Rating:

Normally, I keep these ratings rather short. This time though, I’m going have to go into greater detail as this is one of the most bug-ridden games I’ve ever played. And this is the “gold” version!

Yesterday, I’ve completed the original game (without the add-on Underworld) with my girlfriend, i. e. we played the whole campaign over a LAN. I’m just going to recount the worst bugs, not mentioning synchronization issues (enemies like dragons looking in different directions on the two computers or her being invisible to me and so on):

• A few hours into the game (probably between 5-10), we had just made our way through a very hard area called Tyr-Haddar and we were on our way back. But we couldn’t get back, there was an invisible barrier on the only way back to the game’s main area. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a save game before that area. So we had to start a new game and play the whole main quest again. This problem is also reported here and here.
• One dungeon didn’t have any enemies at all. I don’t think that was right.
• All my girlfriend’s character’s spells in the slots in the lower right of the screen were at some point suddenly halfed in their level and thus useless.
• When we got to the demon almost at the end of the game, my girlfriend suddenly couldn’t use her spells anymore at all. Right clicks just didn’t work anymore. Restarting the game or loading a different save game didn’t help either. (I’ve also read about this bug somewhere in a forum, but can’t find it now.)
• So, we finally reached the end boss where you are supposed to get some blue symbols above your character’s head in order to be able to damage the boss. On the one machine those symbols appeared only once during the whole fight while we could see them more often on the other machine.
• The extro then was a good summary of the whole game: the client was simply disconnected while the server showed a white screen with the extro’s sounds playing in the background.

Yes, the game really is that buggy. We’re now asking ourselves frequently “is this supposed to be this way or is it a bug?”, but we keep playing the game anyway because it’s fun.

What are your experiences with bugs in Sacred?

A few weeks ago, I decided that my laptop needed a different Linux distribution. It has been running Gentoo Linux for a some years, but I don’t think anymore that Gentoo is the right choice for a laptop because you can’t just install anything when you are on the go. For those who don’t know, Gentoo is a flavor of Linux where you don’t use binares, you compile anything from source. That naturally takes some time and is hard to do when you are running on battery or don’t have much time.

Besides, I also removed Gentoo from my desktop more than a year ago. My new choice of Linux is Arch Linux right now. It works with binary packages (I didn’t know installing software could be that easy! ), is optimized for newer processors (i686) and has a very good package manager.

So, the day before yesterday, I was installing Arch. It was already good on the way when I got the idea to check if the new kernel had built-in support for smart batteries (“SBS”, my laptop has on of those and back in 2004 there was almost no support for them in Linux). I was looking around somewhere in the /sys/ folder and catting some files to see their content. The machine then locked up, I couldn’t do anything except for doing a hard reset. I booted the Arch setup CD another time and from then on the hard disk didn’t work anymore.

There it is, the broken disk, looking so innocent

Fortunately, I had saved my most important files on another computer. I just hadn’t saved some files from the laptop’s Windows partition. There wasn’t a lot of important data, but losing one file was very annoying: My Sacred character. I’m currently playing Sacred with my girlfriend and our characters are already level 34.

To compensate my loss I downloaded an unskilled dwarf of level 30. From there on, it shouldn’t be too hard to get back to 34.

A last word on my SBS battery: With a new hard disk, that set me back 45 € for a 120 GB 2.5″ disk, and Arch completely installed, it’s now working without any problems. I don’t know if I just read the wrong files in /sys/ or if the hard disk was already a little faulty…