Episode 143 - A Hole Named James - Sacrifice

An enemy wizard is approaching your podcast! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, for the first main episode of Fanbruary, we’re going to be talking about Sacrifice, an RTS title from 2000. Sacrifice is billed as an RTS game without a bunch of resources to manage, and it in fact does have only three: your health, mana and souls, the resource you use to summon units, but this did not stop us from being overwhelmed and bad at it. If you are looking for nuanced discussion of the game from seasoned RTS veterans, this isn’t going to be the podcast for you, but from a first encounter with the game, there’s still a lot going on. The production value present in Sacrifice is much higher than we could have expected, and there were many choices, both large sweeping decisions to smaller touches that show a lot of care was put into the game. Voice actors that video game fans and just average people would recognize, imaginative creature designs and a pretty expansive tutorial make this an appealing game to just about anyone. We’re going to talk about managing units in a third person RTS game, how the narrative/gameplay interaction is shockingly robust for a game of this era, and we somehow find a way to shoehorn in a reference to Blitzball. Thank you for joining us again this week! When we first heard about Sacrifice, we thought we may have another Realms of the Haunting on our hands, but it turned out to be just a very competent entry in the RTS genre that people just seem to be less aware of than the big ones. Is it our unfamiliarity with the genre, or is Sacrifice actually a hidden gem? If you played along, were you able to manage the game easier than we did? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Gunfire Reborn to close out Fanbruary, so be sure to join us then!