Sacred 2 - Delayed. Really!
 

In the Gamespot interview we posted yesterday Sacred 2 producer Christian Grunwald talked about a Q1/08 release, simultaneously on PC and XBox 360. We didn´t mention it explicitly because it was clear for us that he was only confirming the well known international release date. A gazillion German web sites thought he meant the German date, which had been set for Q4/07, and so rumors started to float.
Today Ascaron´s PR manager Torsten Meier clarified the situation in the official Sacred 2 forum. The German versions will indeed be delayed until Q1/08, but not due to bug plague. Ascaron needs more time to implement all planned "genre expanding features" in the desired quality.
Meier also let the community know a PR with an announcement regarding Sacred 2´s appearance at the Games Convention in August will be made soon. I wonder if it will include more than the already known info that the MP part will be unveiled.
More information.

Q1 08. Didn't they already say a while back that it would be a 2008 title? I wasn't expecting it before then.

I was thinking the same … but then I'm not in Germany ;)

The German release was scheduled for Q4/07. Now it´s the same date worldwide. IMHO this can mean either of these two things:
They´ve found an international publisher big enough to pull off a worldwide release on two platforms. In Germany it´s Take2 - and Take2 would be stupid not to try to sign such a successful franchise (last confirmed number: 2M on one platform) for the rest of the world too. I read somewhere Ascaron has 3 big publishers interested in Sacred 2.
Or the international version will be delayed until Q2.

That reminds me of Age of Wonders : Shadow Magic : Sold by Take2 in the U.S. first, THEN in the country of its developer (as like the rest of Europe).

This is a coin with two sides :

- On the one hand it makes one jealous why "they get it first, but we don't"
- On the other side it gives us the possibility to get all of the first patches the international version might spawn.

Ascaron's reputation with the bug-infested Sacred 1 was heavily damaged back then.
(The worst bug I EVER read about was that sometimes instead of items, whole Seraphims could be dropped …)

Anything that results in a better game is fine by me. Getting properly published and distributed helps sales, which helps devs have the funding and backing to support their games with post-release patches and so forth.

And if Sacred2 is anything like the original, this is a good thing. :)

WHOLE Seraphims??? So you would be carrying a player character model around in your inventory? Never ran across that one— bizarre.

But the amazing thing is that most people don't think of that now - the game was a complete mess at release, but they patched and patched and patched - and then gave away content for free that they had planned to charge for! Talk about a company earning back goodwill!

I think I ran into this bug a few times in the monastery. I'd kill a goblin, and a seraphim or battlemage would pop up out of nowhere. They had no names, and you couldn't interact with them — although I recall the battlemage got hit by goblin crossfire and went hostile against them, killing them and stealing my precious XP. The seras just stood there trying to look pretty.

And I agree: players can be very forgiving after the fact if the game gets patched up. If the game is good enough to keep playing until the patches arrive, sentimentality will override original impressions. Daggerfall, Baldur's Gate 1, and Gothic 1 were supposed to be extremely bugging at initial release (I didn't play any of them until long after they were released). It seems like most of the great RPGs everyone loves were a mess when first shipped.

That makes a little more sense than what I was visualizing.O_O

But still a very weird bug. I was fortunate in not playing the game til it had been patched several times.

I never had this bug, but burst out into laughter when I read about it in the bug-fix list. ;)

one of the wilder (and more comedic) bugs Ive heard of!

I just had the game-breaker where I'd travel to certain parts of the map and the game would crash. No fun!