IncendiaryDevice
Self-Ejected
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I've just finished marathoning Blackguards Special Edition (including the DLC) and Blackguards 2 for the first time, and the experience has been such a joy I can't help but express this in as many words as possible and inevitably pine for the lack of a BG3. Enjoy. Or not.
Blackguards (special edition and DLC purchased from Gog a year or two back) version 1.6 English Language edition:
I didn't really have any idea what to expect from this game, I'd kept myself from spoilers as much as possible and was never a contributor to the kickstarter nor a player of any alpha versions. I bought it on Gog during a sale a year or two back while looking for a new game. I had recently completed Drakensang: The River of Time and the combination of Dark Eye rules combined with now turn based combat with interactive environments had me as sold as I can be. What I was unsure about was whether it was an RPG in the traditional sense, always having it in my mind's eye as a tactics game rather than an RPG. I never found out for sure, however, as my old machine wouldn't run it. I now have a machine that can run it comfortably at its recommended settings and I decided to christen this new machine with Blackguards. And, boy, was I delighted with the result. This is not just a tactics game but is indeed a full-on RPG, albeit with some concessions to irregularity of expectation, though these are soon adapted to.
I'll review and score the game simultaneously, the same as I did with Drakensang: The River of Time, by selecting the 10 most prominent features of the game and assessing each out of 10 and then adding them all together to provide a grand total.
Ambiance/Atmosphere/Immersion etc
I found the overall combination of music, colours, setting & art design to be a perfect cohesion that not once took me out of the world nor ever made me feel like the game was suddenly in a different universe nor that any particular area was more shabbily put together than another. Those areas that felt in any way out of place I later discovered were, of course, the DLC parts.
Its one of those games where you can leave it running idle while you think about building your character and find yourself simply marvelling at the delightfully designed backdrops, the myriad of details that vary in every pixel, both static and sprite, while at the same time wallowing in its other-worldy fantasy rhythms where even the greys and browns which permeate the scenes feel alive and vibrant.
With each town and battlemap being individually painted and crafted for a sole and single use. I like to believe, and the game does nothing to dissuade this belief, that such excellent variety with a single style is born from genuine passion. What makes blackguards unusual here is also its strength as each of these scenes are merely screensavers with minor animations playing here and there. It was made by developers who primarily make adventure games and they've converted the screensaver nature of an adventure game into a full blown RPG. So you'll never see your characters run around any maps (aside from battle maps), instead they teleport around the world from screensaver to screensaver via the world map. While this seems very odd and jarring at first, it's amazing just how quickly one adapts and completely forgets that this is even a thing which makes the game odd or unconventional. One could even argue its genius if one so desired.
This category was the first aspect to grab me about the game, both because it was odd and because it was still great and felt natural, as if that's how RPGs had always been, and my enthusiasm for it did not dwindle for the entirety of my adventure, only increased and, for this reason I have no choice but to provide a maximum score for this part 10/10 - no complaints and overwhelmingly pleasantly surprised.
Voice Acting/Dialogues/Graphics etc
Similar to the above category, but more so, I fell for the voice actors immediately. I can't speak for the male lead as I chose to play a female (more of that later*) and from the moment she spoke, I thought, hey, what a surprisingly not-in-the-slightest-irritating voice, I'll be able to listen to this for hours! Then the Dwarf spoke. And he was a Yorkshireman. Not Scottish as most generic Dwarves are, but a Yorkshireman, and I was floored. Then the mage character spoke and I was in heaven. I could adventure with these three for eternity: https://youtu.be/7lS4q9qhAXU?t=21m11s each one making masterful use of intonation and subtlety to perfectly convey their meaning and personality. Throughout you get to hear comedy, tragedy, sarcasm and sincerity and none of it ever feels out of place but always on the nail. "If I did this quest I'd probably die" an NPC will say "And what a tragic shame that would be..." comes one of your reply options (paraphrasing, not exact dialogue).
If the game ever offered me a choice to kill any of these three, I'd reject it out of hand and regardless of any role-playing. In that respect I guess you could argue it's too good for its own good. Where the voices are let down slightly is in the fact that the animations don't talk very accurately while the voice actor is talking, they just stand there like mouth-wobbling manequins, but on this point I honestly didn't give a shit, but shall deduct half a point because it is a genuine criticism, just one I personally never really noticed much.
The dialogues throughout the game are all pretty much very enjoyable and I very rarely found myself skipping any text scenes. Even when someone's talking complete bollocks about a topic I have no interest in and couldn't even understand the point of I still found myself fascinated by the choice of accent or choice of words used and nothing ever felt like padding chatter or someone's fanfiction self-flagellation. The course of the game manages to straggle that line between light humour and dark gritty to almost perfection.
