Game News Sacred Fire now available on Early Access

[Infinitron]

Tags: Iceberg Interactive; Poetic; Sacred Fire

Poetic decided to release their Ancient Caledonian psychological RPG Sacred Fire into Early Access today, a day earlier than originally announced. The Early Access build includes the first of the game's three acts. According to the FAQ, it will remain in Early Access for six to nine months. The Early Access launch trailer is actually identical to last month's release date trailer, but I'll post it anyway:

Why Early Access?
Sacred Fire is an innovative role-playing game experience, modeling how emotions influence our choices. We were fortunate to build a patient and dedicated community over the years and several playtesting rounds, and have really benefited from our public demo. The feedback we received from events such as Steam Next Fest in 2021 has been invaluable, offering important insights into how the players experience the game so we can make fundamental improvements.

It’s only natural that we’d like to continue with this on a grander scope, so an Early Access release will help us to better understand who our customers are and how they experience the game.

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
We plan to stay in Early Access for 6-9 months.

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
The Early Access version contains character creation and the first of the three acts of the story, or roughly 40% of the branching content with full voice-over.

The full version will contain 2 more acts to complete the story, more character and location variety, as well as more ambient sound effects. We also expect the full version to be much better balanced and so even more immersive.

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
All of our game mechanics and features are complete. We’ve had 1 round of bug fixing and re-balancing based on external QA reporting. We’ve also implemented full voice over on all scenes, and have completed a significant portion of our planned character art and effects.

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
We do plan to raise the price when we exit Early Access, but this decision will also factor in feedback and our general sales performance in the meantime.

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
Players can report suggestions and bugs with an in-game tool as well as via the Steam forums and Discord. Even for our demo at Steam Next Fest this was super helpful, and has shaped multiple demo and game updates - so we’ll be hungry for more feedback!

As player immersion is so important to us, qualitative feedback will also be something we ask for often. Already the community has supported us and helped to improve our tutorial, tooltips, bonuses and penalties, with clearer notifications and prompts. We want players to have a premium experience, so their input during Early Access is critical to achieve that.​

The Sacred Fire Early Access build is available on Steam and GOG for $18, with a 10% launch discount until next week.

 

[Agesilaus]

I buy anything with an ancient rome/greece/china theme, but this seems very cringe.

>snowgoblin attacks player character
>player character uses "empathy"
>hmm the snowgoblin is a fellow creature, he has hopes and dreams, he is only attacking me because he comes from an undeveloped & under-served community of troglodytes, he is a good boy deep down.

or maybe it's just the music and voice acting from that video that has me moving towards a thumbs down. I feel like I'm watching some sort of new-age woke speech from an overly emotional & weak-minded american.

 

[BING XI LAO]

KALIIIIIIIN

 

[aratuk]

Noticed something odd in one of the screengrabs on Gog.

WTF dat?

Spoiler

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I can't recall but was this a CYOA VN type game?




Well, more like a gamebook CYOA rather than a pure VN. I dunno... I guess it depends if one can truly DO anything and how many endings there are.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

This is one of the gayest things I've ever seen.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I can't recall but was this a CYOA VN type game?
...
Well, more like a gamebook CYOA rather than a pure VN. I dunno... I guess it depends if one can truly DO anything and how many endings there are.

Seems destined to be Codex GotY.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I can't recall but was this a CYOA VN type game?
...
Well, more like a gamebook CYOA rather than a pure VN. I dunno... I guess it depends if one can truly DO anything and how many endings there are.

Seems destined to be Codex GotY.

It was sort of reminding me of King of Dragon Pass which I know some people around here are super into. Personally, I don't understand the love for it and thought it was an abomination, but to each their own.

 

[Thac0]

Noticed something odd in one of the screengrabs on Gog.

WTF dat?

Spoiler

This games mental stats are based on the Big 5 model, which is genuinly the leading model for categorising the human mind in psychology. You know those MBTI 18 personalities tests that reddit and codex are so fond of? Those are considered outdated bullshit, Big 5 is the successor model and much more accurate.
Idk why it does not just link to a generic test or a wikipedia entry tho.

 

[Peachcurl]

Oh, interesting. Isn't that understandmyself page associated to Jordan Peterson?

 

[lukaszek]

or maybe it's just the music and voice acting from that video that has me moving towards a thumbs down. I feel like I'm watching some sort of new-age woke speech from an overly emotional & weak-minded american.

did you play demo? discovering emotions and caring about them is 80% of the game

 

[jackofshadows]

I can't recall but was this a CYOA VN type game?
...
Well, more like a gamebook CYOA rather than a pure VN. I dunno... I guess it depends if one can truly DO anything and how many endings there are.

Seems destined to be Codex GotY.

