Sure, I probably played Arcanum (2001) five or six times. But I spent the years from about 1999 to 2006 playing Angband and Sid Meier's Alpha C. That's the kind of difference in replay value. And the only reason I played Arcanum more than once is that the different characters offered different gameplay, e.g. "this time let's be an explosives expert," or "this time let's be a really charismatic gnome".
Arcanum was good story stacked on mostly poor gameplay. It wanted to be a steam punk fallout and the story/setting carried out through what was otherwise pretty shitty gameplay.
I tend to agree that I liked the idea of the gameplay more than the way it actually worked out. I remember things such as: a pet dog you could add to your party who would steal all the experience points for himself; a skills system where in theory you could mix magic and technology, but in practice they interfered and more than negated any benefit of being creative with it; and a graveyard where zombies would spawn endlessly so that you could grind them for XP for as long as you could bear it.
I guess the atmosphere sells me on games. That's a whole other thing. I note "/setting".