In terms of graphics I was not offended by anything (other than during character creation, but more of that later*) and I have nothing to say about this other than this and what I've already said about character animations while talking. In terms of spell effects and combat actions effects, again, the game walks the perfect line between underwhelming and overblown where each effect is both easily distinguishable from another and each looks as meaningful as another and each has its own unique and easily recognisable sound effect. All making it a sheer joy to perform any actions during battle. In fact, one of the game's most formidable memories is of the Dwarf shouting "BY ANGROSH" (sp) as his axe boom-crunches into an enemy, which, later in the game, is even more satisfying when its a one-shot kill.
I'm going to knock off another half a point from the general graphics score because of the graphics during character creation, but I shall discuss that in the nitpicks section for ease of reading, leaving this section with a formidable 9/10.
Character Creation
It's worth nothing here that on many of the YouTube videos of this game the players are choosing between three different character builds when they start the game: a mage, a warrior, a hunter, but in the current version that I played there is in fact only a choice of two with the hunter class having been removed at some point.
Character creation is one of the really strong points of the Dark Eye universe and this game is no exception. You could spend literally hours deciding what character to play and how to start off building them and then never get bored of building that character throughout the game. No complaints here other than those detailed later in the nitpick section. Nothing does great character building quite like a good p&p conversion and this is a pretty damn good attempt and a major hook throughout. I'll take half a point off for the nitpicks and award a confident 9.5/10.
Combat
It is turn-based combat which takes place in an enclosed hex-based combat arena. Things can go wrong even with this descriptive perfection, such as it being a huge drag waiting for your turn while the masses of enemies take their turn or waiting for endless animations to go through their motions. In this game these are rarely noticeable issues. I think I can only remember maybe two battles where there were simply too many enemies and I never got impatient at any of the animations, even in battles where I'd shamefully had to perform multiple reloads. One battle involving too many enemies did make the screen stutter in agony however, though this could have been due to background programs running rather than it being the game's fault and as such I shan't immediately condemn that encounter as a flaw at this point in time.
The combat screens are also the puzzle screens in Blackguards. And here, again, the game shines brighter than many of its peers. There are levers everywhere during combat, cunningly hidden treasure chests, all kinds of foul traps, but also all kinds of foul traps that you can use to your advantage as well, doors to other sections of the battlemap, bridges to draw, webs to hack away, chandeliers to drop, gates to open, fumes to ignite, poison to explode, quicksand to avoid, stalagmites to dodge, and I'm only mentioning some of it all. Some battle screens don't even require you to fight as much as they require you to either just sneak or, more brashly, make a dash for it. Sometimes you can be relieved when you get nothing more than a straight kill everything and nothing else battle, just to break it all up a bit and let loose some BY ANGROSHes.
The AI is also not at all bad, often, but not always, having a penchant for your weakest characters, using all the special moves at its disposal, looking for the best placement available on the map and spellcasters that aren't afraid to tear you a new one. Though one thing I did notice is that there is an element of random involved in the well intention and sometimes a reload with a very mild change in approach can result in completely different approaches from the opposition, especially with line-of-sight being a crucial aspect for every archer or spellcaster.
There's also a huge variety of methods to go about achieving your aims in any battlemap, from choosing to poison your weapon, through three different healing systems, a variety of elixirs to help you out and all kinds of traps and random throwing weapons to compliment whatever your character build is already performing.
I looked forward to every battle screen while at the same time having a sense of trepidation of readiness throughout. There's a few nitpicks but I can't fault barely any of it in a serious game-faulting way so, again am going for a confident 9.5/10.
Questing Generally
Nothing in life is perfect, alas, and this is the first category where Blackguards is indeed a bit weaker than some grand RPGs that make a point of having side-quests.
This isn't to say BG lacks side-quests, it most certainly doesn't. In fact, chapter 3, which is the main meal of the entire game is almost entirely made up of side-quests, dozens of hours worth. It's that the quests aren't really that long or overly-engaging. In that its not so much an adventure to go and hunt the dragon as it is a case of "if you want to fight the dragon then go to that place on the world map and fight the dragon". There's very little sense of really delving into any dungeons or being on the trail of anything. New quests simply open up as you do other quests and re-talk to people, but the new quests are as easy to get to as the last, even if the combat screen is 5x harder than the previous one.
Happily though, its not an MMO case of merely quantity over quality, as each of the little quests are fully fleshed out battlemaps with often much more complex content than the main quest, and none of the quests are those collect 10 shark eyebrows from each corner of the map or that kind of thing. It's just a shame that they all feel small in scope and that dungeon crawling is only rarely encountered in favour of lots of overland darting about between towns with quick one-off cool battles/puzzles.
