Sacred 2:News from Expo
= Stepping Into Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Universe
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ket.com/albums/u222/erialc_photo/SFA-GCEvent-1.jpg
During the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Convention Games
Convention in Leipzig], the awaited
appeared fully. A version specifically conceived for
the multiplayer event organized by [http://Ascaron.com
Ascaron], simplified at most to show principally the
engine and the gameplay of the game, has been
accessible to some lucky guys. There's been quite a
bunch of people to be able to test this version, as
there was 16 of them every 10 minutes during the all
fair: few minutes of hacking & slashing monsters,
playing either the Seraphim, the [[Shadow
Warrior]], the Dryad, or even the High Elf,
all identical except for their look for the occasion,
and then the 16 players met in the arena to fight each
other. Meanwhile, in another hall of the Games
Convention, other visitors could assist to a quick
presentation of the Xbox 360 version of Sacred 2:
Fallen Angel.
Personally, after having participated to the
multiplayer event during the Business Day, I have been
lucky enough to see the PC version of Sacred 2: Fallen
Angel, shown to me by Jens Eisched, Marketing Manager,
and Torsten Meier, Public Relations Manager, who
answered as well a bunch of my questions as a Hack &
Slash fan and amateur, as well as player of the
original Sacred.
== 2,000 years ago, the Seraphim were already
ready to become heroines ==
At first, there was the Creator, who created worlds
and populated them each with one unique intelligent
race for them to worship him. The Seraphim, and their
leaders the Archangels, were one of those. However,
one day, they decided to use the ethereal creative
energy to create their own world, Ancaria, and to
populate it with several races, giving them the
freedom of choosing their own fate. When the Creator
found out, instead of destroying Ancaria, he
banished the Seraphim on this world with the charge to
protect it. He would interfere only if the
Seraphim were not able to unite all the races.
But that was not meant to happen, and before long the
High Elves, favourite race of the Seraphim, started to
use the creative energy to their own benefit and rule
the world. Not every High Elf agreed with this plan,
and soon a civil war burst, costing lives of many
people and many Seraphims, and leading to the division
of the High Elves between the one trying to use the
creative energy to give Ancaria and its people their
lost greatness, and the one wanting to purge Ancaria
with a cleansing fire and then arise as uncontested
rulers. A second civil war was soon to be started...
2,000 years before Sacred 1's story, Sacred 2:
Fallen Angel brings the player to a time where the
creative energy is still active. Humans are yet the
servants and slaves of the High Elves, Dwarfs still
enjoy their recluse life, and the world of Ancaria
is far different and unknown of the events that will
occur in Sacred and Sacred Underworld. The player will
have to chose between the Path of the Light and the
Path of the Shadow, except when playing a Seraphim
who can only follow the Path of Light, or an
Inquisitor, who can only follow the Path of the
Shadows. This choice the player make at the beginning
of the campaign will affect the whole world and the
various NPCs he'll meet.
In addition to these two sides of the main campaign,
each proposing roughly 40h of game play to the user in
the first difficulty mode, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
offers an incredible variety of secondary quests, with
overall over 800 quests for the player to fulfill.
Contents
A world full of diversity
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel brings us to a very large as
well as very disparate world; 11 totally different
regions, from jungle to desert, from Mediterranean
climate to icy mountains, are then open to exploration
for the player. Each of these regions have their own
climatic environment, their own sounds and lights
effects, and fauna and flora as well as architecture
of the buildings adapted to the races populating them,
their social culture, and their technological
development. Furthermore, the world of Ancaria is made
of one single piece, and will appear to the player
through streaming. Thus, you will never have to wait
for the game to load an area, as even when you'll
enter a dungeon or a cave, the transition will be
completely natural and smooth, without any loading
time.
The world of Ancaria shown in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
follows the rhythm of night and day, with a day/night
cycle every 50mn or so, and so do the numerous
inhabitants of the world. Depending of the time of day
or night, the NPCs inhabitants of the world will go
one of the 50 trade available for NPCs in Sacred 2:
Fallen Angel. Exploration of the world will be even
more diverse thanks to the advanced weather management
in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel; you'll happen to get
yourself into a sand storm, get lost in a deep fog,
being wet by the rain, frozen by the wind, and so on.
The world map itself is quite huge, as it is 30 to 40%
bigger than the one available to the player in Sacred.
