Arx Fatalis is an action role-playing gamedeveloped by Arkane Studios and published by JoWood and Dreamcatcher Interactive, released in 2002 for Windows and 2003 for the Xbox. This is a single-player game.
This game generally received extremely positive reviews from the gaming press; it was praised for its original and pleasant gameplay, as well as for its well-executed environments. It is an unofficial sequel to the game Ultima Underworldand offers many similarities compared to this game.
Arx Fatalis takes place in a fantasyworld that used to be a prosperous land but one day the sun failed and the inhabitants were forced to take refuge in subterranean. In these places the inhabitants started to build new cities in which humans, trolls, goblins and dwarves were living together peacefully and made their homes on various levels of the cave.
However through time the scarce resources became too few for everyone. The animosity between the different species began to rise and conflicts between races occurred.
The entire game will takes place in one of these large caverns; your character awakens in a prison cell, he does not remember anything even who he is and why he is here. He eventually managed to escape and discovers that he has a mission that is to imprison and subvert the God of Destruction Akbaa who is trying to manifest itself in the Arx s world.
You can create your character by applying him ability points to four core attributes and skill points to a number of different abilities, from close combat, magic, to stealth, intuition and object knowledge.
While playing you will obviously gain experience levels that will let you further improve these attributes. In other words you can decide to specialize your character or balanced its abilities, it is up to you.
You will have to combat, explore and interact with all non-playable character, and as Arx Fatalis is a first-person game you will see all by the eyes of your character, and you will go through the different part of the cavern connected by tunnels and ladders.
Arx Fatalis features a quite dark world; indeed most places lack light sources, but it can be an advantage for you as it will ease your progression by allowing you to stealthily move in the shadows; or it can also forced you to use torches to lighten up a room o search for some object or find your way in a path.
The environments in Arx Fatalis are filled with details and you will be able to use the local flora to brew various potions and so you can move and throw things. Do not forget to feed your character or he will be weakened and could more easily lose combats.
For the combats you will have to find and use some ranged weapon that you will find in the Arx Fatalis world. You will use swords, clubs and axes to execute thrusting, slashing and chopping moves against your opponents.
You can also cast spells by using the proper hand gesture; you will first need to find the proper runes, and you then trace the symbols on the runes in the air using your mouse. A successful combination of rune symbols will cast the spell. There are 50 spells available across 10 increasingly powerful spell levels.
With Arx Fatalis, Arkane Studios intended to pay homage to the classic early-'90s first-person role-playing game Ultima Underworld, but it has done much more than just imitate that game.
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You know Morrowind? Gigantic game world? Hundreds of hours of RPG gameplay? More story than a Robert Jordan novel? Right, that one. Think of Arx Fatalis as a sort of anti-Morrowind: it's a similar game, but it also tries to rein in some of the more gregarious faults of Bethesda's epic.
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