The game has a food system, whereby you can rest outside of towns by using one portion of food, a meaty leg of some beast, nicely roasted being one portion. And these rations weigh a lot, so you can't carry loads of them about without incurring an encumbrance penalty. You also start the game crawling out a dungeon, where these rations are useful. However, the number of times the rations are useful throughout the entire game is sadly barely ever and most dungeons can be exited from as easily as they are entered, meaning that something clearly went wrong with the design somewhere in this regard and its kinda telling how the food rations were one of the things quickly expelled from the game in the sequel.
So this is a difficult one to score as the quality of the quests was still great, its just that the quests never really felt like "quests", if that makes sense. Its more just stuff that you can do if you want. But, yes, you want to do that stuff. So, erm, dunno really, 7/10 ?
The Main Plot
I can't say I cared too much for the plot of this game. Its standard murder mystery fare which is neither horrible nor outstanding. Someone's been murdered, you get the blame, your memory's been wiped, you go find out what happened until you end up fighting the bad guy. The twists are mostly telegraphed and its a lot of going through the motions and its quite easy to forget why you're even doing everything you're doing. Could care less when XYZ emotional hook in the plot shows itself and I got a greater sense of plot-fulfilment when Frogrim, oops, I mean Naurim, the dwarf finally gets to kill his dragon in an optional side-quest.
Its all just an excuse really, and in that regard its ideal for this kind of game. Blah blah blah until the next battle/puzzlemap. I mean, its not all bad, I'm exaggerating a bit here, but its a bit like any open world game, the general idea is to avoid the main plot for as long as possible anyway, so bitching about a perfectly serviceable main plot is a bit unfair, truth be told. One aspect of the main plot which was nice, however, is that it gave you the occasional memory scene where you'd be transported to the time before your imprisonment and before the murder and play-out some interesting scenarios without any of your usual companions, which was actually very enjoyable and refreshing.
There's one incident in the main plot involving a third companion you meet in your journey which rubs pretty much everyone the wrong way, and I was no exception. Not sure if its a flaw or not, but for the sake of my review it will be, a whole point's worth. The ending is also kinda underwhelming, but I was expecting that so I had no whelm to be undered by. All in all, probably a 6.5/10. Its certainly no Planescape or Dues Ex, but then I don't think it ever wanted to be or was meant to be. There's plenty there for a storyfag, just not maybe as juicy as the tasty legs of meat you might be more used to.
Itemisation
Itemisation is good. Better than average. There's always a reason to browse shops for new items or to look through won loot and there's plenty of named items and item variety generally to keep you interested and possibly in indecision about what weapon/item to use for the next fight. Its not perfect though as there's no things like amulets or rings, you literally cannot equip the ring in this game, and virtually no armour has any unique stats beyond being a part of a set, but the weapons and assorted general items are all in a vast abundance of variety and flavour.
Its no surprise the sequel put a bit more effort into the armour variety and actually did decide to include amulet-like items, though the sequel still didn't really "get it" in this regard, so it seems possibly to be something endemic to either the devs or the Dark Eye system or Germans generally. 8/10. p.s. don't forget to always double-check what kind of damage your weapon deals (more on that in nitpicks).
Bugs and other problems
As far as I could tell, none really to speak of. At least none that I could confidently argue had nothing to do with programmes running in the background. I thought I noticed something that could be a bug every now and then, but I could never be sure and nothing stood out as anything one would mention. 10/10. I always had my own unique save games aside from all the autosaves, but I don't think I ever needed to.
Game Length
Blackguards is a deceptively huge game. I don't know why, but I was always under the impression it was quite a small game around the time of its release, so I was pleasantly surprised when it just kept going, and going, and going. I think I probably burned around a hundred hours on it including all the character creation and character building think time combined with all the dithering around shops and inventory on top of all the content, which I tried to be as completionist as possible. I've no doubt a quick, main-plot targeted min/maxed confident barge through would take a lot less, but who wants to do that! The game provides waaay too much and still left me wanting more, much more. 10/10. Does not outstay its welcome.
Monster/Enemy Variety
Its not all humans, not by a long shot. Even similar to humanoid enemies, such as lizardmen or goblins have their own unique aspect. Pretty much every map will provide a different angle to what you encounter and how you counter it. There's plenty of human enemies, possibly slightly too many, but there's more than enough alternate beasts to provide enough of a sense of variety to gameplay, including, Ents, Kid Kongs, dire wolves, tigers, lizardmen, goblins, dragons, plants, wisps, chimps, golems, mad mages, shamen, giants, insects, etc to name a good selection. Though the main stock of your enemies will be the humans, which, again, seems to be something more akin to Dark Eye or German devs generally, or, rather, what they like to term "low fantasy", which is probably some kind of code word for non-gay gay shit, etc etc or whatever the reason it. Anyway, could have been better, but it was a lot better than some even attempt, a slightly above average 7.5/10.
