Former Sacred 3 Dev Apologized, Claims Deep Silver Decided New Direction

Ex-Keen Games designer Sascha Wagentrotz made a post on the Steam forums to apologize for Sacred 3, which has received a generally poor reception and seems to have displeased most fans of the series. Wagentrotz stays shy of fully shifting the blame on Deep Silver’s shoulders, but nonetheless makes clear that the new arcade-y design direction was not up to the developers at Keen Games:

I’ve read a lot of hate against my former employer keen games, that they destroyed the franchise (on purpose)… All I can say is, that you should not overestimate the power of a developer in a “work for hire” constellation with a big publisher.

Wagentrotz also gave away his Steam key for the title, provided proof of his identity and replied to some questions:

How many people working for keen game actually played Sacred/Sacred 2?
Did any you guys sit down for a month and play them to get the feel of the game?
Infact was there any poster’s or figurines around the studio for inspirition?

Of course we played it. One of the level designers had a very deep knowledge of the whole sacred lore, but the whole story and chatter writing was outsourced (proof for that in the credits of the game I guess).

…

If there’s anything I’d like to know though, what was the atmosphere around the project like? And was there a sense that they decided to make it a beat’em up regardless of fan outcry for any given reason? It really seems baffling that they’d take that route with as poorly recieved as Sacred: Citadel was and how much the fans who knew about the changes were disappointed prior to release.

Atmosphere… most of the sacred 3 devs still like each other. Don’t want to spill the beans.

The fan outrage didn’t surprise me. I anticipated some rage, but it escalated a bit more than expected. Even with this anticipation, some things did hurt pretty hard. For me personally it was Totalbiscuits WTF, RPS’ Wot I Think and the steam tags of the german steam store (one tag is “Müll” which means garbage.

…

Now I’m not aiming these comments directly at the OP but rather the studio he’s working (worked?) for. It’s the job of the people in charge to make the right call, obviously the person(s) in charge of Keen Games need to be booted asap and replaced by people that have something that resembles common sense. I hope that the next game of Keen Games (if there’ll be one after this fiasco) will be of a better quality and aimed towards pleasing a true gaming crowd rather then trying to milk an already dying franchise that used to have a core of hardcore fans (which as you can see all ran to the hills screaming and crying for good reason).

In closing: SHAME on you Keen Games, shame on you!

As I stated before, there is no “black and white” answer for the question “who is to blame? Deep Silver or Keen?”. I don’t want to create an “enemy image” or something like that. I don’t want to tell internal details. It would be great for the community to have those details, but I’m certainly not the one who should give them to you. I’m not an official representative of deep silver or keen, I was just a Game Designers who built enemies and bosses for this game 😉

If you analyze the Sacred 3 credits, you should recognize that there is always an extra “Lead Department X” entry. But not for the Game Design department. You won’t find a Game Director, Creative Director or Lead Game Designer. Why? Because the project didn’t have one.

Deep Silver owns the IP, they spent the whole money and had the financial risk on their own. Of course they say how it goes and in which direction. I don’t have to have their oppinion, but it’s their right to do so. They still paid salaries for us developers and our families, for a long time.

If a publisher owns an IP and would like to produce a sequel, he often gives other developers the opportunity to apply for this project. The interested developers then usually make a prototype, a high concept document and a production/budget plan. It’s like a casting. In case of Sacred, keen did the best pitch and had the best prototype. Then they got the budget which enabled them to hire a lot of key personell and “infantry for the concent creation front”. So no, the portfolio does not matter. Keen is an experienced developer with a lot of skilled individuals. Sometimes it’s better to empower those people.

Thanks, Destructoid.