"Sacredity"

Several weeks later here I am writing in my blog again. And what's happened? Oh why bother? Alright I'm back to "between jobs" right now. I had a short contract at a local company. That contract expired. So here I am, between jobs. Only for a week now I've been unemployed. I've mostly played my latest game, "Sacred Gold". This game I have several things I like and several things not so much. What I like is its' simplicity, just the joy of building of up a character quickly and easily then taking that character online for the that whole benefit. More than one comparison has been made between it and that of Diablo 2. There's even a quote to that effect from a review printed right there on the box.

Alright so what I like is the giant map that makes it seem like it just goes on forever. Exciting things yet to see. And even so it didn't drive me crazy that I couldn't yet see the rest of the plot and story. That was one of the things that would annoy be about other RPGs like KOTOR, Fallout and Planescape: Torment. This one the plot seems secondary and not terribly important. There's one primary quest, represented by a large arrow on a compass, and a series of sub-quests, also with a much small triangle for an arrow. The sub-quests are really there to provide an excuse to explore the large map and gain some extra experience.

That brings me to leveling: just fight wave after wave of enemies. Whether it's goblins, undead warriors, or enemy soldiers serving under a bad guy king. The easiest way to gain experience is run around the map collecting a large number of mobs (EQ/WoW players call these mob "trains") then turn around and take out the large all at once with any number of special abilities.

The special moves are called combat arts at least one of which are available from the start of your first character irregardless of which kind of character you choose to play. Within a few levels you encounter your first "combo master". Each special ability allows for an ability like healing, protect and dealing damage, however once this is done a short "regeneration" time. By creating a combo of two or more special abilities the character will perform each in sequence then regenerate the whole combo as if it were one ability. For instance I created a combo containing a series of auras followed by a mulit-hit. One aura buffs all my defense and attack stats, one harms all enemies in a radius around the character and one both pushes all enemies in the immediate area away while simultaneously stunning them. That one takes around 40 seconds to regenerate so I don't know use it a lot.

My favorite thing about this game is how even when my level was in the 40s I could level up rather quickly by using a combination of a potion that increases experience gained and taking out large numbers of mobs at a time. Doing this three or four times will indeed take your level up even in your 40s.

For me this easy leveling provided a distraction from the lack of plot and ubiquitous slow progress.

Of course, there are things I dislike about the game. For instance the bugs. And there are A LOT of BUGS. Maybe not quite to the level of a beta but for a game that already has two expansion packs (a free "plus" pack and the pay-for underworld expansion), has been out for years and is already in the all-in-one gold package I would expect a few less bugs or at least a few more patches to fix the actual bugs. Expectations too high?

For instance I have come across many, MANY broken quests. They simply don't work or break or the NPC in question simply decides he's going to stand in the corner and not do anything no more.

And that another thing: what's the deal with the quests? How the hell can there be so many escort missions?! How the hell can NPCs have so little hit points and cause so little damage?! What the FUCK?!

Ok there's two main categories of escort missions: those with NPCs to escort to someone and/or some place and those that end up the NPC in question is dead and you simply have to take proof back the original quest provided to complete the mission. The other kinds of missions, extremely secondary though they are, include collecting ten or fifteen of a particular item from a particular type of mob (another influence from EQ/WoW perhaps) and perhaps killing a local bear/big zombie/uber spider/whatever the hell that seems to be bothering a local NPC or towns folk.

Multi-player I have tried but not extensively. I remember taking my level 30 character and ended up getting all the way up to 37 simply by being in a group with other high level characters and then hanging out around them while they killed level 50 to 70 mobs. Of course I couldn't re-import this character back into my single player game so it didn't do me any good.  ¶ 7:38 PM