Total score
8.7/10
Nitpicks
Weapon Talents: Its very difficult to imagine putting use to many of these talents as the only character who's really open to much variety is your own and so the variety is there more just for you to make a decision about at the beginning of the game rather than be anything to consider throughout. It could have been simpler to simply ask the player to pick two types of weapon at the start and forgo so much wasted screen space (and then made the weapon master talent only require two weapons specialisations).
But the biggest oddity among the weapon talents is Throwing Weapons. What an odd place for this. You could just imagine some guy somewhere picking Throwing Weapons as their only proficient weapon during creation and then discovering there aren't any throwing weapons, just one-off consumable belt-items that are called throwing weapon. Lol at them having 1 javelin and then nothing for hours of gameplay. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with this, why a belt-item has a weapon proficiency at all. If it's a weapon it should be a permanent item equipped in the weapon slot. Also, the tutorial really should have made more of a deal about the weapon sliders, something like that is too big to be left to manual hunters.
Talents: There's quite clearly too many dump-talents here and I really can't see anyone going big on many of them before the end-game was already upon them and they had nothing else to do with their points, to which, even then, some of them are a pointless drain beyond all the others.
Warcraft is made useful only by maximising it and getting the free weapon change action. Wouldn't it have been more useful to have had a talent tree that also consisted of a free-action to use a belt-item as well. One of the reasons I barely ever used belt items was because you barely ever get a moment to waste in a battlescreen, and you don't want to be applying your 2 turn poison on the first round (the most likely round to leave you nothing else to do).
Special abilities: There's also quite a lot of pointless special abilities, such as defensive stance and the fact that, for example, spearmen only get three special moves, whereas a swordsman has loads.
The dual wielding feat claims it reduces the penalty for dual wielding, but forgets to tell you what that penalty is. Same with a lot of descriptions for feats. Like the attack of opportunity feats which claim "Enemies suffer a penalty on Attacks of Opportunity when the hero moves past them", to which, what is their current chance and how much does this reduce their chance? Me? I'm just getting these for the initiative... etc. The Marksman feat is even worse as the wording says "May cause a wound" where as the details of the feat state "wounds 1", but neither say what that chance is nor how its derived.
The old "missing when it said I had a 95% chance" is a notable issue with this game's communication. Its no wonder some people rage about this as its highly misleading, because it only shows the to-hit chance, and forgets to take into account all the other factors around scoring damage, like dodge, parry, armour and etc, but then the game should be telling the player exactly why they missed without them going to the battlelog, such as a brief floating text of "hit but dodged" or "hit for zero damage" etc.
Base attributes: Still can't get my head around magic resistance. I get how it works, I just don't get what it's use is in this particular game. As in, whether its worth hundreds of APs, and should the game be clearer about this, etc. The strength stat states it "can increase the damage done by the hero" and there's no damage display and no means to verify how your damage is increased by increasing strength, and why does is say it can increase damage rather than it does increase damage, how is the strength modifier random.
Spells: A mage can be a warrior but a warrior can't be a mage.
Armour: Why does the stat always say zero but have the real numbers in brackets, why doesn't armour do much considering the vast cost and punishments of heavier clothing. Or does it. Where are the details about the penalties for wearing heavier armour. What exactly is ordinary damage and who wields it. What is the mental image of infantry damage.
Nowhere to stash any items.
Not enough weapon slots for given weapon choice/requirements. For example: Bow + Hunting arrow or war arrow or fire arrow or blunt arrow or sinew cutter arrow - five choices for three slots and you have no idea what the next encounter will require. Likewise with weapons, regular damage, infantry damage, fire damage and magic damage - 4 types for three slots and no idea which will be needed. increased as an annoyance by the cost of a turn to swap weapons.
Not enough slots on belts to accommodate 1 bandage, 1 astral potion, 1 poison = 1 throwing weapon. And then there's healing potions and elixirs to consider and you have no idea what the next battle requires.
All the male portraits are shit. I had to go with a female purely because all the males are shit:
Why do all the blokes have beards. no baldies, chin or head. three the same, 1 ridiculous Mohican and a blonde... ponytail. Oh come on. The girls are only marginally better, but at least they have 2 blonds to choose from instead of one which is some kind of variant at least. I mean, for such a huge game, this is it? Can't even cope with skin colour changes? Or facial hair tweaking? Or a decent stack of wigs? I mean, like... really? What was causing the individualisation blockage here?
Pining for BG3?
BG2 was such a completely different kettle of fish its hard to imagine a BG3 even being a BG1 worthy successor. While it would be nice to see a BG3, its hard to imagine the devs have the wherewithal to make it and not fuck it up. Would they make an improvement on the 8.7, or would they swing even weirder with a reworked BG2?
I'm not sure. I would like to encourage a BG3 but at the same time BG1 is just fine as is and the parts where its not are not parts that these developers seem to understand anything about anyway, so it's unlikely there'd ever be any improvement over what already exists.
