Sacred 2 - Interview #1 @ RPG Vault

Creative Director at Ascaron Hans-Arno Warner chats with RPG Vault in the first part of an interview on Sacred 2.  The conversation confirms sales of Sacred (plus expansions) of 1.8M copies and goes on to discuss the upcoming sequel - let's take an early clip:

Jonric: What do you regard as the primary strengths that enabled Sacred to differentiate itself and to achieve this impressive level of sales?

 Hans-Arno Wegner: One important attribute of Sacred is the seamless world that allows the player to move freely. The player does not have to follow a fixed path, but can explore realms full of hidden mysteries. This adds a lot of atmosphere and freedom of play to the game. Ancaria itself is huge and full of beautiful details.

Another strength of Sacred is the strong and appealing characters. Our wide variety of exciting and truly unique characters makes it fun to play right from the start. Our character development system gives the player perfect freedom to select the Combat Arts he wants to use from the very beginning. You can even choose to fight mounted or on foot. Sacred allows a wide range of different paths for developing each character. For us, the capability of personalizing the player's character is one of the most important aspects of the game.

We also took care to make the interface ideally suited to the gameplay, easy to use and effective. This makes the game incredibly accessible. So, in addition to core RPG gamers, Sacred has also won over a wider range of casual and female gamers.

Sacred was designed to have an atmospheric epic single-player campaign, but also to give multiplayer gamers all they expect from this type of game, including closed and open internet play, cooperative campaigns, PvP, PvE and the much-loved hardcore mode.