Sacred 2 - Preview @ GamingExcellence

GamingExcellence has a pretty good hands-on preview of Sacred 2.  Here's a bit on the character development sysem:

The ability system is also something of an anomaly, at least for people who’ve played hack-and-slashers like this before. The oddity is this: you start out with all of your abilities unlocked already. There are essentially no level requirements. As you level up, you gain skill points that you can attribute to any of your abilities or raise things such as weaponry skills and defensive abilities. While some might raise a questioning eyebrow regarding this choice, I for one found promise within it.

The ability to use all of the abilities without investing any skill in them means not having to worry about what kind of ‘build’ I should have, and feeling like I’ve wasted skill points after spending them. There’s nothing quite as demoralizing as saving up skill points to spend them in “Armageddon Explosive-tacular” only to find out that it’s a somewhat-large burst of fire. The ability system also brings in a lot of customizability to your character, and the question of if you want to specialize your skills and grow powerful in particular areas or to generalize and have a bevy of abilities at your control is yours to answer. And with fifteen abilities per character, there’re a lot of choices to make.