Blackguards

Blackguards is a 2014 tactical role-playing game for Microsoft Windows and OS X. It was developed by German game developer Daedalic Entertainment, makers of adventure games like The Whispered World, and distributed by EuroVideo. It is based on the leading German pen and paper role-playing game The Dark Eye. Due to the successful reception of the game, Daedalic Entertainment released a sequel, Blackguards 2.

Blackguards
Developer(s)Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher(s)Daedalic Entertainment
Kalypso Media (PS4, X1)
SeriesThe Dark Eye
Platform(s)Microsoft Windows, OS X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Release24 January 2014
Genre(s)Turn-based tactics, tactical role-playing
Mode(s)Single-player

Plot

Story

Blackguards is set in the fictional place of Aventuria within the Empire of Horasia. The player controls the protagonist, who tries to solve the murder of a princess, with the help of various characters he meets during his long journey. There are five protagonist the player controls in varying party combinations: a dwarven bootlegger, a decadent black magician, a witch, an indigenous gladiator, and a drug-addicted half-elf huntress.

Development and release

On 4 March 2014 the DLC Blackguards: Untold Legends added seven quests relating to one of the protagonists, four weapons, eleven battle maps, and 25 tracks.

Reception

By September 2014, Blackguards had become Daedalic's highest-grossing game.[1] It remained in this position by 2016, which the company's Carsten Fichtelmann attributed to "a high rate of full price sales", compared to the greater sales quantity but lower revenue of the Deponia series.[2] Blackguards received mixed reviews, Metacritic gave 68/100 from 48 reviews. For instance IGN's Rowan Kaiser rated the game 7.8/10 and concluded: "Good. Except for its muddled progression system, tactical RPG Blackguards gets a lot of things right."[3]

Tony Vilgotsky of Russian magazine Mir Fantastiki rated this game 8/10 and said that "deepness, enthrallment and atmosphere make this game interesting not only for turn-based RPGs' lovers and fantasy adventures' fans but for very wide circle of gamers".[4]

Reception
Aggregate score
AggregatorScore
Metacritic68/100[5]
Review scores
PublicationScore
Eurogamer8/10[6]
GameSpot7.7/10[7]
IGN7.8/10[3]
gollark: My tape download program now supports downloading big files without splitting them, via range requests, assuming they're served from a server which supports it: https://pastebin.com/LW9RFpmY (do `web2tape https://url.whatever range`)
gollark: Here is a similar thing for JSON. Note that it delegates out to an external JSON library for string escaping.```luafunction safe_json_serialize(x, prev) local t = type(x) if t == "number" then if x ~= x or x <= -math.huge or x >= math.huge then return tostring(x) end return string.format("%.14g", x) elseif t == "string" then return json.encode(x) elseif t == "table" then prev = prev or {} local as_array = true local max = 0 for k in pairs(x) do if type(k) ~= "number" then as_array = false break end if k > max then max = k end end if as_array then for i = 1, max do if x[i] == nil then as_array = false break end end end if as_array then local res = {} for i, v in ipairs(x) do table.insert(res, safe_json_serialize(v)) end return "["..table.concat(res, ",").."]" else local res = {} for k, v in pairs(x) do table.insert(res, json.encode(tostring(k)) .. ":" .. safe_json_serialize(v)) end return "{"..table.concat(res, ",").."}" end elseif t == "boolean" then return tostring(x) elseif x == nil then return "null" else return json.encode(tostring(x)) endend```
gollark: My tape shuffler thing from a while ago got changed round a bit. Apparently there's some demand for it, so I've improved the metadata format and written some documentation for it, and made the encoder work better by using file metadata instead of filenames and running tasks in parallel so it's much faster. The slightly updated code and docs are here: https://pastebin.com/SPyr8jrh. There are also people working on alternative playback/encoding software for the format for some reason.
gollark: Are you less utilitarian with your names than <@125217743170568192> but don't really want to name your cool shiny robot with the sort of names used by *foolish organic lifeforms*? Care somewhat about storage space and have HTTP enabled to download name lists? Try OC Robot Name Thing! It uses the OpenComputers robot name list for your... CC computer? https://pastebin.com/PgqwZkn5
gollark: I wanted something to play varying music in my base, so I made this.https://pastebin.com/SPyr8jrh is the CC bit, which automatically loads random tapes from a connected chest into the connected tape drive and plays a random track. The "random track" bit works by using an 8KiB block of metadata at the start of the tape.Because I did not want to muck around with handling files bigger than CC could handle within CC, "tape images" are generated with this: https://pastebin.com/kX8k7xYZ. It requires `ffmpeg` to be available and `LionRay.jar` in the working directory, and takes one command line argument, the directory to load to tape. It expects a directory of tracks in any ffmpeg-compatible audio format with the filename `[artist] - [track].[filetype extension]` (this is editable if you particularly care), and outputs one file in the working directory, `tape.bin`. Please make sure this actually fits on your tape.I also wrote this really simple program to write a file from the internet™️ to tape: https://pastebin.com/LW9RFpmY. You can use this to write a tape image to tape.EDIT with today's updates: the internet→tape writer now actually checks if the tape is big enough, and the shuffling algorithm now actually takes into account tapes with different numbers of tracks properly, as well as reducing the frequency of a track after it's already been played recently.

References
  1. Holowaty, Christoph (September 3, 2014). "Fichtelmann: "Bei uns ist Game-Design kreative Diktatur"". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on September 20, 2014.
  2. Karkalemis, Manos (February 28, 2016). "Interviews with the Daedalic Entertainment team". Ragequit.gr. Archived from the original on March 6, 2016.
  3. Kaiser, Rowan (January 30, 2014). "Blackguards Review". IGN. Retrieved 2014-02-20.
  4. Reviews of Blackguards
  5. Blackguards at Metacritic. Retrieved 2014-02-20.
  6. "Das Schwarze Auge: Blackguards - Test" (in German). Eurogamer Germany. 2014-01-27. Retrieved 2014-02-20.
  7. "Blackguards review". GameSpot. Retrieved 2019-02-07.
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