Sacrifice: Intro
Sacrifice is an odd game all-around which was beloved by critics but didn't achieve significant commercial success -it's one of those games you probably don't know exists until someone who loves it gushes at you about how fantastic it is.
The gameplay is fundamentally odd, being an RTS played as an over-the-shoulder third-person game centered around a single individual that is 'you', a wizard. On top of that oddness, the resource mechanics are fundamentally unlike other RTSes, with the primary resource fought over being the souls of dead units -you can pick up your own effortlessly to bring them back into your pool to summon new units, whereas enemy souls take actual effort to acquire. Simply winning fights against an enemy wizard is not a primary goal; you want to kill them without letting them scoop up all their fallen so you can add some of their souls to your collection, simultaneously increasing your army size while decreasing theirs.
Oh, and killing enemy wizards isn't even that effectual, as they'll just respawn in short order and can command their units just fine while dead. You need to desecrate their altar for killing them to take them out of the game.
I'm much more interested in showing off and talking about Sacrifice's story, however. Its single-player campaign is also quite odd; a given run through it will be ten missions in total, but at each step there's five possible missions you could do, correlated to the game's five gods. Toward the beginning of the campaign, you're free to hop between gods, changing what spells you acquire and giving yourself a different story, with it only being later that your options start getting pruned away, sometimes all the way down to having 1 'option'.
And the thing is, your choices actually change the plot!
So Sacrifice is doing something very complex and interesting with its story. It doesn't execute everything perfectly, but it's quite impressive, and a lot of bits and pieces are designed so you'll only properly understand them if you do other play-throughs to get cross-mission context. I've checked out some Let's Plays of the game, but the ones I've seen tended to be handled as choose-your-own-adventure audience participation setups that showed off a single playthrough.
I'm going to be showing off all the missions.
I'll be covering gameplay to a decent extent here, but my primary goal is to discuss the story, storytelling, etc.
Starting with...
The gameplay is fundamentally odd, being an RTS played as an over-the-shoulder third-person game centered around a single individual that is 'you', a wizard. On top of that oddness, the resource mechanics are fundamentally unlike other RTSes, with the primary resource fought over being the souls of dead units -you can pick up your own effortlessly to bring them back into your pool to summon new units, whereas enemy souls take actual effort to acquire. Simply winning fights against an enemy wizard is not a primary goal; you want to kill them without letting them scoop up all their fallen so you can add some of their souls to your collection, simultaneously increasing your army size while decreasing theirs.
Oh, and killing enemy wizards isn't even that effectual, as they'll just respawn in short order and can command their units just fine while dead. You need to desecrate their altar for killing them to take them out of the game.
I'm much more interested in showing off and talking about Sacrifice's story, however. Its single-player campaign is also quite odd; a given run through it will be ten missions in total, but at each step there's five possible missions you could do, correlated to the game's five gods. Toward the beginning of the campaign, you're free to hop between gods, changing what spells you acquire and giving yourself a different story, with it only being later that your options start getting pruned away, sometimes all the way down to having 1 'option'.
And the thing is, your choices actually change the plot!
So Sacrifice is doing something very complex and interesting with its story. It doesn't execute everything perfectly, but it's quite impressive, and a lot of bits and pieces are designed so you'll only properly understand them if you do other play-throughs to get cross-mission context. I've checked out some Let's Plays of the game, but the ones I've seen tended to be handled as choose-your-own-adventure audience participation setups that showed off a single playthrough.
I'm going to be showing off all the missions.
I'll be covering gameplay to a decent extent here, but my primary goal is to discuss the story, storytelling, etc.
Starting with...
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