Sacred 3 released - to surprise of the publisher - and gets a mauling from RPS

[Huw the Poo]

Link to RPS article

Damn.  It sounds truly awful, if even half of that stuff is true.  Here's my favourite quote:

It's spectacularly bad. Bad not like Sacred games have been bad before, where maps stopped working or the game just crashed. In this game crashing would be a welcome feature.

Ouch.  And...no loot?  At all?  That's the central theme of a game like this!

There's a half an hour video of John Walker playing it.  I think I'll have a beer and watch it now.

[Nefaro]

Link to RPS article

Damn.  It sounds truly awful, if even half of that stuff is true.  Here's my favourite quote:

It's spectacularly bad. Bad not like Sacred games have been bad before, where maps stopped working or the game just crashed. In this game crashing would be a welcome feature.

Ouch.  And...no loot?  At all?  That's the central theme of a game like this!

There's a half an hour video of John Walker playing it.  I think I'll have a beer and watch it now.

Srsly?!

WTF?

[Huw the Poo]

There's also no open world at all.  At the end of a mission you just...click on the next mission...which consists of walking through a few corridors before fighting a boss.  It looks absolutely dire.  I just watched that whole video of John playing and it was painful.

What a shame.  I actually really liked Sacred 2, and the only criticism of it that I've ever agreed with is that it's just too big.  It takes forever to get through.  But it had everything a proper ARPG should have.

[panzerde]

Wow.

This is what happens when you hire a bunch of out of work SAP developers and have them build an ARPG.

[DennisS]

Sacred is one of the very few games that has remained on my hard drive for years and years, and also one of the first to get installed on a NEW PC.

This sucks..thank God I didn't purchase it day 1...I almost did.

[Huw the Poo]

This sucks..thank God I didn't purchase it day 1...I almost did.

Dude, never purchase day 1, or preorder for that matter.  You will often regret it, and it just encourages this sort of nonsense.

[Wolfe1759]

On the plus side the RPS and WTF video reviews were rather fun in a train crash way and it inspired me to start up another run at Titan Quest which is fun.

[Nefaro]

There's also no open world at all.  At the end of a mission you just...click on the next mission...which consists of walking through a few corridors before fighting a boss.  It looks absolutely dire.  I just watched that whole video of John playing and it was painful.

That's terrible.  :(

What a shame.  I actually really liked Sacred 2, and the only criticism of it that I've ever agreed with is that it's just too big.  It takes forever to get through.  But it had everything a proper ARPG should have.

I also liked Sacred 2, once I got around to playing it.  My only criticism was the camera views.  I could never get them right.  It was one of those with the camera anchored way too low to the ground, so even if you adjust it up/down/in/out in the settings, it will still always be staring straight at your shoes and not far enough out ahead of you.   >:(

I thought the huge open world was just a plus.  It would be bad if there was a lot of empty space, but there always seemed to be something to fight nearby, at the least. 


EDIT:  Just like Dennis, I also keep the original Sacred installed on one of my computers.  :)

[DennisS]

This sucks..thank God I didn't purchase it day 1...I almost did.

Dude, never purchase day 1, or preorder for that matter.  You will often regret it, and it just encourages this sort of nonsense.

You note that I did NOT purchase on day 1    ....       

I have been burned more than once. I want to see some reviews.

[Yskonyn]

I had already expected S3 to be going to crash and burn.

I still have S2 installed and play it sometimes. Its a shame the MP servers were taken offline a few years ago as the game doesnt support direct IP connections and I detest using something like Hamachi.

Anyway, S2 has been unplayable for me for a long time. I got it right on release because I loved S1 as well, but S2 kept on crashing on my PC.
This wasn't actually resolved until just before the expansion hit. Way late and by that time I was busy playing something else.
Once I found out the game was working ok, the community was already falling apart and shortly after the servers were shut down.

I like the game SP, but for me these games really shine MP where you can trade loot and have fun bashing enemies with some friends.

Too bad S3 really is the wreck everyone was afraid of. The series could use a good new game..

[Huw the Poo]

Reviews are starting to appear.  On Metacritic, the user rating as I type is 1.4, out of 108 ratings!  Damn.

Amongst the professional critics the score currently stands at 64.  I like this quote from Fraser Brown at PCGamesN (who gives it 4/10): "I have no doubt that some folk will dismiss Sacred 3 because it bears no resemblance to the previous core games in the series. But that's not why it should be avoided by most. It's simply not fun to play."