PennyAnte
Liturgist
It says in the demo notes that the low-level respawns are not supposed to attack you, that that was a fix made between the demo and final releases. That said, I did see level scaling, so I don't know what they're talking about re: lower-level monsters. (Maybe some mobs stop scaling past a certain level?) It also has a rough feel, lacking in polish. There are a lot of unexplained mechanics - what exactly does energy do and how is it regenerated - it doesn't seem to always power skills directly, though some skill descriptions reference it, also how do energy shields work - is that the character's energy or something you get from gear? I really wanted a manual or at least a gamefaqs.com-type character build walkthrough so more was explained, and we could use more hover text to help in that area as well.
There's an odd pairing of fantasy and tech items, not particularly well done in terms of an integrated, creatively credible game cosmology/mythos/backstory you can really "believe in" ... it's just kind of haphazard ...
Overall it feels pretty crappy, but I have this odd sense of "wanting" to like it more, so I'm going to give this demo another shot or two. I have a nagging "maybe it will be better after 6-8 patches" feeling, but that's what I thought about Sacred 1 and never went back to it after passing my first judgment and seeing the first two or three patches. I'd say they didn't improve enough from the first game, and something like Titan Quest still is a much better, more polished game with a better interface, better gear, better character development, better, smoother gameplay, etc.
Some upsides:
- Hit Q to autocollect all loot in a radius, and you can filter out lower quality levels if you want to so your inventory doens't get cluttered with lousy stuff
- Loot is highlighted with a kind of sparkly candle-flame effect so you don't have to hold down a key to have it "show," which is a convenience
- There seems to be a passive benefit to leveling all combat arts, so even those you won't use may be worth adding to for extra % dodge, stuff like that
- Buffs are toggled, not activated and set on a timer, so you don't have the busywork of needing to refresh them every half minute, which I really appreciate, especially because this means they don't flare out in combat without me noticing and also because when I play an ARPG, I usually do it for a block of several hours at a time, like 2-3 hours before I go to bed, so timer buffs are a pain - instead, each buff just ups the overall regen time of your other combat arts, so you can use them less often when buffs are engaged - like all regen timers, you can drive this down with certain build choices, that's a lot of what build strategy is about in Sacred
- The graphics for the character and gear look very nice - your character can look very "pimped out" even by level 5 or 6, so it's quite possible to, well, dress up your barbie doll in ultra-stylish ways, then toggle /psychopath and go on your killing sprees
- The starting inventory size is pretty generous, although it's big enough that you want to select and drag multiple items, especially when, in addition to everything else, you've got 15-20 character skill runes that take up one square each
- There is a shared stash from the get-go for sharing class-specific loot with your other characters
- You apparently can go to level 200 across multiple difficulty levels in the final game
Some other downsides:
- No multibutton mouse support in the control config menu - so you can't set Mouse buttons 3-5 or use the scroll wheel to spin through combat arts, which I'd prefer
- I don't like the camera much - it's very top down for the most part, whereas I want it more tilted at max zoom. Also, I'm not sure that it grabs enough area, though I haven't yet run into being killed by arrows from off screen or something like that. Still, it seems like enemies are in engagement range almost as soon as they're viewable, which I don't like and isn't ideal for a game with ranged character classes
- Short of toggling off all speech, there doesn't seem to be a way to shut off the character's side commentary or chatter while idle, which gets very annoying very fast
- Navigation doesn't feel easy; it seems like it's tougher than it should be to get where you want to go (outside of using quest arrows). Rivers on the main map look like roads, and wrong turns are easy to make, all of which makes the camera feel worse than it maybe is ... still, there is a minimap, world map and a third map you can toggle on and off - it has a transparency slider, so you can kind of use it as a "navigational overlay," which I'm checking out to see if it minimizes my concerns in this area
- I don't think that, in the end, there will be as much character build variation as there is in Titan Quest
- It's WASD, but S doesn't let you backpedal and kite like you can in Shadowgrounds Survivor - it instead turns you around so you run in the opposite direction with your back to the enemy ... similarly, A and D spin the camera and character facing. Why even use WASD if it isn't to help you kite and strafe? Let us turn the camera by pushing at the screen borders and use WASD more like it would be in a first-person shooter. It would make caster and ranged characters better
There's an odd pairing of fantasy and tech items, not particularly well done in terms of an integrated, creatively credible game cosmology/mythos/backstory you can really "believe in" ... it's just kind of haphazard ...
