Blackguards 2 Preview

RPG Codex’s “Darth Roxor” has penned a preview for Blackguards 2, and from the sound of it, the game is headed in the wrong direction and risks turning into a big disappointment. A few reasons why:

With the cool stuff out of the way, we can now focus on what sucks, starting with the character system. In all the previews, it has been mentioned that Daedalic have taken certain “liberties” with The Dark Eye system, in order to make it “less confusing”, but purportedly just as complex and open to choice, regarding character building and combat. Suffice it to say, adventure game developers should probably not try to completely overhaul established PnP mechanics.

For starters, all the base values from Blackguards have been completely removed. To make matters worse, nothing has been put into the system as any sort of substitute. Character-inherent magic resistance no longer exists, special abilities no longer have any attribute requirements (sans stuff like “max bows or crossbows to get master archer”), and most of the derived stats like initiative or speed have been redistributed across talents.

Talents also had an overhaul. Most of the useless ones like Treat Wounds got ditched, Survival and Streetwise got merged into Warcraft, and the original Warcraft was split into different lores. You now have 8 talents in total: Willpower and Body Control (same as the original), Warcraft (loot gained, initiative and speed bonuses), Perception and Traps (also the same), and Human/Animal/Arcane Lore (gain knowledge of enemy human/animal/magical entity’s stats).

The special attack selection has remained the same (albeit it with different numbers on each ability, including Hammer Blow, which now eats away a large chunk of Endurance for a whopping +10 damage…), except for the addition of ranged overwatch. For the most part, this remains true for the selection of other special abilities as well. The only new things here are buffs to the newly added Endurance stat, some feats that let you cast spells in metal armour and a row of three (+10HP) options.

Weapon talents have been slightly changed as well. Instead of going from 0 to 20, they now scale from 0 to 100, with 4 tiers (at 0, 50, 80 and 100) that give varying degrees of initiative, damage and crit chance bonuses.

Finally, the spell selection. This is probably the only part of the character system that I would call an improvement overall, because many of the spell values and effects got re-adjusted. Witch Spit now replenishes Endurance, making it slightly more useful. Fireball does considerably more damage. Move as the Lightning is much less broken, etc. Apart from this, the spell selection is identical. Characters get many more astral points at the start, too Cassia starts with 40 so you don’t have to off-spec immediately into a ranged weapon to stay relevant.

Simply put, the sum of all of these changes simply suck. Why? Because, due to the void left behind by the removal of base values, you have considerably less options to choose from, and raising your character’s stats now becomes a complete no-brainer. While in the previous game, you had to think hard about planning your advancements, considering stat requirements and choosing between raising a costly attribute or getting a new ability, in Blackguards 2 you just pick everything that you need immediately. Only mages are left with some degree of choice because of the spell selection. Fighters, however, just pump one weapon skill, pick a few special abilities, two talents and are good to go, no questions asked. This is further combined with the general XP costs of advancements staying more or less the same as in the previous game, on top of additional XP rewards to boot. To put this into perspective, after playing for about four hours, I think Naurim and Takate reached power levels similar to their alter egos in Blackguards 1, from around the start of chapter 3. I may be exaggerating just a bit, but this is due to the fact that it is actually very hard to even measure a character’s growth and power level in Blackguards 2, simply because everything is just so… samey. Just about the only difference you will note between improving Takate and Naurim in this game, is that one will have the Power Attack tree, while the other will have Feint & friends.