Video Version
Arcanum Revisited?
Set in a world on the brink of transformation, New Arc Line is a story-driven RPG that immerses players in a realm where magic and technology clash in a relentless struggle for dominance. Something you notice right from the start as the game opens up with the remnants of city blasted by some horrible disaster. It also has one of the worst names ever. It sounds like the name of a publisher with a spotty track record of microtransaction games.
It is actually coming from Ukrainian studio Dreamgate and I decided to take it for a spin especially as it's got enough vibes from games I like that its worth checking out.
In New Arc Line, everything is happening after the Magic-Technology Wars where science and engineering have triumphed over magic, or at least done so with enough gusto that magic is more of a undercurrent at the start. If it looks like Pillars of Eternity, Baldurs Gate and maybe a bit of Arcanum you would be right. All those games and more have influenced the developers in many ways.
It's a weird history here, Technologists, riding the wave of industrialization, have risen to power, relegating magic and their users to an almost second-class citizen with Sorcerers and enchanters overshadowed by inventors and engineers who now dictate the course of history. This battle has been going back and forth for ages. Each with their own massive problems. For example, magic users could become special powerfully respected mages by creating miracles but each one they created destroyed a bit of the reality each time. While of course the other side has its own issues. And the story is lodged firmly in the grips of a massive change.
The seas are ruled by steamboats, the skies are dominated by zeppelins, and the tools of war are no longer wands and staves, but guns, grenades, and automatons built for everything from sweeping up the blood and bandages from an illegal street fight to being used as secondary firepower for criminals bent on pulling off Cops tv show level of crimes.
In fact, it's the buildup of the automatons that have caused so many issues, just like the worries about AI in current news the automatons, mechanical marvels designed to revolutionize industry, have led to mass unemployment
Which has sort of flipped the sentiment on its head. Where technologists won the battle, even if it appeared to be a war, their replacement of workers have now caused the normal citizens to start to rise up and question the status que.
Basically 2 tyranny's fought, one lost, and now the winners are starting to question if being on top is worth it.
Making Those Sexy Characters
The game opens with you making a character choosing 2 races elf, humans currently each offering basics statistics. Also kudos to the devs as the character models actually look very good compared to some of the early access games I have played.
You have the typical choices of tattoos, facial setup, currently more of a set of templates, hairs, beards all that. Then you dive into the careers available for early access which are currently 2 the Voodoo user and diesel engineer. Both offer the ability to pick from a named trait think of this as a bucket of skills wrapped up in a title.
Scholars are educated in the old ways some of it useless but with a ton of intellectual power to bring to bear but a bit weak in the knees cause not many priests are doing fucking drop set squats.
Outsiders are people who have come out of a magic rift that may or may not connect to the story proper. They got the magic in their blood.
Renegade Cultists, this one is interesting. Its a background where you created and flourished a hidden evil cult but then at some point in your life decided to escape and try to make up for the error of your ways.
Guild spy's are ex-guild spy's actually taking on the mantel of desired change with all the skills that being a spy teaches like deception, slight of hand, and you know spy stuff.
Sole survivor is an odd one. your family have all been killed from the original stories upheaval and yet some in the city still know your name and it has some power, and I am sure some enemies. You are able to bring it to bear to get a bit more from people using persuasion or charm and other skills.
Arcane Researcher is a bit like the scholar except instead of studying the world and the various groups within it you studied magic and how to avoid being corrupted by it.
There is also Monster Hunters. You do a ton of damage and know your way away a fight.
There are a couple more as well, but you get the drift
As you will notice almost all of them have dueling definitions or more complex ones, that's just another way that the game tries to throw a bit of tit for tat in.
After that you add points to your main statistics as well as adding Specialties being both passive and active. Need to move a crashed car you can try to find a key somewhere nearby; you can try to figure out why the breaks are ceased up or you can try to move it all rolling on dice that check your specialty against a difficult set by the activity. Perks like Timekeeper that focuses a character because they know that every second counts so when they are in discussions or diplomacy, they are fiery and know that every decision matters. Experienced inventor gives you a plus 5 to technology.
