Sacred’s Flawed Multiplayer

By Paul Munn | March 16, 2007

A little while back I reviewed Sacred, focusing on the offline game. I’ve since taken some time to go online with the game and play a handful of rounds with others, and I’ve come away disappointed. We know that Ascaron is hard at work on Sacred 2 for both Windows and the Xbox 360, and I’m hoping that they’ve addressed the following problems from Sacred in Sacred 2.

Sacred had a reputation for having been very buggy at launch, and coming to it years later gave me benefit of having all of the patches in place for the game. The online game still, however, has problems. There are some animation glitches, especially when on horseback, and occasionally after dismounting a horse, one won’t be able to get back on. Add in some occasional warping even with the highest speed connection and you have some network code that could have used a bit more work. These aren’t deal-killers that prevented us from using the co-op story mode online, because eventually you would be able to get your horse back if you tried again later, but one design choice and a different bug are.

One other bug I noticed was save game corruption. When I played online with James we got to a point where his character was suddenly unable to arm or remove any weaponry from his item slots, leaving him to pummel foes with his bare hands. While his Gladiator was up to the task of doing that, he would much rather use actual weaponry. After saving the game and attempting to reload into another online session, he found his character model in the menus to be replaced with an ogre. This kind of save game corruption simply shouldn’t happen in a game this far past release. Keeping backups of saved games external to the game itself really shouldn’t be required to compensate for a broken game.

Other than these bugs, the online multiplayer has been designed to be used after the offline single player game is finished. You really can’t play offline and online games with the same character. How so? To start an Open Internet game, you need to import a character. You can’t import a character directly from an offline save game, you need to load the saved game and explicitly export the character using an easy-to-find menu option for doing so. When the online game is saved, it’s not saving the state of the online game with the character data, it’s only saving the character data back to that import slot.

This wouldn’t be so bad if you could join a game online with your character, and then when you’re done bring them back into your offline game. After all, you like this character, you wouldn’t mind bumping them up a level or two online to help you move along the offline game more easily, and you’re not even asking to have completed quests move with the character. But you cannot import a character into an existing offline game. You must start a brand new offline game and import a character from the very beginning of that game.

This is an artificial limitation that keeps me from wanting to go online again until I’ve finished the very large amount of offline content.

That’s not to say there aren’t other fun ways to play online. There are head-to-head modes as well as the option to play from a central hub that lets you visit a wide variety of areas of the game so you can square off against just about any type of monster you can think of with a friend and just walk off with the loot for your next online bout. But you still can’t take the built-up character from those modes and bring it back into your offline game in progress to keep moving forward.

So in the end, Sacred is a good offline hack-and-slash game and if you can rig a way to back up your saved games after each play session and restore them when corruption occurs, the online game is also good if you never plan to take your character back offline. Just having to write all those caveats makes me realize that Ascaron really should have done a better job with the game. With luck they will be paying special attention to these types of issues in Sacred 2, and will let you export and import into offline games as much as you like.

See also:
360 No Longer Lackin’ Hackin’
Sacred Plus review