RPGs of 2014

I bought Blackguards a couple of weeks ago and played it for awhile. I enjoyed it, but what might not be entirely clear is that it is almost entirely a turn-based combat game, similar to an X-Com. In other words, even though there is a map and towns and locations and such, towns are just one screen that has a couple of shops and healers and such that you click on. You don't explore the town, you don't wander around looking for quest npcs, etc. The most you do is click some dialogue trees on someone on that same one screen. Occasionally they will affect a future combat, like putting out traps that the bad guys will wander into if you do a certain other dialogue tree before the fight, etc. But in general you are just clicking the world map to go to another battle, period. There are obviously RPG elements involved with characters and skills and such, and you can gain more party members as you go along, but this isn't Planescape or even Aarklash, which was essentially all combat too...but different.

A good comparison would be Shadowbane I guess, but with even fewer RPG "elements." At least in Shadowbane you'd walk around the town and find stuff, or walk through buildings for quests. In Blackguards you would just finish the combat and then a new world node would open up, so you click it and bam, another combat.

It does have a couple of crappy "gotcha" moments I've already encountered, like where you finish a battle and get to have an interlude, but there is no actual healing being done during that interlude, and then it throws you right back into another extremely tough battle, so if you didn't spend the end of the previous battle healing your entire party and regenerating mana, you're fucked for the next battle, and even if you saved it during the interlude, you have to go reload before the FIRST battle and do it all over again to make sure you are full up before the second one. That was fairly annoying, I have to say. Either tell me there are going to be two battles without rest, or allow me to rest. Don't spring that shit on me because you know I'm just going to reload it, and I'm going to be pissy about it.

It isn't a bad game by any means, because I do actually enjoy the combat part of it quite a bit, but I didn't realize it was pretty much just that with a little bit of story to tie it all together. I don't know what it is selling for right now, but if it is any more than the $25 I got it for, I'd say wait. I intend to play it and finish it one of these days (was mainly waiting for it to hit release), but I don't know that this is really a $40 or $50 game by any stretch.

DA:O was all about the Blood Mage. The retarded AOE shit he could do would kill literally anything. You didn't even need to be tanky. The Arcane Warrior scaling armor off of magic items was pretty hilarious too. All in all. DA:O wasn't a bad introduction to their new IP. Some of the characters were really well done.

It just suffered from a stupid as shit enemy. Your end boss was a Dragon that didn't even speak. Logain or whatever his name was may have been the true enemy, but him blatantly ignoring the Blight made no sense... as Darkspawn were killing shit everywhere. The party squabbling a-la BGI and BGII though was A++. I wont speak of DA2 because that game was shit where nothing you did mattered in the slightest. Side with the mages!? Oh, you have to kill the Archmage anyway! Side with the Templars, you have to kill the Archmage and Templar whore anyway! That was retarded.

Both games had decent gameplay though.