Arcanum and Morrowind were the best RPGs of my early teens. They blew me away at the time with their wealth of options and intricate worlds. I have often wondered whether it's just nostalgia, because I was an impressionable kid back then - 12 when I first played Arcanum, 13 or 14 when I first played Morrowind. But it's not. I replayed both of them not too long ago and they still hold up well. And there still aren't any newer games that even try to do the things these two excelled at.
They are both heavily flawed games. I already noticed the flaws back when I first played them, but they are all the more apparent now that I replayed them. But at the same time, the things they excel at became more noticeable too: especially when you compare them against modern RPGs.
Arcanum has an interesting character system that may be utterly broken (harm spam lol), but nevertheless offers a lot of different character builds to try. And since it's classless, you can mix and match as you like. You can even mix tech and magic skills on the same character and keep the aptitude balanced at zero, which is a pretty damn useless character build... but you can do it and have fun with it as an experienced player who just wants to fool around. Same with Morrowind. Lots of skills to choose from, some of which are pretty useless, and you are allowed to gimp yourself on purpose: a friend of mine back in the day made an Argonian pearl diver whose major skills were athletics and acrobatics, a completely useless character. Both games offer a huge amount of freedom in character building, and allow you to fuck it up without artificially safeguarding you from bad choices.
Arcanum, moreover, has the world react to your character creation choices like no other game beside it. Some quests are only available to characters of a certain sex (like Madam Lil's brothel quests which can only be performed by a woman). Many NPCs will react to your race. If you play a half ogre everyone will treat you like shit. Setting your intelligence below a certain threshold will make your character a drooling retard, and every NPC in the game will change his dialogues towards you. Questgivers will try to exploit your dumb ass by offering you lower rewards, while some others will just completely refuse to talk to an idiot like you. There hasn't been any RPG since Arcanum that has NPCs react to your character's race/attributes/sex so consistently as Arcanum. Nowhere else do your character creation choices make such a clear difference as in Arcanum.
And it's not only your character, it's also his choices during gameplay. There are many quests with multiple solutions and outcomes. You can kill EVERY essential questgiver NPC in the game and there's always some alternative way to progress the main quest. Which doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so, but it's possible. Some quests have a huge range of possible outcomes, depending on several variables. There's an alchemist in Shrouded Hills who hates technology and wants you to destroy the local steam engine. If you do it, the simple-minded dwarf who tends to the engine will attack you. If you have any companions with you, they'll kill the dwarf in self-defense, but on my most recent playthrough I left Virgil outside, hit the dwarf until he ran away with broken morale, and left the building. And then I found a consequence I had never encountered before: if the dwarf is still alive, he will tell the constable about it, and the constable will refuse to talk to you ever again! Most players will never see that, because if you have companions with you when you destroy the steam engine, the dwarf will not survive. And yet the devs made sure to add an alternate outcome for when he survives. Fuck yeah. If he doesn't survive, the constable has no idea who destroyed the steam engine though... and will task the player with repairing it. If you do repair it, the alchemist who gave you the initial quest of destroying it won't talk to you ever again because he feels betrayed. Cool stuff. And that's not the only quest with several variables: there's a stolen painting quest in Tarant where the usual way of doing it is to talk to the woman it was stolen from, get the quest to find it, then search for it and return it. If you get it before talking to her and barge into her house to turn it in, she will think you're a scammer who stole it from her and now tries to sell it back, because why else would you both have the painting in your possession and know that she wants it back?
Which other game has such intricate condition-based differences in its quests? Arcanum does this aspect of RPG design perfectly. It even pays attention to the order in which you do things, and reacts accordingly. Everything can matter in an Arcanum quest: what other quests have you solved before? What is your character's race? What is your character's sex? In which order have you gone through the quest stages? Have you talked to anyone else before? Arcanum's quest design and reactivity in unsurpassed. Nobody else has even attempted to go anywhere near Arcanum's quality in this aspect.
