Pumping Irony

I am so very tempted to just say “Here’s a game desperately in need of a patch” and end the post there, but I won’t. In fact, a patch is due on June 5 but I don’t know what that will address other than enabling trading between players and the corrupted game save bug. I’ve read that compared to the state of the PC version when it launched, I’m playing a pretty polished game, but the console version was also apparently rushed prematurely to store shelves. See? It’s not just MMOs folks!

Now, when I say “first impressions” usually I’ve perhaps been through a decent chunk of the game. But this time I mean it. This is quite literally a first impression. I have two characters, a Dryad for the Light campaign, and a Temple Guardian for the Shadow campaign. Each is now level 7, which took roughly two hours to achieve. So, I have approximately four-ish hours total in the game, but doing the same content twice so I suppose another way of looking at it is that I have two hours of playing with an additional two hours of gaining some (slightly) better understanding.

I’ve said this before, but let me just say it again to get it out there in the open: I did not enjoy Diablo. I never understood the draw to the game. I didn’t “get it.” In the years since, I have been content to simply say “I’m not a Diablo kinda guy” and leave it at that, but I think Sacred 2 may have given me an inkling as to why that is. I’ll also go ahead and admit that Sacred 2 was a huge impulse purchase on my part. I kept seeing more and more AGE members on my Friend List playing the game, skipping out on scheduled game nights in favor of Sacred 2, forming static parties and posting about how awesome and addictive it is.

I won’t bother covering the RPG mechanics, partly because Pete did that last week so I’ll refer you there, and mostly because I am still learning them myself. I only last night figured out how to use that Runemaster NPC to open up a new Combat Art! I haven’t bothered picking up a crafting-type skill yet, so I can’t speak on that yet. I can say that the RPG aspects are pretty deep, though. There’s a ton of customization ranging from attributes to skills to Combat Arts to applying runes… then on top of that are gear upgrades. Fan forums are quite busy with threads on builds and so forth.

When choosing my first character I was immediately attracted to the description of the Shadow Warrior, but he looks rather similar to a Chosen from WAR and I still haven’t quite recovered from my “Chosen is not a Dread Knight” realization so I skipped it. I didn’t see myself enjoying the whole ranged combat thing in a top-down game but when I asked about a good starting character, the response was overwhelmingly in favor of the Dryad. I was referred to a popular build and already at level 7 she is a dps factory, killing everything in one or two shots! Yay, dps is fun! I only played the Dryad solo and overall I had a decent time of it.

Last night some of the AGE guys wanted to start a new group on the Shadow side so we all made new level 1 characters and did a full four-player co-op. I decided to try the Temple Guardian, who seems to be a sort of Anubis-looking cyborg thing with a frickin’ laser beam on one arm! Rock on, that sounds cool right? Well… I don’t know what the hell to make of the TG class. He now has two Combat Arts equipped, one of which is the default which summons a glowing red cloud that shoots a fat red laser beam from it. I can at least tell that one does some damage (half or less) to a single target. The other one creates a fiery aura around my character and causes the enemies to get angry, gang up and beat my wimpy little TG to death. I’d like to say it’s massive damage that causes the massive aggro but I honestly can’t tell that is the case yet. If his arm laser is actually hitting anything and doing any damage whatsoever, I certainly can’t tell it. He’s been a major disappointment so far, doing barely any noticeable dps and dying easily and frequently.

The world of Ascaron is massive! It’s a huge, lush environment full of little details. Even little non-interactive critters like bunnies will make tall grasses sway as they hop through it. There are towns with lots of quests available, there are caves scattered about the wilderness, and it’s all in full 3D. On the downside, it’s also full of invisible walls. There’s no going for a swim in the water. There’s no walking over an obstacle, no matter how small, you have to walk around it.

Each town has a resurrection monolith you can activate, which also allows you to teleport there from the world map. Sometimes you’ll find a portal you can activate which will allow teleportation as well. In a co-op game you can join the other players by clicking their icon on the world map and teleporting to their location. That one is handy!

