Posted December 15, 2008
Sacred Gold collects together the original Sacred, Sacred Plus (containing a couple of new regions, monsters, items) and Sacred Underworld (Mods to the original campaign to incorporate the two new characters and a completely new region).
Released a while after the seminal Diablo II it came at a time when it appeared that all we had was the Diablo series for our hacking and slashing needs. Sacred offered a pleasant change. The basics are pretty much the same as Diablo. Left click on an enemy to attack, right click to use a skill then sweep up all the loot.
The main differences come from the skill and leveling system. Unlike Diablo skill tree, where all combat skills are tied to levels (get skill A at level 1, Skill B at level 5 and so on) here you find the combat skills on champion monsters and in chests. So before you've reached a couple of levels you can have an almost complete set of skills. BUT take a skill to far to fast and the regen time of the skill will make it to cost prohibative. Instead you need to balance this with creative uses of the skills and levels. As you gain levels you can increase selective stats and add passive skills to your characters. Through the correct tweaking of these stats and certain skills you can reduce the regen time of a combat skill to less than the duration, making your character a walking tank.
Don't think this makes the game easy. You will be fighting large amounts of monsters on the screen at any one time and, unless you are playing on the easiest of settings, the monsters will generally stay ahead of you on the difficulty curve.
The game is massive. It is possible that it could even rival the likes of Oblivion for the size of the playing field. Also around 80% of this world is available to you from the beginning of the game and tons of quests for you to do during this time. There are Dragons tucked away in obscure areas, Skeletons (who sometimes keep coming back) in desert areas and lush rural areas inhabited by orcs and goblins.
Unfortunately there are a couple of problems. The version on offer here (as well as on a rival system) does not allow you to change the resolution. It appears to be fixed at 1024x768. Now I am running this on a machine capable of running GTA IV with all settings set to medium/high at 1280x1024, you would think that an increased resolution would be possible.
A slightly bigger problem is that the quest system is quite buggy. Sometimes you will not get a compass pointer to indicate where to go for a quest, making it necessary to flit between the map and the game world constantly. Othere quests do not register on the map either making them impossible to complete. These aren't game breakers, especially as some of the quests are so mundane (more on this in a second) but it can be irritating as they can be a good source of loot and XP.
Finally there are the quests themselves. There is a main story quest which is pretty dull and just an excuse to make sure you move from one area to the other. But that isn't the big problem. Instead it is the side quests. There are somewhere in the region of 300+ side quests. Unfortunately more than a few of them are of the mind numbingly dull variety. Example "My Sister is a bit old and tends to be forgetful, can you go look for her" or "I need you to go and fetch my Fishing Partner". Quests so insignificant you wonder why they are there.
But even with these niggles I would highly recommend this game, especially if you are looking for something to do until Diablo III is released.
Released a while after the seminal Diablo II it came at a time when it appeared that all we had was the Diablo series for our hacking and slashing needs. Sacred offered a pleasant change. The basics are pretty much the same as Diablo. Left click on an enemy to attack, right click to use a skill then sweep up all the loot.
The main differences come from the skill and leveling system. Unlike Diablo skill tree, where all combat skills are tied to levels (get skill A at level 1, Skill B at level 5 and so on) here you find the combat skills on champion monsters and in chests. So before you've reached a couple of levels you can have an almost complete set of skills. BUT take a skill to far to fast and the regen time of the skill will make it to cost prohibative. Instead you need to balance this with creative uses of the skills and levels. As you gain levels you can increase selective stats and add passive skills to your characters. Through the correct tweaking of these stats and certain skills you can reduce the regen time of a combat skill to less than the duration, making your character a walking tank.
Don't think this makes the game easy. You will be fighting large amounts of monsters on the screen at any one time and, unless you are playing on the easiest of settings, the monsters will generally stay ahead of you on the difficulty curve.
The game is massive. It is possible that it could even rival the likes of Oblivion for the size of the playing field. Also around 80% of this world is available to you from the beginning of the game and tons of quests for you to do during this time. There are Dragons tucked away in obscure areas, Skeletons (who sometimes keep coming back) in desert areas and lush rural areas inhabited by orcs and goblins.
Unfortunately there are a couple of problems. The version on offer here (as well as on a rival system) does not allow you to change the resolution. It appears to be fixed at 1024x768. Now I am running this on a machine capable of running GTA IV with all settings set to medium/high at 1280x1024, you would think that an increased resolution would be possible.
A slightly bigger problem is that the quest system is quite buggy. Sometimes you will not get a compass pointer to indicate where to go for a quest, making it necessary to flit between the map and the game world constantly. Othere quests do not register on the map either making them impossible to complete. These aren't game breakers, especially as some of the quests are so mundane (more on this in a second) but it can be irritating as they can be a good source of loot and XP.
Finally there are the quests themselves. There is a main story quest which is pretty dull and just an excuse to make sure you move from one area to the other. But that isn't the big problem. Instead it is the side quests. There are somewhere in the region of 300+ side quests. Unfortunately more than a few of them are of the mind numbingly dull variety. Example "My Sister is a bit old and tends to be forgetful, can you go look for her" or "I need you to go and fetch my Fishing Partner". Quests so insignificant you wonder why they are there.
But even with these niggles I would highly recommend this game, especially if you are looking for something to do until Diablo III is released.