Game Classification

Sacred is an action role playing game set in the fantasy world of Ancaria. You can choose from six different characters - Dark Elf, Battle Mage, Gladiator, Forest Elf (a female archer), Vampire Lady and Seraphim (a descendant of arch angels). Your mission is to save Ancaria from evil which comes in form of Shaddar, a Necromancer who spent his days creating monsters to roam the plane.

Each character starts out in a different location, but all of them are quite near to each other. Besides the main quests, which are divided into four so-called "acts", you'll get to solve more than 500 different subquests, of which some are randomly assigned. While the main quest doesn't get you anything but to continue in the storyline, the subquests award you experience, gold and sometimes items.

The character system is different to other games of this type, since your character can not "learn" the spells or skills he (or you) wants to use, but needs to find "runes". These runes can be read, which gives the character +1 to a certain skill. Besides this, with each level up, you can assign stat points - strength, dexterity, mental regeneration for spells, physical regeneration for life replenish and so on. The character level is not limited, it's possible to gain levels way over 100 but this of course takes time. Also, the skills are not limited; if you want, you can read 200 runes with one skill and thus have level 200 on one skill, but this has a severe disadvantage: the skills get more powerful, but they take more time to regenerate at higher levels (which can lead to extremely powerful attacks which can be performed once in 4 minutes, rendering them unusable).

The size of the world can be compared to Baldur's Gate, but here, it's all in 3D. There are large towns and small villages, all with different inhabitants, different vendors and of course, many quests to solve. Travelling through the world can take hours, that's why the game boasts horses to ride on, which of course make the player much faster, but can be killed by monsters as well.

The game features single player and network, open and closed internet play on four difficulty levels with up to 16 players at once. Player-killing is not possible in normal games, but it's possible to open special Player-vs-Player games where no quests are active, but players may be killed. Hardcore play is also possible - which means that once you're dead, the character stays dead forever (normally, you just respawn in town, the character loses neither experience nor gold). [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : PC (Windows)

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/sacred/