With Sacred 3 having come out to a rather lukewarm reception (a 1.4 on Metacritic might do that to you), a lot of the game’s angry purchasers have been posting threads encouraging those unhappy with the game to seek out Unbended. As many of you know who follow this site, we’ve covered this game extensively, and seeing as how it is being developed by the original Ascaron team, may in fact be the only game that deserves to be called Sacred 3.

With that out of the way, it was just brought to my attention that their FAQ has been updated with several new snippets of info that might be of interest to the game’s overly-anxious fans. Though a good deal of them are not answered and instead focus on humorous replies that tell us nothing (I love Sacred’s humor, but I don’t think an FAQ is the best place to do this), there are a few interesting revelations that caught me by surprise.

On DRM, Boxed versions and GOG availability:

Will there be a boxed version? After all, I’d like to loot in real life, too! And will there be DRM?
Our goal is of course a box. Sometimes it’s just nice to be able to touch things and put them on your shelves. We’re looters as well. We can’t make a final statement on DRM, but none of us likes it.

Will UNBENDED be available to buy at GOG.com?
There are of course no concrete plans yet, but it’s certainly something we would go for, yes.

On the subject of crafting, which has sort of become the focus of ARPGs as of late:

As Crafting is of great importance for UNBENDED, are you thinking of a possibility to enable gamers to craft their own sets with self created set bonus and maybe determine the look, too – meaning everything be your own creation?
Crafting will definitely include the color. Chose your own bonus? Well, in principle that’s possible; you just need to use the right recipe. A real DIY would be bad for the balancing and would devalue the hunt for recipes.

And a good reply about A.I.:

Will the AI in UNBENDED be your own creation or will it [use a 3rd party AI system]?
AI is always a delicate matter in ARPGs. Enemies have to act in patterns the gamer can learn. You have to understand those patterns and in the end be able to use them to your advantage. Otherwise, the ogre with the big club comes, whacks it on the ground and goes his way. For NPCs and animals, we’ve always had a useful AI module that allowed them to have daily routines etc..

Besides the aforementioned topics, the FAQ also seems to hint at the team’s desire to allow for player modding akin to what we see in Torchlight, as well as freedom to run player-controlled servers in the same vein as Minecraft. A fairly lofty promise, but one I’d certainly love to see kept.

The team has promised to continually update the FAQ as time permits, so this remains our best way of learning about the game until the next phase of development is underway.