Sacred

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.

Censorship

In order to receive an ESRB "T for Teen" rating, the North American version of the game removed blood and gore effects in such a way that they can not be restored by modifying the settings.cfg file.

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 Jeanne