Sacred was formerly developed by Ikarion, of which you can still see the logo in some in-game pictures hanging on walls.
The game Ikarion developed was "Armalion", and it was designated to be an RPG for the Dark Eye RPG system.
Ikarion went bancrupt, and I heard that pleas to several companies remained unheard, so they just went bancrupt, and Ascaron just bought the remains of Armalion.
Their first intention was to develop an full-blown, classical RPG, like Armalion without its Dark Eye RPG license, but at one point someone changed their minds and decided to male an action game out of it.
I remember having read one of the original devs actually being totally shocked over this decision, as he wrote to the rest of the Armalion fans (known as the "Order of noXQs"), so much he couldn't work on it for a while. It must've really been a shock to too what has become of what he had been working so long for. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />
The interesting thing is, that the decision of turning this "classical" RPG into an action game was apparently influenced by German magazines not stopping to compare the "classical" RPG with what Blizzard did, because Blizzard's works were (and still are) considered kind of an "industry standard" by them. They still do: No single RPG review is without at least a small hint reading like "this is like..." or "this is unlike ..." Blizzard's action RPGs.
Another very interesting and to me unique thing is, that from the time on as the game was marketed and announced as an "action RPG2, a whole lot different kind of folks poured into the official Sacred forum (which was then still part of the overall Ascaron forums, and not saparated as it is today).
The talk and the topics ceased to be deep and serious, and became much more ... flat, so to say.
I have never ever again experienced such a shift of the member-base of a forum again.
And if you want to learn more about Armalion, ask Rei (she's in the game as Sisaya), she knows much more than me about it.
Oh, and RPGDot still has screenshots of the game. Me, I have a copy of the whole Armalion web site minus the forums (alas !), made with HTTrack for historical reasons.
You can have a glimpse on it via this link:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020329094138/http://armalion.de/In English:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020202040501/www.armalion.de/English/index2.htm 