Another BG1 but called BG3 would be ok. Its been long enough for more of the same not to feel too much like more of the same.
Blackguards (special edition and DLC purchased from Gog a year or two back) version 1.6 English Language edition:
I didn't really have any idea what to expect from this game, I'd kept myself from spoilers as much as possible and was never a contributor to the kickstarter nor a player of any alpha versions. I bought it on Gog during a sale a year or two back while looking for a new game. I had recently completed Drakensang: The River of Time and the combination of Dark Eye rules combined with now turn based combat with interactive environments had me as sold as I can be. What I was unsure about was whether it was an RPG in the traditional sense, always having it in my mind's eye as a tactics game rather than an RPG. I never found out for sure, however, as my old machine wouldn't run it. I now have a machine that can run it comfortably at its recommended settings and I decided to christen this new machine with Blackguards. And, boy, was I delighted with the result. This is not just a tactics game but is indeed a full-on RPG, albeit with some concessions to irregularity of expectation, though these are soon adapted to.
I'll review and score the game simultaneously, the same as I did with Drakensang: The River of Time, by selecting the 10 most prominent features of the game and assessing each out of 10 and then adding them all together to provide a grand total.
Ambiance/Atmosphere/Immersion etc
I found the overall combination of music, colours, setting & art design to be a perfect cohesion that not once took me out of the world nor ever made me feel like the game was suddenly in a different universe nor that any particular area was more shabbily put together than another. Those areas that felt in any way out of place I later discovered were, of course, the DLC parts.
Its one of those games where you can leave it running idle while you think about building your character and find yourself simply marvelling at the delightfully designed backdrops, the myriad of details that vary in every pixel, both static and sprite, while at the same time wallowing in its other-worldy fantasy rhythms where even the greys and browns which permeate the scenes feel alive and vibrant.
With each town and battlemap being individually painted and crafted for a sole and single use. I like to believe, and the game does nothing to dissuade this belief, that such excellent variety with a single style is born from genuine passion. What makes blackguards unusual here is also its strength as each of these scenes are merely screensavers with minor animations playing here and there. It was made by developers who primarily make adventure games and they've converted the screensaver nature of an adventure game into a full blown RPG. So you'll never see your characters run around any maps (aside from battle maps), instead they teleport around the world from screensaver to screensaver via the world map. While this seems very odd and jarring at first, it's amazing just how quickly one adapts and completely forgets that this is even a thing which makes the game odd or unconventional. One could even argue its genius if one so desired.
This category was the first aspect to grab me about the game, both because it was odd and because it was still great and felt natural, as if that's how RPGs had always been, and my enthusiasm for it did not dwindle for the entirety of my adventure, only increased and, for this reason I have no choice but to provide a maximum score for this part 10/10 - no complaints and overwhelmingly pleasantly surprised.
Voice Acting/Dialogues/Graphics etc
Similar to the above category, but more so, I fell for the voice actors immediately. I can't speak for the male lead as I chose to play a female (more of that later*) and from the moment she spoke, I thought, hey, what a surprisingly not-in-the-slightest-irritating voice, I'll be able to listen to this for hours! Then the Dwarf spoke. And he was a Yorkshireman. Not Scottish as most generic Dwarves are, but a Yorkshireman, and I was floored. Then the mage character spoke and I was in heaven. I could adventure with these three for eternity: https://youtu.be/7lS4q9qhAXU?t=21m11s each one making masterful use of intonation and subtlety to perfectly convey their meaning and personality. Throughout you get to hear comedy, tragedy, sarcasm and sincerity and none of it ever feels out of place but always on the nail. "If I did this quest I'd probably die" an NPC will say "And what a tragic shame that would be..." comes one of your reply options (paraphrasing, not exact dialogue).
If the game ever offered me a choice to kill any of these three, I'd reject it out of hand and regardless of any role-playing. In that respect I guess you could argue it's too good for its own good. Where the voices are let down slightly is in the fact that the animations don't talk very accurately while the voice actor is talking, they just stand there like mouth-wobbling manequins, but on this point I honestly didn't give a shit, but shall deduct half a point because it is a genuine criticism, just one I personally never really noticed much.
The dialogues throughout the game are all pretty much very enjoyable and I very rarely found myself skipping any text scenes. Even when someone's talking complete bollocks about a topic I have no interest in and couldn't even understand the point of I still found myself fascinated by the choice of accent or choice of words used and nothing ever felt like padding chatter or someone's fanfiction self-flagellation. The course of the game manages to straggle that line between light humour and dark gritty to almost perfection.
