Arcanum Preview

The game that’s due out in a month and a half, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, has been previewed over at GameStats. Here’s a snippet:

Arcanum is an absolutely massive game, and as such the world map is suitably huge. You can get from point to point either by walking in the standard game map, setting way points in the world map, or taking trains or boats. Taking the trains or boat is usually by far the fastest mode of transportation, and walking in the world map is much faster than in the game map, where walking anywhere can literally take hours. If you were to make a journey from one side of the continent to the other, you could easily spend nearly a dozen real time hours walking-the game is just that big. There are also a great number of random things to find in the world, such as old ruins, mazes, dungeons, altars, and many other things that keep you wandering around for another hour after you were supposed to be done with your quests. In terms of sheer gameplay, I would safely estimate that Arcanum would offer a player who did a moderate number of quests nearly 100 hours of gameplay.