Sacred Gold

i like this game more than Diablo.

Normally I don’t touch RPGs or FPSs, because I don’t really care for all of the frantic mouse clicking. Instead I’ve always played RPGs and Sims. My favorites’ are the AOE series, Age of Mythology Series, Empires Dawn of Modern War, Medieval Total War Series, Stronghold Series, LORs Series and my favorite of all time Heroes V. Earlier this year I gave Oblivion a try, played it once and haven’t given it another look since. It was ok, but I don’t really care for all of the fighting in the dark. When I saw a copy of Sacred on GOG I decided to give RPGs another look. WOW am I glad I did! I spent most of the thanksgiving holiday playing this game and have loved every minute of it. I’m still new to RPGs, and seem to be getting killed more often than I like, but I love the beauty of this game environment and have to admit this game is causing me to rethink my prior opinion concerning RPGs. If you are new to RPGs, like I am, give this game a try. You will find the environment both stunning as well intuitive. And be sure to have a comfortable chair and a clock nearby, as this game will suck you in and keep you there.

I hate this f***ing game. The Gold game pack includes the original Ancaria campaign and the sequel Underworld campaign. Ancaria is, at best, okay. But the Underworld campaign takes everything wrong with Ancaria, and turns it up by about a factor of 10. The story is trite and completely formulaic. It doesn’t take much time for it to fall into the background as one settles in for a long grind-fest. Hordes of trash mobs are the rule, and in Underworld it gets to the point that you literally can’t move more than about a tenth of the visible screen without getting swarmed. The game might be tolerable under these circumstances if it balanced the swarms against player leveling and ability, but it doesn’t. Gold is plentiful - which is good. There’s nothing worth buying - which is bad. Early on, one levels up fast and there are some powerful items at shops, but after about level 30 - 40 the item quality levels off and unique drops are hard to come by (and yes, that’s even with the “Trading” skill maxed out and playing at a higher difficulty). Likewise, there are some very powerful abilities early, but they don’t increase in capability at the same rate as enemy level and especially enemy number. Spells start off nicely, but again they plateau at about level 40 or so (for a Battle Mage) and aren’t able to keep up with the exponential growth of hordes. Unfortunately, the lazy-ass designers couldn’t be bothered to compensate with better strategy opportunities to deal with the hordes, so one is left with buying up a boat load of health postions and slugging it out just to get from point A to point B. Don’t get me started on the item and skill inventory system. Toward the begninning you only have a couple of skill quick slots, so attempting to switch into an uninstalled skill or spell during combat is virtual suicide. That’s because there’s no auto pause when switching, and no damned hot keys. In other words, it’s complete bull**it. Throw in the primitive isometric, single perspective layout, the ridiculously tiny map fog as compared to the overall game size, and really poor voice acting — well, what little there is of it — and this becomes about the most unengaging and disappointing game I’ve played in a long time. Only Pillars of Eternity, with its infuriating tactic of increasing the apparent scope and size of the game just by keeping the chraracters in a constant state of resource famine, has rivalled it for me lately as an utter fail. Certainly, games of the pedigree and time period of Sacred will be limited by the one-note, repetitive graphics and sprite animation, but for a thoughtful and balanced game these soon fade into the background. Sacred is neither thoughtful nor balanced, so its native primitivism is pretty hard to overlook.

Sacred is a nice RPG, however the game doesnt work well with newer computers... Dual-core means no hosting.. Wireless means no LAN play. Which is very sad! However you can still get a good single player experience and have som hours/days of fun depending on how much you get into the story.

Yup I heard that said when this first came out. I was a firm believer of that statement when I played Sacred.