After choosing the character the main game starts
Open but Closed
During a catastrophe a massive dragon had apparently destroyed the city, and you wake up, wearing nothing but what looks to be a hospital robe with some mysterious symbol on it and as you explore, as you talk to each denizen you realize somehow you have caused it.
Exploring the small first area you start to piece together the absolute destruction that has occurred. characters lament dying family members, others scream at you in hatred, and more are in a dire state of deep shock even as the mysterious steampunk magical items from the world float around, broken from their original machines.
It may be the closest to Arcanum we may ever get, except this opening area while information filled and thematically absolutely useful, is boring as shit. Luckily it's like 5 minutes but I swear it somehow felt like 15 or 20.
The biggest most notable issue is that you are hurt, which means you are pretty much dragging a bad leg behind you the entire way which makes movement slow.
After a bit of traipsing around you move to a cutscene where you find some ideas of why this has all occurred, the powerful in charge of automation and steampunk have driven the common man down into the dregs and a judge reads your diary and journal entries proving that you, in some way, have started all the cataclysmic.
Then it jumps a couple months past and that's where things get weird.
Sure, it's a trope used in many movies, books and games to leap backward but I thank the developers for making sure that happens because it sets up a small bit of knowledge on where the main stories background is and gives the player some pretty vital information on why the battle between the two groups is so important.
It also lets you see what you, or your choices may have caused with the opening docks looking like something pulled almost directly from the mind of Ken Levine.
It's here where you learn that you have just arrived to the city and need to check in, having your first real interaction with characters taking on small quests, mostly the, "I lost some random shit, or I need you to find random shit, or you just found random shit variety."
Perhaps the most interesting part is that almost instantly the writing goes places I didn't expect. For example, you find out pretty quickly that your second character a massive brawling fist a cuffs fighter is also a rampant drug user, and it's not just within their basic narrative as some small thing. Many charterers in the game indicate that the dealt or been dealing something illicit to him. It's actually far headier than I expected. the same goes for some of the other writing. while it's not exactly structurally complex in the narrative its god enough unique elements I caught myself actually interested in a side character for the first time in a long time in a game like this.
Another excellent change is the consistent narrative battle of magic versus steam tech. It's not only the character classes you choose but also the narrative. If you sway a region towards magic or tech during discussions and quests the region will be more useful and powerful in that changing the power of your attacks in battle, lending power to moves you do. It is a phenomenal way of merging quests and narrative and combat and ultimately warping all the parts together ways many games don't.
That doesn't mean the writing will work with everyone, but I will get to that in the Fun factor
At some point here, you will also get into your first true fight.
Combat runs on an initiative with each character taking turns and having action points for specific action, so far nothing incredible new or special hear and it works exactly as you would expect though movement isn't on a grid based system its just on a line system more like a miniatures tabletop game using a ruler. You get to test it out here and there, a fight on the warf, check, a couple random folks who get pissy when you pilfer their property check and check occasional random monster that was hiding in someones suitcase like a person carrying bedbugs across states, check and check.
It's an easy to grasp system and so far in the early access I haven't seen anything that either makes me hate or love it. it's just a solid system with you having those action points to move and fire and reload, as well as specialties. Like your second character you get who has a massive hammer that can do expected hammer things like stun or just absolutely pound someone like they are a strength test at a punching bag machine
Fighting isn't the only thing, in fact in discussions you not only have your skills you can utilize to get out of bad situations but also items that can be used from time to time. When you fail some checks you will get a second change using a magical card deck that is drawn from seemingly randomly that you can apply to the second try. As well as a pick pocketing mini game that has you using up points based on your skills to move through the various pockets of the victim with items uncovered by spending points as well as grabbing them, and you have to exit with points remaining. It's actually a pretty damned good mini game especially as with luck even a bad pickpocket skill might get something but also pushing your luck can even get a master thief caught.
Its a lot of systems and narratives going over one another that's for sure.
This is presented a few places in New Arc line and, I think is the crux that will decide if a gamer enjoys the title. For a small developer and publisher there is an insane amount going on in New Ard line that is influenced across different bits of the gameplay. From quests to random narrative, to choices in what you do or don't do for the world, and then in combat.
