Arcanum 2: Journey to the Center of Arcanum

hi everyone it's me Tim

today I want to talk about

the sequel to Arcanum

called Journey to the Center of Arcanum

so let me give you some background

um for those of you new

Troika games was a game Studio that I

started with Leonard barski and Jason

Anderson on April 1st 1998

and our first game that we shipped was

Arcanum

Arcanum shipped in 2001

using a new isometric engine we made

however even before it shipped we

started thinking about ideas for sequels

and that we wanted to make the jump to

3D

and we were talking to valve because the

VP of valve Scott Lynch had been the VP

who signed us to Sierra for Arcanum

and we were talking with them about

their Source engine

and we really wanted to use it

so we put together a design dock

which I still have I read through and

I'm like Whoa We were very ambitious uh

Troika liked to do a lot of things in

fact Arcana might commonly refer to as

our kitchen sink game

because if anybody had an idea including

me it went in the game I mean did we

really need fake points did we really

need the newspaper

did we really need procedurally

generated sectors in the world

no but we put them in anyway

so in Journey to the Center of our

kingdom we were going to make the jump

to 3D

we were going to have a lot of it take

place underneath

the world very much like Journey to the

Center of the Earth by Jules Verne the

inspiration

the storyline of the game

was

Franklin Payne who you may have met in

the first game The Big Game Hunter

Franklin Payne has gone missing and his

wife contacts you and hires you to find

out what happened

and she explains that he built a giant

boring machine

um very Elon Musk

to dig deep under the ground

and search all these underground Caverns

for what he was hoping to be

remains of a previous civilization

so you end up going down the

the shaft left by that boring machine

and searching for Franklin Payne and

along the way

just spoilers for this

23 year old design

you encounter

old civilizations most of them in Ruins

caveman

um dinosaurs that was gonna be fun

um because you know we had magic in Tech

you might as well throw dinosaurs in

there

and one of the

penultimate discoveries you made before

you found Franklin Payne was the

discovery of an ore

that let you blend magic and Technology

into the same item without them being in

conflict

and those items could be used then

independent of your magic Tech bar

so it was very exciting and

we had all these great ideas it didn't

happen

um which you know you know

what ended up happening is we

we were getting along really well with

Sierra with a valve

which later by the way LED to

us using the source engine in

collaboration with them on vampire

masquerades bloodlines

but instead what happened is even though

we talked about journeying Center

Arcanum as early as 2000

if a year before Arcanum shipped

when we finished Arcanum

in the summer of 2001 even though it

didn't ship until September

we started working on

a project and that was

Lord of the Rings

amazingly I still have the design

documents for that

and

I got the demo running again

so I'll make another video about that

and talk about that because that was

really interesting

um

we had some great ideas Jason Anderson

came up with this wonderful idea to

let you play in The Lord of the Rings

storyline

with an explanation for why

this particular group of people don't

appear in tolkien's books we even talked

with a Tolkien

a state expert

about our ideas and he liked them

but instead

um that demo got made and then Arcadium

shipped

Journey to the Arcanum obviously never

happened Sierra not only took back the

Lord of the Rings demo but

they were going through financial

difficulty so there was no Journey to

the Center of Arcanum

that led to us looking for other

contracts

we landed Temple and Bloodlines at

almost the same time which is why our

team got split into and I worked on

Temple and and Leonard and Jason worked

on bloodlines

I'm trying to remember some of the other

things that would be interesting about

Journey to the Center of Arcanum I mean

the fact that it would have been 3D it

would have been our first 3D game was

really cool we were ready to make that

leap we were seeing that 3D games had

the detail that we wanted

we were especially looking to do a lot

of indoor exploration you know caves and

big underground areas very different

than what we had on arcano most of which

was outdoor

um or very small caves and dungeons we

were also looking forward to

making the leap in the system mechanics

from an isometric set of system

mechanics to ones that worked better in

3D

interestingly that was in 2000

eight years later Bethesda took

Fallout one and two system mechanics

have made the leap into Fallout 3 which

was 3D

so it's interesting to see how all these

companies were doing roughly the same

thing at the same time

um

I don't regret that journey in the

center of Arcanum

wasn't made I'd like to tell people I

don't regret anything

however I am

slightly sorry that we announced it and

talked so much about it and then nothing

happened I feel like we got a lot of

people's hopes up and then

nothing happened

but anyway that's kind of the story of

Journey the set of arcaneum in a

nutshell uh if you have any questions

let me know

otherwise I don't know maybe I'll talk

about Lord of the Rings next it'd be fun

to show that video it's nothing special

in the Arcane Dimension it was done in a

matter of weeks but still a pretty cool

thing

anyway thanks