What makes a game a role-playing game? For me, it is creating a truly unique and personal character. It is interacting with the world in complex ways, forging relationships and alliances, assembling a party that interacts with me as well as each other, and feeling like my dialogue choices and actions affect the world around me. In various games I have played, I’ve built strongholds, had romances, and changed the course of a game with a misspoken word or accidental death. I like sprawling dungeons that wind ever deeper, trees that sway in the breeze, and clouds that pass in the sky overhead.
Sacred has none of that, so why did I get so addicted to the game? It seemed like the antithesis of what I wanted in a CRPG.
Sacred was released on March 23rd, 2004. The game was published by Encore, having been developed by Ascaron Entertainment. Sacred received quite a few criticisms for being an unpolished product with too many bugs, and subsequently, Ascaron released Sacred Plus on November 10th, 2004. Sacred Plus has been billed as the (director’s cut) or (producer’s cut) version of Sacred, but it is essentially just the latest patch. Owners of Sacred can download Sacred Plus (version 1.8.26) for free from the Ascaron website. People interested in buying Sacred for the first time should simply purchase the retail version of Sacred Plus, which is the original game plus the patched material. Sacred Plus adds some areas and other content, as well as cleaning up some bugs and balancing issues.
I played an unpatched original game, and I didn’t have problems. Yes, you heard me right. Look up any early reviews of the game or forum discussions, and they will be rife with complaints about bugs and problems. Me? I discovered one quest that couldn’t be completed, so I avoided it. Beyond that, everything went swimmingly. Go figure.
But I did have one gripe. After I play a game to completion, I like to play through again with cheats on God-mode, with the very best items, or what-have-you. Buyers beware: not only are there no cheats available for Sacred, but the very topic is forbidden on any Sacred forum I’ve ever found. It seems a little uptight to me, but I’m not a game developer or publisher. If you like to mess around with hacks, editors, and console cheats, be forewarned that Sacred will not let you. The original unpatched game allows you to cheat with a God mode, but all subsequent patches lock out the cheat codes.
Sacred is gorgeous. It uses a third-party perspective like the Baldur’s Gate games, and the background art and animations are just excellent. You can zoom in and out from a high bird’s-eye view to an intimate close-up. Your character will look sweet; the character models are detailed, as are their weapons and armor. The graphics are awesome, but more pretty than gritty. For example, when you open a chest or kill a foe, treasure is represented by a glittering rainbow that sprays up into the air like a fountain, landing on the ground in a scintillating pile.
Otherwise, the details are great: arrows stick out of their targets, lighting and shadows are accurate and dynamic, smoke rises from fires, mist rolls through towns, and every particle is handled with meticulous care. Except the bloodshed. The US version of the game has had its gore toned down to earn a Teen rating. Corpses will sparkle and vanish before any gore dares offset the Teen rating that was so very important to the publishers of the game.
The soundtrack and voices are great. The score will add to the epic feel of the game. Rousing and then calm, exciting and then refreshing, it will follow your character’s exploits in a cinematic fashion. The sounds of the game are bright and clear, and the voice acting is on par with the graphics and score. You will catch your character spouting out lines on a regular basis. As with most games, some lines will be cheesy, some will be cool, and many will be memorable.
Sacred takes place in a land called Ancaria. Ancaria is a huge world and the gameplay is very open-ended, meaning you can just wander freely and do quests, fight monsters, and collect and upgrade items to your heart’s content. The settings are mostly non-interactive, aside from chests and the like, but the artwork and backgrounds are phenomenal. You will explore deserts, plains, cities, and wintry mountains, all beautifully rendered with exquisite detail. As you travel, the game map will update, lifting the fog of war to let you see how much of the world you have explored. You can look up the percentage of the world explored, as well as track foes you have killed in your adventures.
As you roam from place to place, you will encounter set quests in certain areas, but you will also create randomly generated quests, many of which are repetitive. So after you clear an area of all the quests, you may return to find that new quests are available, usually simple things like retrieving an item from a location, escorting a local to a new location, or killing something. And again, some of these quests will appear again in another location, so you might have to (escort the architect) or (retrieve the helmet) more than once in different locations.
The dungeons are small, and most of the game takes place in outdoor settings. Monsters respawn regularly, so an area you thought cleared will be repopulated when you pass through again. However, after you clear all the quests in a set of linked areas, the area is deemed at peace, and the respawn rates calm down. Monsters roam in huge numbers and in mindless fashion, some fighting other monsters, but all willing to turn their attention to you. They are the standard fare of undead, orcs, and ogres, some dragons, and a few bosses of a more unique nature.
The main plot itself is nothing groundbreaking: stop the evil wizard and save the world. But no matter how much ground you have covered as you work your way through, you will be stunned to discover how little of the world you have covered. It is HUGE. There are about a dozen teleportation portals you can use, but it takes a lot of legwork if you want to conquer Ancaria.
Quests are not only logged in your journal, but you also have an indicator arrow at the bottom of your screen that always points to where you have to go next for the quest. You don’t have to think or remember details, you can just follow these arrows, kill foes, and pick up items. The game even indicates whom you should talk to by hovering an exclamation point over them, and using colored dots on the game map, it shows you where quests are to be completed and where key characters are located. In essence, you travel from place to place, quest-to-quest, retrieving items and killing enemies until you are done with the game.