Where many games slowly build things up New Arc Line says, welcome and throws you down into some serious complexity, even if its currently in the nascent forms but god damn I love that.
Graphically especially after the first part of the game where you are forced to trudge around due to some kind of mysterious injury or maybe just really bad gas, looks amazing. It has an almost refreshing amount of world building even in the first locations with policemen taking in new entries to the city and as you sign in and show them your documentation for entry you can see an amazing amount of detail. From clutter around items to tons of characters in the background. Little graphical embellishments like your party members carrying a portable tech automaton on their back like master blaster from mad max and being able to craft weapons armor and explosives right there in the town square cause that doesn't seem suspicious at all.
Presentation is also where the games feeling of Bioshock Infinite come into play, where everything looks bright and cheery, with festival bits festooned around locations, but everywhere you look things are a bit off. There is a feeling, an undercurrent you see in animations and between groups that feeds back into the narrative. The city just excused atmosphere, from random drunks looking like they are teetering over their tables to robots working away on the side of a walkway in some mysterious job maybe only they know or a moment that looks like Dennis Rodmen is going street theater
Performance right now is ok, it has a number of options including upscaling, and while the 4090 didn't need it to crank everything the 2080 did, even at a lower resolution, sort of the typical expectations of Unreal engine here. Not bad but not amazing. With the 4090 I was able to hit 4k with all settings on ultra and stay above 70fps. But I have seen reports of people getting much worse performance. That might be because of a bug that is here Weirdly enough if you turn off framerate lock the game has low fps, or reports that, if you lock it at say 144 the fps skyrockets despite no locks, vsync or any other settings being done. An anomaly that I assume they will fix.
That being said God damn there are few games that look this good especially once you go into the main game proper. The art design and the way they present it just works for me. The little effects they have in palace like full reflections everything. It may not currently have the exact polish as something like Baldur's Gate but for early access it does a great job, other than the aforementioned lower fps than I would like. Oh, also my characters hair was transparent in layers when I chose the female and only in the inventory screen.
Some Sputtering in This Steampunk Engine
It's also not nearly as much content or actions ability as say Baldurs Gate 3's opening island, and that makes sense because they don't have metric fuck ton of money or integrations.
Also the camera likes to be obscured at times and it happened occasionally during cutscenes or discussions.
That being said its a war of magic versus technology. I play a lot of RPGS in the typical isometric vein and I can count on just 1 hand how many worlds really interest me from the start. Arcanum, tyranny, and only a couple others, however the mix of magic and tech the overlap of narrative impacting the battle ang gameplay and the characters absolutely have me interested in what's occurring. I found myself wanting to know every slang word or every term diving into conversations, which is rare for me where sometimes clicking one more narrative choice seems like a checklist named "be bored just a bit more"
I really enjoyed this. It doesn't break new ground in the control or viewpoint, and it does have its issues including a camera that absolutely will not be tamed sometimes. Even when turning the camera assistant off it needs some work for what it shows and doesn't show and some cutscenes have background in them sometimes cutting off what you are looking at.
While Arcanum had the back and forth between technology and magic of the world view within the character, here the outward facing elements and the idea of altering a locations overall emotional resonance with either magic or technology to race or lower the usefulness of it, was highly interesting but I need to see more.
But the world, the interesting characters worked for me, its a world I found to be a nice combination of old and new, the duality of steampunk versus magic, the way the narrative and quests can adjust the world, were all profoundly interesting. but like many of these games that deliver status que in some parts and a highlight in others, our millage and enjoyment will be directly tied into both the unique worldview and if you feel early access is something you want to engage in. A hard choice these days with so many titles not delivering or using early access like a beta test that you have to pay for.
Lastly there were some claims that possibly the dev used Ai for character shots. Steam requires a for that now and it's not tagged on the game, from what I saw and where I saw it, it didn't look like that. But maybe we will find out later.
The games length was about 9 hours for me, but I didn't fight every single bastard who was holed out in the city waiting for me and my pals to traipse in.
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