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Sacred - It really is that good - TrueMuppet - 04-21-2004
Roland's post is right on the money. Sacred is nowhere near being 'a Diablo killer'; I'd say that in half a year, perhaps a year should Ascaron do an expansion, noone except for the die hard fans will still be playing Sacred. I got it the day it was released in Germany, i.e. end of February. I looked forward to it a great deal & found myself decidedly underwhelmed.
Reasons:
- Biggest peeve: Sacred plays like D2 on molasses. Characters move a great deal slower, there's no run/walk switch. Attack & combat speed are about what you'd get in D2 if you played with normal attack & skills with 1-x seconds spell timers only: unless you possess a rather good rig to reduce or even eliminate cooldown timers, you'll fight 'use attack x skill...wait for cooldown...use attack skill x...yawn...wait for cooldown' most of the time. I found this approach about as enticing as clipping my toe nails.
- The skill concept is n times less complex than D2's, hardly surpassing good old D1. Basically, you stick with one attack type throughout the game, with little to no need for diversification, and support it with another one or two weaker support spell (if you feel like it). Contrary to abaout any other Diablo-style action RPG, increasing your skill level is unnecessary at best, crippling at worst - all you get is a paltry damage or duration increase that will up the cooldown time as well. The latter's increase, however, is almost always greater than the damage etc. gain, so you effectively worsen skills & damage-over-time by spending skill points directly . Rather, you're supposed to use the required runes for your skills to socket 'em into your equipment; that way, you get the damage/duration/etc. benefit at a reduced (IIRC 1/2) cooldown increase. Oh yes, the latter is of course not mentioned in neither handbook nor game itself... In most cases, though, upping your skills isn't really a requirement anyway at the moment - practically any char has a 'killer' skill that will easily get you through the game, which leads us to...
- The utterly nonexistant game balance. You'd think that after the D2C/LoD & 1.08/1.09 progressions, people might have learned a lesson or two from Blizzard's mistakes, namely: 'A skill or item that is a great deal weaker than comparables ones means you now have one broken & useless skill or item. A skill or item that is a great deal stronger than comparable ones means you've broken a lot of skills or items because you make 'em redundant. However, this is excatly the way Sacred plays right now - you can, for example, get a Wood Elf through all difficulties by using Mulithit at sLvl 5 as your only attack; pretty much no other skill or skill combination can rival its power. Add the fact that quite a lot of skills are bugged to high heavens - Quick as a Flash, for ex, is supposed to gradually increase a Woody's attack speed, but does infact maximize it at sLvl 1 - and you get a game that at present neither offers much room for nor really requires character skill development. Oh, and yeah, power level of course varies greatly between classes - who would have thought that if you overpowere ranged chars they'll dominate meleers to hell & gone in kill speed & safety? Never happened before, that. Completely unique novelty, that particular design flaw...
- Design flaw, naaaarf, don't get me started on Sacred's idiotic 'motivation by lowering frustration' traits. I still don't see an IOTA of sense, for example, to limit the number of available skill and weapon hot keys at the beginning of the game, with more being added as you level. Same with the whole 'you must first find the corresponding skill rune or 1:4 trade runes to be able to learn or improve a skill, no matter how many levels you may have gained in the meantime'. Outa luck with drops? Well, no skills for you, then. Sucks to be you if you try to break the cookie cutter mold & do a char who actually relies on those weaker skills who need upping to higher levels. Sorry, but if you have to include artificial measures that handicap general game play & have no bearing in the game world itself in order to make the game more challenging, I'd say you're trying to implement some very quick & dirty & greatly annoying solution to cover half arsed game design...
- Quests are as uninspired as they are numerous. Can't really think of one that'd go beyond the simplest 'FedEx' stuff a la 'Bring item x to person y', 'Grease person z for n gold' or 'Figh your way through a gazillion monsters of the same type & then talk to person a who will order you to retrieve item x1 by offing person z2' etc ad nauseam. Boooring. As for the main quest, Sacred's fig leaf of a story is even smaller than D2's (Demon blah end of the world blah deliver us from evil, hero snarf).
Running out of time right now, I could go on for _pages_ about flaws & stuff that Sacred manages to actually do worse than D2 even though the latter is four years older and, as the de facto 'industry standard' for action RPGs, should provided excellent study material on how to and how not to design such a game.
I sorta pitty the poor sod who bought my copy on eBay last week.
Sacred - It really is that good - Walkiry - 04-21-2004
Sal Paradise,Apr 14 2004, 08:19 PM Wrote:I could only afford one - Spellforce or Sacred. I am glad I went with Sacred.Well, not having Sacred myself I can't tell, but I can't think of anyone who would be glad of not having Spellforce after playing it.
Sacred - It really is that good - Sal Paradise - 04-21-2004
Please! Details on Spellforce?
Also, once again, I am not insulting Morrowind players. By "torn from the same cloth", I mean that the people who like Morrowind REALLY like it. It is one of those "love it or hate it" games. Morrowind players always jump to the defense of Morrowind moreso than Diablo players jumping to the defense of Diablo. I didn't even say that Morrowind was a bad game. It's probably a good game, but I don't like it. I think Picasso was probably a great artist, and Mozart a wonderful composer - but I hate cubism and classical music. It doesn't make it bad, just a different personal preference.
