Deep Silver - Takes Over Sacred Brand, Announces Sacred 3

Deep Silver's mother company Koch Media announced at their GC press conference that they've purchased the Sacred brand out of Ascaron's ashes. Sacred 3 is already in the works. This is no surprise for our readers, but now we have the official confirmation.
Koch Media also revealed some numbers. They expect an 18% revenue boost in the ongoing business year, breaking through the 300M EUR mark for the first time.
Found on GamesMarkt.de.
More information.

The Press release was - as I assume - yesterday at 15.00 local time at the GamesCom.

Wonder if this might be the mysterious Piranha Bytes game with beta keys in the Risen CE?

I doubt that. PB prefers to work on their own stuff.

This is good news. I liked Sacred. Hope they bring back vampire characters. They were my favorite in the original.

skavenhorde said:

This is good news. I liked Sacred. Hope they bring back vampire characters. They were my favorite in the original.

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Dwarfs, please!

I want to use those cool shoulder-canons again! :lol:

szokol said:

Dwarfs, please!

I want to use those cool shoulder-canons again! :lol:

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Dwarves? Those little half pints. They're too tiny to be a real hero

Good news for Sacred fans

Here's hoping they can avoid feature creep and actually make a sound balanced game this time.

Good luck, hope they can pull it off and here's hoping they dump the endless respawing, the game weakest feature. Constantly respawing kills any sense of accomplishment, attachment to the world, environment and story.

Acleacius said:

Good luck, hope they can pull it off and here's hoping they dump the endless respawing, the game weakest feature. Constantly respawing kills any sense of accomplishment, attachment to the world, environment and story.

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Yes, but outside of those things, respawning isn't bad

To be honest, after Sacred 2, I wouldn't play it again even if Blizzard took it over; it was that much of a let down.

Why do you say Sacred 2 was a let down?

skavenhorde said:

Why do you say Sacred 2 was a let down?

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I liked Sacred 2 very much, its main-quest and side-quests had more content than some current "pure" RPGs.

But I can understand the problem:

- The action RPG fans (aka Diablo 2) expect very balanced and fun fighting abilities of the character classes, fun levelling , looting, grinding (e. g. with respawning - it is a must in that subgenre) and multiplayer
- The story/setting/role-playing oriented RPG fans expect a solid main story, interesting side quests, different solutions to problems, interesting background lore etc.

A game which tries both has a high chance of not being liked by the hardcore fans of either side.

I am a mainly story/setting/background lore/exploration driven player, while fighting is only the "salt in the soup" for me.

And exactly for that reason, for me Sacred 2 was quite good, because, as said above the amount of side quests was huge and these side quests were all related to the main theme of the story. In some cities you can spend time to run around and simply look at the architecture, which is quite good.

E. g. I liked the wood-house-citiy of the dryads - of course I played a dryad, since I try an archer in all games I play.

I found fighting quite easy ( I tend to use the highest difficulty setting available, but I am not concerned with questions like: which character classes abilities can be tweaked in the best way etc.) but not so easy, that you could ignore the enemies. So it was exactly the right level for my kind of gaming.

I can see why non-action-RPG-fans might be turned off by respawning, but this is essential for the action-RPG-grinding mechanic. I like the solution in Sacred 1 and 2: The monsters in places, where you already have been don't respawn on a higher level only because of the higher level you got in the meantime,but stay at the level ofthe first encounter (IIRC).

This is ok, because you can simply ignore them when re-visiting an area after some levelling. They tend to die "automatically" if you have some kind of defensive spell which reflects part of the damage, because they can't harm you and practically kill themseves, when trying to.

Edit: IIRC the monster don't even try to attack you, if the are a certain number of levels below you. So its up to you if you want to fight or not.

So all players,who love to see some good graphical content, varying places, lots of sidequests, lore, to look in the last corner of a map and accept fighting as a filler, which is meant to prevent your character from getting to lazy, will love this game more then some pure implemenation of the two subgenres.

And I really recommend to try it as a story driven RPG and to simply ignore the action-RPG-grinding-mechanics.

I believe Alrik has pointed out, that Sacred 1 was once planned as a "pure" RPG and turned into an action RPG due to development constraints (time/money lack?).

I would of course prefer Sacred 3 to be a pure RPG, but if it will be an "action RPG" / "pure RPG" mix again like the first two games, I will like it anyway.

All in all: The message of a Sacred 3 is areally good message.

bkrueger said:

I believe Alrik has pointed out, that Sacred 1 was once planned as a "pure" RPG and turned into an action RPG due to development constraints (time/money lack?).

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Yes, but the reasons why they did it remain obscure for non-insiders like me. I can just state that it happened. First press releases were ceven speaking of developing a "full" RPG.

My normal theory is that the constant comparing of this RPG to Blizzard's D2/LOD by German magazines created in someone the idea of doing an action-RPG out of it. But I'll never know for sure.

I still remember someone of the original development team of Ikarion having been out (on vacation ?) for some time, then coming back, and being confronted with the decision of making an action game out of it. He stated that he was severely shocked, so to say.

But still, Rei from the Larian forums is very likely the only person left who could tell almost the full story, especially since she has seen the game in an early stage. And there is only one member of noXQs Order (named after one of the devs, if I remember that correctly) out there who has seen Armalion live, visiting Ikarion in Aachen, Germany. I don't remember his name anymore, though.