And then there's the secrets. Arcanum has so much hidden content, that isn't impossible to find because there's enough hints for it, but it never holds your hand. Dialogue options that result from a high INT or CHA score aren't tagged as such! You have to realize that this is a smart thing to say by yourself! There's the option of getting an ultimate blessing from ancient gods, and there are some vague hints on how it works, but it's never marked as a quest and you have to figure out the sequence yourself based on cryptic hints. You can find the real tomb of Mannox but it's in an unmarked location and nobody ever explicitly tells you how to get there, or where it even is. And then there's the quest to find the Iron Clan. Lots of things that actually take some effort to discover and aren't presented to you on a silver platter.
Morrowind has the same great strength. There are unique artifacts hidden all over the place, and you find them by naturally exploring the landscape and delving into dungeons. The Imperial Cult questline even has some "oracle quests" where you are sent to retrieve artifacts, and their location is described to you in vague descriptions of the surrounding landscape. There are, of course, no quest markers for anything in this game. Only descriptions of how to get there: follow this road, take a right after the bridge, etc etc. You have to actually look at your surroundings to find your way, and the game allows you to get lost in the wilderness. Modern games don't allow you to get lost, they always put some markers into your interface to point the way. When I replayed Morrowind years after last playing it, it felt so incredibly refreshing to just be lost with only a vague idea on how to get where I wanted to be.
Morrowind's equipment system is awesome, too, and apart from very few exceptions I can count on half a hand (Kingdom Come Deliverance, Neo Scavenger) no other RPG has ever implemented anything like it. Armor is split into different parts and can be layered with clothing. There are 16 individiual equipment slots in this game. 16. Helmet, cuirass, left pauldron, right pauldron, left gauntlet, right gauntlet, greaves, boots, shirt, pants, skirt, robe, belt, left ring, right ring, amulet. Not even modern AAA RPGs that claim to offer a lot of customization in the appearance of your character offer such detailed mix-and-match equipment systems. And it's not only fun for playing dressup, it also makes hunting down a full set of armor more difficult and rewarding. Daedric armor is the best armor in the game, and for most parts of the armor, there is only ONE piece in the entire game. Finally tracking down a full set feels like an accomplishment, because you don't just have to find armor + boots + helmet, but... cuirass, boots, helmet, greaves, left pauldron, right pauldron, left gauntlet, right gauntlet. It's a real fucking journey to find all of these. And of course, the game allows you to enchant every single type of equipment piece there is. Magic pants. Magic skirt. Magic robe. Magic belt. Everything magic. You can even enchant items by yourself, but are limited by the item's capacity for magic (higher quality = more capacity).
Morrowind's exotic but believable world also plays a huge role in its immersion. The world is full of weird shit, but it all makes sense. And while there's a lot of massive lore text dumps, you don't even need to read them to understand how this world works. There is enough top quality non-verbal world design: you know exactly what these people eat and where it comes from, as you can walk through farmland and visit egg mines. Different towns have different architectural styles to set them apart. Guards of great houses wear different styles of armor, made of the same material but with different stylistic elements. It feels like a real place populated by real people, despite the staticness of the NPCs.
One of my favorite memories from Morrowind is how I screwed up a main quest for myself back on my first playthrough as a teenager. I stole a couple of expensive books from Jobasha's Rare Books, a bookstore in Vivec. They had a high monetary value, so I stole them and sold them elsewhere (because vendors realize when you try to sell them their own stolen wares). Later in the game there's a main quest where you have to find a rare book. There are only two copies of it. One is in a heavily guarded temple library, the other is... for sale at Jobasha's Rare Books. Yep, I had stolen that book earlier and sold it to some random merchant in some peasant village I didn't even remember anymore. And my sneak skill was nowhere near good enough to get my hands on the copy in the temple library. So I screwed myself out of the main quest without even knowing. The game allows you to screw yourself and make major mistakes like that! It's awesome.
And since then, no other RPG has attempted to do the things Arcanum and Morrowind do. Some games have taken single elements from them, sure, but nobody has ever tried to make a coherent spiritual successor to this style of game design. The only upcoming game I can think of that tries to go for Arcanum's approach to quest design is Space Wreck. Maybe Colony Ship too, but Age of Decadence had a much more guided way of presenting its C&C than Arcanum, so I dunno.