In terms of graphics I was not offended by anything (other than during character creation, but more of that later*) and I have nothing to say about this other than this and what I've already said about character animations while talking. In terms of spell effects and combat actions effects, again, the game walks the perfect line between underwhelming and overblown where each effect is both easily distinguishable from another and each looks as meaningful as another and each has its own unique and easily recognisable sound effect. All making it a sheer joy to perform any actions during battle. In fact, one of the game's most formidable memories is of the Dwarf shouting "BY ANGROSH" (sp) as his axe boom-crunches into an enemy, which, later in the game, is even more satisfying when its a one-shot kill.
I'm going to knock off another half a point from the general graphics score because of the graphics during character creation, but I shall discuss that in the nitpicks section for ease of reading, leaving this section with a formidable 9/10.
Character Creation
It's worth nothing here that on many of the YouTube videos of this game the players are choosing between three different character builds when they start the game: a mage, a warrior, a hunter, but in the current version that I played there is in fact only a choice of two with the hunter class having been removed at some point.
Character creation is one of the really strong points of the Dark Eye universe and this game is no exception. You could spend literally hours deciding what character to play and how to start off building them and then never get bored of building that character throughout the game. No complaints here other than those detailed later in the nitpick section. Nothing does great character building quite like a good p&p conversion and this is a pretty damn good attempt and a major hook throughout. I'll take half a point off for the nitpicks and award a confident 9.5/10.
Combat
It is turn-based combat which takes place in an enclosed hex-based combat arena. Things can go wrong even with this descriptive perfection, such as it being a huge drag waiting for your turn while the masses of enemies take their turn or waiting for endless animations to go through their motions. In this game these are rarely noticeable issues. I think I can only remember maybe two battles where there were simply too many enemies and I never got impatient at any of the animations, even in battles where I'd shamefully had to perform multiple reloads. One battle involving too many enemies did make the screen stutter in agony however, though this could have been due to background programs running rather than it being the game's fault and as such I shan't immediately condemn that encounter as a flaw at this point in time.
The combat screens are also the puzzle screens in Blackguards. And here, again, the game shines brighter than many of its peers. There are levers everywhere during combat, cunningly hidden treasure chests, all kinds of foul traps, but also all kinds of foul traps that you can use to your advantage as well, doors to other sections of the battlemap, bridges to draw, webs to hack away, chandeliers to drop, gates to open, fumes to ignite, poison to explode, quicksand to avoid, stalagmites to dodge, and I'm only mentioning some of it all. Some battle screens don't even require you to fight as much as they require you to either just sneak or, more brashly, make a dash for it. Sometimes you can be relieved when you get nothing more than a straight kill everything and nothing else battle, just to break it all up a bit and let loose some BY ANGROSHes.
The AI is also not at all bad, often, but not always, having a penchant for your weakest characters, using all the special moves at its disposal, looking for the best placement available on the map and spellcasters that aren't afraid to tear you a new one. Though one thing I did notice is that there is an element of random involved in the well intention and sometimes a reload with a very mild change in approach can result in completely different approaches from the opposition, especially with line-of-sight being a crucial aspect for every archer or spellcaster.
There's also a huge variety of methods to go about achieving your aims in any battlemap, from choosing to poison your weapon, through three different healing systems, a variety of elixirs to help you out and all kinds of traps and random throwing weapons to compliment whatever your character build is already performing.
I looked forward to every battle screen while at the same time having a sense of trepidation of readiness throughout. There's a few nitpicks but I can't fault barely any of it in a serious game-faulting way so, again am going for a confident 9.5/10.
Questing Generally
Nothing in life is perfect, alas, and this is the first category where Blackguards is indeed a bit weaker than some grand RPGs that make a point of having side-quests.
This isn't to say BG lacks side-quests, it most certainly doesn't. In fact, chapter 3, which is the main meal of the entire game is almost entirely made up of side-quests, dozens of hours worth. It's that the quests aren't really that long or overly-engaging. In that its not so much an adventure to go and hunt the dragon as it is a case of "if you want to fight the dragon then go to that place on the world map and fight the dragon". There's very little sense of really delving into any dungeons or being on the trail of anything. New quests simply open up as you do other quests and re-talk to people, but the new quests are as easy to get to as the last, even if the combat screen is 5x harder than the previous one.
Happily though, its not an MMO case of merely quantity over quality, as each of the little quests are fully fleshed out battlemaps with often much more complex content than the main quest, and none of the quests are those collect 10 shark eyebrows from each corner of the map or that kind of thing. It's just a shame that they all feel small in scope and that dungeon crawling is only rarely encountered in favour of lots of overland darting about between towns with quick one-off cool battles/puzzles.
The game has a food system, whereby you can rest outside of towns by using one portion of food, a meaty leg of some beast, nicely roasted being one portion. And these rations weigh a lot, so you can't carry loads of them about without incurring an encumbrance penalty. You also start the game crawling out a dungeon, where these rations are useful. However, the number of times the rations are useful throughout the entire game is sadly barely ever and most dungeons can be exited from as easily as they are entered, meaning that something clearly went wrong with the design somewhere in this regard and its kinda telling how the food rations were one of the things quickly expelled from the game in the sequel.