To get on foot from the top left corner to the bottom
right corner, it will take you around 6h, if you don't
stop to do something else. But don't be afraid, there
will be as well some transport system, although it
won't be the classical portal system we had in
original Sacred and other games. If there will be
central locations akin to the actual portals, journeys
between them will no longer be instantaneous. Instead
in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, travels between those
points will be done riding dragons or sailing on
boats.
New look and feel
We must admit that the original Sacred was quite
old graphics wise when it was released over 3 years
ago in 2004. This can't be said of his big brother
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel. The graphics engine, entirely
developed in-house by [http://www.Ascaron.com
Ascaron], shows a really good graphics rendering.
Additionally, this graphics engine can do most
everything, from using any resolution (included the
very old ones), or disabling nearly any graphic
effects. Then a low end computer should be able to
still be able to run the game correctly with good
framerate, as long as it's using a lower resolution
and toggle off most graphic effects. Particularly, the
engine itself asks only for
DirectX9, but
people with DirectX 10 will benefit from it and get
better graphical effects. It goes the same for the
At the moment, the minimal required configuration is
estimated to a simple 1.6 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and
a true GeForce 4 with 128 MB of RAM. With such a
computer, as long as you use a low resolution and
toggle off all graphic effects, the game engine should
be able to provide around 100 FPS. We still don't know
yet which minimal resolutions and minimal graphic
effects will be used in the game itself, but Sacred 2:
Fallen Angel should run correctly and relatively old
computers anyway. Before we get our hopes too high
though, let's wait to actually try to run the game on
such a computer when the time of preview versions will
come, or simply the time of beta test, as a closed
beta test is planned for next October, and an open
beta test in January 2008.
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will provide a completely free
camera, which will let the players change
independently the horizontal orientation of the
camera, the pitch, and the level of zoom. It is not
defined yet which levels of zoom will be proposed in
the final version, but it's likely that there will be
a large width of zoom available, allowing the player
to zoom closely to the character to admire the
details, or, for the perverts, the forms, and on the
other hand to get far away from the character to enjoy
more visibility.
Last but not least, the world map in Sacred 2: Fallen
Angel is no longer a 2D map like in Sacred, but will
allow us to view the relief of the regions of Ancaria
in 3D (note: however, we will always see the map from
above, with a fixed angle of view, but that wouldn't
have much of interest to be able to change this).
One of the main enhancements in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
compared to his little brother is the shortcuts
management. While it was very limited in Sacred, with
most players using AutoHotKey scripts to improve the
game ergonomics, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will feature a
completely customizable shortcuts system. And if the
system of weapons slots and combat arts slots is still
there, with however the combo slots being dissociated
of the combat arts slots, it should be possible to
assign a hotkey to place a combat art into the art bar
from the combat book.
The Seraphim and her new friends
From the character pool in Sacred 1, only the
Seraphim can be found in Sacred 2, 2,000 years
before. The five other characters are completely new,
and at the same time quite diverse. The first
characters to be announced to the public were the
Seraphim, of course, then the Shadow Warrior.
More recently, the High Elf joined her two
friends. During the Games Convention and the
multiplayer event, people could see the Dryad as
well, although we still don't know much about it,
unlike the other three. Lastly, the two other
characters have been announced to the press: the
Inquisitor, and the Temple Guardian. If we now
know the background history and part of the aptitudes
of the Seraphim, the Shadow Warrior and the
High Elf Adept, we still know very little about
the Dryad, the Inquisitor and the [[Temple
Guardian]].
The Seraphim is very similar to the one in Sacred 1:
fighter with a bunch of heavenly magic, she represents
the good itself in the world of Ancaria. The
Inquisitor is kind of her evil opposite. Fond of dark
magic, the dude only wears robes and uses twisted
hand-to-hand combat techniques. The Shadow Warrior
masters all forms of combat, from hand-to-hand to
powerful armed techniques, and, having been in contact
with the underworld in the past, can call on some of
his old comrades for help. The High Elf Adept is the
classical sorceress, well-versed in three powerful
magic disciplines, but she can nonetheless be an able
fighter when using her magic in conjunction with
hand-to-hand combat. The Dryad Scout will be the
character all fans of Sacred's Wood Elf will want
to play, as she's a very proficient archer, and a
master in the magic of Nature. She practices as well
some kind of voodoo, which she can use to harvest
shrunken heads from her enemies!
