f13.net

...or, "Somebody Tell Those Fucking Germans That Barrels Are For Smashing."


We spent about 2 or 3 hours on it last night, and I am kind of looking forward to playing more tonight. But you can't smash barrels or share loot (you can only sell or scrap loot that you can't equip - boo, I say!).

Character set-up for co-op mode is buggy. It wouldn't let player 2 make a character, so player 1 had to create an additional character that sort of disappeared into the ethers when it came time to start (I ended up having to jump in after Sauced started playing). Boo, I say. This is apparently being worked on, but still. How did it get released this way? Did I mention that the world is laden with juicy barrels and boxes that you can't smash?

The world is dauntingly large, and Sauced and I both found this really exciting, but just because the map is big doesn't mean you can actually access all of it. I suspect some of it is just for show, but maybe I'll be wrong.

But is it fun? Okay, it is a little fun, but only because I always wanted to play a big-world RPG on my couch in co-op mode with Sauced. Buy Borrow it.

(http://www.sacred2.com/typo3temp/pics/a3119de47e.jpg)

Heh, first time reading schildy's Rules of Engagement. Moved image to separate comment.

The world of Sacred 2 is absolutely overwhelmingly massive. And, yea, half the stuff can't be broken. It drives me batty.

It's like, why have a world with barrels and then give me a sword? It's cruel.

Your little person put her shirt on wrong.  Doesn't go on the head.

Don't even get me started on the female characters' center-of-gravity altering tittehs.

No, the fashion crisis is troubling enough.  :ye_gods:

Can anyone compare this version to the PC version?  I've had my eye on the PC one since launch, but it's never once wavered from the $50 price point.  I generally don't spend that on ~70% rating games. 

If you can get over the fact that the world design is more like an MMORPG (as in huge, mostly lifeless, set up with shitloads of quest hubs, and has varying degrees of bad scaling), it's not bad. The whole thing is just overwhelming to me for some reason on PC. It's pure sensory overload. It's probably better played on a console.

Yeah, if it were on a PC I'd just as soon play an MMORPG.

MMORPGs don't do loot like this, hence the appeal. But if they did, the MMORPG would probably be called "Tooltip Online."

This game needs less tooltips.

Not sure I have a desire to play anything like this, but I may one day. If I recall, you can get that marvel game on ps3 as well VDL. It's sort of hack and slash diabloish, with plenty of inanimate objects to destroy. Not as pretty as this, but fun enough in co op.

I got the pc demo and only the background graphics show with my soundcard....

They claim this is creative's fault and not theirs.

What happens when you remove the sc from the system?  Your MB should have stock audio. 

If you wanted to go that far with it, of course. 

So it's a console game with a PC port?  Or the other way?  I need to know so I can get the right one from a UI/control perspective.

The PC version was released late last year to a ~75% metacritic score.  Seems as if people liked it here at F13, but nobody said it was robot jesus. 

I know a few bashed it a bit for it's clunky camera when it launched.  I don't know if the console is a port or if it was built ground-up. 

I'm trying to talk the budget committee into a PS3 purchase this summer, so I might hold off on picking it up for PC until I know if she'll approve. 

What does that even mean?

Also waiting for a price drop on the PC version.

Since you've never played it, it probably doesn't make sense. But the game is tooltip city. And your guy (or girl) is like always saying something snarky. And god, the music will never ever feel right. It's all just too much.

Sounds like I want that on a small screen with crap speakers, then.  Besides I'm leery of the controller mapping.

I'll give you the tooltips, though there are times tooltips make sense and a console would handle it differently.

But the audio would be the same, no?

Smashable barrels are fun in single player action rpgs.  But it's massively frustrating in multiplayer on a shared screen.  So I say good for them.

Annoying that you can only do local co-op in offline.

The game isn't strictly multi-player though, so it's frustrating.  :uhrr:

Are there more specifics or sources on this?  Also I've heard that online is only one player per console, there's no local co-op online.  True?  Not the end of the world, but... that's damn stupid and annoying.

They're probably right, Creative is a pretty terrible company in a lot of ways.

I went looking for this for 360 yesterday. EBgames was sold out (of the four copies they brought in). Gamestop guy looked at me, blinked, "We didn't get that one".

They are apparently working on patches for multiplayer already.

Local online currently only supports one player.  Two players  must be in Offline mode.

