Sacred (2004)

Finished. And I am...baffled. To me, Sacred is not a good game by all possible measures. And yet it spawned an expansion, two sequels, and enough positive reviews here alone that I simply must be missing something. That something might be nostalgia, but I am unsure. I heard Sacred was "big in Europe" years ago. If true, what does that say about European gamers in 2004? What parts of Europe? These are questions I will answer. I am going to track down reviews of the time and see if I can figure this out. I don't like Diablo style games much, but even so. The game is HYPER janky. Absolutely nothing works the first time you click on it. Abilities just decide when they do and don't want to work. Movement is really inconsistent, with your character sometimes going off in weird directions while you hold the mouse to run. It'll decided that you clicked on a random NPC when you surely did not (those NPCs universally have nothing of note to say, either). The world is huge and empty of anything interesting. You can see places where it looks very much like a side quest should take place there and yet there's nothing. You can explore a whole town and find nothing because the game has absolutely nothing in it. The gear is boring, with no fun keywords or effects. The ability system is, to me, poorly implemented. Enemies have moves that stun you constantly. The AI is bad and both allies and enemies will sometimes just not attack (your allies are dead meat, since even the best ones can't defend themselves). The story is a dull "Great Value brand" Tolkien imitation you and your buddies in middle school dreamt up at the lunch table. And the worst part of it all is the map. That miserable, godforsaken map. Sacred's map will make you think that you can get from point A to B but you cannot. Getting lost and finding a ridge you can't cross is 50% of this game. In the latter half of chapter 3 I gave up and used teleport cheats. These are not things I would be fine with in 2004. These are glaring, obvious mechanical problems that I can't fathom someone putting up with and then going "let's do that again on a harder difficulty." But, again, I believe I'm missing something. Some context or...something.

This game is so strangely hollow. There's all this space...and nothing in it. Sure, monsters, but tons of NPCs who say nothing and chests with nothing in them. A barrel, a box, a grave? Sure, I can see those being empty. But a treasure chest? The story feels like a placeholder, there are no characters, really. There are a ton of sidequests, but they're the worst kind of MMO style fetch quest or "kill X of these." The game has an inexcusable amount of escort quests. Escort quests are only as good as your AI is, and the AI in Sacred is bad. Even at their best, escort quests blow. Thankfully, nothing in the game matters so I can simply ignore 90% of what is thrown at me. I literally run past most enemies if I can.

Started up a game here. Why? Because I want to play the second one and I like to play games in sequence as long as it's not impenetrable. Why do I want to play the second one? One of my favorite bands put out a song in promotion of that game years ago, and I love that song, and always wanted to check it out. So far it feels...fine? Click click click and all that. We'll see where this goes.