Also, from the looks of it, there might be some sort of a hidden ‘sanity’ meter that adjusts itself according to your actions – whether you keep playing into the machiavellian desires of power, or try to grasp at shreds of your past self. A lot of Cassia's actions and motivations are recurring, and they have a very clear basis in the years she spent in the labyrinth. When asked about her goal, she says outright that it's not vengeance, and instead, she simply keeps repeating that “there is no why” (which unfortunately can also be seen as a morbid meta-commentary regarding a few of my own questions later in this article.). She is driven to rule, but she doesn't even know why. The above paragraph gives only the gist of the plot, but I think the game's story could turn out to be one of its strongest points thanks to having Cassia at its centre. Why does Cassia do all this? Because she's completely crazy. The protagonist of Blackguards 1 is nowhere to be found, and is not even mentioned anywhere. To do this, she gains the trust of the companions from the first game – Naurim, Takate and Zurbaran – and commandeers a mercenary company known as the Silent Legion. After that, she sees but one goal in her life: she needs to rule Mengbilla. One day, she finally manages to escape the dungeon. Her face is covered in bloated pustules, and her mind is riddled with illusions of grandeur taken from the book. The spiders' venom is highly toxic, both to the mind and to the body, and soon enough, Cassia goes very obviously insane. There, she spends four years trying to get out, finding her only companions in corapias, spiders that inhabit the dungeon, and a book written by the local equivalent of Machiavelli. For reasons unknown, she is seized by Marwan's men one night and thrown into a dungeon, beneath the Mengbillan arena, at the time of the battle of the Nine Hordes. It looked, sounded and played like Blackguards, so it had to be just like Blackguards, right?īlackguards 2 follows the character of Cassia of Tenos, the consort of Marwan, slave trader and emir of Mengbilla. However, both of these factors could be reasonably handwaved away: Daedalic wanted to re-use just about all the assets of BG1 (a very wise move) to cut down on development time, and, admittedly, the first game was rather clunky at times, so it could use some “quality of life” changes.Īs you may remember, I first saw the game at Gamescom in August, and my impressions back then were largely positive. There were a few suspicious things about it, starting with the expected release date of early 2015 – just a year after Blackguards – and the sudden promises of streamlining, both of which smelled awfully much like a slamdunk. Nevertheless, Blackguards must have proven to be profitable enough because Daedalic announced a sequel. As if they didn’t have dozens of streamlined games at their disposal already. These particular people wanted the game to adapt to their. However, some people were not particularly happy about these things, and so they kept whining to the high heavens about “vicious randomness”, “confusing stats” and “unforgiving difficulty”. Instead of the larpy shovelware RPG-lite that most people expected, we got a solid, tacticool game with lots of dicerolling, interesting combat setpieces and a modestly complex character system. I believe it is safe to say that Blackguards, Daedalic Entertainment's first RPG, surprised everyone when it came out this year.
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