First of all, I must admit that it's been a while since I've really been bitten by the RPG bug, since lately my gaming life has revolved around strategy and multiplayer action games. But I do rather miss games with role-playing worlds that are deep and expansive - games like Ultima VII, Darklands, and Fallout; I don't miss giant dungeon crawls. Second, the recent turn toward action RPGs and massively multiplayer games hasn't made it easier for me to find a deep story-based role-playing game. I played MUDs enough back in my early college days not to feel a huge desire to jump back into a similar time sink. And though I find the combat action of Diablo II as instantly gratifying as many gamers do, there needs to be more than just point-and-item accumulation to keep me going.

While I think Dungeons & Dragons-based games have a lot of promise - including the sequel to an old friend, Pool of Radiance - the game I'm most hoping will satisfy my adventuring impulses is Arcanum. The reason is simply that I'm excited about the game's unique look and feel, which bring together a retro-technological look with familiar fantasy fixings like magic spells, elves, and dungeons. It's a big step for an RPG to break out of conventional settings. For example, Fallout revived the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max imagery first seen in the 1988 computer RPG Wasteland. I think that there's a continual need to find new worlds, environments, and character-rich settings for RPGs.

The well-established monster menagerie provides game designers with a large repertoire to which they can return again and again to create fantasy worlds that seem inextricably indebted to Tolkien. It is admittedly hard to invent the hordes of new creatures that a combat-heavy game requires for character development. A balance between innovation and familiarity is necessary, since players do need be able to figure out what's going on. Arcanum neatly balances the two by taking familiar races and putting them in a new context - for example, dwarves with guns. Indeed, making repeating rifles has got to be much more fun than being stuck baking bread all day.

Next: Ruins of Myth Drannor