how many people he can convince to join the party at any one time. He could always use a Mind Control spell to force people into his party who otherwise would not join, but there is a limit, based on Intelligence, to how many spells a character can maintain active at the same time. Finally, some quests will have NPCs join your party. For example, when you rescue the baron's kidnapped daughter, she will join your party until you return her home - and already I can imagine unscrupulous players dragging the poor girl all over the continent before returning her. I checked a few months back and figured at one point a character could have 12 NPCs following him around, which is more of a personal army than a party.

Jason: There will be a number of NPCs who can join the PC. We call this type of NPC a Follower. Whether you need Followers depends on what kind of character you create. Say, for example, you create a character who is a socialite and is not real big on combat. He may need to enlist the aid of a few Followers if he runs into a situation where he need some muscle. Most of the Followers in the game are there to help the player, but we may have a few that will be a hindrance, such as a princess you must escort, but that will be rare. The player will not control the entire party, although the PC can trade items freely with them. Each Follower will have their own, unique personalities that control how loyal they are and how they behave in a given situation.

Jonric: How will multi-player work, and how will multi- and single-player differ? And I'm rather curious in that I know Tim is a single-player fan - why is there multi-player at all?

Tim: Our single-player game is story-driven, set in an enormous world to explore. Think Fallout in a fantasy-tech setting, and you have a very good concept of the game. On the other hand, our multi-player game is quest-driven and will be set in a much smaller area, probably a town and its surrounding areas, with dungeons and caves to explore. Think Diablo as an RPG. :-)

Why both? Many people like multi-player games to play with their friends, and we thought our world lent itself to a fun, lighter, quest-driven, multi-player version. And if the multi-player version attracts people who would otherwise not try the single-player game, and they like the single-player game, we will have helped expand RPGs to a bigger crowd.

Leonard: We wanted to give people the chance to adventure with their friends in this world, yet we felt we'd have to compromise the depth and complexity of the story we were trying to tell if we made it multi-player. The way we solved this was to make them two completely different entities - the single-player game is an in-depth, complex, story driven game, and the multi-player is much more of a dungeon crawl with some quests thrown in for good measure.

Jason: The biggest difference between the multi- and the single-player games are that the single-player game is going to take place on a large map the size of a small continent, and there will be scripted events the PC triggers to further the story. Multi-player games can be set up as servers on a local network or the internet where the games will take place on maps that are about the size of a city and are completely separate from the single-player game. Players will be able to play either cooperatively or competitively in the multi-player game. The quests on these maps will be written just for multi-player and will take into consideration things like distributing experience points when there are multiple PCs in a party and if one PC finishes a quest before another. Also, there may be quests that require the cooperation of two or more PCs to complete it.

Jonric: Why different game areas for single- and multi-player?

Jason: We decided on the separate maps for single-player and multi-player games because there were many complexities in the single-player game that didn't translate well into multi-player. We also did not want to compromise the single-player experience just to say we had multi-player. Likewise, for multi-player we had a lot of good ideas and didn't want to throw them away just because we couldn't get it to work with the single player game. At the very least, Arcanum's multi-player will be as good as Diablo's. However, we are hoping to get more depth of quests and replayability from Arcanum's multi-player.

Jonric: What are the main features of your game engine? What are its major strengths and limitations, and how have these affected the game's design?

Jason: Lighting is probably the coolest feature in our game engine. Arcanum will have complete day and night cycles, and light levels aren't used just to make the game look pretty; they are also used in game play. Light, or lack of it, provides both pluses and minuses to individual characters. For example, if a PC's opponent is in a darkened area, there is a negative adjustment applied to the PC perception, which will affect his ability to attack in the dark. Thieves, however, will have a bonus when hiding in a darkened area, because a guard's perception will be lower. One benefit of our engine is that it does not require a 3D accelerator card to play.

Jonric: Why did you decide to go with a 2D graphics engine? What do you consider to be the major advantages and disadvantages?

Tim: Well, first off, we knew we were comfortable with 2D and its advantages and disadvantages. Basically, we knew and accepted what we could and could not do. With 3D, it seems the possibilities change every six months, and I would have hated to see features added, lost or changed because some new card becomes popular. This situation makes the whole game's design go into flux too frequently. Besides, the level of detail in 2D isometric still exceeds the detail we're seeing in 3D games. This lets our artists insert more of their style into the game.

Leonard: We went with a 2D engine for several reasons. Firstly, we felt that we wanted to spend most of our time designing the role playing system, the story, the NPC interaction, etc., not developing a cutting edge 3D engine. We also wanted to push a 2D isometric engine as far as it could go before we made the jump into 3D.

Jason: 2D is what we knew, and we didn't see any real big advantages in using a 3D engine. It would have taken a lot of time to get a 3D engine working and we wanted to spend that time working on the design. We would rather be cutting edge in game design than graphics, we'll leave that up to Id. An advantage of going with a 2D engine is the level of detail that we can get into the environments. The biggest disadvantage in my opinion is that the line of sight for the PC is different from the players. It would be nice to be able to rotate the view. Another advantage of going with a 2D engine as opposed to 3D is the level of detail that we can get into the environments. The biggest disadvantage in my opinion is that the line of sight for the PC is different from the player's. It would be nice to be able to rotate the view.

Jonric: How will the control interface work? Will it have any features of particular interest?