And then it gets worse - in Offline 2-player mode, the 2nd player must be on a 2nd Profile on the console if they want to save their progress.  Otherwise they are a guest and have to roll a newb level 1 character each time.  The quest rewards are all specific to the Class of player 1, so player 2 has to get by on drops that they pick up, as you can not trade or drop items on the ground.

I picked up the 360 version on (re)launch day.

If you liked Sacred, you'll feel at home here. If not, well, don't bother. It's basically the same game in 3D (with the same camera issues that Dungeon Siege had). The world is massive. Character development is complex and deep. The 360 controller works extremely well in this game (I always thought the original Sacred had console control scheme written all over it).

I never did buy the PC version. SecureROM, don't you know. If Ascaron (assuming the the console launches pull their chestnuts out of their present financial fire...) ever gets around to pulling the DRM, I may snag a copy from the bargain bin in another year.

The downsides to the console as opposed to the PC are somewhat downgraded graphics (they're good, but S2 really does look bitchin' on a horse of a PC), no color coded loot (uses a PSU-style star rating), and the whole trading thing. Supposedly that's going to get patched, but with Ascaron's present financial woes I wouldn't hold my breath. Upside is the consoles have more slots for CAs, weapons, and combos. I ran the game both from the disk and installed to the 360 HD. Some loading times in towns from the disk. Not bad, but a bit intrusive. Playing from the HD minimizes that, but it never entirely disappears in towns.

Overall, I like the game a lot, but I was a big Sacred fan. S2 is better than the original, but it's still essentially the same game. If you like loot raining from the sky and just tearing up masses of enemies, it'll cure what ails you.

I picked this up for the 360 to play co-op with my daughter, who finds Diablo-ish dungeon crawls fun. The fact that we can't play co-op with two saved characters without having both of us signed in as Live IDs (we only have one family Live ID) is annoying as all hell. Also I'm confused about the camera: whenever there's two of us playing, it defaults suddenly to a high overhead view that's no fun and I can't get the camera to go back in.

Is it an onerous task to have multiple logins?  Well, on the PS3? :oh_i_see:  I have three so that my wife and boy can play Little Big Planet with me.  The loot situation where it keys on player 1 is somewhat piss-poor, though.

You can't trade items between characters while playing with your bud in the same room (PS3).

How epically fail.

My dryad has a buff that increases the likelihood of shrunken heads dropping. Only the Dryad can use them. However, the Dryad is never allowed to pick them up. We have to hit L3 (to check the loot) and wait 30 seconds until the lock comes off so I can pick up the item THAT ONLY MY CLASS CAN USE. Sauced still ends up accidentally picking them up 90% of the time because his character is a melee fighter. Epic, epic fail.

Also, wtf is up with the Alchemy quest. It has each of our characters listed as having picked up a different number of the mana stones, even though we were in battle together when they were dropped. The dudes to kill for the last 1 or 2 mana stones never repawn, so we can never finish the quest. We've tried everything - returning at night to see if the enemy is time-of-day sensitive, straight-up camping the site, going into a dungeon and coming back out, nothing seems to work.

This game is now off the purchase list.

Reading through this thread my questions were initially about how does the co-op work but are now more in line with Yegolev's comment.

Its really sad because we were having a great time with it.

But when I get pretty much all the armor that only my bud's character can wear, and I can't trade it.

Well, it's a tad frustrating.

I'm still holding out a lot of hope that some of these issues will be addressed, but I also wonder how the game got released with so many bugs (I took a peek at the list of bug fixes, and it was looooong). There doesn't seem to be a forum on the game's site for the PS3 version.

Are you new to gaming?

A buggy eurorpg? NO YOU SAY!

I love eurorpgs and have learned to live with the bugginess. Of course, the co-op in S2 does sound a cut above the normal wonkiness. Drakensang is not without a certain amount of fundamental oddness (pathing lol), but still a good game.

I still need to finish Sacred 1, dernit.

It just doesn't make sense why it's programmed that way.  The online characters can trade with each other, but you can't do it local.

Makes no fucking sense.

But the game is god damn lootastic.

Wiseass.  :oh_i_see:

I guess I'll save my 60 bucks and continue waiting for GameFly to send this. I've unfortunately been waiting on this title as I have a difficult time finding games I can play on the couch with the wife, that we both enjoy. At least it sounds like the lootasticness pro trumps the no-trade con. I am of course assuming this works the same no matter the platform since I'm 360 not PS3.

