Wheel of Dubious RPGs Episode 003: Sacred

Welcome back to the most horrifying, terrifying, mystifying, thing on the internet to feature a wheel of chaos since that ill-fated Giant Bomb feature where they pretended to play Donkey Kong 64! It's a bit of a short one for today, because it turns out I don't have much to say about

Sacred

Release Date: March 19, 2004. Underworld Expansion: Aug 2, 2005 (PC)

Developer: Ascaron Entertainment GmbH

Time Played: About 90 minutes (Hey, did a game make me immediately break my "two stream minimum" rule? Sure did!)

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5 (mostly for how much of a pain in the ass it was to get the game running at a reasonable frame-rate and that time I got stuck in level geometry)

Diablo-esque games on the wheel I would've rather played instead: Dungeon Siege III, Nox, Lionheart, and now Dungeon Lords.

Would I play more? NOOOOPE. It's too competent and not weird enough to be on the wheel, but it's too mediocre to be exciting to play in another context.

Given the era in which it was developed and the continent it was developed on, I had higher expectations for Sacred than a drably competent loot-em-up. I think it might be the first game too boring to deserve a spot on the wheel. Indeed if not for the intervention of a friendly, helpful fan of the game in my chat I probably wouldn’t have gotten past the rather… disastrous frame-rate I was encountering before I downloaded a fix, and it probably wouldn’t have been played at all. And honestly? I think I might’ve preferred that.

It’s probably a little weird to react so strongly to a game like Sacred, which seems like an entirely inoffensive, low-friction, open world-ish refinement of Blizzard North’s staggeringly influential Diablo II, but I think my general level of tolerance for these sorts of games is critically low. I’ve been on the record as finding Diablo III’s ultra-streamlined, mildly banal firehose of loot where “the numbers go up” to be a few steps too close to clickers for my liking, while Path of Exile’s nightmare sphere grid skill tree and endless endgame build variety are both too intimidating and demanding of my time to warrant serious investment. It’s difficult to hook me on this stuff in the best of circumstances, unless you base your endless loot treadmill around a more compelling gameplay loop (see: Monster Hunter, Destiny) or hit the exact right balance for me in terms of skill progression, loot progression, and overall difficulty to catch my interest.

Sacred leans a little closer to the “streamlined” camp of post-Diablo 2 loot-n-scoots, with abilities based around cooldowns instead of mana, and quality-of-life additions like mounts and an auto-loot key, but it doesn’t do anything weird or interesting enough to be truly dubious. Some unorthodox character classes, like a vampire knight, demoness, and two flavors of elf, but those aside there doesn’t really seem to be much of a hook for an enterprising dubiomancer to conjure any entertaining blog or stream fodder from it. For my case, I spent the better part of 90 minutes using the Battle Mage’s basic fireball spell on hordes of goblins, roughly two seconds at a time, occasionally upgrading my armor and weapons and kind of wishing I had put Divine Divinity or Beyond Divinity on here instead. Maybe it would be more fun with a different class and/or with more people along for the ride, but at that point I might as well play something from the same genre that does everything better.

As always, you can follow my dumb antics and watch stream archives on my Twitch page. Still haven't figured out what I want to do with my full recordings once the archives leave twitch, but I don't really want to put a bunch of unedited two hour streams on YouTube.

I never played Sacred, but I did play Sacred 3 for like....2 hours and in my opinion after reading this, it seems like the series just got WAY worse (albeit I think 3 was by a different dev).

My immediate reaction was "They made a third one?" and then after some brief research it seems like the original developer went under right after they finished the expansion for Sacred 2. I must've totally blanked that entire thing out of my mind, because I had no recollection of Sacred 3 being a real video game.

@arbitrarywater: I think that I played it on the Xbox 360 as well...of all the terrible ways to play an already terrible game. I think console games have come a long way when it comes to point-and-click style stuff, but not that game.

I'm another that played Sacred 3 on Xbox 360 for about three hours. Fortunately in my case it was a rental. When it came to the Xbox 360 and RPGs, it was really a "take what you can get" situation in the gaps between all the Bioware and Bethesda releases. I think I ended up playing every poor-to-middling RPG for that thing.

I might object to Anachronox being considered "dubious," except I always lose focus towards the end. Feels like a game that gets progressively weaker as it goes.

@mento: Anachronox caught my attention mostly on the virtue of being part of the “Western-developed JRPG” trend that happened in the early 2000s alongside games like Summoner, Silver, Septerra Core, and Sudeki. Unfortunately, I don’t own any of those other games, which makes Ion Storm’s attempt the one that got it. You’re not the first to say it might be too good to be on there, so if any of those other games go on sale that might be a change worth making.

@mento: it was thankfully a Gamefly game for me. Sounds like we had similar dearths in games at the time....

I never liked how slow Sacred felt. Just took forever to get anywhere or do anything. Also, I remember the character pathfinding in that game being pretty iffy.

I'm pretty sure that Summoner, Septerra Core and Sudeki are all on GOG, but I wanna say that Silver was taken off of it a while ago (I think I bought it when it was still available?). That game's combat system is....something, alright; would make a good fit for the wheel.

Never thought I would hear nor see Sacred mention in Giant Bomb.

I played both Sacred 1 and sort of "finished" Sacred 2. Never touched the third since I think it went down more of the hack and slash route and was received very poorly.

S1 and S2 basically came from an era when people were both asking for and trying to make a Diablo 2-like. If you approach it from that angle S1 and S2 had some interesting concepts for its time.

Their stats system attempt to split the differences between letting the player control some portion of stats distributions while keeping the flavor of the character with passive stats growth. I think in D3 stats are level/class lock, while in D2 players can fully distribute their stats beyond the initial.

The skill level vs cool down were different from Diablo hard caps and +skill approach. The combo system has promise also, but it was buggy as hell.

I remember genuinely looking forward to S2 before it releases since S1 was one of those "had potential, but not quite there game," but in the end both games had technical and balance issues that were never address completely as far as I remember. S2 might have been a little better through sheer tech.

The really dubious thing about Sacred might actually be its "lore"...the game actually has a sci-fi backdrop. S2 straight up have a robot bipedal dog as a playable class in between your typical elf and...what might as well be a Sith Lord.