These two games have been sitting on their throne for twenty years, and in all that time nobody has even attempted to dethrone them. Pretty much every RPG released since offers less than these two games, rather than more.
Will there ever be something to surpass them? Or are we doomed to live in a world where such greatness will never be seen again?
They are both heavily flawed games. I already noticed the flaws back when I first played them, but they are all the more apparent now that I replayed them. But at the same time, the things they excel at became more noticeable too: especially when you compare them against modern RPGs.
Arcanum has an interesting character system that may be utterly broken (harm spam lol), but nevertheless offers a lot of different character builds to try. And since it's classless, you can mix and match as you like. You can even mix tech and magic skills on the same character and keep the aptitude balanced at zero, which is a pretty damn useless character build... but you can do it and have fun with it as an experienced player who just wants to fool around. Same with Morrowind. Lots of skills to choose from, some of which are pretty useless, and you are allowed to gimp yourself on purpose: a friend of mine back in the day made an Argonian pearl diver whose major skills were athletics and acrobatics, a completely useless character. Both games offer a huge amount of freedom in character building, and allow you to fuck it up without artificially safeguarding you from bad choices.
Arcanum, moreover, has the world react to your character creation choices like no other game beside it. Some quests are only available to characters of a certain sex (like Madam Lil's brothel quests which can only be performed by a woman). Many NPCs will react to your race. If you play a half ogre everyone will treat you like shit. Setting your intelligence below a certain threshold will make your character a drooling retard, and every NPC in the game will change his dialogues towards you. Questgivers will try to exploit your dumb ass by offering you lower rewards, while some others will just completely refuse to talk to an idiot like you. There hasn't been any RPG since Arcanum that has NPCs react to your character's race/attributes/sex so consistently as Arcanum. Nowhere else do your character creation choices make such a clear difference as in Arcanum.
And it's not only your character, it's also his choices during gameplay. There are many quests with multiple solutions and outcomes. You can kill EVERY essential questgiver NPC in the game and there's always some alternative way to progress the main quest. Which doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so, but it's possible. Some quests have a huge range of possible outcomes, depending on several variables. There's an alchemist in Shrouded Hills who hates technology and wants you to destroy the local steam engine. If you do it, the simple-minded dwarf who tends to the engine will attack you. If you have any companions with you, they'll kill the dwarf in self-defense, but on my most recent playthrough I left Virgil outside, hit the dwarf until he ran away with broken morale, and left the building. And then I found a consequence I had never encountered before: if the dwarf is still alive, he will tell the constable about it, and the constable will refuse to talk to you ever again! Most players will never see that, because if you have companions with you when you destroy the steam engine, the dwarf will not survive. And yet the devs made sure to add an alternate outcome for when he survives. Fuck yeah. If he doesn't survive, the constable has no idea who destroyed the steam engine though... and will task the player with repairing it. If you do repair it, the alchemist who gave you the initial quest of destroying it won't talk to you ever again because he feels betrayed. Cool stuff. And that's not the only quest with several variables: there's a stolen painting quest in Tarant where the usual way of doing it is to talk to the woman it was stolen from, get the quest to find it, then search for it and return it. If you get it before talking to her and barge into her house to turn it in, she will think you're a scammer who stole it from her and now tries to sell it back, because why else would you both have the painting in your possession and know that she wants it back?
Which other game has such intricate condition-based differences in its quests? Arcanum does this aspect of RPG design perfectly. It even pays attention to the order in which you do things, and reacts accordingly. Everything can matter in an Arcanum quest: what other quests have you solved before? What is your character's race? What is your character's sex? In which order have you gone through the quest stages? Have you talked to anyone else before? Arcanum's quest design and reactivity in unsurpassed. Nobody else has even attempted to go anywhere near Arcanum's quality in this aspect.
And then there's the secrets. Arcanum has so much hidden content, that isn't impossible to find because there's enough hints for it, but it never holds your hand. Dialogue options that result from a high INT or CHA score aren't tagged as such! You have to realize that this is a smart thing to say by yourself! There's the option of getting an ultimate blessing from ancient gods, and there are some vague hints on how it works, but it's never marked as a quest and you have to figure out the sequence yourself based on cryptic hints. You can find the real tomb of Mannox but it's in an unmarked location and nobody ever explicitly tells you how to get there, or where it even is. And then there's the quest to find the Iron Clan. Lots of things that actually take some effort to discover and aren't presented to you on a silver platter.
