Sacred 2 - German Demo Wednesday!

Sir Brennus writes that GameStar.de will have an exclusive demo for Sacred 2 on wednesday - presumably German. According to the announcement, the 2Gb file will offer players a taste of the Seraphim in the High Elves area, with several dungeons and 15 quests to solve.
More information.

Insgesamt dürfen Sie 15 Quests als rechtschaffender Held lösen, die bösen Lösungsansätze will sich Asacron für die Vollversion aufheben.

Am I getting this right? The demo features only heroic solutions for quests and the evil ones will only be available in the full game?

Correct. AFAIR you have to chose your path rather early. Seems they have hardcoded it for the demo.

nice screens, have to say that mount is pretty cool!

It's cool that a demo will be available, so that I can check if my hardware is good enough to play the game in high resolution. I still don't get the idea of an "exclusive demo" though, this just doesn't make any sense at all but well…

Originally Posted by Brother None
Am I getting this right? The demo features only heroic solutions for quests and the evil ones will only be available in the full game?

As I understand Myrthos preview, the Seraphim — the character in this demo — is inherently good, thus you only get the good path available. Put another way - there are no evil ones for that class.

Hopefully the English one won't be far behind. 15 quests is a nice sized demo.

Depends on how the quests are like.

I think there might arise a new trend at one point ? - In earlier times, we had the "fed ex missions", so to say ("bring this" "take that" "deliver this over there"), and maybe at one point weL#ll have the "hack missions": "Hack this" "destroy that" "kill the enemy over there" …

Not too much variance, I see there.

Now, I'm wondering whether I should try and download the demo or just wait until it is shipped on a magazine's DVD …

The German demo has been released.
You can download it from here

It's German.
I'll install it tonight and give you some review tomorrow.

Originally Posted by Gragnak
The German demo has been released.
It's German.

Surprise, surprise !

Eh eh eh…..
I'm the master of the obvious!

Let the english translations begin!

Originally Posted by Gragnak
Eh eh eh…..
I'm the master of the obvious!

Gratz! Not everybody knows what he is good at.

Originally Posted by redman5427
Let the english translations begin!

Not necessary. The English demo will surely follow within a short time.

I tried it and liked it.

My german is pretty weak, but I understand most things - given time - and I think this will be a welcome addition to the genre.

But some things worry me:

Classes are gender-locked

Powers still seem to be too slow and have too long cooldowns. I know you can reduce cooldown, but in the original Sacred this was cumbersome and extremely expensive, and the cooldown increases with every level of the power - meaning you're constantly racing for your powers to be practical. Truth be told, I think it's a horrible design flaw - because as a designer you NEVER give players powers that aren't (truly) useful in practice. Better to give them lesser powers they can actually use, than give them neat stuff they have to wait on constantly.

This brings me to the actual combat and I'm not sure what I think of it. It looks pretty great, but with the Seraphim it felt sluggish. You get one melee power at the start, and though it was more powerful it was SLOW to animate and didn't really seem to be that big a DPS advantage given the time it takes to execute. That doesn't bode well in terms of class design, and it's something that becomes increasingly important as you proceed through the game and possibly the most important thing for the game to have serious longevity. You can't afford NOT to have a solid and balanced character development system in a game like this if it's supposed to be more than just a quick run-through. Sacred suffered much the same thing.

Didn't try the combo system, but if it's anything like the last one it's not going to be a good feature. I never successfully made a single useful combo - though I hear it's possible with certain combinations. But overall they really need to rethink the entire system, as I think it's great in theory but pretty bad in execution. I might be wrong and it's only based on the fact that it SEEMED to be like the original Sacred.

Constantly respawning enemies are back, but they seemed to be fewer in numbers and hopefully less of hassle to kill.

Please note that these are only impressions and I might be entirely wrong about how they're handling stuff - it just seems very much like the old one in these areas.

—-

Improvements over sacred:

I like the new engine. The old one was quite sluggish when loading - something it did constantly as it was "seamless". If it's still a seamless world - I'm going to really enjoy it.

The dungeon I entered seemed to have more flavor and what appeared to be traps and puzzle-like elements. I didn't figure out how it worked, but it bodes very well. I love puzzles and traps and think they're being omitted in far too many dungeon games. If this holds true, it's another great addition to the game.

It appears there's a pretty deep skill system this time around, and I really like the amount of passive skills. IIRC - in the original Sacred - you basically put points into attributes and a few skills every level and it never felt particularly impactful. This seems much more elaborate and free, though it might end up being just as tame. At the very least, there are neat icons for all the skills.

A minor thing, but I really like the "pickup" key. Loot glitters with a very obvious visual indicator, and with a single keypress you not only pick up everything in a certain radius - but you also get a listing of the loot as floating text. In Dungeon Siege, for instance, you had a keypress for the same thing, but you picked up everything on screen, and your character had to run around to do it, and you didn't really have time to read what you actually picked up. With this system, you only pick up stuff in a limited radius, meaning if you're playing with friends you're not grabbing everything - and it happens instantly AND you get to read what you picked up at the same time. Naturally, with friends you're going to share anyway, but there's something inherently fun about being the one looting stuff - and here everyone should be able to do that without hassle.

I can't even get it to run.. I choose the Seraphim, and the games goes to load, then just loads the exit splash screen for when the demo exits I think, saying when it comes out,ect.. then to the desktop..