Let's now conclude this presentation of the 6
characters of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel with maybe the
most peculiar of those, which should be detailed to
the public later on: the Temple Guardian. This
character is an archaic cyborg with a jackal head,
able to alter his head and his arm. He is extremely
dangerous in hand-to-hand combat, and has mastered as
well the use of technological weapons. Due to the
nature of his own origin, he has mastered the powerful
T-Energy, and can use it to change his environment.
Additionally, we'll find in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel the
horses which were already present in Sacred, some of
them being faster or more resilient. But the real
novelty here is that in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, each
character class will have access to its own specific
mount: for example, the Shadow Warrior will be able to
mount a powerful Hellhound, while the Seraphim
will mount an agile Tiger. Furthermore, these
mounts will not only be for fast travelling around the
world: they will really affects the fights if you
fight mounted, giving you advantages and
disadvantages, each having their own, while in
original Sacred you could only use very few of your
combat arts while mounted, and there was not much
interest to fight while mounting a horse.
On character creation, the player will have the
ability to change some of its physical
characteristics, like the hair colour, and some of
those will be alterable further on in the game with
dies for example. The player will also have to choose
between 6 gods of Ancaria, three being evil gods, the
other three being good gods. The Seraphim and the
Inquisitor will only be able to choose among the three
gods sharing their alignment, while the other four
characters will be free to choose any of these 6
divinities. Each of these divinities will grant a
special powerful techniques to the character
worshipping them.
You're never really alone
In Sacred, the multiplayer component had been added
relatively late in development. As a consequence, the
singleplayer and multiplayer parts were distinct, and
you had to export your singleplayer character to go
play online, and then start again the campaign if you
wanted to keep using the character you played online.
For Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, Ascaron conceived the
multiplayer component right from the scratch, and the
singleplayer part is in fact a particularity of the
multiplayer part: when playing singleplayer, you're in
fact playing multiplayer with only one character. On
the technical side, this means that even when playing
singleplayer, the game will use client-server
mechanisms. On the practical side for the user, this
means at any time he will be able to call a friend to
help him in his quest, much like in Titan Quest, or be
able to go play online in Free mode, and then go back
to where he was in the campaign.
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel offers, like his little
brother, various multiplayer modes. First, we will be
able to play LAN, Open Multiplayer, or Closed
Multiplayer. In each of these multiplayer modes, we
will then have the choice between several sub-modes:
campaign, free, PVP, and of course we will still be
able to play Hardcore. Some people will surely notice
that we will be able to play in campaign mode on
closed servers as well, while this mode had been
removed from closed servers on Sacred 1 because of the
dupe exploits coming with it. Exploiting the campaign
mode to dupe will no longer be possible in Sacred 2:
Fallen Angel, thanks to a small difference: on closed
servers in campaign mode, it won't be possible to save
and load games. Of course it means it will be really
difficult to actually complete a campaign on the
closed servers, but it's still better than not being
able to play the campaign at all, or open the closed
servers to massive dupe exploits. As for the campaign,
as we could have guessed, everybody in the game will
have to do the same campaign, either good or evil,
which means that Seraphims and Inquisitors won't be
able to play campaign together. Of course, as the main
quest is not in the Free mode, any class will be able
to the other in this mode.
As PVP was only in specific games in Sacred, we could
see that not that many people used this possibility.
In Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, there will be no need of a
specific game to fight each other, as there will be
PVP Arenas in the world of Ancaria, allowing players
to fight each other one and one or in group, up to 5
vs 5!
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will offer a trading system,
although we don't know yet how it will be done: it
could be through a trader NPC, or through a direct
trade interface, or even both. Regarding the
possibility of exchanging items between characters on
the same account (or characters on the same computer),
there's nothing sure here as well. Maybe will there be
a shared stash, maybe not, we will have to wait until
later to know this. But what is sure is that Sacred 2:
Fallen Angel will improve the contacts between players
on the servers, with a more developed buddylist,
accessible through a GUI rather than through command
line. Although no official information has leaked
about it, it might as well include additional features
like a guild management, but then again we'll need to
wait for more informations. After all, the very
anticipated Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is still nearly 9
months away from release.
In a multiplayer group, XP and loot management will be
similar to the one of the first Sacred, both
increasing with the number of people in the group.
Levelling speed is still being tweaked, but all in
all, this should be again similar to Sacred's system.
To close up on the multiplayer system, one question is
asked, or has been, by a large chunk of Sacred's
community: Will the accounts still be linked to the CD
Key? Will we still need to type in our CD Key when
logging in? Unfortunately, there's still no answer to
this question, the matter being still worked on at
Ascaron.
