A hybrid of the action and adventure genre, role-playing games can often be found to rely heavily on character growth and development - Which usually involves player statistics, conversation and strategic combat rather than puzzle-solving. Huge, epic quests set in vast, fantasy worlds filled with hundreds of non-player characters and side quests usually sets this genre apart from the other more traditional genres. And if the cash registers are registering correctly, then it should be quite save to say that these titles in which we spend countless hours dragging characters through monster filled dungeons or exploring beautiful fantasy realms are quite popular. There's just something enticing about the way these titles whisk us from the drags of real life and immerse us in fantasy worlds of epic proportions. And recently, dozens of online RPGs have started growing more and more popular, including EverQuest, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot. Here are some of this year's best and most involving RPG titles.
From the creators of Fallout, comes an RPG filled with guns, explosives, swords and sorcery - Arcanum : Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. It is the 19th century, and the formerly undisputed arcane ways of magic have now come under fire by the new arts of technology. Suddenly, trains, electricity, and flintlock pistols have spread like wild fire around the land. One by one the weak have now grown strong, as using these tools of destruction require little skill.
Without a doubt one of the best RPGs released this year, Arcanum features a massive and sprawling story and game world. And while the main quest is overwhelming in its own right, the game also offers thousands of side-quests. Some of these side quests include settling a dispute between two seers, freeing the spirit of an old woman, as well as collecting taxes for the king of Cumbria, to name a few. Side quests often force players to make a moral decision. This can help you earn a reputation in towns and cities, to either foster closer ties with its inhabitants, or earn a notorious reputation for yourself.
Players retain the ability to customize characters more than ever possible before. Besides the eight usual fields - Willpower, perception, intelligence, charisma, strength, dexterity, constitution and beauty, players can now decide their character's alignment towards magic or technology. Characters must learn three categories : Skills, Spell Colleges and Technological Disciplines. Skills consists of social, combat, thieving and technological skills. Spells are divided into 16 Spell Colleges, with each college containing five different spells each. As for the new arts of technology, they are divided into eight Technological Disciplines. Your level of expertise in each field of technology decides what technological wonders you can create. This comes in the form of degrees, which can be purchased or negated. Higher level spells can be learnt if a person has a high willpower rating, while technology usually requires a higher intelligence rating.
A realistic combat system also exists in this beautiful world. Enemies can inflict realistic injuries ranging from scars to limps. These can seriously affect your speed, or even your fighting abilities. Fighting styles are also affected heavily depending on a player's decision to lean more towards technology and magic. Several technological items like revolvers and healing salves can be created by combining several items, like combining filaments and lamps to create a electric light via electric or combining roots and leaves to create healing antidotes via herbology. Spells are the usual fanfare - Just learn em' and cast em'. In addition, a Non-Player Character's reaction towards you will be heavily affected. For example, if you play the technologist, folks dealing with magic will have a negative reaction towards you, as well as refusing to sell you any of their goods. The same applies to using magic too heavily. Some might even not join your cause! You can however, choose to walk the middle path by keeping a balance on your magical and technological skills. Hell, being male or female even affects the side quests you can take! For example, as a female, you get to 'service' customers for a brothel. You'll also be forced to take other measures to enter the Wellington Gentlemen's Club in Tarant by either killing Mr. Wellington and his bodyguard, or by 'servicing' him and then paying 200 gold pieces. The choice is pretty obvious.
The level of interactivity within the game is amazing. Use dynamite to blow up those safes who just refuse to open. Take off your clothes to make someone beg you to have the decency to put them back on. Drink wine to temporarily raise your strength to insane heights! Combined with your considerable arsenal of skills and weapons, nothing can stand in your way! Okay, maybe a few technological horrors or well armed brigands here and there, but still...
For those of you who enjoy adventuring and slashing through baddies with friends, Arcanum offers a multiplayer mode where you can play with or against friends. Though multiplayer is fun, it's ultimately a little disappointing. The multiplayer maps are much smaller than those in the single-player game, the game suffers from lag, and since you can't import your character from the single-player game you have to start off with a low-level character.
