Explore the hills and mountains
The developers have encouraged exploration of the whole game world, exploring castles, forests, mountains, shrines and deserts. They've also added a number of secret places that will be hard to find, for example, you could stumble across a picnic area high on cliff with an expansive view over the river beneath, or you may stumble across a cave hidden in a rocky outcrop where a reclusive wizard will offer you treasure. Of course, walking from one end of the game world to the other just wouldn’t be much fun, which is why we’re going to be treated to a wide variety of mounts in the game.Each character in Sacred 2 has an exclusive set of mounts. First up, we saw the Seraphim’s sabre-toothed tiger, which animated extremely smoothly and had realistic looking fur (of the furry kind). I was told that we’ll be able to train these mounts and assign them skills which may come in extremely handy for fights later on in the game. They’ll be a wide range of mounts, including horses, dragons and the ominous looking Hellhound. In addition, we’ll also be able to ‘pimp’ our rides with various armour and special abilities.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageThe combat system looked fairly simplistic to use, with the main buttons being used to launch quick attacks, the shoulder buttons being used to execute spells and potions and the d-pad used for assigning magical attacks and the fight sequences I saw were all visually impressive. Ascaron say that they wanted to capture a natural feel to the fight scenes and therefore have relied on traditional hand drawn animation rather than motion capturing. The combat system will be customisable allowing you to use a range of melee and magical attacks and based on the fact that there are approximately 400 quests in the game, dozens of close up and ranged weapons and spells and combo building, the fighting shouldn't become too repetitive.
Read on you ravenous tigers...