I played through Sacred right up until the 2nd act, at which point, I decided to give up on it, because it was so hideously dull.
I had high hopes for this game when I first installed it. For the past few months I've been itching for another Diablo clone, and it looked like Sacred was the answer to my prayers. Unfortunately, due to a lot of design decisions, the game just wasn't very fun at all.
First of all, I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out which items to keep and which items to sell. Should I keep the armor with the higher defense rating, or the armor with the higher resistance rating? Hovering my mouse over these stats didn't explain what these two stats meant, and at first I tried keeping whichever was the more "expensive" item as a heuristic for trying to determine the "better" item, but I soon found some examples of items that were obviously more expensive, yet worst than their peers. This wouldn't have bugged me so much except for the fact that my character kept complaining "My armor is not sufficient at defending me from physical attacks!" As far as I know, I'm wearing the best armor I've seen so far in the game. What more do you want me to do? =P
That ties in with the next problem: The enemies seem to have some serious balancing issues. The character class I played as was the Vampiress, and this class has the ability to temporarily transform into a vampire form (her default form being a human knight). When I became a vampire, I was ripping through the enemies as though they were tissue paper, often killing them in 1 or 2 hits. However, when my transformation wore out and I became human again, they ripped through me, often killing me after as few as 4 hits. I guess she wasn't kidding when she said her armor wasn't up to snuff.
Certainly I could attack as a vampire, then run away, wait for my vampire ability to recharge, and come back and kill 3 or 4 baddies, then run away, wait for it to recharge, etc. but honestly, would anyone find this repetitious sequence fun?
Interestingly enough, there seemed to be no penalty for dying (i.e. you don't lose XP, gold, items or anything) except for respawning in the last town you were in. That means there's no incentive for playing carefully or drinking health potions, except to avoid the tedium of travelling for a few minutes (real life time) to get back to the spot where you died.
One of the features fans of Sacred seem to like to brag about is the horses. While it is a neat feature, I ended up not using the horse simply because they were more of a pain than help. My attack rate dropped drastically meaning I'd kill fewer bad guys before they'd kill me. Dismounting and mounting the horse repeatedly every time I found and defeated an enemy respectively was actually quite a pain. Why didn't they give us a hotkey for mounting/dismounting?
While I like the idea of having lots of quests to complete, all the quests I've encountered were pretty uninspired. E.g. "please kill the evil taxer/slave traders/bandits/rapists/etc. for me. Thank you, here's some gold and XP." or "Bring item foo back to me. Thank you, here's some gold and XP." One thing I commend Sacred's designers, though, is indicating where I have to go to complete a quest on the map. Too many RPGs simply let you get lost.
Overall, this game was a big disapointment to me. I guess I'll just have to keep waiting for that Diablo clone.
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