All this takes place in an incredibly well-designed and vibrant world. Buildings and other stationary objects are well designed and highly detailed. The game's graphics are also very effective, with players being barely able to see a thing at night. And yes we tried the "turn up the brightness till your eyes crack" trick. This incredibly beautiful world is only enhanced by its sad and haunting music, matching the environment perfectly.
Arcanum is a fantastic game that will keep even the dedicated hard-core RPG fan enthralled for hours and hours. The idea of bringing in guns and technology into the fantasy world of magicks and dragons is refreshingly original. The graphics are nice and make for a highly detailed and beautiful world to be engaged in. It is definitely a must have on any RPG fan's list. If you're serious about role-playing games, then Arcanum is well worth the investment of time, money, and effort.
Japanese role-playing games have proven time and time again to be a staple of console gaming, containing some extremely popular role-playing games including the highly popular Final Fantasy series. But ever since the introduction of Square's Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII to the PC, this sub-genre of the RPG genre has been virtually nonexistent on the PC. Hearing the grieving cries of the gamers, developer Ion Storm is attempting to redress the situation with Anachronox, a Final Fantasy-inspired game designed specifically for the PC. And although some minor rough spots are dotted throughout the game, Anachronox is a solid addition to the genre, ranking high on the unfortunately short list of games that manages to actually maintain an actual sense of humor and personality such as Giants : Citizen Kabuto and Grim Fandango.
You are Sylvester "Sly" Boots, a down-on-his-luck private detective living in a futuristic city built on a mysterious, giant alien artifact. And not unlike the lovable gumshoe detective Tex Murphy, Boots has managed to drag himself down into financial ruin, owing money to all the wrong hats around town. His attempts to get a case and pay off his debts eventually leads him off of Anachronox and finally on a quest to save the universe as we know it. Along the way, other characters will also sign-up in Boots' noble quest to save the cosmos. While the case sounds pretty familiar, there's a lot of cleverness in the dialogue and plot details, setting Anachronox apart from the pack.
Combat occurs in real-time with each character requiring a varying recovery period between each combat action, kinda in the Final Fantasy style. To cross the field of battle, characters must move between set points on a grid overlaid across the battlefield. Players must learn to take advantage of this, as this combat system allows for a real difference between melee and ranged weaponry. Characters armed with long ranged weapons may safely open fire from a distance, while combatants armed with melee weapons must charge in a mad rush to reach and attack opponents. However, this carries the possibility of blocking the line of sight of characters farther away. While it's a simple enough feature, it effectively breaks the monotony of the "attack and heal" routine found in many other such RPG games.
The combat system becomes increasingly complicated when the mysterious "mystech" is introduced. Mystechs are chunks of rock that are imbued with various powers such as the ability to shoot balls of fire and summon ice storms. Called the elementor system, it allows one to socket various colored bugs into your mystech and then level them up, creating a huge variety of different effects in the tradition of Final Fantasy VII's materia system. Each of the games's seven characters have a series of unique special attacks, which helps form Anachronox's "magic" system. This only adds another layer of depth to the combat system which should help satisfy many RPG fans.
Although the world of Anachronox is brought to life on id Software's dated Quake II engine, the graphics still manage to rate as pretty damn beautiful. While environments and characters can prove to be somewhat blocky, the level design and character design more than compensate for the relative lack of polygons. The ability to render facial animations has also been implemented, permitting the characters to seem more life-like than ever. Most of the environments, especially the alien city of Anachronox itself, are filled with dozens of little details that help bring the city to life. Coupled with sound effects of high quality and competent voice acting, Sylvester and his crew are made all the more memorable.
