New development house Troika Games, founded by the developers of the popular RPG Fallout, have been beavering away on their first game, to be published later this year by Sierra. Guess what? It's an RPG!
Andy Smith

Let me guess, post-nuclear holocaust setting?
Oh you wag. No, this one's a curious mix of fantasy sort of meeting reality.

Come again?
Well, the setting of the game is a world where fantasy and magic exist but the inhabitants have just undergone the Industrial Revolution of late 1800s Europe. You know, where steam-powered machines revolutionised manufacturing and got everyone out of their cottages and into the factories?

Oh. Sounds interesting.
We thought so too - it reminds us of that cyberpunk novel called, er, The Difference Engine or something, by that, er, cyberpunk bloke. In the world of Arcanum, populated by the usual RPG mix of gnomes, dwarfs and halflings, the races are coming to terms with the fact that they can use flintlock pistols as well as flaming swords. The game concerns itself with how these different races react to their newly changed world: some embrace the new technology, some reject it and some are marginalised by it.

There's still magic though?
Yes, but technology's on the rise and magic's on the decline.

Does it have the usual RPG make-up of quests and sub-quests?
Certainly does. There are several major quests to undertake, each with multiple paths to their conclusion, which should help a lot with the game's replay value. There are also hundreds of sub-quests to get sidetracked by.

Anything innovative?
Actually, yes. The team have got rid of any notion of character classes. Arcanum uses a classless, points-based system whereby players use points they've gained to 'buy' different attributes for their characters. There are some 16 primary skills that you can improve upon as you progress, including the usual lock picking, healing and gambling. If you're more into the adventuring side of things, though, you can allow all this character development stuff to be handled by the computer while you concentrate on the quests you've undertaken.