Sacred is an action role-playing game set in the fantasy world of Ancaria. The player can choose from six different characters/classes – Dark Elf, Battle Mage, Gladiator, Forest Elf (an archer), Vampire Lady and Seraphim (a descendant of archangels). The mission is to save Ancaria from evil which comes in form of Shaddar, a necromancer who spent his days creating monsters to roam the plane.
Each character starts out in a different location, but all of them are quite near to each other. Besides the main quests, which are divided into four acts, there are more than 500 different subquests, of which some are randomly assigned. While the main quest only progresses the storyline, the subquests award the player experience, gold and sometimes items.
The character system is different from other games of this type, since the character can not “learn” the spells or skills they want to use, but instead needs to find runes. These runes can be read, which gives the character +1 to a certain skill. Besides this, with each level up, stat points can be assigned – strength, dexterity, mental regeneration for spells, physical regeneration for life replenish and so on. The character level is not limited, and it is possible to gain levels way over 100 given enough playtime. Also, the skills are not limited; if they so choose, the player can read 200 runes with one skill and thus have level 200 on one skill, but this has a severe disadvantage: the skills get more powerful, but they take more time to regenerate at higher levels (which can lead to extremely powerful attacks which can be performed once in four minutes, rendering them unusable).
There are large towns and small villages in the game, all with different inhabitants, different vendors and, naturally, many quests to solve. Travelling through the world can take a long time, so the game offers horses to ride on, which make the player character move much faster, but can be killed by monsters as well.
The game features singleplayer and multiplayer modes on four difficulty levels with up to 16 players at once. Player-killing is not possible in normal games, but it is possible to open special Player-vs-Player games where no quests are active, but players may be killed. Hardcore play is also possible – which means that once the character dies, they stay dead forever instead of respawning in town.
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