This is pretty much true - there is such a copious amount of loot that it's hard to get mad about not being able to trade. You can't buy everything that's dropped at the merchant, so some drops are really nice if you can score them, but it's pretty much a game about running around killing and questing and looting, and that's still fun.

A little thought on character selection can help, also.  Just make sure anyone who *needs* drops is the "Main" player.  If Voodoo had started the game instead of me, we'd only have a few buggy quests and some seriously shitty frame rate issues to complain about.

Still, we've got a good 25 hours of co-op play in so far, but started to wear out on Sunday.  They did a fairly terrible job of creating interesting locations to quest in, or any large scale dungeon crawling to do, so it gets repetitive quickly.  It's an awful lot of running across same-looking plains and around same-looking forests and through same-looking mine shafts, wading through armies of angry oversized rats.

So GF finally shipped me a copy.
I'm not sure if it's because I'm running 360 version, or if it was the game update that ran, or both... but offline co-op trading is in and working just fine. We've only given it under an hour so far so the jury is out, expect to flesh it out more through the weekend, but so no complaints. Well one complaint, the wife wants more hair style choices.  :roll:

Edit: Correction - Couch co-op trading works just fine, but you still need to be connected to XBL service. If you're not connected you get a message that trading is disabled.

Wait, if you're signed into Xbox Live you can trade in single-screen co-op, but if you disconnect from XBL you can't?  :uhrr:

Really debated picking this up, not being able to trade loot turned me off though; if you can on the 360 I may yet get it.

Correct, even playing an offline game, you still need to be signed into your live account(s). I sign in with my gold account and the wife uses her free silver account. I had the cable guy out yesterday to switch over our phone service and that's when I realized disconnecting from live pops up the trade message.

That's the only hiccup the game has given me yet. I think the game is great, the enormous amount of options for developing characters has my game-ADD kicking into overtime though and I have at least one of east class built while I try to decide which to stick with for the multiplayer. Not that it matters since I can join in co-op with any. I think the only down side so far with local co-op is one of us has to wait while the other accesses menus for skills, inventory, merchants, etc.

Ahh, thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll have to register my girlfriend a Silver account if/when I pick this up.

I played Sacred 1 and liked it.  Played the hell out of it, actually.  By the time i was done I never wanted to play Sacred again. 

Sacred 2 is pretty darned similar.  I wish they would have shaken it up a bit, like from Diablo to Diablo 2.  I give it a "C". 

Blacksmithing skill tooltip on the console version is misleading to the way it works, confirmed by dev somewhere on the official forums (read it earlier too lazy to go back and find it). The tooltip makes is seem as though you can smith in the field which is not so, you must still visit the blacksmith shop.

All that really means I need to stop visiting the game's forums, it seems every time I do I end up re-rolling my toon. Having a hell of a good time with a Temple Guardian/tank spec & Dryad/range-caster spec combo.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,689315/Sacred-2-Add-on-Ice-und-Blood-announced-First-screenshots/News/ (http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,689315/Sacred-2-Add-on-Ice-und-Blood-announced-First-screenshots/News/)

Pretty much the url says it all, Sacred2 addon, created by the shattered remnants of Bankrupt Ascaron with help from Deep Silver (Koch Media) New class, new lands, new bugs!

Allegedly shipping 2H2009 Which is anywhere from 6 days ago to xmas, so I expect it in April.

Figured I'd rent this first before I bought it - glad I did. While I can see some potential fun, the camera angle made me want to claw my eyes out. You should not allow a game to pan the camera down to the character to almost eye level and then stop just before you can actually see past your feet.

Well I bought it.  The camera angle alone was a constant source of frustration, and coupled with my character being unable to walk over a blade of grass or a single stone I stopped playing.  Lasting the few hours I did is a testament to my desire to play something like Diablo.

So then I played Diablo.  Again.

To be fair, in Germany stones and grass are too strong to be walked on. You must go around them.

I'm still having fun with this in occasional, small doses. While the zoom can be somewhat annoying, I find that I spend almost all of my time in hack-n-slash games zoomed all the way out for max area visibility. Only time I zoom is to view how new items look when equipped, and in S2 I can do that while equipping them. Glad I bought this one so I can have it around to pop in whenever I feel the urge.