Personally, I couldn't wait.

Arcanum definitely had the potential to be that new and different something. The developers, Troika Games, were comprised of former Fallout designers, and Arcanum also represented Sierra's first foray back into the role-playing arena, meant to be the serious genre-buster that Half-Life had been for first-person shooters. Everything was pointing to an RPG that would break the boundaries of traditional swords-and-sorcery gaming, by fusing the classic fantasy realm with a world in which technology had advanced to the rough equivalent of the Victorian Era.

Unfortunately, hype is also one of those things that can really hurt a game, and in almost every way, Arcanum fails to live up to what it promises. While there are times when Arcanum really shines, for the most part it is at best a mediocre undertaking.

Things start out cleverly enough -- you, as the main character, are traveling over the continent in an airship that is suddenly attacked by ogreish air pirates in bizarre flying machines. Your craft, fatally damaged, crashes at the base of a mountain range, and as you pull yourself from the wreckage, you come across a man bearing a mysterious ring and warnings of great evil. As he expires, he passes both along to you, begging you to find "the boy" and deliver the ring into his hands. From there, the great big world of Arcanum opens up, and any number of options are yours to explore.

And boy, there are options. Character creation alone is an endeavor that can eat up quite a bit of your time, if you're so interested. Attributes are broken down across eight different categories, which then influence your proficiency over 16 different skills, which in turn determine your capacity to perform dozens of specific tasks -- everything from mixing potions to casting spells to concocting explosives. Starting characters are granted skill points to assign to any level of these stats, with the potential to earn more as they advance in level. Aside from combat abilities, each of these skills is classified as either a Magickal or Mechanical discipline, and greater mastery in one will actually hamper your abilities in the other.

To add a touch of extra flavor, there are even background templates that can be chosen from your character, based on their race and gender. I personally chose to make my character the daughter of a hero, allowing her to inherit a +1 magickal weapon at the game's outset, but saddling her with a crippling reaction penalty if she ever commits an evil act. There are a number of others -- snake handler, bookworm and spoiled child all leap to mind, each with their own benefits and penalties -- and a few pre-generated characters for those who just want to leap into the game.

This kind of depth offers a lot of potential, but there's a chance that the overly-eager will spread their skills a little too thin, which can result in a pretty frustrating experience. Arcanum provides for this by offering an auto-levelling genie to take care of spreading your character points out across general classes, but that only really helps after you've gained a few levels. In the meantime, you might find yourself beaten to death several times by randomly encountered sewer rats or wolves, because you didn't bother to goose up your melée skills right away.

Once the actual gameplay began, I was struck by the kind of detail that went into the system driving Arcanum. Everything in the game world is laden with statistics, including weight, size, magickal or mechanical applications and -- in the case of NPCs -- reactions. Based on your race, your gender, your dress, your attributes, your skills, your magickal/mechanical disposition and countless invisible factors, non-player characters have the chance to respond very differently to you. It's too bad that, most of the time, they don't. I very deliberately angered a quest-giving government official in what I thought was the most permanent way possible, only to find that waiting a couple of in-game hours was all it took to strike up a conversation with him again.

Of course, there's a good chance that my particular example might be caused by a bug, because there are an awful lot of them in Arcanum. The first patch was released the day the game hit the shelves, with a second following almost a week afterwards. Most dramatic among the problems they address are a tendency for the game to fatally crash machines employing 64MB video cards (like mine), but there are a host of others, some of which can either seriously affect the outcome of a quest, the alignment of your character or the continuous operation of your computer.

The video card bug is especially confusing, because none of the graphics in Arcanum are particularly breathtaking. The maps seem to be dominated with low buildings, and are awash in gray, brown and dark green. I'm sure this is at least partially to invoke the sootiness of the Victorian age, but even the interiors of the more opulent buildings really only have the feel of a single-level dungeon. Even the characters aren't granted that much of their own detail -- costume or armor changes will give them a different look, but at one point I had a hard time telling one of my party members from a town guardsman who happened to be passing by. For a world that's supposed to be locked in conflict between the forces of magick and technology, you'd think that there'd be a little more, well, variety.

The musical score is simple and effective, with most of the in-game music being provided by elegant string instrumentals. It's appropriate to the period that the game is trying to evoke, and often does a better job of creating atmosphere than the graphics do. The sound effects alternate between the excellent (the thrilling zings of magical spells as they're cast), the adequate (the different sounds of footsteps on various types of terrain) and the confusing (the thud-thud of a sword against a foe). What voice-acting you hear is performed well, but it's used surprisingly little throughout the game. The vast majority of character interactions are carried out with white text that floats above an NPC's head; even your own party members are given only a few introductory lines of dialogue before they lapse into silence.

There are also some other options to extend your Arcanum experience, including an on-line gaming component and a module construction kit. As in Baldur's Gate, players can build a party on the Internet and run through a section of the game; however, they can only do so in modules, mini-adventures that are separate from the main plot. Troika packages a sample module with Arcanum to get players started, as well as the tools to build further modules, in the hopes that the gaming community will keep Arcanum fresh for some time to come.

It's a shame that Arcanum lacks as much polish as it does, because buried inside of it are the mechanics of a really great game. The opportunity to build your own weapons out of things you find in the city trash bins, role-play a mage that carries a six-shooter under her robes, or live the dream of being a dwarf whose favorite weapon is a flamethrower are all enticing. If the gameplay was a little less Dragon Warrior and a lot more Fallout, even the technical issues might be forgiven, and Arcanum might have become an instant classic.

As it stands, Arcanum is an exercise in frustration. There are so many moments when you know it can be a better game than it is, so many times when you're expecting it to break out and show you what it can really do, that you can't help being disappointed by the experience. But the both the studio and the system they've created show a lot of potential, and the few bright flashes of inspiration that Arcanum does demonstrate give some real hope for a strong follow-up effort from Troika Games.

Personally, I can't wait.