Yet Another Tribute to Shiny's Sacrifice

[Bolty]

Mentioning Shiny's Sacrifice yet again in an attempt to bring enlightenment to those who may have missed out on it back in the day.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a great article on the Making of Sacrifice, Shiny's last great game before the company was gutted and turned into a company that put out Matrix-game drek. It's a game I've loved since the first time I've played it, and I still return to it from time to time over the years.

Sacrifice is oft-described as a real-time strategy game, but it's really undefineable. It's a mixture of a number of genres sort of smashed together. It had graphics that were simply far, far ahead of its time such that they still look good today - players of World of Warcraft would feel at home.

The game never sold well. People just didn't buy it, despite rave reviews across the board from gaming critics. Part of the reason was again that you couldn't pigeonhole it into a genre and say "if you like Game X, you'll love Sacrifice!" Another reason was that it was pretty tough to learn to play it. Even the article quotes the developers:

In terms of its biggest problem, we return yet again to accessibility – and here the small team was actually a problem. “Sacrifice had more of a difficulty wall than a difficulty curve,” Eric says, “We didn’t realise this as developers, but there’s a certain point at which you understand the game. It sort of clicks for people. They’ll be playing it… and then it’s there. The QA guys and the team had been playing it, but it was harder than we realised as we’d gotten over the curve and become familiar with how to play it.”

This is definitely true, especially in multiplayer where you'll typically get completely crushed by the computer-controlled multiplayer AI the first time you try it out.

Kieron Gillen wrote a piece for PCGamer looking back at Sacrifice as well, trying to figure out why one of the "best 10 games ever made for the PC" didn't sell well and lamenting its fate.

And playing now, it’s amazing what you’ve forgotten. It’s a game which has kind of found itself in the Top 100 every year through its reputation rather than an active familiarity with it. Last great Shiny game, looked really weird, blah-blah-blah. Except it’s painfully better than that. Take one obvious thing that never gets mentioned among the “Hieronymus Bosch does Command and Conquer”-isms: It’s funny. Really funny. While the similar period Giants gets remembered as being packed full of gags, the brilliantly-voice acted and sharply scripted Sacrifice gets no credit. “Of course I don’t want to destroy the world,” the Death God Charnel argued pointedly, “that’s where all the good slaughters happen”. “Haven’t we all had enough of war?” speaks James, the voice of reason in the heavens. “NO!” ripostes everyone else in perfectly-timed shouted chorus. Away from the world-play, it manages the highest calibre of slapsticks. One of James’ highest level spells is an in-gag reference to Earthworm Jim, where the wizard fires a several hundred ton cow into the sky. Thirty seconds or so later it returns, a single target annihilated beneath this beef-missile.

The name of the spell? Bovine Intervention.

I'm wondering if anyone else out there has played this wonderful game and if they'd like to wax nostalgic of it. For a time, I really got into the custom maps people made, and there are hundreds of them out there on the Net. There were some maps that were just designed for complete multiplayer mayhem of high-action and high-violence, and some even made their own single-player campaigns. Sometimes even the simplest maps in concept would yield the most fun - five wizards, each starting with an army of units and souls, meeting in one smallish central point where a hundred souls waited for capture led to 5-way skirmishes that really got the heart pumping.

-Bolty