A guy who worked on designing bosses and enemies in Sacred 3 opened a discussion on the Steam Forum for the game, its quite an interesting read, where he tries to answer some random questions about how the game got so badly phuqed up. :

http://steamcommunity.com/app/247950/discussions/0/35219681839092913/#p1


TL:DR

Its quite long (about 10 pages so far), but here is an excerpt from one post (page 6) :

EXCERPT

As I stated before, there is no "black and white" answer for the question "who is to blame? Deep Silver or Keen?".
I don't want to create an "enemy image" or something like that. I don't want to tell internal details. It would be great for the community to have those details, but I'm certainly not the one who should give them to you. I'm not an official representative of deep silver or keen, I was just a Game Designers who built enemies and bosses for this game ;)

If you analyze the Sacred 3 credits, you should recognize that there is always an extra "Lead Department X" entry. But not for the Game Design department. You won't find a Game Director, Creative Director or Lead Game Designer. Why? Because the project didn't have one.

Deep Silver owns the IP, they spent the whole money and had the financial risk on their own. Of course they say how it goes and in which direction. I don't have to have their oppinion, but it's their right to do so. They still paid salaries for us developers and our families, for a long time.

If a publisher owns an IP and would like to produce a sequel, he often gives other developers the opportunity to apply for this project. The interested developers then usually make a prototype, a high concept document and a production/budget plan. It's like a casting. In case of Sacred, keen did the best pitch and had the best prototype. Then they got the budget which enabled them to hire a lot of key personell and "infantry for the concent creation front". So no, the portfolio does not matter. Keen is an experienced developer with a lot of skilled individuals. Sometimes it's better to empower those people.

So from that excerpt... the game had a specific direction that was all they could get funding for...

Doesn't change the fact the game sucks, probably mostly because exceptions of what it would be rather than anything else. *sigh* I'd rather have seen them make an hour long movie at the quality of the intro than see the game as they've released it...

Well that's only one post out of ten pages, that is answering a specific question. But yes, it was peoples expectations the were totally dumped on in the end.

It is kind of telling that the dev site has been scrubbed clean of anything to do with Sacred 3....ashamed or what?

http://www.keengames.com/

If they had gone the route of making it a true sequel and not.... *waves* THAT, then things would have turned out quite differently. Different team? If they did it with lots of quests and good graphics and okay to play and was an RPG at heart, people could probably have looked past some of it's failures while they patched and upgraded or made the expansion to it...

I'd call it a bait and switch... Maybe by the letter of the law they did everything correct, but with no coverage during the release and their big strategy on selling it based on name alone when they know the first two games were nothing like that is just poor choices. If they had given it a different title, like, oh i don't know... 'Sacred - The decent' or something, then you know it's related to Sacred and not the direct sequel, then you'll look closer and you get what you pay for, same thing with Sacred Citadel. That's interesting... although a search will show up open positions for Sacred 3 development still...

I need a drink...

It's like 1984, the game has been deemed to be UN-good, to have it removed from the site it must have been doubleplus UN-good :)


Pedantic much? :)

I thought he was trolling at the start but he seems to be genuine.

Was there ever anything on there?

Well....that's a good question, I really don't know, but, its kinda telling that there isn't anything on it :)