Was thinking about Sacred 2...

[Pelu]

sup all... is sacred 2 worth the price... I was looking for a few games and Sacred 2 was the only one who really catched my attention...

 

[AlgaeEater]

Horrible and boring single player, it's ok with friends on multi.

Quests are boring, boss battles aren't epic at all. Skills aren't that great either. If you haven't played Titan Quest and the expansion, I would much rather go with that one, it's a lot better. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it much. Sacred 1 was much funner in my opinion.

 

[ibex333]

I just uninstalled Sacred 2 from my computer a few days ago after playing for a day. I just couldn't take it anymore...

Pros:

Gorgeous gfx. On par with Witcher maybe and sometimes maybe even better.

Tons of items


Cons:

Main story is lame and uninspired. It doesn't captivate you as a player, and doesn't sound interesting.

Very poor performance. I understand my PC is by far not the best and not even mid-range by today's standards, but it's more than adequate to run 90% of all today's game at high to ultra high settings. Not the case with Sacred 2. I could constantly see some sort of strange lag that wouldn't go away even when I'd tune down the settings.

The game just feels clumsy somehow. The controls are horrible and so is the camera. I mean... How hard was it to make the controls precise and comfy when the original Sacred had it done just fine? I constantly had to wrestle with the camera just to return to the view I like. Because of all this, every time I'd shoot a fireball with my high elf I'd pray that it hits the target, since oftentimes my spells would fly backwards or to the side because my character wouldn't even face the enemy properly. There are 3 camera modes, designed for follow, top view, and something else... (forgot) But none of them work properly, and they all feel the same.

Enemies constantly respawn just like in the original Sacred. I thought the devs would learn their lesson by now, but no... It's annoying to kill a bunch of enemies just to come back to the same spot and see them all respawned less than a few min later. On top of this enemies will follow you for too long. You can run away all you want, but they don't stop giving chase. They will follow you even into town, and everyone who lives in the town will just stand there minding their own business as you are getting slaughtered by a horde of enemies you aggroed while running away. One particularly funny episode involved me running to the second floor of the mayor's house, and into his bedroom, but the enemies followed me there too all the way from the grassy fields where I collected them!

The leveling system is quite strange. On one had it's hasn't changed too much from the original. On the other hand, there are some additions, which are quite confusing I might add.

Overall, Sacred 2 just feels "lame" and "mediocre" somehow... It just doesn't have the feel of "quality" I got from Diablo, or Witcher, or even Icewind Dale. Hell, even the original Sacred felt like a better game, despite it's many shortcomings.


The patching system is broken. I had to download several of the same patches 3 or more times over and over again, and again, just to install them, because the downloads would become corrupted. (This never ever happened to me before with any other game)
Also patches are way too big. Some patches are big enough to be a game in themselves.



Maybe... Just maybe... After tons of patching, and a year or two later, it might be worth picking up Sacred 2 on Steam for $5-7 and give it another try. For now, I strongly advise you against it, and suggest you play Witcher instead if you haven't tried it yet.

 

[dj2004]

Originally posted by: ibex333

Cons:

Main story is lame and uninspired. It doesn't captivate you as a player, and doesn't sound interesting.

Yes, the story is basically nonexistent. After ending the campaign you are "rewarded" with a ~minute long video. There are hundreds of side quests to do, but again, not much story.

Originally posted by: ibex333
Very poor performance. I understand my PC is by far not the best and not even mid-range by today's standards, but it's more than adequate to run 90% of all today's game at high to ultra high settings. Not the case with Sacred 2. I could constantly see some sort of strange lag that wouldn't go away even when I'd tune down the settings.

I believe I know the lag that you post of. I run a very similar setup as yours and I play on medium->high settings and it runs very well at 1920x1200 resolution. I found lowering the render settings to medium and turning off weather helped quite a lot.

Originally posted by: ibex333
The game just feels clumsy somehow. The controls are horrible and so is the camera. I mean... How hard was it to make the controls precise and comfy when the original Sacred had it done just fine? I constantly had to wrestle with the camera just to return to the view I like. Because of all this, every time I'd shoot a fireball with my high elf I'd pray that it hits the target, since oftentimes my spells would fly backwards or to the side because my character wouldn't even face the enemy properly. There are 3 camera modes, designed for follow, top view, and something else... (forgot) But none of them work properly, and they all feel the same.

The game is not as fluid as Diablo, but I have no complaints. The game allows customization of controls. You will likely have to move the camera quite often to see all around you but this quickly becomes something you won't even have to think about. ibex333, I'm not sure how you are missing as clicking on an enemy automatically shoots the fireball that way.

Originally posted by: ibex333
Enemies constantly respawn just like in the original Sacred. I thought the devs would learn their lesson by now, but no... It's annoying to kill a bunch of enemies just to come back to the same spot and see them all respawned less than a few min later. On top of this enemies will follow you for too long. You can run away all you want, but they don't stop giving chase. They will follow you even into town, and everyone who lives in the town will just stand there minding their own business as you are getting slaughtered by a horde of enemies you aggroed while running away. One particularly funny episode involved me running to the second floor of the mayor's house, and into his bedroom, but the enemies followed me there too all the way from the grassy fields where I collected them!

I believe the respawn timer is set at 30minutes in the recent patch. Teleporting to a marker also resets the limit, as does dying and exiting/entering caves. Enemies do stop chasing the player but this depends on the character's speed. I can lose them in ~30 seconds and I do not have a character built upon speed.

Originally posted by: ibex333
The leveling system is quite strange. On one had it's hasn't changed too much from the original. On the other hand, there are some additions, which are quite confusing I might add.

Leveling involves a lot of customization. This includes attribute points, skills points, and customization of combat arts. In the beginning, this will be confusing but after some time it'll be easy to create a good build. Forums are a big help, too, as the game does a poor job of explaining what each thing does and how much it does it.

Originally posted by: ibex333

The patching system is broken. I had to download several of the same patches 3 or more times over and over again, and again, just to install them, because the downloads would become corrupted. (This never ever happened to me before with any other game)
Also patches are way too big. Some patches are big enough to be a game in themselves.

Complaining about patch size is quite funny. Would you rather have them release less content or a hundred small patches? The latest patch adds a whole new island with new textures, so its size is around 600-700MB.

Their patching system is broken though, as their newest patch has a horrible file checker that usually does not work causing a whole slew of issues to get the patch installed. A big thread about this can be found on their forum.


And some more pros/cons:
Pros:
Big map that has a great deal of variety
Cool bosses
Quite a few "extra" bosses that have nothing to do with the campaign - they are there to reward the player for exploration
Classes have different armor slots - for instance, Dryads can use heads to summon monsters while no other class can do this
~260 levels

Cons:
Camera is horrible when fighting bosses as it centers on them. Since bosses are so large, it is already hard for the player to find clicking ground to move around.
Item stats are sometimes messed up. For example, unique rings with no stats sometimes drop.
Comical voice acting, much like the first Sacred


In the end, I have been playing for a few months and enjoy it immensely. I wouldn't have paid $50 but I couldn't pass it up for $25 new.

 

[Pheran]

Did you play Titan Quest? I played some of Sacred 1. I haven't tried Sacred 2 but I recently started playing Titan Quest Gold and it looks pretty good.