Morrowind has the same great strength. There are unique artifacts hidden all over the place, and you find them by naturally exploring the landscape and delving into dungeons. The Imperial Cult questline even has some "oracle quests" where you are sent to retrieve artifacts, and their location is described to you in vague descriptions of the surrounding landscape. There are, of course, no quest markers for anything in this game. Only descriptions of how to get there: follow this road, take a right after the bridge, etc etc. You have to actually look at your surroundings to find your way, and the game allows you to get lost in the wilderness. Modern games don't allow you to get lost, they always put some markers into your interface to point the way. When I replayed Morrowind years after last playing it, it felt so incredibly refreshing to just be lost with only a vague idea on how to get where I wanted to be.
Morrowind's equipment system is awesome, too, and apart from very few exceptions I can count on half a hand (Kingdom Come Deliverance, Neo Scavenger) no other RPG has ever implemented anything like it. Armor is split into different parts and can be layered with clothing. There are 16 individiual equipment slots in this game. 16. Helmet, cuirass, left pauldron, right pauldron, left gauntlet, right gauntlet, greaves, boots, shirt, pants, skirt, robe, belt, left ring, right ring, amulet. Not even modern AAA RPGs that claim to offer a lot of customization in the appearance of your character offer such detailed mix-and-match equipment systems. And it's not only fun for playing dressup, it also makes hunting down a full set of armor more difficult and rewarding. Daedric armor is the best armor in the game, and for most parts of the armor, there is only ONE piece in the entire game. Finally tracking down a full set feels like an accomplishment, because you don't just have to find armor + boots + helmet, but... cuirass, boots, helmet, greaves, left pauldron, right pauldron, left gauntlet, right gauntlet. It's a real fucking journey to find all of these. And of course, the game allows you to enchant every single type of equipment piece there is. Magic pants. Magic skirt. Magic robe. Magic belt. Everything magic. You can even enchant items by yourself, but are limited by the item's capacity for magic (higher quality = more capacity).
Morrowind's exotic but believable world also plays a huge role in its immersion. The world is full of weird shit, but it all makes sense. And while there's a lot of massive lore text dumps, you don't even need to read them to understand how this world works. There is enough top quality non-verbal world design: you know exactly what these people eat and where it comes from, as you can walk through farmland and visit egg mines. Different towns have different architectural styles to set them apart. Guards of great houses wear different styles of armor, made of the same material but with different stylistic elements. It feels like a real place populated by real people, despite the staticness of the NPCs.
One of my favorite memories from Morrowind is how I screwed up a main quest for myself back on my first playthrough as a teenager. I stole a couple of expensive books from Jobasha's Rare Books, a bookstore in Vivec. They had a high monetary value, so I stole them and sold them elsewhere (because vendors realize when you try to sell them their own stolen wares). Later in the game there's a main quest where you have to find a rare book. There are only two copies of it. One is in a heavily guarded temple library, the other is... for sale at Jobasha's Rare Books. Yep, I had stolen that book earlier and sold it to some random merchant in some peasant village I didn't even remember anymore. And my sneak skill was nowhere near good enough to get my hands on the copy in the temple library. So I screwed myself out of the main quest without even knowing. The game allows you to screw yourself and make major mistakes like that! It's awesome.
And since then, no other RPG has attempted to do the things Arcanum and Morrowind do. Some games have taken single elements from them, sure, but nobody has ever tried to make a coherent spiritual successor to this style of game design. The only upcoming game I can think of that tries to go for Arcanum's approach to quest design is Space Wreck. Maybe Colony Ship too, but Age of Decadence had a much more guided way of presenting its C&C than Arcanum, so I dunno.
These two games have been sitting on their throne for twenty years, and in all that time nobody has even attempted to dethrone them. Pretty much every RPG released since offers less than these two games, rather than more.
Will there ever be something to surpass them? Or are we doomed to live in a world where such greatness will never be seen again?
