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Sacred 2 fixes on the way
Yesterday, I spent about five hours with Sacred 2, the nifty action RPG from German developer Ascaron. Most of those five hours were troubleshooting. For instance: Question: Why can't my robot dog with a laser cannon for an arm equip his nifty new battle-axe, even though I put points in the "hafted weapon" skill and the battle axe was clearly identified as a "hafted weapon"? The solution is posted below.
But the more pressing problem was trying to figure out how to play for any length of time without the game crashing, usually so hard that I had to resort to the power button. I tried updated drivers, beta drivers, rolled back drivers, and disabled PhysX drivers. I tried a variety of graphics settings. I even tried disabling the sound. You're know you're in dire straits when you're disabling the sound. The next step is to start yanking components out of the case one by one to see if one of them is somehow incompatible.
Luckily, it's didn't come to that. The good news is that I finally managed to "fix" my problem. Now I can play Sacred 2 without crashing. The bad news is that in order to do this, I have cranked down the graphics to their lowest settings. Which is just sad. Sacred 2 is now one of the butt-ugliest games I've seen all year. And this is coming from someone who played Too Human.
So I was delighted when Ascaron community manager Carolyn Hacker posted the following list of planned fixes in the next patch for Sacred 2: * Fixed several possible causes for crashes
It's the mainly the first one that I'm looking forward to. But the ingame options menu will be nice since it means I'll be able to gradually change graphics settings while I'm playing instead of only from the main menu. It also means I'll be able to change settings like what kinds of treasure I auto-loot and how the camera works. It's amazing to me that this game has been out for months in Germany, yet it's still having these problems and yet you still can't change anything in the menu without actually leaving the game.
* Added a new ingame-options menu
* Added several new bosses to reward exploration
* Added 8 new portals for more convenient traveling in Ancaria
* Better path navigation in some areas
As for when we can expect the patch, according to Hacker, "the time window we're hoping for is around the end of November".
(Answer: He's a robot dog with a laser cannon for an arm. Laser cannons aren't the same things as "hands" -- duh! -- and therefore make it impossible to equip two-handed weapons. This isn't in the manual because it's common sense, which explains why I had a hard time figuring it out.)
By Trent Polack at 10:14 AM ON 11/13/08
It's strange that you're having so many problems. My friend and I were playing it for a couple hours straight last night without much of an issue. What's more, the game runs surprisingly well with all graphics maxed out (save antialiasing, which kills performance) at 1920x1200.
It's not going to revolutionize the genre or anything, but it's a decent hack-and-slash game for the moment. Considering the genre has only seen Space Siege this year, well, uh. Sacred 2 doesn't appear to have much competition.
By Chijts at 3:05 PM ON 11/13/08
Another example why I'm quitting getting games for my PC.
By jfudge at 6:36 PM ON 11/13/08
This reminds me of when I bought Gothic 2 from GamersGate. Unfortunately there were no fixes far that game's crashes and GG graciously gave me my money back. I really want to play Sacred 2 but before I fork out any cash it had better get fixed.
By SpinDR Mario at 10:54 AM ON 11/14/08
Also note that the review version included an extra disk that is the "Elite" texture pack, only meant for the very highest end systems and cards, as it basically adds 6 GB of almost entirely uncompressed graphics. It sounds like there is a driver issue or an issue with the particular video card and the Elite graphics that we're trying to track down and resolve. Given that the hardware popularity between the US and Europe is not always the same, it's possible that simply not enough gamers with the same video card have, as an example, tried the Elite textures to raise the issue. Here, on our demo machines, which are largely Alienware Area-51 m15x, and contain a single nVidia 8800 GTX (Mobility) card, the Elite textures ran great. We're a little puzzled, as publisher of the game, but are working to resolve this, and I can assure you that it's an anomaly not the typical experience users have reported, with several hundred thousand copies sold world wide to date.
SpinDR Mario:
Also note that the review version included an extra disk that is the "Elite" texture pack, only meant for the very ...More »