So this is a difficult one to score as the quality of the quests was still great, its just that the quests never really felt like "quests", if that makes sense. Its more just stuff that you can do if you want. But, yes, you want to do that stuff. So, erm, dunno really, 7/10 ?
The Main Plot
I can't say I cared too much for the plot of this game. Its standard murder mystery fare which is neither horrible nor outstanding. Someone's been murdered, you get the blame, your memory's been wiped, you go find out what happened until you end up fighting the bad guy. The twists are mostly telegraphed and its a lot of going through the motions and its quite easy to forget why you're even doing everything you're doing. Could care less when XYZ emotional hook in the plot shows itself and I got a greater sense of plot-fulfilment when Frogrim, oops, I mean Naurim, the dwarf finally gets to kill his dragon in an optional side-quest.
Its all just an excuse really, and in that regard its ideal for this kind of game. Blah blah blah until the next battle/puzzlemap. I mean, its not all bad, I'm exaggerating a bit here, but its a bit like any open world game, the general idea is to avoid the main plot for as long as possible anyway, so bitching about a perfectly serviceable main plot is a bit unfair, truth be told. One aspect of the main plot which was nice, however, is that it gave you the occasional memory scene where you'd be transported to the time before your imprisonment and before the murder and play-out some interesting scenarios without any of your usual companions, which was actually very enjoyable and refreshing.
There's one incident in the main plot involving a third companion you meet in your journey which rubs pretty much everyone the wrong way, and I was no exception. Not sure if its a flaw or not, but for the sake of my review it will be, a whole point's worth. The ending is also kinda underwhelming, but I was expecting that so I had no whelm to be undered by. All in all, probably a 6.5/10. Its certainly no Planescape or Dues Ex, but then I don't think it ever wanted to be or was meant to be. There's plenty there for a storyfag, just not maybe as juicy as the tasty legs of meat you might be more used to.
Itemisation
Itemisation is good. Better than average. There's always a reason to browse shops for new items or to look through won loot and there's plenty of named items and item variety generally to keep you interested and possibly in indecision about what weapon/item to use for the next fight. Its not perfect though as there's no things like amulets or rings, you literally cannot equip the ring in this game, and virtually no armour has any unique stats beyond being a part of a set, but the weapons and assorted general items are all in a vast abundance of variety and flavour.
Its no surprise the sequel put a bit more effort into the armour variety and actually did decide to include amulet-like items, though the sequel still didn't really "get it" in this regard, so it seems possibly to be something endemic to either the devs or the Dark Eye system or Germans generally. 8/10. p.s. don't forget to always double-check what kind of damage your weapon deals (more on that in nitpicks).
Bugs and other problems
As far as I could tell, none really to speak of. At least none that I could confidently argue had nothing to do with programmes running in the background. I thought I noticed something that could be a bug every now and then, but I could never be sure and nothing stood out as anything one would mention. 10/10. I always had my own unique save games aside from all the autosaves, but I don't think I ever needed to.
Game Length
Blackguards is a deceptively huge game. I don't know why, but I was always under the impression it was quite a small game around the time of its release, so I was pleasantly surprised when it just kept going, and going, and going. I think I probably burned around a hundred hours on it including all the character creation and character building think time combined with all the dithering around shops and inventory on top of all the content, which I tried to be as completionist as possible. I've no doubt a quick, main-plot targeted min/maxed confident barge through would take a lot less, but who wants to do that! The game provides waaay too much and still left me wanting more, much more. 10/10. Does not outstay its welcome.
Monster/Enemy Variety
Its not all humans, not by a long shot. Even similar to humanoid enemies, such as lizardmen or goblins have their own unique aspect. Pretty much every map will provide a different angle to what you encounter and how you counter it. There's plenty of human enemies, possibly slightly too many, but there's more than enough alternate beasts to provide enough of a sense of variety to gameplay, including, Ents, Kid Kongs, dire wolves, tigers, lizardmen, goblins, dragons, plants, wisps, chimps, golems, mad mages, shamen, giants, insects, etc to name a good selection. Though the main stock of your enemies will be the humans, which, again, seems to be something more akin to Dark Eye or German devs generally, or, rather, what they like to term "low fantasy", which is probably some kind of code word for non-gay gay shit, etc etc or whatever the reason it. Anyway, could have been better, but it was a lot better than some even attempt, a slightly above average 7.5/10.
Total score
8.7/10
Nitpicks
Weapon Talents: Its very difficult to imagine putting use to many of these talents as the only character who's really open to much variety is your own and so the variety is there more just for you to make a decision about at the beginning of the game rather than be anything to consider throughout. It could have been simpler to simply ask the player to pick two types of weapon at the start and forgo so much wasted screen space (and then made the weapon master talent only require two weapons specialisations).