Very funny and fresh one, bravo. The difference is that DE is a great fucking game genre-affiliation aside while this... this is just some questionable VN with trillion checks poured all over it (and they are just there, unlike in DE where it was fun thanks to various descriptions of that), judging by the demo. Now with we wuz Celt refugees and shit theme or something.

 

[Shin]

This is one of the gayest things I've ever seen.

Yeah, it's pretty gay.

 

[karnak]

So...

What's the story on this?

Afro-Celt?
Nubian runaway slave?

I have severe doubts that a black dude would survive long on the Ancient Britain climate, but what do I know?...

 

[Alter Sack]

The nigger character looks a little bit like they took a female model and put a beard on it.

But maybe it's intentional and it is a celtic transexual nigger?

Who knows.

 

[Thac0]

Demo seemed fairly liberal friendly btw, in the opening your sister slaughters 5 armored romans single handedly while she was alone and ambushed. Both a woman winning against a man, and someone alone taking out multiple enemies is fairly unrealistic, combined they delivered a serious hit against my immersion. I don't think the dev knows that women are weaker than men physically.
The demo itself was fun however, littering ten billion skill checks over a VN and giving you options to play around with your skill pools during skill checks makes for a very unique and enjoyable gameplay loop.

I wrote some fairly positive demo impressions here:
Sacred Fire - a psychological RPG about romance, loyalty and revenge - now available on Early Access

Those with strong opinions about politics can probably give this one a pass, as when you scroll the thread you see that the last update was a nigger for main character update.

 

[Mortmal]

Could be a phoenician trader but it's already far fetched . They were good sailors , its possible they had commercial counters along the coast in brittany, but there was never any evidence of it. I'd like to know how they justify it, if ever . It also could be the celts travelling to anatolia.

 

[Alter Sack]

Demo seemed fairly liberal friendly btw, in the opening your sister slaughters 5 armored romans single handedly while she was alone and ambushed. Both a woman winning against a man, and someone alone taking out multiple enemies is fairly unrealistic, combined they delivered a serious hit against my immersion. I don't think the dev knows that women are weaker than men physically.
The demo itself was fun however, littering ten billion skill checks over a VN and giving you options to play around with your skill pools during skill checks makes for a very unique and enjoyable gameplay loop.

I wrote some fairly positive demo impressions here:
Sacred Fire - a psychological RPG about romance, loyalty and revenge - now available on Early Access

Those with strong opinions about politics can probably give this one a pass, as when you scroll the thread you see that the last update was a nigger for main character update.

I don't particularly care about politics in games as long as it isn't shoved down my throat.

And this game seems to exactly do that.

So I will give this one a pass.

 

[aratuk]

Just received an email from Kickstarter asking if I prefer Steam or Gog. I had forgotten…

 

[Tyranicon]

So, is Doug Cockle (voice of ze witcheroo) a big part of the game or did he get cut? I remember he was a big part of the kickstarter campaign.

 

[Sergiu64]

Could be a phoenician trader but it's already far fetched . They were good sailors , its possible they had commercial counters along the coast in brittany, but there was never any evidence of it. I'd like to know how they justify it, if ever . It also could be the celts travelling to anatolia.

Yeah, no. They're just plain being inclusive for no redeemable or logical reason.

 

[Tyranicon]

I also don't see the point of making a historical RPG if you're not going to stick too closely to the actual history.

Why bother?

Just make it fantasy and you can do whatever you want.

 

[Mortmal]

Could be a phoenician trader but it's already far fetched . They were good sailors , its possible they had commercial counters along the coast in brittany, but there was never any evidence of it. I'd like to know how they justify it, if ever . It also could be the celts travelling to anatolia.

Yeah, no. They're just plain being inclusive for no redeemable or logical reason.

Inclusive without any logic in the anything goes setting that is antiquity that's just lazyness .

 

[Sergiu64]

Inclusive without any logic in the anything goes setting that is antiquity that's just lazyness .

Probably just a business decision on their end. Either that, or they really are super high on pushing agenda. But yeah - they should have chosen a region where such things could actually have happened - want homo stuff to be available? Great - Ancient Greece awaits. Want racial stuff too? Ok, lets do Roman Empire - they were all over the Mediterranean, including Africa.

 

[Nortar]

Inclusive without any logic in the anything goes setting that is antiquity that's just lazyness .

Probably just a business decision on their end. Either that, or they really are super high on pushing agenda. But yeah - they should have chosen a region where such things could actually have happened - want homo stuff to be available? Great - Ancient Greece awaits. Want racial stuff too? Ok, lets do Roman Empire - they were all over the Mediterranean, including Africa.

I can understand when devs are being beaten into compliance by publishers who want to broaden audience, instead of making good games;
but when a single indie dev is selling soul of his passion project to jump on "current year agenda" bandwagon he can do it without my endorsement.