Did Sacred 2 suck or something?

I'm still teetering on the brink. I love Diablo games and $30 isn't bad but... but the reviews! And I know Steam will eventually have it for $20....

Ok, I did some culling of the ol' friends list. Drop me a request if you're playing Sacred 2 on the 360!

I think I'm more interested in the 360 version, because my older son and I could have some fun with local co-op. It depends how 'mature' the subject matter is.

Hey Certis, based on your earlier impressions.. I've got a copy incoming. I hope that makes the cut

My main issue with Sacred 1 was that the interaction of the weapons skills seemed so ambiguous. I hope Sacred 2 gives a better idea of how everything works together.

Picked up the 360 version earlier... Planning to play tonight... I'll be looking for co-op opportunities.

Irongut wrote:

I think I'm more interested in the 360 version, because my older son and I could have some fun with local co-op. It depends how 'mature' the subject matter is.

You're probably pretty safe. Apart from some armour that really doesn't look like it would offer much in the way of protection it's all fairly tame, at least as far as I've played so far.

Might want to stick to the "light" campaign as so far there's been a few "slaughter the innocents" missions in the shadow campaign (but then again, it's all pretty much in the quest text and you can skip your way through that and just follow waypoints anyway).

stevenmack wrote:
Irongut wrote:

I think I'm more interested in the 360 version, because my older son and I could have some fun with local co-op. It depends how 'mature' the subject matter is.

You're probably pretty safe. Apart from some armour that really doesn't look like it would offer much in the way of protection it's all fairly tame, at least as far as I've played so far.

Might want to stick to the "light" campaign as so far there's been a few "slaughter the innocents" missions in the shadow campaign (but then again, it's all pretty much in the quest text and you can skip your way through that and just follow waypoints anyway).

Is there a story in this game? All I ever do is click on stuff until it dies.

So how many GWJ 360 Sacred players are there? I'm also trying to decide whether I should pick up the console or PC versions of this game.

Also, I guess for good co-op you need similar-leveled characters?

Do not, I repeat, do not choose the Chaos god as your character's god. Maybe the God power is worth it at high levels, but man is it not worth it during the low levels!

Picked up the PS3 version tonight and my wife and I spent a few hours playing. Yeah, it's rough around the edges. There is quite a bit of screen tearing and switching down to 720p didn't help much. I'm hoping they add an option to turn off the ground shadows because that seems to be killing it; the game runs really smooth at night but during the day when trees are casting shadows all over the place I notice a decent amount of screen tearing. Then again the original Sacred had pretty similar issues so I'm not too surprised

I like how the combat controls works. Everything is just assigned to a button. What's cool is that you can put an axe on one and a sword on another and instantly switch between the two just by tapping the appropriate attack button. Comboing skills is back from the original which is pretty cool and key to doing more stuff in a shorter amount of time.

I do wish the camera was zoomed in just a hair further as I think it is a little too far out in local coop. Also, the screen can get really busy and its hard to track your character. My wife is the shadow warrior guy and the gem over her head was green which got lost in the crowd really easily with her green glowing skeleton companions running around. They really need to add in local trading as well.

The game is just fun, though. I love exploring the open world, getting quests, running through caves, finding hidden stashes, etc. It's all very satisfying. If they can patch up a few of the graphics and interface issues I'll be more than happy. My wife loved the bit we played tonight and I think we'll be playing much more in the future.

I heard there were finally rumors that MS would expand the friends list.. maybe they'll announce something at E3.

Ok, I caved and ordered.. that didnt take long. It just required the slightest nudge. (as you can see)

Didn't notice much screen tearing on the 360 version, but I haven't tried the local coop yet.

I've picked up the 360 version as well.

Does anyone know if you are doing local co-op, can you then go on-line as well? Most games don't seem to support this.

You people are going to have me buying a crack-loot game right when I am busiest. Dangit.