The perfect setup to slay monsters
Sacred had few massive bosses, apart from the dragons
we would slay all across Ancaria. For Sacred 2: Fallen
Angel, Ascaron decided to introduce massive bosses who
will ask to think about strategy to defeat them. The
player will be as well confronted to frequent
mini-bosses, met randomly across the world of Ancaria.
But this focus on the need of strategy won't stop to
the bosses and mini-bosses; indeed, each group of mobs
will have a leader, and when this leader will be
slain, the group will retreat and gather, and define
their new leader. But the most interesting feature is
that the group strategy will depend on the group
leader abilities: for example, if the group leader
happens to be a magic user, then the monsters may
regroup in front of him to protect him, or, if it is a
melee fighter, they might try to cast protective
spells on him.
To face such monsters, we need equipment, and we will
have quite a large choice: helms, body armours,
shoulder armours, arm armours, gloves, leg armours,
boots, as well as amulets and rings, the number of
which is still not yet defined. And for the Seraphim
only, there will be wings as well. Like the first
Sacred, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will bring its lot of
unique items and sets, but Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will
go further, and implement a crafting system, allowing
the player to modify or even create new items. That's
however all we know about this crafting system at the
moment. A part of the Sacred community hope there
would be one day some modding tools for Sacred, and of
course that there will be some in Sacred 2: Fallen
Angel. Once again, there is nothing much to see here
at the moment, but it has been said possible there
would be such modding tools added in the future,
although most likely not for the release of the game.
Time will tell.
Now, what pleasure would it be to slay monsters again
and again, if we didn't have powerful combat arts to
do so? Like Sacred, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will offer
combat arts and skills. Combat arts will be divided
into three categories for each character, and are on
their own already pretty much diverse and will allow
for a huge number of different builds for each class.
Those specificities will be of much importance when
fighting other players in the arena, as it will be
needed to careful think about which art to use and
when and how to counteract the arts of the opponents.
And here, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel innovates, as each
and every combat art will be customizable by the
player during his progression. For example, the player
will be able to make the Jump Attack of the Shadow
Warrior a short jump with area damage attack, or on
the opposite a long jump but less powerful, to go
straight at the enemy caster or archer, or even to fly
away from the combat faster in case of troubles.
PC, or Xbox 360?
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will be released on both PC
with Windows and Xbox 360. What shall we expect from
these two different versions? Graphics wise, they will
be more or less the same, with maybe a slight
advantage to the Xbox 260. Of course, with the Xbox
360, no way you could control the character with a
mouse and a keyboard, which will have a noteworthy
impact on controls. Control of the character will then
be done with the analogical stick, and the player will
mash the buttons of the pad instead of the buttons of
his mouse. The use of skills and combos will
apparently be managed by keeping pressed a trigger.
All in all, those controls seem very similar to the
controls in the few other games of the genre available
on gaming consoles.
On several points however, the PC version will be
better than the Xbox 360 version. Indeed, while with
the Xbox 360 you will only be able to play up to 4
people in the same game, the PC version will allow to
play up to 16 in the same game, just like in Sacred.
The PC version will offer higher resolutions as well,
as long as you use a display supporting them, and have
a computer powerful enough to manage it, and will
offer much more graphical settings to adapt the game
to the computer running it. Meanwhile, due to the
difficulty of editing characters on an Xbox 360, there
will be no difference between closed and open
multiplayer on the Xbox 360
For those who still wonder at this point of the
article, it won't be possible to play in the same game
with a player on Xbox 360 and another on a PC, and it
won't be possible either to transfer a character from
an Xbox 360 to a PC or from a PC to an Xbox 360.
However, an Xbox 360 player will be able to bring his
character with him to play over at a friend, and on a
single Xbox 360, two players will be able to play on
the same screen, while joining two other people
through Xbox Live.
Thanks
I would like to thank Stefan Hinz (Manager Online
Marketing), Jens Eishched (Marketing Manager), Torsten
Meier (Public Relations Manager), and Markus
“PowerPyx” Kobbe (Moderator on the German forums) for
all the informations they gave me on Sacred 2, as well
as for the presentation of the PC version of the game
and the time they spent answering my questions.
Reference:Gork
[http://http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?showto
pic=5676 Stepping Into Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
Universe, A complete preview of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
after the GC2007] and in French:
[http://www.sacred-fr.com/index.php?txt=art_comment&id
art=306 Dans l'univers de Sacred 2: Fallen Angel ]
