Sacred 2 part deux: Gameplay

Part 2 of my coverage of Sacred 2. Read on for talk about the world, quests, and enemies!

Map and Travel

Sacred world map... click to see the whole thing!

Besides the byzantine character development system outlined previously, Sacred 2 has a few other noteworthy features. First, the game worl♦d is huge… I mean, HUGE… and unzoned. You can move around it freely, on foot, with a generic mount (like a horse) or with a class-specific mount which must be quested for. That part is great; I like a gameworld so big you feel you’ll never see it all in one play-through. In this respect, Sacred 2 absolutely compares with Bethsoft games like Fallout 3. (Here’s the whole world map in an awesome fully-zoomable version.)

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel — Character development

A high elf in Sacred II.

Probably everybody knows that Steam is having a game sale. Great time to pick up those games you’ve been holding off on all year because you weren’t sure they could compete with the big name games you bought on release day.

At least, that was how I saw it ;)

My choice was Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, from Ascaron Entertainment, a German company. I’d played the first Sacred and its expansion Sacred Underworld; Sacred 2 is a very similar game, the major difference being that it’s now full 3D. Sacred’s an “action RPG”: hordes of mostly weak monsters, an angled overhead camera, a shallow storyline, and no profound moral choices. I like the classic “deep” RPG genre, but after playing Fable 2 and Fallout 3 back-to-back I was happy to slip into something a little simpler and less… consequential. Sacred 2 is fun and fast and plenty pretty.

I’ve been playing for a week, and have two characters (a Temple Guardian and a Dryad) in the twentyish range… which means I’ve only touched a tiny corner of this very, very large game. I haven’t done anything with multiplayer and probably won’t, so don’t look for remarks on that here. But I’ll venture some early comments on the single-player campaign, with more to come unless the few but irritating issues annoy me to the point of abandoning it.  Starting with the core of any RPG…