Sacred 2 - Combat Trailer @ GamersHell

titus said:

I tried the demo myself but, well it wasn't realy convincinf for me then. Might like it now but I doubt it

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No surprise. Sacred was no killer application. It was the "game that is good enough", and sold more than 2 million copies with this probobly accidental strategy. It was risk-free to recommend Sacred to the mass market because it came with 200 hours of mostly above average hack&slay. It wasn´t necessarily better than the rest but it had less weaknesses, at least after the 12th or so patch.
So if your purchase hurdle is relatively high it´s quite possible Sacred couldn´t get over it immediately.

The difference between Sacred 2 and the legion of nameless Diablo clones is that the cash on the bank, the sales projections (now on 3 platforms!) and a lot of user feedback allows and also forces Ascaron to think bigger. They can no longer be "good enough" if they want to become the 2nd Bethesda, they have to set new standards. Now they are the only Diablo clone with mass market appeal. If they want more they have to up the ante.
Even if most of these new standards are only small tweaks of known things, some are really new. Examples: A massive hand-crafted world with correctly mapped dungeons below it. Meaning that everything is at the correct place instead of having rather abstract exits at random places. Walk 500m to the north in a dungeon and you´ll come up 500m north on the world map. The seamless multi-player is also new I think. You can enter or leave a game at every time, save, enter, leave, continue - the game scales the difficulty accordingly on the fly.

And the huge map, of course. According to the press releases, it will take hours just to walk from one side to another, without any stops or fights. That is big!

szokol said:

And the huge map, of course. According to the press releases, it will take hours just to walk from one side to another, without any stops or fights. That is big!

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Hope that means horses will be in ready supply ;-) remember fleeing very effectively on mine (clippety-clop) in Sacred. Running/walking everywhere is a pain in the a*rse in big game worlds.

Wood Elf was my favorite class in Sacred, as long as they give me an equivelent in this game I'll be happy. I think the graphics look great, tho I'm not a melee type of action-rpg'er, so i didnt see much to really get me excited by the vid. With ranged, you can play and try not to get hit, as opposed to just whacking away while youre getting whacked on, and youre just watching health bars the whole time. It's just more fun imho.

The presentation in the vid is awesome, i like the look of the game, the effects look really cool. I'll be getting it most likely too Mags, maybe we'll tear it up a little in mp, i'm going to want to show off my elf!

I hope they come up w/ decent mp lobby type thing like Battlenet

Sounds good Sammy. I bet we could talk chamr into showing up, too. From what I've read they're putting a lot of emphasis on mp--hopefuly it will get done right.
With my current nostaligic foray into D2, I'm ready for something that just says "kill zombies now." I'm trying out a Ranger build(paladin with a bow) and everything you say about the wood elf holds true. Keeps you awake.

I read today that they´re aiming very high. Their sales projection is 4.5M units on 3 platforms.

Interesting. I'm not surprised, given ~2M on PC only for Sacred 1. On the other hand, the market has evolved, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

magerette said:

I bet we could talk chamr into showing up, too.

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I bet you could...