The audio is a mixed bag. The background music is nice though it plays only sparsely. Combat sounds are adequate. Voiceovers are its sore spot. It’s cheesy. However, I can’t quite tell yet if it’s cheesy just because it’s a) a video game, and it’s still rare to find quality voiceovers in games, b) the developers didn’t have the money to contract better actors (they recently filed for bankruptcy so this is a possibility), or c) it’s intentionally cheesy, because it’s certainly cheesy on a consistent basis. It even has a little tongue-in-cheekiness to it, with some enemies saying lines such as “I’m nothing more than an extra!” as they die. Perhaps it’s because it’s so consistent that I don’t find the voiceovers grating at all. Go into a town and the NPCs are quite lively, conversing with each other or with you as you walk by. I’ve had a bard-type NPC come up and sing to me, I’ve had another play his musical instrument for me, last night I even had a needy child run across the town square and follow me around, shutting up only long enough to take a breath it seemed.

Solo, I suppose Sacred 2 is a decent-enough game if you’re into the whole Diablo clone scene. The engine needs some optimization loving, it chugs a bit here and there and doesn’t always manage to pre-load the world in time for a seamless experience. I experience frequent loading, especially in towns, where the map stops scrolling and I wait for the disc icon to go away before I can continue. I had hoped installing to the hard drive would alleviate this (it sure helped with Mass Effect) but alas, it made no discernable difference.

Co-op should be awesome; after all, it’s kept the Diablo series going all these years. However… first impression? Holy Mother of Gandalf I haven’t seen netcode this bad since Quake’s first month or few before its first patch. The lag in Sacred 2 is nothing short of incredible. It doesn’t actually affect what I’m doing with my character though. Even in the worst lag I can still move around and click my abilities fine. It’s getting a reaction from things everyone sees that the lag becomes noticeable. Did that mob just die or did it die 3-5 seconds ago and I’m just now seeing it? I’ll run over some loot but it’s a good 3-5 seconds minimum before I see it being picked up. If I stop running, the map stops scrolling immediately but my character continues in his running animation for 3-5 seconds. C’mon… it’s only a four-player game. Fix. The. Netcode.

Finally the real crux of the game. Or, I should say my real crux of the game: the camera. Sacred 2 is a top-down game but it’s a 3D game and gives just enough of a camera view to tantalize me with what the game could have been. There’s all these cool graphics, cool spells and combat abilities going off but in order to see a damned thing the camera needs to be scrolled back so far that I can’t see a damned thing! Argh! In co-op it’s even worse because now with four players fighting and slinging spells I had no idea what was happening on my screen as I looked down from orbit. In order to see the environment I have to scroll back so far that I’m immediately disconnected from the game. I can’t tell what, if anything, I’m targeting. I can’t tell what, if anything, is happening. Scrolling all the way in actually shifts the view to an almost-but-not-quite third-person (still from slightly overhead) view. If you’re standing on the crest of a hill and do this, it’s the closest you get to a third-person view while actually being able to see in front of you. I think this is my main problem with games like this. Sometimes I don’t mind top-down at all. But for whatever reason, the Diablo clone games just don’t do it for me. If Sacred 2 had been a third-person (freeform or fixed over the shoulder, I don’t care) I think I would be in love with this game. Well, if they ever fix the netcode, that is. Put me into the world, not above it. Let me see and feel the wonder of exploration of this huge, massive world you’ve created. Let me see and enjoy all the cool new gear and effects I acquire. I’d look forward to playing constantly, especially co-op (if they fix the netcode… have I mentioned that yet?) if that were the case. But as it stands, I just don’t know that I can enjoy, much less look forward to, watching from a birds-eye view as the little people on the surface make little things go boom.

I think my perfect solo+multiplayer (I’m not asking for massively multiplayer… yet) Action RPG on a console would be a hybrid of Guild Wars, Hellgate: London and Warhammer 40K. Fast action with deep RPG aspects and customization but the futuristic setting featuring both melee and ranged combat from either third- or first-person (or a toggle for both) with a wide-open world to explore and maybe some (not all) dungeons being randomly generated. Oh, and with a better version of Fable 2’s multiplayer where if I’m playing solo but a friend is in the same area we can toggle being able to join without leaving our current game session. Charge me for DLC expansions but otherwise free online play and I’m there!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.