Also, when I say "all Morrowind players", clearly I am making a gross overgeneralization that wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny when granulated to the level of each and every Morrowind player. Another gross overgeneralization is that people who are passionate about classical music are kooky and weird. When I was still in school, I worked at a used CD store. All of our classical music afficionados were strange. I am not talking about the casual classical music listener. I am speaking of the people whose entire library consisted of nothing but classical. It was either the way the spoke, the fact that they hunted for music by serial number instead of artist or title, the strange biscuits and tea that they ate and drank while shopping - it all just seemed weird. Quirky-kooky people.
It doesn't mean that every classical music lover down to the last man acts similarly strangely, just all the ones I've seen or met. That's the way it is with Morrowind players. All of the ones I have seen and met are similarly defensive about Morrowind. That might be offensive to classical music lovers, but I wasn't trying to offend Morrowind players by my description of mindlessly jumping up and down to get my acrobatics skill increased. There are lots of ways to play, totally customizable characters, and you don't have to use the acrobatics skill at all if you don't want to. It was merely an element of the XP and/or level-up system that I chose to highlight in order to illustrate a point.
So, please! Morrowind players! I implore you! Make peace with your non-Morrowind playing brethren! The only reason I've came here to share my thoughts about Sacred is because I like and respect the people on this board. I have been a member here since D2 first came out. I am the same Sal Paradise who wrote the Poison Daggermancer guide on Diabloii.net for version 1.0 of the game (http://www.diabloii.net/strategy/nav-d2guides.shtml). I sided with those who felt that Blizzard encouraged people to PK in Diablo2 ruining the fun-factor. I encouraged Blizzard to create an option for "non-hostile" games. I remember the days when several of the more prominant posters on this board (who are no longer around (Elric - where are your forum etiquette rules?) would post something and it would immediately turn into a 200 post flame war. Through all of that, I have stuck around. I took a year off from coming here. I sold Diablo 2. I held an essay contest on battle.net and gave the winner all five of my accounts with characters and gear out the wazoo. But I'm still here, and I still read. I rarely post, but I resepct the ideas and opinions of those who show up and contribute. I think Sacred is a great game. I know that some people here don't, and I'm OK with that. It's just a difference of opinion.
Sacred - It really is that good - kandrathe - 04-21-2004
Quote:So, please! Morrowind players! I implore you! Make peace with your non-Morrowind playing brethren!Who's fighting. :)
I would say that when you use inflammatory rhetoric you might get, well, um, flames. Now you've gone and painted classical music lovers as kooky with your broad brush of generalization. :D
I'd write more, but I'm off to play Morrowind while eating some strange biscuits, drinking tea and listening to Mozart's "EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK".
Naw! I'm at work, drinking coffee, eating a bagel and refactoring my business object model for the 4th time this week.
Edit: Oh, and I'm listening to ENIGMATrilogy +1+2+3
"Sade dit moi qu'est ce que tu vas chercher ?
le bien par le mal la vertu par le vice
Sade dit moi pourquoi l' 'evangile du mal ?
quelle est ta religion ou` sont tes fide`les ?
Si tu es contre Dieu, tu es contre l'homme"
Sacred - It really is that good - the Langolier - 04-22-2004
Sal Paradise,Apr 14 2004, 12:19 PM Wrote:Seraphims (angels) get upgradable wings.Seraphims is incorrect. Seraphim is plural; seraph is singular. (Not that it was your mistake, of course).
Also, angels don't have wings.
Sacred - It really is that good - Walkiry - 04-22-2004
Sal Paradise,Apr 21 2004, 03:25 PM Wrote:Please! Details on Spellforce?Well...
http://walkiry.no-ip.org/spellforce/
And a lovely review:
http://walkiry.no-ip.org/spellforce/review.html
This game is huge, it's long, it's fun, and it's very flexible, being playable wherever you love pure RTS micromanagement, Diablo-like map/dungeon crawling or anywhere in between, with your army or your favourite heroes party.
Sacred - It really is that good - Drasca - 04-23-2004
now where to find the Spellforce thread. I know its here somewhere. Hmm. Dang, no automatic comment board like in Livejournal for your Spellforce blog?
Well. I'll have to resort to good old stalking and private messages.
Sacred - It really is that good - Assur - 04-23-2004
the Langolier,Apr 22 2004, 06:35 PM Wrote:Also, angels don't have wings.Right!
You really shattered my remaining childhood beliefs with that remark :angry:
Sacred - It really is that good - Walkiry - 04-23-2004
Drasca,Apr 23 2004, 03:06 AM Wrote:Hmm. Dang, no automatic comment board like in Livejournal for your Spellforce blog?I'm old-school, all my pages are 100% static HTML. I use offline scripts to generate them from the content and the layout templates (so that I don't have to edit every single file if I want to change something), but that's it ^_^