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- August 30, 2006
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I tried the demo myself but, well it wasn't realy convincinf for me then. Might like it now but I doubt it
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.
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2006
- Messages
- 7,830