GAME REVIEW: SACRED 2: FALLEN ANGEL (PS3)

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel prompted me to think long, hard, and deeply about video game design, perhaps moreso than even the experimental games of which I am so fond. But, in the words of the immortal Dav Pilkey, before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this one.

MY WIFE THE ADDICT

I’m married to a beautiful and intelligent woman named Mary. I could go on for pages and pages about how wonderful she is, how much I adore her, how blessed I am that she puts up with me. She is my partner both in life and in art, my closest collaborator and my best friend. We connect on so many levels about so many things. But like most couples, there are a couple of areas where we don’t see eye-to-eye.

It’s not so much that we disagree, but that we don’t share the same cultural touchstones. There is a slight age difference between us, and so when I mention a geek landmark from my childhood, like Duck Tales or Transformers or “east-most peninsula is the secret”, she generally has no idea what I’m talking about. Superhero comics hold no allure for her, and she never really got into video games. Sure, she plays them from time to time, but she fits pretty squarely into that demographic so beloved by gaming companies and so disparaged by gaming enthusiasts, the casual player.

Now that I’ve told you a little bit about Mary, let me tell you a little bit about Sacred 2. It is, to put it charitably, Diablo-esque, and while my familiarity with Diablo is passing at best, it’s safe to say that it doesn’t do it nearly as well as Diablo does and doesn’t bring much of anything new to the table. The translation and voice-acting is surprisingly atrocious and borders on being annoying. The story is inane and run of the mill. There are technical glitches and bugs, not to mention a fair share of camera and difficulty curve issues. And while some games insist on holding the player’s hand throughout the entire experience, never allowing them to explore or discover anything for themselves, Sacred 2 takes the opposite route, throwing the player into the thick of it with very little by way of concrete explanation.

And my wife Mary, the casual player, knows all this, admits it freely, even brought some of it to my attention. And despite that, Mary stays up playing Sacred 2 until four or five in the morning. Since I’m unable to sleep alone, I consequently don’t get to sleep until four or five. At ten or ten-thirty, I prepare to go to work; often, Mary has resumed playing the game before I even wake up.

When I come home, she’s still playing the game. I used to come home to a freshly-prepared meal, sometimes quite ordinary (pasta, veggies, fish-and-rice), sometimes quite adventurous (turkey and collard greens with beans and wine-cooked rice), but almost always exquisitely scrumptious (the time she used salsa instead of pasta sauce, eh, not so much). Mary enjoys cooking immensely, derives as much pleasure from preparing a meal as I do from eating it, but since Sacred 2 came into our house, I’ve had to make runs to McDonald’s for hamburgers. I haven’t had fast food this regularly since I was in high school, and it no longer agrees with me. Meanwhile, Mary’s seraphim has gone up another two levels and has learned a new combat art.

I have seriously considered hiding the game before going to work, but since that would involve (1) waking up before she does, (2) distracting her from its absence until I have left the house, (3) “forgetting” my phone and shutting down all the phone lines at work so that she couldn’t call and ask where it was, and, finally, (4) finding a place to stash it where it would remain undiscovered for the six hours that I’m away, as I have no doubt she might spend that time in a single-minded T-1000-esque search of the house, I have not gone through with it. I’m just far too exhausted from the lack of sleep and far too ill from the fast food to expend that energy or think that far ahead.

And the thing is, while Sacred 2 isn’t a resolutely terrible game, it’s also not a particularly great one; it’s certainly not good enough for a non-gamer to be playing it thirty or forty-plus hours a week. Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever spent thirty or forty hours in a single week playing video games, plural, let alone one game whose flaws are so glaring and so obvious.

And, again, Mary is acutely aware of these flaws; she’ll complain about this one or that one, threaten to kill the NPCs if they don’t shut up or stop singing, curse the camera or the insanely tiny and hard-to-read text. “I know it’s not very good,” she’ll say, “but there’s something addictive about it.”

GRINDING

That “something” is looting, pure and simple. You kill something to get stuff which allows you to kill more things to get more stuff. Progressing in the game makes it easier to progress in the game; the reward and the effort are forever intertwined in an unending cycle, a sort of perpetual motion machine of gaming. It’s this cycle that made the Diablo games so popular, that caused so many players to sink so many hours into it. That same cycle is responsible for the success of massively-multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft (and, it should be noted, the various controversies that politicians use to score cheap points).

