Sacred for Windows

Sacred quietly crept onto store shelves early in 2004 while waiting for other promised PC Game blockbusters to arrive - Halflife 2, Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004.

At first glance (reading the box) I was fooled into thinking that Sacred is merely another Single or Multiplayer Diablo II dressed up with different characters and alternative plot and thus initially passed it up. I discovered a copy sitting on the shelf at a local Fry's at $10 off the normal price so I decided to take a chance.

The basic plot revolves around the hell-spawn summoning errors of a local Necromancer 'Shaddar'who is banished for several hundred years and naturally seeks revenge on those doing the banishing! Obviously your character's role in this struggle is to redress the imbalance and set right the corruption set in motion by 'Shaddar'!

The style of the game starts with a Diablo-esque visual engine with similar (though not so extreme) weapon enhancements and a basic plotline. The character types include a Dark Elf, Gladiator, Vampiress, Wood Elf, Battle Mage and Seraphim. While the basic skills may at first appear similar to Diablo - it quickly becomes apparent that you have only a subset of the total skills and attributes to allocate. Thus some careful crafting of skills are required (i.e. you cannot be good at everything within your particular discipline). This may frustrate those that like to be 'Uber' in every skill. On the other hand, in its multiplayer mode, the specialization leads to some very interesting team tactics.

The German based developers, Ascaron appear to have an eye for extreme detail. In operation, Sacred is exsquisite to say the least, I cannot think of any others of its genre with that level of detail. The terrain, buildings and dungeons are a delight to behold, the NPCs and monsters are for the most part pretty impressive. The AI is very cleverly written with your enemies running away when hurt or seeking distance if armed with ranged weapons or magic. If you do corner a ranged weapon weilder, they will invariably switch to a melee weapon. Many of the NPCs have humorous lines and it seems my characters are often beset by taunting children in many towns. Interestingly, the town NPCs attitude towards you will change as your reputation improves.

There are a number of screen resolutions available which helps maintain stunning visuals (though you will need a 2GHz+ system and above average video card to take advantage of the higher end ones). The mouse scroll wheel will allow you to zoom in for a very close view of the action. Zoomed in is when you become aware of the absolute attention to detail that the developers at Ascaron lavished on this production. Even the clothes and weapons are faithfully rendered. While zooming in gives a stunning effect - zooming way out is needed to determine what is next on the menu to converse with, attack, avoid or run away from.

Levelling up is what most RPGs are all about and there are plenty of ways to do this with Sacred. Unlike Diablo and most other RPGs there really isn't much of a penalty for getting killed in Sacred other than being returned geographically to the last plot milestone point. In fact in some cases, getting killed might be the quickest way back to where you need to be!

Most towns and villages provides a personal treasure chest that allows you to stash any items that you want to keep as you travel around Ancaria. Unlike the personal town chest in Diablo, Sacred offers a massive amount of space (though even then you will still wish for more later in the game). As in Diablo - Sacred offers 'Set' items that work best when gathered as a set of weapons + armor. These rarely drop as loot but can occasionally be found on traders (especially if your character has high trading skill).

Multiplayer mode offers a way to exchange items with other players though at the time of writing there was no "trade-window" method of doing this - so throwing items on the ground is the accepted way to trade which is sadly abused by a small number of players.

Sacred begins with the usual character select screen when starting a game from scratch but there is little to do other than receive some default skills/items and go through either a single player campaign or multiplayer game. In single-player mode, for the first few levels you will find yourself dreadfully short of cash to buy decent gear and potions. By the time you get above level 30 you will typically find that you have more gold than you will ever be able to spend!

Unlike Diablo, and because of the zero death penalty I would actually suggest you join a Sacred multiplayer game right away - select a bronze level game or set one up yourself and you will quickly discover there is safety in numbers. Often very high level gamers may join your game, while this makes it very difficult for new players to compete (as spawning monsters are relative to the level of players) they are more than likely going to leave much of the loot lying around. Thus you can get several levels, a stash of gold, some decent gear then export the character to use in starting your own single-player bronze level game.

Discovering the towns (some are even underground) that are scattered across Ancaria is of primary importance, strategically located portals (once discovered) make traversing the land much easier. Each town has a set of services (though often a town will just have one or two). The services include: a smith, a combo master, a stable master and a trader. There are also one or two of these services scattered around outside of town.

There is a set of main quests with a myriad of sub-quests. What surprised me is that you can ofen pick up a sub-quest as a consequence of an action (like freeing a prisoner) rather than be given the quest from the beginning. Quests often result in excellent experience and/or special items. At the very least, completing quests contribute to the level of "peace" (i.e. significantly reduced monster spawn rate) in an area on the map.

A full walkthrough is beyond the bounds of this review however, I have some hints that might help you get a jumpstart on the game.

You will need gold early on so (other than going multiplayer early on) be sure to open every barrel, chest, cabinet and magical hiding place you spot. Later in the game (after level 10) you will find that gold is no problem. Buy as many of the blue (mentor) potions and chug them all the time when in combat to speed up levelling. If you need more potions, use the portals to cycle round the traders as their inventories will respawn each time you visit a "new" trader. There are some towns with more than one trader so simply running between them will have the same effect. Focus on just a handful of combat skills to develop and don't try to apply a skill to every available one your character lists. The reason for this is that it appears you will spawn fewer combat skill loot drops as your total number of known skills increases. You can use the combo-master to exchange skills from other classes for ones you can use. I found riding a horse to be pretty much worthless (as a lot of skills cannot be used)though many claim that the wood-elf (bow wielder) can make good use of a mount. Early in the game I would find horses and sell them off to the stable master. Once you have a horse - you can "whistle" and your horse will appear even when it was last ridden happens to be in a completely different town!

I have merely scratched the surface of what Sacred has to offer. Even at full price, the hours of fun gameplay you will get is well worth the money. Just be sure to get the most recent patch from the Ascaron site.

Sacred does have a few shortcomings with occasional impossible to complete sub-quests, places on the map you can get completely stuck (with no monsters to kill you off) and the occasional lockup (saving games frequently helps). Setting up a multiplayer game over a router or residential gateway is a challenge (though joining one is much less troublesome), a fix is reportedly in the works. You can play multiplayer on a local LAN with just a single copy of Sacred however the original CD must be used to start each game. The CD has some extreme copy protection and earlier revisions of the game even stopped the game loading if certain CD copying utilities were found to be active on your machine! Game-saving is a little less than intuitive though you can "export" a multiplayer character and then start to use them with a Single Player campaign. You can also "export" from the single player and use them in Multiplayer.