04-21-2004, 06:41 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-21-2004, 06:43 AM by TrueMuppet.)
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.
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.