Discovered a hidden gem

[Rennn]

I was browsing Steam yesterday, looking for good games. I found Arx Fatalis by accident, and what I discovered was pretty impressive. It's a first-person rpg with a unique story and a very unique setting; the sun died, and the surface of the world is frozen. Everyone left lives underground, hunted by rat-men and other creatures. That's the basic premise.

 

What really impressed me was the attention to detail that I was able to identify through a couple youtube videos.

As I said before, the game is in first person, a rarity in rpgs. If you look down you can see your feet and legs, and this is from a game in 2002, remember! Most modern rpgs still don't do that. I later found that you actually cast spells by "drawing" glowing runes with your mouse.

 

The AI and environmental interaction is also more complex than many games today, let alone a game from a decade ago. For example, I saw a person pick up a brick and bash open the bars of a cage in real-time. He later picked up a rock and threw it at an enemy in order to lure it away from its friends.

 

To top it off, the game takes place in a sandbox environment with many alternate paths and a free-form style of adventuring. It's not as open as Oblivion, but it's more open than games such as Dragon Age. The art style is dark and brown, and the game takes place underground. Arx Fatalis's style is a sort of hybrid between an English style of Feudalism and a darker form of ancient Egyptian architecture.

 

I was worried, however, that the game would have no mod capability, and that it wouldn't run on Windows 7. Fortunately, Arkane Studies, also responsible for Dishonored, released a patch nine years after the game's initial release adding high-resolution support and Windows Vista/7 support. They also released the game's source code as a gift to the fans. Long-term dev support doesn't get better than that!

 

Although Arx Fatalis is available dirt cheap on Steam, I personally bought a new sealed copy from Amazon for five times Steam's price, lol. I prefer no drm when possible, especially if there's a chance of the Steam version not working correctly with mods. Anyway, I wanted to post this as a tip for people who like darker rpgs and who don't mind dated graphics. All my late-night internet searches for hidden gems didn't turn up much, and it's pure luck that I found Arx Fatalis at all, so people with similar interests might want to give this game a look.

[lostone1993]

Yes its unique game, but you haven’t said some of worst things. It has lots of bugs. Personally while the game is good, the constant bugs, including save corrupting and game crashing bugs very quickly turned me off.

Also I have the vista while patch did make it work it had some of the worst graphic glitches I have ever seen

 

Not trying to turn you off just thought it was worth the warning

[Rennn]

Hopefully I'll have better luck...

 

If not, there are almost certainly fixes online for some of the problems, considering fans used the source code to remake the game.

Failing that, I'd just have to be sure to get XP for a notebook instead of using Windows 7 like my gaming rig. It's not exactly a hard game to run, lol.

Edited June 15, 2012 by Rennn

[Deleted472477User]

I tried it out briefly a few years ago, but couldn't get into it. sounds like it's worth another look.

[Rennn]

I've spent four hours compiling every piece of editing software, bugfixes, and file I can find. Many of the main links are dead, as expected, but I think I've finally got everything saved and backed up. If need be I'll make fifty saves and load Windows 2000 on a notebook. When I buy a game I get really dedicated to liking it, lol.

 

It does sound buggy, unfortunately. If there's nothing absolutely gamebreaking I can either work around it or probably fix it eventually, considering how much data Arkane gave out.

Edited June 15, 2012 by Rennn

[eric31415]

I have some fond memories of Arx Fatalis. I played this on the Xbox a long time ago, at least twice. One of my favorite RPGs ever.

 

Besides an interesting story and environment, the game had some really cool features for it's day. Throw an item to distract your enemies, toss a raw chicken in a fire to cook it (or kill the chicken with a fireball...), extinguish torches for better sneaking, the cooking/crafting system (Skyrim gave me some flashbacks to this game), fishing, and probably more that i don't remember. All in all, it did a great job of making you feel involved.

 

Interestinglly, Zenimax (parent of Bethesda) now owns Arkane studios.

 

According to Arkane's site, they are currently hiring...

[Rennn]

I got the game and patched it. So far I haven't seen any graphical bugs, which is good. My framerate dives to 20 fps when I look at my journal, but I already knew about that before I bought it. It's too early to tell about save corruption, but so far I'm happy with how this has turned out.

[Halororor]

It's an amazing game, but it suffered from some serious performance issues last time I tried it. Maybe I should try again, seeing as I formatted my PC a few months ago.

[Aegrus]

I bought it on Steam recently. No graphical bugs that I can see, with an AMD gpu. I played a bit of it and it ran well, though for some reason my frame rate dies when I walk under a waterfall. . .

I haven't played it much, since I got back into Dragon Age Origins, but it's been fun so far. Reminds me a little of the old King's Field games.

[Rennn]

I did notice a bug. If your framerate gets too high the game will sometimes speed up in relation to your framerate. I fixed it by capping my framerate at 45.

 

I don't have that waterfall problem, btw.

Edited June 24, 2012 by Rennn