Just for laughs, there are tons of hidden treasure stashes, a few pop culture references, and some Easter eggs to be discovered, but I’m not going to give away any of the details here.
The game is more action-oriented than role-playing, with the focus being on hacking-and-slashing as opposed to negotiating, interacting with NPCs, and problem-solving. Your biggest problem to solve is going to be how to kill the next round of enemies.
The interface is well crafted, taking up a minimum amount of your monitor screen. You have hotkeys for commonly used weapons, feats, and potions. There is a halo around your character icon to let you see how your hit points are holding up. And as I indicated previously, you have a quest compass to keep you pointed in the right direction.
You can access a character screen, your journal, and your inventory. You have a limited amount of inventory space, and potions do not stack (which can be irritating). And while there are treasure chests in towns for you to store your stuff, they all share one inventory (so what you put in the chest in one location is available to you at the chest in another location).
Sacred is billed as an RPG, but for me, that means I get to develop and customize a character, which is not quite the case with Sacred. You will get to pick your character’s name, equip them as you see fit during the game, and level them up the way you like (assigning ability and skill points), but otherwise you are basically choosing from six pre-generated characters to play.
You can be a gladiator, seraphim, wood elf, dark elf, battle mage, or vampiress. The gladiator is a burly redheaded male, homologous to the standard fighter type. The seraphim is a long, blonde haired female described as a warrior angel. She is somewhat like a paladin, with some magical attributes, but an overall fighter vibe. The wood elf is also female, akin to a ranger with an archery focus. The dark elf is a male specializing in stealth think: “drow assassin.” The battle mage (male) is what you’d think, a combination of fighter and magic-user, but pretty good at fighting. The vampiress is a raven-tressed female who is a warrior by day and a vampire by night. Each character has its own set of combat arts, but some characters have access to the same ones (for example, all characters except the battle mage have access to a combat art that involves a whirlwind type of attack).
Your character has six ability scores (charisma, endurance, etc.) that will improve as you increase in level. There is an automatic increase in the abilities that are key to your chosen character, plus you can assign one point yourself. As you kill things and complete quests, you gain experience, which leads to level increases. You’ll start off with two skill areas, and you can add new skills as you hit certain levels. Skill areas include things like sword lore, dual-wielding, parrying, and so forth. Different characters have access to different skills, with overlap, of course.
I could see wanting to play each character type at least once; they each get different combat arts, weapons, and armor, as well as looking different and having different voice sets. To explore the entire world and complete all the quests with each character type would consume an unearthly amount of time. This translates to a strong replay value for the game.
Depending on which type of character you play, you will also get a different opening and series of initial quests, but once past that, the game plays the same for everyone. Part of that sameness of play will revolve around a lot of fighting.
Combat is a simple point-and-click affair in Sacred, usually boiling down to constantly attacking something until it’s dead, without much finesse involved. But aside from your standard attack, you can use combat arts, which are special attack modes (like “hard hit”, which is a type of power attack), and combinations of them that are created by merchants known as combo masters.
Combat arts are found like treasure, and once these runes are found, they can be learned and used. Extras can be sold or used to create combat combos when you talk to a combo master. These combos allow you to perform multiple moves at once. Many items and combat arts will be character-specific, but there are plenty to go around, regardless of your choice of character.
Your weapons are cool, and so are the combat animations. You can upgrade and customize many items by visiting the local smithy and assigning magical items and their bonuses to some of your weapons and armor. Merchants’ stock is not set, and so changes every time you talk to another merchant. There are some unique items and specially matched sets of items that can be worn in conjunction for improved bonuses.
Oh, and don’t worry about accidentally killing someone. You can’t attack innocent bystanders in the game, which may be unrealistic, but it is pretty convenient. Some weapons will allow you to attack the local wildlife, but that’s about it. You will occasionally have companions, either temporary allies or characters you are escorting, but you will have no control over them.
A lot of gamers want to see mounts in their games, and Sacred has them. You can buy and ride a horse, which allows you to move faster. You can even allocate skill points to riding, which allows you to ride better horses. The horse will soak up damage from foes before you do, but combat while mounted is awkward, and you cannot use all of your attacks from horseback. Horses can be equipped with saddles that confer additional bonuses to them (and you) when they are used.
I imagine that when people cry out for mounts, they expect the mount to be a little more like a companion than an accessory. Sacred at least put them in the game, but the horses tend to be the equivalent of extra armor coupled with boots of speed. They do not add life or character, much less companionship, to your game.
It’s hard to say whether or not you’ll like Sacred. It depends on what you’re looking for. The visual styling and presentation are great, and the game is very addicting. Most gamers will feel compelled to gather all the items and explore all the areas. This will bring endless hours of enjoyment. On the other hand, some people will tire of the simple kill-and-loot format after several hours. A true role-playing gamer may be disappointed in the limitations the game has as an RPG. I never played the Diablo games, but I have heard many analogies made between Diablo II and Sacred. I can testify that the D&D CRPGs involve a much higher degree of role-playing than Sacred, and that turned me off to Sacred initially. However, once I played for a little while, I couldn’t get enough of the game. There’s a lot to like, and with the bugs and issues from the original release addressed, it’s hard not to recommend the game.
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