Tim: We have a fairly simple interface. Most of the time, the player will just use the mouse and left-click on objects in the world. Clicking on a door will open it, on a chest will loot it, and on an item will pick it up. If you click on a creature, you will either talk to it or attack it, depending on whether you are in combat or not. Left-clicking on an empty area will make your character walk there. And right-click is the universal cancel button in our game. You use it to cancel whatever you are doing.

My favorite part is a hot key bank that you can drag anything to, such as items, spells or skills. So you can quickly drink a heal potion, cast a lightning bolt and then Conceal yourself, all without using any submenus. I really like our hotkey bank with items, because if you use an item from it and you have an identical item in inventory, that other item will be usable from the same hot key. For example, hot key 1 can be set to a heal potion, and if you have 5 of them, the hot key will be useable 5 times before going blank.

Jason: We have an intuitive point and click interface. :) No features of particular interest, really. First we stole any good ideas we could from other games and tried to improve on them. Also, we tried to keep the number of mouse clicks as low as possible. But all that is nothing new, everyone tries to do that. Whether they succeed or not, is the question.

Jonric: How important a role will music and sound play? Do you know who is writing the music yet, and kind or kinds will there be? How about the sound?

Tim: Sound is going to be very important. Footstep sounds are based on ground and armor types, and ambient sounds are based on location and time of day, like forest and swamp noises, or chatter in a bar, or a tinkling fountain. Some of these are to immerse the player, and some are important for game play, like hearing a guard approach. I was big fan of Thief and appreciate the importance of sound in game play.

Jason: Music is another tool that we utilize in the same way we do graphics. We are planning to use music to bring the player into the world of Arcanum. The music for each of the areas is going to be unique to accentuate the differences of these locations. The style of the music has not been decided as of this time.

Jonric: Arcanum is clearly a hard core, stats-based RPG. Do you thing this will seriously limit its overall appeal? What kind or kinds of gamer are you aiming Arcanum at?

Tim: I have always maintained that I will make a game that I like to play, and I can only hope that others will like it too. Arcanum will be a real, hard core RPG for everyone who liked Fallout and games like it. And for those people who didn't play Fallout because it wasn't a fantasy game, well, here you go! Finally, I think that a lot of the Diablo crowd will enjoy our multi-player version immensely.

Leonard: We hope that the success of Fallout and Baldur's Gate has shown that hard core RPGs aren't as much of a niche product as people had thought in the past. Our goal is also to make our game have many different levels that a person can get into it on. For instance, we have a mode where the computer will distribute your points for you, so theoretically, a player could pick a pre-made character, jump right into the game, and not even concern themselves with the stats and other minutiae. Once we've sucked them in, we hope that they'll be drawn to delve deeper into the possibilities inherent in our system. One of our goals is to broaden the market for "real" RPGs. I'm personally tired of every game saying it has "RPG elements" - if every body wants RPG elements in their games, why not just make RPGs?

Jason: Our goal is to dispel the belief that CRPGs are only for hard core gamers and create a game that a non-RPGer can get into. We do have many stats, but we tried to serve it up in as friendly a manner as we could. All of the stats and skills will have on-screen explanations of what they are and what they effect. The thing for a player who is daunted by the number of stats and skills to remember is that there is no wrong way to spend your points. Build the character you want and have fun, the world will react. For a player who doesn't want to deal with the maintenance of his character, we are planing on having an auto-maintenance feature. The user will be able to select a pre-defined template for how his character's points will be distributed. Some examples of these templates are Barbarian, Thief/Mage, Thief/Technologist, etc.

Jonric: Why do you feel Arcanum will stand out among all the other RPGs currently in development? What will make it different from all the rest?

Tim: Many of these games are action hybrids or games with "RPG elements" - whatever that means. We are making a hard core RPG that is just dripping with style, and I think people will respond to that.

Leonard: Arcanum lets people create any character they can imagine and the game will react to that choice. A lot of games give you your character, or allow only minimal choices. We feel the heart of any RPG is role playing- making a character that is distinctly mine and experiencing the world through their eyes.

Jason: The classless system, which allows players to truly role-play a character of their own design, puts Arcanum apart from the rest. Arcanum is a TRUE RPG. There's no having to be saintly or a hero of the people. The player can define the motives of his own character and role-play that character and the world will react accordingly.

In addition, Arcanum is a huge world with many unique areas to explore. And though the world of Arcanum is very large, we have made sure that it is not cumbersome to move from one place to another because we realize that it is irritating to spend a large amount of your game time wandering through nothing only to find nothing.

Jonric: OK, last question. The game's website makes reference to a series of games. Are you thinking beyond Arcanum already?

Tim: Yes! We have more ideas than we can cram into one game. Besides, magic and technology do not appear to be in a stable balance. Who knows what the future holds?

Leonard: We'd love to be able to create a series based in the world of Arcanum, if we're fortunate enough to be given the opportunity.

Jason: Wishful thinking I guess.

Jonric: I don't have to guess that it's many RPG fans' wishful thinking that Arcanum were already here. Thanks very much to all three of you for taking the time to share so much information on what we can look forward to when it does arrive.

Sources:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000815220959/http://rpgvault.ign.com/features/interviews/arcanum1.shtml

http://web.archive.org/web/20000815220955/http://rpgvault.ign.com/features/interviews/arcanum2.shtml