Description
Sacred is an action role playing game set in the fantasy world of Ancaria. You can choose from six different characters - Dark Elf, Battle Mage, Gladiator, Forest Elf (a female archer), Vampire Lady and Seraphim (a descendant of arch angels). Your mission is to save Ancaria from evil which comes in form of Shaddar, a Necromancer who spent his days creating monsters to roam the plane.
Each character starts out in a different location, but all of them are quite near to each other. Besides the main quests, which are divided into four so-called "acts", you'll get to solve more than 500 different subquests, of which some are randomly assigned. While the main quest doesn't get you anything but to continue in the storyline, the subquests award you experience, gold and sometimes items.
The character system is different to other games of this type, since your character can not "learn" the spells or skills he (or you) wants to use, but needs to find "runes". These runes can be read, which gives the character +1 to a certain skill. Besides this, with each level up, you can assign stat points - strength, dexterity, mental regeneration for spells, physical regeneration for life replenish and so on. The character level is not limited, it's possible to gain levels way over 100 but this of course takes time. Also, the skills are not limited; if you want, you can read 200 runes with one skill and thus have level 200 on one skill, but this has a severe disadvantage: the skills get more powerful, but they take more time to regenerate at higher levels (which can lead to extremely powerful attacks which can be performed once in 4 minutes, rendering them unusable).
The size of the world can be compared to Baldur's Gate, but here, it's all in 3D. There are large towns and small villages, all with different inhabitants, different vendors and of course, many quests to solve. Travelling through the world can take hours, that's why the game boasts horses to ride on, which of course make the player much faster, but can be killed by monsters as well.
The game features single player and network, open and closed internet play on four difficulty levels with up to 16 players at once. Player-killing is not possible in normal games, but it's possible to open special Player-vs-Player games where no quests are active, but players may be killed. Hardcore play is also possible - which means that once you're dead, the character stays dead forever (normally, you just respawn in town, the character loses neither experience nor gold).
Alternate Titles
- "圣域" -- Chinese Title (Simplified)
- "Князь Тьмы" -- Russian Title
- "Sacred: La Leyenda del Arma Sagrada" -- Spanish title
Part of the Following Groups
User Reviews
The Press Says
| Gamers.at |
Mar 08, 2004 |
86 out of 100 |
86 |
| PC Games (Germany) |
Feb 25, 2004 |
80 out of 100 |
80 |
| GameBanshee |
Feb 24, 2005 |
8 out of 10 |
80 |
| Joystick (French) |
Apr, 2004 |
8 out of 10 |
80 |
| IGN |
Apr 12, 2004 |
7.8 out of 10 |
78 |
| Digital Entertainment News (den) |
Jul 28, 2004 |
7.1 out of 10 |
71 |
| CanardPC |
Apr 07, 2007 |
7 out of 10 |
70 |
| Super Play |
May, 2004 |
5 out of 10 |
50 |
| Game Revolution |
Apr, 2004 |
C |
50 |
| GameSpy |
Apr 09, 2004 |
  |
40 |
Forums
Trivia
Copy protection
Sacred has a rather original copy protection system. While the game seemed to work fine, at some point - usually upon entering a dungeon - the player character was teleported to a small island called Mal-Ork-A that he could not leave. The island could be visited by a legit player as well, but in that case, he'd still have the boat he came with.
Sadly, since
Sacred was rather buggy already, the protection occasionally kicked in for legit players as well, making this kind of protection rather worthless.
Dwarf dungeon
The Dwarf dungeon world in
Sacred were created using the renderings of
The Light Works. They provided in-game graphics for this level and the water elements.
Multiplayer
Thanks to the game's advertising as being a
Diablo II competitor, players believed they'd be able to play online like in Blizzard's game. While there was online multiplayer, it didn't work initially and had to be patched in. Frustration quickly ensued when it became apparent that Ascaron had saved on the wrong end - the servers. Instead of a Battle.net competitor able to handle hundreds, if not thousands of concurrent games, only a handful of servers were available, each hosting just one game with 8 players. Most of the time, these servers were either full or had crashed. If it worked, multiplayer was often plagued by synchronization issues - one player would get a quest the other didn't, or would see (and be attacked by) monsters the others didn't.
Also, it quickly became apparent that the multiplayer servers didn't actually do much more than store the character data. In fact, one could modify the client-side game files and get away with using ridiculous items online - the server never checked the client's files. It was also possible to cheat the client's memory in order to instantly level the character to max. level - this also was not detected by the server.
These issues were all fixed in the months after release.
References
There are many references in
Sacred:
- Sunglasses
- A bunny costume (which is applied to cheaters only)
- A light saber like in Star Wars
- The ice hockey mask and machete from the Friday 13th movies
- A dungeon which is made up like a Pac-Man game
- A village which is a exact copy of Tristram from Diablo
- Game boxes as quest items (all from other Ascaron games)
- Tons of humorous tombstone inscriptions
Awards
- GameStar (Germany)
- February 2005 - Best PC RPG in 2004 (Readers' vote)
Information also contributed by
JeanneThis entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
phlux 
(4144) on Mar 10, 2004.
