Has anyone played this game? I was looking in wikipedia for gesture recognition games and was reminded of the existance of this game from a while back - it is inspired by Ultima Underworld, a great classic IMO.
It seems to be compared in reviews with Morrowind, which also sounds good to me, and as I intend to play magic based chars in most games anyway the fact that the spell system is one of the best parts of the game helps.
Arx Fatalis
Arx Fatalis is quite an interesting game. It's much shorter than Morrowind but I found it to be a much more interesting game. You also can't max out all your abilities like in Morrowind. If you try to play a jack of all trades you will miss out. Better to specialize some and just replay with a different ability set.
The spell system is very cool but it can be extremely difficult to pull a spell out of your ass in the heat of the moment, so make sure you are constantly revisiting your 3 saved spell slots. Oh, and if you don't have a manual you should read some FAQs, because I found the controls a little confusing at first(OEM copy with mobo, lacked manual).
Also, if you have a modern ATI card you should look on-line to download some texture fixes.
The spell system is very cool but it can be extremely difficult to pull a spell out of your ass in the heat of the moment, so make sure you are constantly revisiting your 3 saved spell slots. Oh, and if you don't have a manual you should read some FAQs, because I found the controls a little confusing at first(OEM copy with mobo, lacked manual).
Also, if you have a modern ATI card you should look on-line to download some texture fixes.
I enjoyed Arx Fatalis, and it certainly receives residual goodness from emulating Looking Glass Studios. I wasn't digging parts of the main story (prophetic hero schlock), but the setting and magic system were indeed interesting.
While some people really hated the magic system--especially in the more tenser areas of the game--I rather liked it. It felt like I was getting better at magic casting along with my character. Towards the halfway point of the game, however, I started focusing more on melee and I believe this attributed to the downfall of my character. I was getting easily killed in one of the final dungeons of the game and finally gave up on it. Subsequently, I never did beat it but am still planning on replaying one of these days before Arkane releases the sequel (if and when they ever do).
You can find the game on Steam for ~$10 which is worth it, provided you can get the game to play these days. On other forums I remember hearing about rendering issues from BOTH nVidia and ATI. No idea how it runs on their latest drivers, however.
While some people really hated the magic system--especially in the more tenser areas of the game--I rather liked it. It felt like I was getting better at magic casting along with my character. Towards the halfway point of the game, however, I started focusing more on melee and I believe this attributed to the downfall of my character. I was getting easily killed in one of the final dungeons of the game and finally gave up on it. Subsequently, I never did beat it but am still planning on replaying one of these days before Arkane releases the sequel (if and when they ever do).
You can find the game on Steam for ~$10 which is worth it, provided you can get the game to play these days. On other forums I remember hearing about rendering issues from BOTH nVidia and ATI. No idea how it runs on their latest drivers, however.
Ok, loaded and patched it up to see how it fared these days and I had a few problems:
The first thing I noticed was that it runs like absolute crap on my 8800GTS + E6750. I was getting ~10FPS throughout the beginning area until I noticed that if there wasn't a torch on the screen, my FPS shot up to 85 (my refresh rate). Looking at a torch, however, drops it down to about 10-15FPS. Ouch. I did manage to fix this by turning AA off through the nVidia control panel. Without AA on it runs rock solid 85FPS... it just no longer has AA.
The second thing was that some objects were blank and had no textures. This caused them to appear simply and uniformly white which is quite strange. Luckily there's a resized-texture pack that you can download here that fixes the problem textures for modern video cards (scroll to bottom).
Apart from turning off AA and downloading the texture pack, though, it seems to run fine.
The first thing I noticed was that it runs like absolute crap on my 8800GTS + E6750. I was getting ~10FPS throughout the beginning area until I noticed that if there wasn't a torch on the screen, my FPS shot up to 85 (my refresh rate). Looking at a torch, however, drops it down to about 10-15FPS. Ouch. I did manage to fix this by turning AA off through the nVidia control panel. Without AA on it runs rock solid 85FPS... it just no longer has AA.
The second thing was that some objects were blank and had no textures. This caused them to appear simply and uniformly white which is quite strange. Luckily there's a resized-texture pack that you can download here that fixes the problem textures for modern video cards (scroll to bottom).
Apart from turning off AA and downloading the texture pack, though, it seems to run fine.
Re: Arx Fatalis
I finished it yesterday and liked the magic system a lot. The whole game is very reminiscent of Underworld (as the devs intended, I think) which is a plus. I loved UU1 and UU2. Too bad they didn't make more, as I vastly prefer UU to the regular Ultimas.
Ivo.
Ivo.
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Lord_Santa
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Re: Arx Fatalis
not being much of a magic-user in any CRPG's, but I love the magic-system in Arx Fatalis
but... melee is very entertaining as well
it's all so *very* "first person", which truly adds to the atmosphere (can see your chest/feet, etc) and all other nice little touches, make this a must-play for any and all dungeon-crawler fans
the almost seamless transition from UU1+UU2 is perfect; graphics are "on-par" with Morrowind, but sometimes looks "slightly" better, but mainly due to that it's a dungeon-crawler and not a open-world RPG (*but* you do have "free-roam")
the main-story (as pointed out) is kinda meh.
but overall game-play and replay-value makes this a true gem
:edit
by seamless transition, I mean that it is in the *spirit* of UU-Universe (everything down to cooking food)
but... melee is very entertaining as well
it's all so *very* "first person", which truly adds to the atmosphere (can see your chest/feet, etc) and all other nice little touches, make this a must-play for any and all dungeon-crawler fans
the almost seamless transition from UU1+UU2 is perfect; graphics are "on-par" with Morrowind, but sometimes looks "slightly" better, but mainly due to that it's a dungeon-crawler and not a open-world RPG (*but* you do have "free-roam")
the main-story (as pointed out) is kinda meh.
but overall game-play and replay-value makes this a true gem
:edit
by seamless transition, I mean that it is in the *spirit* of UU-Universe (everything down to cooking food)
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Re: Arx Fatalis
I picked it up from gog.com awhile back. I have only played the first hour of the game, but it was enjoyable.
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darthmunky
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Re: Arx Fatalis
If it's anything like Morrowind, I'm getting it!
Re: Arx Fatalis
It's got a cool game name; it arx fatalis means "deadly stronghold" in Latin.