GDC 08: Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Preview
Ascaron's original Sacred was a bit of a mixed bag that provided great action RPG hack'n'slash fun for Diablo 2 fans but didn't necessarily draw legions of new players to the genre. Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, from Ascaron and new publisher cdv USA, improves upon the original in almost every way while retaining its strengths. Particularly, the Sacred franchise has always forgone the clichéd character archetypes for more daring, interesting, and risky choices.
The sequel is no exception - you'll have six vastly different character types to choose from: the heavenly Seraphim return; the Inquisitor, a Seraph's polar opposite; the necrotic Shadow Warrior; the classic High Elven sorceress; the head-shrinking voodoo Dryad; and an archaic dog-headed cyborg, the Temple Guardian.
That's right - cyborg. Sacred 2 embraces the polyfantastic past of a world in which both magic and technology have arisen, intertwined. The player chooses whether to play alongside the forces of light or shadow, unless playing as a Seraph or Inquisitor, which are dedicated to the paths of light and shadow respectively. Also - each character gets its own mount, and the mounts will all fight as extensions of their characters when you're riding; in other words, you won't have to dismount to fight.
The game looks gorgeous, and lives and breathes with no loading times, no instancing, and cooperative multiplayer of up to 16 players on PC and 4 on Xbox 360 (yup, more hack'n'slash fun on the 360!), and provides an immediately rewarding level system that gives each character three distinct combat arts that aren't restrictively tiered - you won't have to wait until you're Level Gazillion to unlock that power you've been pining for. With over 180 quests in each main campaign alone and 24 hours of gameplay if you race through, Sacred 2 could make a lot of twitchy dungeon-running button fingers happy when it launches worldwide in September, 2008.
