DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS

ARCANUM: OF STEAMWORKS AND MAGICK OBSCURA SYSTEM: PC

YEAR: 2001

THE TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL (PICTURED) SYSTEM: PC

YEAR: 2003

VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE BLOODLINES SYSTEM: PC

YEAR: 2004 is infamously unbalanced in Arcanum, with those wishing to play a debonair steampunk gunslinger having a much rougher time than magic-based builds. “Magic was completely unbalanced in Arcanum,” admits Tim. “The time needed to make a balancing pass was lost when other features ran over their scheduled times.”

The balance went further out of whack when the game’s skill system was changed late in development. The main change was that skill levelling was converted to a single-point system from one in which higher level skills cost more to level. Tim, who was in charge of the game’s combat and character design, was the only holdout at Troika at the time for the original system.

“That is one of my biggest regrets,” rues Tim. “I seemed to be the only one defending the original system, so I remember thinking, ‘Everyone wants this, I must be wrong,’ so I changed it to a single-point cost system to try to fix the imbalances. I was not successful. The worst part? When one of my Troika coworkers, the guy most vocal about me needing to change the skill system, turned to me a few weeks after we shipped and said, ‘You never should have changed that.’”

“We all wore him [Tim] down and I take my share of responsibility for that,” says Leonard. “In hindsight, I wish we’d stuck with our original vision for the skill system.”

But this was probably the most significant point of friction in an otherwise harmonious project. Tim, Jason and Leonard were joint CEOS, and every major decision had to be unanimously agreed upon. Instead of causing rifts about what should go into the game and what shouldn’t, this structure instead resulted in pretty much everything the trio envisioned making the final cut.

With little oversight from Sierra, which remained hands-off, the team was creatively let loose, much like it was with the original Fallout. So when we ask Tim and Leonard about any interesting ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, they have nothing for us. “Tim called it our ‘kitchen-sink game’,” says Leonard. “Every idea that we had went in. We wouldn’t cut things, we just said, ‘This is the game. This is what we’re doing.’”

“I SEEMED TO BE THE ONLY ONE DEFENDING THE ORIGINAL SYSTEM, SO I REMEMBER THINKING, ‘EVERYONE WANTS THIS, I MUST BE WRONG’” Tim Cain

Arcanum really thrives in the quest design. Even if every main NPC in the game is killed, it can still be completed. At the same time, it is unafraid to lock players off from large chunks of content based on their decisions and character development. More than most games of its time – or since – Arcanum expertly manages that RPG tension between player freedom and consequential decision-making.

The ring you receive right at the start of the game, for example, is the first item to set you on course for the main questline. The default path will probably see you asking around at a local town about the ring’s origin, before going to the big city of Tarant and tracking down the inventor Gilbert Bates. But you can sell the ring, if you like, and instead use your sneaking skills to break into the Bates mansion in Tarant. Or you could just kill interested parties, then go through their belongings or speak with their spirits for clues. There is always an alternative.

‘Brigands At The Bridge’ is an early-game quest where you need to deal with some highwaymen blocking your path out of the village of Shrouded Hills. You can kill them, persuade them to let you pass or do some work for them. Do the latter, and you get tipped off about the Thieves’ Underground, which unlocks a whole path of deceit and skulduggery for evil-leaning characters. Your decisions in Shrouded Hills ultimately dictate whether the town flourishes or falls apart at the end of the game.

n perhaps the biggest showcase of how disruptable the world is (and one of Leonard’s favourite quests), you can even destroy the city of Tarant. “I don’t know a lot of people that did it, but there’s a half-orc in Tarant who’s leading an uprising,” says Leonard. “If you had the right skills and information, you could talk him into unleashing the orcs and destroying Tarant.” Doing so would wipe out all the traders, quest-givers and NPCS in the city, yet still you could complete the game.

This kind of emergent gameplay seems like it would require some serious preplanning and an intricate web of mind-mapping to pull off properly. But in true Troika style, that wasn’t the case.

“You’d think that there was this grand plan about how it would all fit together, but it was more like flying by the seat of our pants,” recalls Leonard.

“We’d be talking about the plot point, figuring it out, then suddenly ask, ‘Okay, what happens if the player kills this NPC before you even talk to them. Or if you steal that ring…’ We’d come up with stuff to deal with that.”

But such freedom wouldn’t be possible without the cogs and well-oiled machinery in the engine room. Tim designed Arcanum’s game engine, as well as the map editor and scripting tools. It was all so easy to use that Leonard – who describes himself as very much an artist and hardly technical – was able to get involved in the game’s scripting and mapmaking.

“The tools were probably too powerful,” recalls Leonard. “We did crazy stuff with reactivity. We had so much power at our fingertips. I was making maps (which I’d never done before and maybe that shows in the gameplay), writing and scripting at the same time. It was an effective way to make content. As you’re figuring out how to put it in the game you’re seeing all these things that you didn’t think of before, so you can change the content to work better with the tools.”

The Arcanum engine was surprisingly robust, capable of procedurally generating an overland map “the size of the US”, according to Tim. “You could spend game months wandering the continent, dropping items in different sectors as you went, never encountering load screens if you stayed outdoors. And any sector you revisited was exactly how you left it. Dropped a sword among some flowers under a tree in some random meadow? It will be there when you come back.”

Arcanum isn’t a perfect game, carrying with it all the bugs and imbalances that have, if anything, become a standardised feature of RPGS that bear the lofty promise of untethered player freedom. With so many permutations of characters you could build in the classless system, ways of completing quests and decisions that affect the game world, it was impossible for the 14-strong development team at Troika to account for everything.

But in offering such a wild frontier of role-playing possibilities, Arcanum, for all its flaws, remains an exemplary RPG – a hotbed of bold ideas and quests that intermingle and unfold in ways that never stop surprising the player. The game was Troika’s biggest commercial success too, teasing a promising future for the studio that ultimately failed to materialise.

Crucially, Arcanum showcases the potential for a project with shared leadership and unanimity in decision-making to succeed. All the team’s chaos and creativity – the magicka and tech – was embodied in the final game, showing that the two forces could come together to create something special after all.

Tim looks back fondly on Troika’s company structure. “Everyone told us it was a horrible idea, but it seemed to work out… except for the part that we lost our company!” Leonard laughs. “But in terms of us getting on and running a company that way. At the end of Troika we were just as good friends as when we started”.

“YOU COULD SPEND GAME MONTHS WANDERING THE CONTINENT, DROPPING ITEMS IN DIFFERENT SECTORS AS YOU WENT, NEVER ENCOUNTERING LOAD SCREENS IF YOU STAYED OUTDOORS” Leonard Boyarsky