I just bought both games and i noticed there are quite some mods available. Now i wonder: if i want to stay close to the original game, but with as many bugfixes as possible, what would be the best mods to use?
The reason i am asking: i used mods in the past but noticed that the developers had differing opinions to mine regarding how difficult a game should be and raised the difficulty quite a lot. If this kind of rebalancing is optional it's totally fine, of course. I'm totally fine with improved graphics, new quests and general QoL improvements, too.
So for Sacred and Sacred 2, do you have some recommendations for me?

Thanks a lot, that helps me!

The Vanilla Drop Mod seems to be available only if you register at the DarkMatters forum. So i guees some extra loot will be okay :)

Sacred 2 is a tough one. Without fan fixes, the game will keep crashing so it's pretty much unplayable but the community patch changes a ton of stuff besides the items. From things like removing transitional character animations to changing skill behavior. And a myriad of other small things. Some are easily reversible, some with a bit of work but some are simply not. Which was the reason I stopped playing a couple of years ago, after spending a few days fiddling with it, I gave up on it.

The Community Patch really needs a version that is just bug fixes and nothing else.

I'm working on it now. It's been announced but not yet released. I need to run some more tests and also make an optional patch for the Christmas content so it can be turned on/off and not constantly present as in CM Patch.

http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/

Oh, it actually got kicked off? When I stopped playing such a version was in a state of "highly unlikely". Very nice to see this is actually being made. Might reignite my interest in the game.

Is there some place for feedback/suggestions? Might happily become a tester for this.

For now the best place will be in the Darkmatters thread that I linked above, though I have now also posted threads on GOG and Steam as of today that I will be checking periodically.

In a decision I may well regret, I am inviting anyone and everyone to write back about changes they think don't fit the "purist" model that I am going for in this project. If I find that I can't revoke the change I will at least describe how to do so yourself.

Great. I'll see if I can still get into my Darkmatters account and will post potential feedback there. Currently scanning the change log.

This sounds great. Never really wanted to install the fan patch, despite how much work was obviously put into it. I really just want to stick to what the devs had originally added. Bug fixes are of course always welcome, but no balancing/content or anything of that nature if you ask me. Perhaps you could even have 2 modes(purist and hardcore purist?).

What I'd really want most of all though is a standalone fix for the infamous 1.5GB crash. There just doesn't seem to be a way to prevent it. I think I remember I had a little program many years back that reduced the game's RAM every X minutes(or maybe it was when you pressed a certain key). Either way, I think many people aren't playing the game solely because of this.

That will unfortunately not be possible. This fixpack still stems from using the CM Patch files and just removing the additional stuff that is easy to remove. The problem is, each of the changed files from the CM Patch contains several changes and some of them are most likely impossible to find and revert without the original author. And as most of the changes have been made a long time ago, it is doubtful that even he could help at this point.

So some of the baked in changes can't be reverted without losing out on several other things. I plan on playing with this purist fixpack and using the vanilla s2renderer.dll file to restore the original animation blending speed. As a consequence though, I will lose out on the all the FX fixes and some performance improvements. Unfortunate, but it's the only way to get the original transitional animations back. Still greatly appreciate this project as it will remove all the additional drops, quests etc. that the CM Patch added which was not originally there.

The infamous memory leak, yes. I remember playing the original Sacred 2 on a Windows XP PC and I could play it mostly fine. Still would freeze eventually, but usually only after hours of playing. Trying to play with Elite textures installed though would crash instantly the moment I entered a larger town :)

Theoretically, you could just grab the fixed .exe files from either the CM Patch or this purist fixpact to fix the memory leak. The .exe itself contains a couple other changes too, but nothing major should be included in that.

There has been some discussion about this on the Dark Matters forums. Feel free to share your thoughts:
http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/

That sounds like quite a good idea to fix the crashing issue. Do you by any chance know exactly what is included in the modified executable file other than the crash fix? May just pull up my VM and grab the executable from there.

Pardon, but that's not true, aside from the handful of binaries which had to be copied over from CM Patch "as is": sacred2.exe, s2core.dll, s2render.dll, s2logic, (which contain maybe 10% of all fixes), the PFP starts with all-vanilla files, into which I built each individual fix one by one. There was no "removal" process and it was not easy as I had to go through 47 scripts, all the models and textures, and the entirety of the game texts. It's taken months.

With nearly 250 fixes logged in PFP, I wish the non-purist change count could be 0, but to have it around 3-5 is the best I can do to be as inclusive of as many fixes as possible.

Sorry, my bad. Should have said that only a couple key files (the .dll files and the .exe files) were taken from the CM, not everything. I know other stuff can be edited by hand (the script files) but worded it wrongly.

Hellol! Sacred has always been a game series I adore, but I do remember all the bugs I used to face. I recently came across this thread and I was wondering if that purist fixpack has been published. Thanks! :)