Overall it feels pretty crappy, but I have this odd sense of "wanting" to like it more, so I'm going to give this demo another shot or two. I have a nagging "maybe it will be better after 6-8 patches" feeling, but that's what I thought about Sacred 1 and never went back to it after passing my first judgment and seeing the first two or three patches. I'd say they didn't improve enough from the first game, and something like Titan Quest still is a much better, more polished game with a better interface, better gear, better character development, better, smoother gameplay, etc.
Some upsides:
- Hit Q to autocollect all loot in a radius, and you can filter out lower quality levels if you want to so your inventory doens't get cluttered with lousy stuff
- Loot is highlighted with a kind of sparkly candle-flame effect so you don't have to hold down a key to have it "show," which is a convenience
- There seems to be a passive benefit to leveling all combat arts, so even those you won't use may be worth adding to for extra % dodge, stuff like that
- Buffs are toggled, not activated and set on a timer, so you don't have the busywork of needing to refresh them every half minute, which I really appreciate, especially because this means they don't flare out in combat without me noticing and also because when I play an ARPG, I usually do it for a block of several hours at a time, like 2-3 hours before I go to bed, so timer buffs are a pain - instead, each buff just ups the overall regen time of your other combat arts, so you can use them less often when buffs are engaged - like all regen timers, you can drive this down with certain build choices, that's a lot of what build strategy is about in Sacred
- The graphics for the character and gear look very nice - your character can look very "pimped out" even by level 5 or 6, so it's quite possible to, well, dress up your barbie doll in ultra-stylish ways, then toggle /psychopath and go on your killing sprees
- The starting inventory size is pretty generous, although it's big enough that you want to select and drag multiple items, especially when, in addition to everything else, you've got 15-20 character skill runes that take up one square each
- There is a shared stash from the get-go for sharing class-specific loot with your other characters
- You apparently can go to level 200 across multiple difficulty levels in the final game
Some other downsides:
- No multibutton mouse support in the control config menu - so you can't set Mouse buttons 3-5 or use the scroll wheel to spin through combat arts, which I'd prefer
- I don't like the camera much - it's very top down for the most part, whereas I want it more tilted at max zoom. Also, I'm not sure that it grabs enough area, though I haven't yet run into being killed by arrows from off screen or something like that. Still, it seems like enemies are in engagement range almost as soon as they're viewable, which I don't like and isn't ideal for a game with ranged character classes
- Short of toggling off all speech, there doesn't seem to be a way to shut off the character's side commentary or chatter while idle, which gets very annoying very fast
- Navigation doesn't feel easy; it seems like it's tougher than it should be to get where you want to go (outside of using quest arrows). Rivers on the main map look like roads, and wrong turns are easy to make, all of which makes the camera feel worse than it maybe is ... still, there is a minimap, world map and a third map you can toggle on and off - it has a transparency slider, so you can kind of use it as a "navigational overlay," which I'm checking out to see if it minimizes my concerns in this area
- I don't think that, in the end, there will be as much character build variation as there is in Titan Quest
- It's WASD, but S doesn't let you backpedal and kite like you can in Shadowgrounds Survivor - it instead turns you around so you run in the opposite direction with your back to the enemy ... similarly, A and D spin the camera and character facing. Why even use WASD if it isn't to help you kite and strafe? Let us turn the camera by pushing at the screen borders and use WASD more like it would be in a first-person shooter. It would make caster and ranged characters better