I bought it for the PC and put about an hour into it. So far I'm not all that impressed. I don't really understand what's going on with what appears to be an unusually complicated loot system, and on top of that I'm not getting very much loot at all. In that hour I went up to level four and found... a sword. Singular. One. It wasn't even a particularly nice sword. I've found some armor and items for other classes too, which felt kind of like a slap in the face, like, "you're only getting a handful of items in an hour, so here, have some you can't possibly use." Then I found an auto-resetting beartrap to walk back and forth over a few times.

Someone want to jump on multiplayer with me, or explain what I'm doing wrong? Right now I'm not feeling too great about my purchase. Oh, and will I miss anything if I turn the voices off? They're... just awful.

LobsterMobster wrote:

I bought it for the PC and put about an hour into it. So far I'm not all that impressed. I don't really understand what's going on with what appears to be an unusually complicated loot system, and on top of that I'm not getting very much loot at all. In that hour I went up to level four and found... a sword. Singular. One. It wasn't even a particularly nice sword. I've found some armor and items for other classes too, which felt kind of like a slap in the face, like, "you're only getting a handful of items in an hour, so here, have some you can't possibly use." Then I found an auto-resetting beartrap to walk back and forth over a few times.

Someone want to jump on multiplayer with me, or explain what I'm doing wrong? Right now I'm not feeling too great about my purchase. Oh, and will I miss anything if I turn the voices off? They're... just awful.

I felt more or less the same when I first got it , to the point I only really tried to play it again recently. Give it a little more time (at least until you get to the elven city maybe). Eventually something sort of "clicked" with it and I started enjoying it much more.

What skill level are you playing on? I started on bronze but found it to be much too easy (and thus dull). Try switching to silver and trying that (although you have to start from scratch i think).

Not sure why you're having problems with the loot though, don't remember ever struggling to find anything. Hell, pretty much every quest I finish at the moment is dropping a set piece or yellow/orange loot. I very quickly had to set the auto-loot to only pick up blue or better items, otherwise i'd have been running back to a trader every few minutes.

Also remember you can store loot you can't wear in the communal area of your chest so you can save them for other characters if you ever felt the need to start a different one.

If you find those skill-runes you can use to boost your abilities but they are for the other characters, save them and trade them in with the runemaster guys. They'll sell you back a useful rune instead at a cost determined by the number of useless runes you trade him.

Oh and no you wont miss anything with voices switched off, save for some crappy acting

I play with the voices off, I don't miss anything without them.

And yeah, play Silver difficulty. Think of Bronze as "easy" and Silver as "normal". If you've ever played an action rpg of any type, just go straight to Silver.

So is this worth buying now or should I wait for bargains?

I picked this up for the 360 and... it's pretty fun!

The character development stuff is really confusing at first - though I'm starting to get a handle on it, I'm really not a fan of relying on loot drops to increase my combat abilities. My only real beef is, the minimap is a bit hard to read.

So I've just got some gift cards from work - might put them towards this on 360 - sounds like it's getting some buzz.

We played some four player coop last night and had a blast. Not much lag to speak of (aside from a couple spikes) and the game scaled well to our levels. What was interesting was Ozymandias came in at level 1 (we were level 8 or so) and caught up pretty quickly. It doesn't take super long to get level parity for everyone if you move as a group.

Hot tip for anyone playing: horses get more expensive as you level up (because you're buying an equal level horse) so the sooner you can get to the high elf camp stables, the cheaper the horse will be.

Certis wrote:

high elf camp stables

For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on (and I think latex gloves and lube would be required to do so) this sounds very wrong to me

I'll be giving this a look when it comes out in Europe next month, by which time y'all will have moved on to something shinier, no doubt!

I just got into Sacred 2 as it finally came out on PS3 last week. So far the game is fantastic on console. I had very low expectations but it is really a great game. Personally I prefer these types of games on consoles as you can play local multi-player and I feel the analog sticks provide a much better control mechanism than the constant clicking of the mouse. The only annoying things are that you can't do local multiplayer mixed with online multiplayer even though you apparently can on xbox, and there is no trading allowed in local multiplayer games. Also dropping down to 720p did get rid of the screen tearing for me.