Anachronox manages to reward players with an interesting combat system, great dialogue, great voice acting, and a beautiful world to explore. While basically it's a by-the-book entry in an established genre, its genuinely funny sense of humor helps set it apart from the rest of the pack. A must-have on both an RPG or even action / adventure fan's list this year.
20 years ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Sir-Tech Canada created the first episode in the popular and venerable Wizardry series. Fondly known among grizzled veteran gamers as one of the "old school" games, Wizardry VIII now marks the end of the series. Not being one to allow the series to go out quietly however, Sir-Tech has managed created one of the deepest, most solid RPG experiences ever - A fitting end indeed for such a popular series. This role-playing experience took an incredible amount of time to develop, having being plagued by the lost of its regular US publisher and going through numerous development changes over the last four years, only being released by means of a direct distribution deal with retailer Electronics Boutique. Creating a game of Wizardry VIII's size, technical stability, and overall quality truly is a remarkable achievement, and players should appreciate all the difficulties that Sir-Tech has had bringing the game to market.
The setting is a futuristic yet dark medieval time, with both spaceships, androids, swords and magic dominating the scene. Continuing the storyline of Wizardry VII : Crusaders of the Dark Savant, the Dark Savant has taken flight with a device called the Astral Dominae, an incredibly powerful artifact containing the secret of life itself. Now, scheming to reunite two powerful artifact to become the most powerful figure that history has ever known, the Dark Savant has traveled to the planet of Dominus, a world on the cusp of the Cosmic Circle, birthplace of the Astral Dominae and home of the Cosmic Lords. Hot in pursuit however, are the two powerful races, the T'Rang and the Umpani, as well as your own brave party of adventurers. With the T'Rang and the Umpani occupied, it is now up to your party to find that artifact first and secure the fate of the cosmos.
Creating characters can prove to be interesting. The character creation system is not difficult to use, and it has a lot of options to choose from. Players can pick six from the excellent selection of pre-made characters, create their own characters from scratch or even import characters from Wizardry VII. After creating six members of the party from the fifteen different professions including the Gadgeteer and eleven races including the Lizardmen, players then distribute points to several attributes, spells are chosen for the magic users and skill points are assigned. Trying to decide what to improve of the over three dozen skills is difficult but probably the most fun part of character creation. When characters rise in level, they receive more points to assign to both their attributes, skills and spells. Characters can also improve their skills over time by using them.
Combat comes in two different modes. Players can choose to play with phased or continuous combat. Continuous combat is effectively real-time, and phased combat allows players time to catch their breath and think. However, characters are intelligent and will automatically try to attack the enemy closest to them, though they won't use spells, and if you don't turn off the auto weapon switching option, they'll select their ranged and melee weapons without your interference. Enemy A.I. also proves to be an equally good boon to the game. Most games of this type simply have enemies engage until one side or the other is dead. Here however, enemies which are scared or blinded will often run far away. Losing most of their companions or taking severe damage can also cause them to flee. The one weak point is that they will still engage initially even if they are seriously outclassed. Well, is not as if they have choice, do they?
Wizardry VIII is brought to life with well designed indoor and outdoor areas, each area possessing a distinct look to set it apart from the other equally creative scenes. Creatures also change "skins" when damaged, with wounds being readily apparent, giving players some idea of how close they are to death. As an added bonus, Wizardry VIII also features plenty of competent voice acting and wonderful sound effects to match. Characters shout out if they spot enemies, and even comment on an enemy's toughness. Characters also develop ties to each other, either expressing their regret or bidding a hearty "Good riddance" when a fellow member dies, depending on their relationship. This help your characters express their personalities, making them more memorable in a sense. Ambient sounds also abound on this world, and the music changes with the situation, especially if you are approaching danger.
An outstanding example of addictive gameplay, good graphics and fantastic sounds plus voice acting, Wizardry VIII is a worthy finale to the Wizardry series, as well as an excellent RPG in its own right. It has everything you could possibly ask for in a role-playing game, and should find a place in many a RPG fan's collection this holiday season.