But the biggest oddity among the weapon talents is Throwing Weapons. What an odd place for this. You could just imagine some guy somewhere picking Throwing Weapons as their only proficient weapon during creation and then discovering there aren't any throwing weapons, just one-off consumable belt-items that are called throwing weapon. Lol at them having 1 javelin and then nothing for hours of gameplay. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with this, why a belt-item has a weapon proficiency at all. If it's a weapon it should be a permanent item equipped in the weapon slot. Also, the tutorial really should have made more of a deal about the weapon sliders, something like that is too big to be left to manual hunters.
Talents: There's quite clearly too many dump-talents here and I really can't see anyone going big on many of them before the end-game was already upon them and they had nothing else to do with their points, to which, even then, some of them are a pointless drain beyond all the others.
Warcraft is made useful only by maximising it and getting the free weapon change action. Wouldn't it have been more useful to have had a talent tree that also consisted of a free-action to use a belt-item as well. One of the reasons I barely ever used belt items was because you barely ever get a moment to waste in a battlescreen, and you don't want to be applying your 2 turn poison on the first round (the most likely round to leave you nothing else to do).
Special abilities: There's also quite a lot of pointless special abilities, such as defensive stance and the fact that, for example, spearmen only get three special moves, whereas a swordsman has loads.
The dual wielding feat claims it reduces the penalty for dual wielding, but forgets to tell you what that penalty is. Same with a lot of descriptions for feats. Like the attack of opportunity feats which claim "Enemies suffer a penalty on Attacks of Opportunity when the hero moves past them", to which, what is their current chance and how much does this reduce their chance? Me? I'm just getting these for the initiative... etc. The Marksman feat is even worse as the wording says "May cause a wound" where as the details of the feat state "wounds 1", but neither say what that chance is nor how its derived.
The old "missing when it said I had a 95% chance" is a notable issue with this game's communication. Its no wonder some people rage about this as its highly misleading, because it only shows the to-hit chance, and forgets to take into account all the other factors around scoring damage, like dodge, parry, armour and etc, but then the game should be telling the player exactly why they missed without them going to the battlelog, such as a brief floating text of "hit but dodged" or "hit for zero damage" etc.
Base attributes: Still can't get my head around magic resistance. I get how it works, I just don't get what it's use is in this particular game. As in, whether its worth hundreds of APs, and should the game be clearer about this, etc. The strength stat states it "can increase the damage done by the hero" and there's no damage display and no means to verify how your damage is increased by increasing strength, and why does is say it can increase damage rather than it does increase damage, how is the strength modifier random.
Spells: A mage can be a warrior but a warrior can't be a mage.
Armour: Why does the stat always say zero but have the real numbers in brackets, why doesn't armour do much considering the vast cost and punishments of heavier clothing. Or does it. Where are the details about the penalties for wearing heavier armour. What exactly is ordinary damage and who wields it. What is the mental image of infantry damage.
Nowhere to stash any items.
Not enough weapon slots for given weapon choice/requirements. For example: Bow + Hunting arrow or war arrow or fire arrow or blunt arrow or sinew cutter arrow - five choices for three slots and you have no idea what the next encounter will require. Likewise with weapons, regular damage, infantry damage, fire damage and magic damage - 4 types for three slots and no idea which will be needed. increased as an annoyance by the cost of a turn to swap weapons.
Not enough slots on belts to accommodate 1 bandage, 1 astral potion, 1 poison = 1 throwing weapon. And then there's healing potions and elixirs to consider and you have no idea what the next battle requires.
All the male portraits are shit. I had to go with a female purely because all the males are shit:
Why do all the blokes have beards. no baldies, chin or head. three the same, 1 ridiculous Mohican and a blonde... ponytail. Oh come on. The girls are only marginally better, but at least they have 2 blonds to choose from instead of one which is some kind of variant at least. I mean, for such a huge game, this is it? Can't even cope with skin colour changes? Or facial hair tweaking? Or a decent stack of wigs? I mean, like... really? What was causing the individualisation blockage here?
Pining for BG3?
BG2 was such a completely different kettle of fish its hard to imagine a BG3 even being a BG1 worthy successor. While it would be nice to see a BG3, its hard to imagine the devs have the wherewithal to make it and not fuck it up. Would they make an improvement on the 8.7, or would they swing even weirder with a reworked BG2?
I'm not sure. I would like to encourage a BG3 but at the same time BG1 is just fine as is and the parts where its not are not parts that these developers seem to understand anything about anyway, so it's unlikely there'd ever be any improvement over what already exists.
Another BG1 but called BG3 would be ok. Its been long enough for more of the same not to feel too much like more of the same.
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