User Rating: 7.8 | Sacred PC
By Treadstone71 | Review Date:
After 50 hours of playing through Sacred’s Multiplayer Coop with a friend, I have come to the conclusion that Sacred is akin to an abusive relationship. The defining characteristic of an abusive relationship is that it’s actually really good for a while before it becomes abusive – so when the abuse starts, the person on the receiving end thinks, “This is really bad, but I know that if I stick through it long enough, things will be good again.” And in this way, abusive relationships are a trap – because if they were continuously abusive 100% of the time, it would be very easy to leave… What does this have to do with Sacred? I will first say that Sacred is incredible. It is hands down better than Diablo or Diablo II or any other 3rd person Isometric view CRPG ever created - when everything is working the way it’s supposed to. That being said, the game is plagued with bugs. While they are not show stopper bugs, they are numerous enough and prevalent enough to be really heartbreaking. And yet, there are times when the games plays perfectly as it should and the gameplay is awesome. So as you’re sitting there gritting your teeth over something that isn’t working the way it should, you keep thinking to yourself, well I know the gameplay will get better if I keep playing – i.e. an abusive relationship. What bugs? I’ll preface the answers with the fact that all of my experience is with the Multiplayer Coop LAN version of the game. I have not played single player, nor have I played Internet Online, so I can’t speak for those. Also I am running version 1.5 of the game having downloaded the patch right away. For starters, if you are the host for a multiplayer Coop game, after the first time you save and then reload your game, your character's name disappears. Never to be heard from again. Zippo. Nada. Nichts. Nichevo. From then on you are known as “ ” or “Dark Elf” or whatever character class you chose, depending on the games mood. Not a show stopper, but mildly depressing, as (for me anyway) the creation of the character name takes up 90% of the time involved in creating a character. To have it so suddenly yanked out from under you is annoying to say the least. But I can live with it because after all, it is only a couple of 1’s and 0’s encoded on a disk somewhere. Horses. Absolutely awesome idea, really fun to ride around and just a generally cool thing. When they work. Number one: When you load a saved game – your horse is gone. Never to be heard from again. Zippo. Nada. Nichts. Nichevo. If you saved out in the middle of nowhere, you’re stuck having to walk back to a town with a stable and buy a new one. Number two: whenever you come out of a house or a dungeon, or what-have-you (anything that requires the game to load an area from disk), about 40% of the time, your horse is stuck. You get on it and it won’t move. It’s dead in the water. I have found that if you hop off the horse, walk off the screen and whistle for it, it will come to you. You can then hop on it and try again. But it probably still won’t move. However, if you do the walk off the screen/whistle for your horse enough times, it will eventually work again. It just may take four to ten times to get it going. Next up: Lag. You should _never_ experience lag on a 100 megabit switched home LAN. Ever. Period. Zippo. Nada. Nichts. Nichevo. But in Sacred, you do. Quite frequently. The game will slow down to a crawl. It’ll become incredibly choppy, the connection between local PC’s will lose sync and the other player will start jumping all over the screen. This happens about once every ten minutes or so. Again, you think, man this is terrible, but if I just wait it out, the game will get better again... And for those wondering, I'm not running any network intensive apps in the background. I keep both boxes lean and clean for the sole purpose of having good gaming experiences. The developers added a nifty device for allowing your players to stay together. If you want you can CTRL-Left click on the players name at the edge of your screen and you’ll be instantly teleported to their location. However, due to the bug where your character name disappears after the first save/load of the game, the click space for the other player teleporting is about two pixels wide. Not a big deal but annoying. However, again, about 40% of the time when they teleport to you, they appear in the middle of their horse and they’re permanently stuck there. No amount of clicking or action will free them. You have to save and reload again to get them unstuck. There are other numerous little things like the other players appearing standing on their horses or standing offset from their horses but clearly the game thinks they’re riding on the horse so their standing figure is ripping around the screen with the galloping horse off to the side. Horses continuously appear with quest symbols (a ?! icon) over their heads and you cannot get rid of them. Quest characters that you have to escort to a specific place continue to follow you around even after you get them to where they need to go. The only way to get rid of them is if they die in combat and then the quest changes to incomplete. Some quests don’t appear to complete correctly even when you do complete them. All of these issues are so minor individually but they add up as a whole to make an abusive experience, because, as I said, when the game works, when it plays the way it’s supposed to, it’s just incredible. And it’s so good that you’re willing to overlook all the pain of these bugs to keep playing it. Because if you play long enough, you know the game will work the way it should for some unspecified period of time. Hopefully Ascaron will release more patches because as it is, this game is still in need of some serious patching. If they do fix the bugs, this game will become the greatest action oriented multiplayer CRPG romp ever. Nothing else would come close. Zippo. Nada. Nichts. Nichevo.

Other Helpful Reviews for Sacred

Load Comments (0)