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Saturday, June 06, 2009

Sacred 2: Offline Coop - Nearly A Fail

The Girl and I were big fans of the Baldur's Gate and Norrath games (and their clones like Justice League) because they offered a good method of couch coop. The best implementations made it easy to create a new character, start a game, and join in and out of current games.

Sacred 2 just recently released for the PS3 and I was pretty excited to get something like the above for the new system. It's a shame that the offline coop nearly wrecked the whole thing.

So for people in our position, there's a trick to doing offline coop right. You won't find it in the manual and the game is of now help. Not sure who figured this out online, but hats off to them.

To play two characters on the PS3 and be able to save them:
- Make sure you have two users on the PlayStation 3 system. That's right, get out of the game, go to the system menu and create a new user. Just for this game.

- Log in as one user, create a character.

- Log in as the second user, create another character. You can now start a campaign and when the second controller hits start, select the first user.

- Now you can select the first character, play and save together.

There's a few odd things that still hang around offline coop - like not being able to trade with the other player. But at least with the above you can play together.

Overall opinion on the game forthcoming, but the above is just a terrible concept.

Update: Review up now.

Update: With the latest patch, you can do offline trading. When two players are close to each other, "Trade" will appear above (like "Use" or "Talk"). It's a bit unfriendly when you're in the heat of a battle, and both users need PSN accounts and be signed and it seems buggy and will flake out on detecting a signed in user ... but it does work. Mostly.

3 comments:

Duncan M said...

It seems almost as broken on the X360.

Firstly, moving gamer tags around to play locally on another box is a pain. Even if you've done it before.

So I created a local profile. Which puts the game in offline mode. No trading, and I couldn't even pick up most of the stuff.

The game just seemed meh. We wound up playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance instead. It was easier to jump into 4 player co-op.

Josh said...

Yeah, it's a bit baffling and couldn't be more poorly documented.

On the pick up front, the game seems to lock drops to certain players (with no indication as to who). It was most confusing for a while, but now we're mostly just running and tapping L1 to loot and moving on.

Clearly, the game lacks the pick up and go style of most any similar title on the consoles.

To its credit though, once we got past the niggly bits, we played it all weekend.

Anonymous said...

I am playing local co-op I have a temple guardian and she has a high elf. I really dont cared for duplicating items or gold. As we play she is getting nothing and i am getting everything. collect parameters are set to normal and she is collecting my runes and vice versus. How can i set it up to where she can have what she needs and similarly for me?