Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Previews

Ascaron Entertainment's Sacred sequel was being showcased at this year's GDC, which prompted a few new previews over the weekend. The first is at IGN:
Out in the field monsters seem to frequently attack in groups. Like in the Diablo series, you'll occasionally run into boss monsters, more powerful versions of the standard types. In Sacred 2, these bosses affect the morale of the minions around them, and taking them down first can sometimes cause the lesser enemies to flee in terror.

Ascaron made a point of mentioning how there's no randomly generated content in the game; every object has been placed with a purpose to make the world feel more unique. Because the world is seamless, there's also no loading when heading into the game's many underground dungeons.

The second is at GameSpot:
The impressive thing about the demo was when the dev showed off the sheer size of the world. We're talking about an area that's about 27 square miles in size, full of cities and villages, woods, mountains, deserts, and more. And delve beneath the surface and there are plenty of dungeons, sewers, and caves to explore. Here's where it gets really cool: The PC version will support up to 16-player cooperative gameplay, which means that you and 15 of your friends can wander around the world at the same time. (The Xbox 360 version will support only up to four players in co-op mode.) You don't even need to stick together; you can all be spread out miles from one another. It's like a very small-scale massively multiplayer online role-playing game in that regard. Whenever you play, even if you're playing single-player, the game is always online. That means that if your friend has the game and starts playing while you're playing, he can seamlessly drop in and out of your game if you want.

And the last is at GamersInfo:
There are 12 ecological regions with very specific animals, monsters, weather patterns, flora, and in some cases loot types. There will be no polar bears in the desert in this game! What happens in each area is designed - hand crafted. But the spawns themselves are dynamically generated. We're back in grid A1 fighting kobolds and uhh...pernicious penguins, and skeletons (he spawned some amazing skeletons where I enjoyed counting the vertebrae in their spines.) These are the three creatures assigned to grid A1 and using Kiwi I have just wiped them all out (uhh, yeah). However, I the runes my green-hair goddess needs seem not to have dropped.

I can head off and adventure some more, following the single player quest line for my race/class/faction for a time, play some multiplayer action if it so suits me but I need not wander far. Time will pass. While it does, the area will start to refill with creatures. But they are not static spawns. All that I can count on is that a) it will never increase to the level it was originally (but will always be enjoyable to adventure in) and b) the creature mix will be appropriate for that area. Somewhere in grid A1 are kobolds, pernicious penguins and rocking skeletons with awesome spines. I simply return and hunt some more in an area I find comfortable, familiar and yet not like it was before.