Does the PC version have any redeeming features?

Certis wrote:

We played some four player coop last night and had a blast. Not much lag to speak of (aside from a couple spikes) and the game scaled well to our levels. What was interesting was Ozymandias came in at level 1 (we were level 8 or so) and caught up pretty quickly. It doesn't take super long to get level parity for everyone if you move as a group.

Yeah, the four player co-op was pretty cool. There was a bit of a struggle very early on, but it's a testament to the GWJ crew that nobody laughed at me when I got punked out by one of the guys wandering around in the opening graveyard. (Well, at least they didn't laugh out loud.) Once I managed to get running, I was able to teleport straight to them on the map - a very handy feature for multiplayer - and get right into smashing things.

One other weird oddity: for some reason, my 360 is carrying some kind of voodoo that makes the game run better during multiplayer. The screen tears occasionally during my solo runs, but sings like a bird when there are three other people slicing up a half-dozen kobolds on the screen. I have absolutely no explanation for it - I thought that my install to the hard drive had something to do with the better performance during the multiplayer game, but I was still encountering some tearing on the solo run I took this morning. Very strange.

(BTW, did you guys manage to solve that kobold chieftain?)

NormanTheIntern wrote:

The character development stuff is really confusing at first - though I'm starting to get a handle on it, I'm really not a fan of relying on loot drops to increase my combat abilities. My only real beef is, the minimap is a bit hard to read.

Those are two of my main gripes as well, with the light vs. shadow questing dynamic being #1 on my list with a bullet. The first Shadow Warrior I rolled up was a pretty cool necro-ranger type, which allowed my ghostly knights and I to run around the landscape like The Four Horsemen, steel chairs and all. When I had to re-roll for the multiplayer session due to the aforementioned Light vs. Shadow divergence, I ended up stumbling into a very angry melee-focused guy that had to work on folks with a melee combo Combat Art that featured an awkward (albeit effective) big guy kick. I kind of understand the reason behind the design, as the loot-based skills definitely open up the possibility for lots of diversity in subsequent playthroughs, but it made me feel at times that my efforts in plotting out my character were kind of fruitless.

Still, if you're looking for multiplayer dungeon hackery on the console, this does a pretty competent job of it. And, given that the level cap stretches out to some delightly absurd limit (200? 250?), it seems like something that could potentially have legs, as long as the endgame content is compelling enough for players to scale.

OzymandiasAV wrote:

(BTW, did you guys manage to solve that kobold chieftain?)

When my wife and I fought that guy we found that magic attacks seemed to heal him, so we went with melee. That was tough with my Tower Guardian, who wanted to fire his arm cannon whenever the boss moved just a little bit away from him.

Like crack this game is.

This style of ARPG is my favorite genre, and this is the best specimen since Nox and Divine Divinity.

There is so much to do in this game, it's freaking crazy.

I love the anachronistic humor, and how nothing in this game takes itself seriously. It's just fun.

Yes it is janky, and yes things can get fiddly, but the game is so much fun that it just doesn't matter.

It's amazing how few of these games get made for consoles - this and Champions of Norrath prove that they can be done, and done well.

Picked this up for the 360 a few days ago and I've played a couple hours.. reached level 10 this morning and got my first horse. I'm playing a Shadow Warrior and so far its pretty entertaining. It reminds me that a fun game doenst really always need to be a particularly "deep" game just has to do a few things really well.

Final Verdict, PC or Console?

Grenn wrote:

Final Verdict, PC or Console?

The interface on the 360 is pretty well done given its a console port.. BUT you can tell the PC probably handles the interface way better. I find the "style" of game more in line with a console game though.. it just doesn't seem "meaty" enough to warrant sitting in front of my PC to play.. this just feels more like a couch game.

Just looked, still $50 on steam. I generally only buy on Steam unless it's a game I really want. I'll wait until Steam goes down in price.