The funny thing is, I’ve never really gotten into Diablo, World of Warcraft, and now Sacred 2; I’ve never really gotten into looting for its own sake. In my article “The Problem with RPGs” (Russell’s Quarterly No. 2, p. 9-64), I sang the praises of the leveling up concept but lambasted the sometimes monotonous grinding upon which it runs. Even in some of the best and most fondly remembered RPGs, battles often devolve into selecting “fight” over and over again.

Why is it, I wondered, that gamers had put up with selecting the same command over and over again in game after game? It was, of course, the story, and that was “The Problem” that gave that article its title. The player had no control over the flow of the story and the major source of meaning was not game play but cut-scenes. Most irritating of all, the player was often hedged in by arbitrary “road blocks”. You know what I’m talking about: the guards standing at every corner of the town that don’t conveniently leave until after you’ve killed all the rats in the cellar.

PLAYER AUTONOMY

Sacred 2, conversely, gives the player a great deal of control. You have, first of all, an insane amount of options and ways to customize your character. The items you loot can be taken to a blacksmith and fixed with stat-altering gem stones; skill points can be spent in different combat arts; new combat arts are unlocked by “memorizing” (using) runes.

The player has complete autonomy to how their character progresses in the game. This autonomy extends to the the way you progress through the game’s world. There are literally hundreds of missions and dungeons to explore and you more-or-less have the freedom to go where you want, when you want. Here, then, is a game that answers some of my most persistent pet peeves in role-playing games.

And yet, for me, that is the biggest problem. It’s not the literally dozens of glitches and bugs. It’s not even the absurdly simple combat, the absolutely terrible voice-over, or the fact that all those missions and dungeons are as generic as possible. And as much as it turns me off, it’s not even the grinding.

It is, instead, that freedom and openness. I just don’t know what to do with it. I spend hours wandering around, trying to find out what I want to do next. When I get a skill point, I have no idea where to spend it; I don’t know what loot to keep and what to discard; I don’t know what combat arts I should be learning. I’m really just overwhelmed by the freedom.

HOW SACRED 2 CHANGED THE WAY I THINK ABOUT VIDEO GAMES

And this realization was very troubling for me. As much as I rail against the linearness of RPGs, as much as I despise cut-scenes and road blocks, as much as I disdain “rhythm vomiters” like Guitar Hero, I came to the realization that I as a player need some kind of structure. That I like knowing where I should go next. That I like knowing that I haven’t made some kind of huge mistake that’s going to make the rest of the game insanely harder or saddle me with the “bad” ending. That I like having a limited number of things to invest my skill points or red orbs in, and that I like seeing the end result of that almost immediately instead of four or five levels later.

Video games are an art form without an audience. Instead, you have two authors: the designer(s) and the player(s). One creates a context for the experience of the other. The designer is the player’s advocate and his opponent at the same time. The games I get the most enjoyment out of are those where I can feel the designer’s intelligence pitted against and yet working with my own. The problem here is that it feels like the player is doing all the work.

This reminds me, oddly enough, of the online flash game/community Creature Breeder, in which you raise, breed, and care for a number of whimsical creatures. Happy creatures cause money to grow on your money tree, and you use that money to buy things to make them happy. You feed them, click on them, toss a ball at them to kick. That’s really all there is to it. The player is responsible for their own enjoyment or lack thereof. The problem isn’t that it was boring. I mean, sure, it was, but the reason why it was boring is that I couldn’t detect the other author.

The Holy Grail of video games is a game in which every player has a different experience. But having played Sacred 2, which at least has some of that potential, I’ve realized that to pursue that Holy Grail is folly. I still think that players should have a great of options, but at the same time I’ve realized that if you give the player too many options, the choices become meaningless.

A great game designer (or team of designers) will strike a balance between the two extremes: providing enough linearness to give the player context and challenge but not so much that they feel hog-tied. Freedom, as a wiser man than me once said, is simply slack in the reins.

Sacred 2, then, has profoundly changed my thinking about the video game art form, its innate need for linearity, and the interface between the player and the designer. I don’t know if I’ll ever put it back into my Playstation machine, and I don’t know if I’d ever recommend it to anyone.

But I’m extremely grateful that I played it.

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