im playing chapter 3 right now and it has a very open feel to it. Suddenly i can go to tons of nodes on the world map and it feels like theres a sidequest behind every corner.

The edit feature is broken was well -- in one place I said "game" where I meant "game-world" and I went to go edit the post and fix it, and 70% of the post was missing from the edit window. (Technically speaking, my post didn't break anything -- it's GOG's forum code that is broken (in multiple ways) and my post is just exposing one such problem.)

That's not "philosophizing". The language we are using here is English. Word order and association matters. Your claim was that two words, in the wrong order, and written as distinct tags (rather than as a joined phrase) somehow clearly meant the same as if not written in the wrong order and not written as distinct tags. That claim is ludicrous.

Try sticking the words 'strategy' and 'tactics' into a google search.

The first hit I get is wikipedia: "The terms tactic and strategy are often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational patterns, activity, and decision-making that lead to tactical execution."

The second is an article titled "The Difference between Strategy and Tactics"

The third is "Strategy vs Tactic - Difference and Comparison": "A strategy is a larger, over all plan that can comprise several tactics, which are smaller, focused, less impactful plans that are part of the over all plan."

The 4th: Strategic Planning: Strategy vs. Tactics: "Quite often, people confuse strategy and tactics and think the two terms are interchangeable in strategic planning, but they're not."

The 5th is "Strategy & Tactics" magazine, which if strategy and tactics were the same thing would quite redundantly named. The 6th is Tactics & Strategy: Do you know the difference? Clearly in your case the answer is "no". It just goes on and on like that.

Though wikipedia is of course never to be entirely trusted, for turn-based games you can find one wikipedia article for Turn-based strategy and a different one for Turn-based tactics. (Feel free to submit an article-merge request saying that strategy and tactics are the same thing so these two articles should be merged -- let's see how far that gets.)

As I said in my previous post: "When so many words are used so haphazardly, as if they have no real meaning, it's just impossible to have a fruitful discussion." And as it turns out, you are using them so haphazardly because you really don't know what they mean.

Um, you do realize that you are not linking to a dictionary, but a thesaurus, right? (But, but, you looked up "thesaurus" and found "dictionary", so they're the same! /sarc)

Oh boy...

Your confused mess of an argument is not made clear just by you repeating the same stuff (that I've already rebutted) over again and proclaiming it to be clear. What is becoming clear is that you lack the English language facilities to determine what is or is not clear -- that's not a jab at you, but simply an observation. (And this whole line of argument is off-topic and irrelevant -- I should have labeled it as such sooner, but I have an unfortunate habit of correcting errors when I see them even when something should be discarded rather than corrected.)

I'm not sure you even know what you are trying to argue. My point from the start is that this type of game (king's-bounty-like) is not one I enjoy. I never made an argument saying GOG was trying to conceal anything. I would say their announcement and gamecard is a little bit inconsistent/confusing, but that's kind of par for GOG and wasn't even an issue until you tried to mock me for suggesting removal of tactical combat from a "turn based tactical combat game" -- a suggestion I of course never actually made, making your first post a total blunder, after which you then tried to "recover" from that by (very poorly) playing games with words. Your apparent continued lunacy seems to simply be from a combination of your English language skills (I see you are in Spain, so I'm guessing English is 2nd language for you?), your inability to admit your first post was a total blunder, and your determination to somehow magically convert that blunder into a "win". (If you are going to treat the forums as a game to be "won" rather than a place for actual discussion, everybody loses.)

As for whether or not Blackguards is an RPG, you seem to want it both ways -- you say it is an RPG (so I can't complain it's not?), but is not advertised as one (so I can't complain that it doesn't support role-playing or that the combat is likely to get boring for me?). And really, it doesn't matter. How you choose to (mis-)define words or interpret GOG's words does not affect one damn thing about what I said in my original post, which was simply my analysis of why I prefer certain other types of games to king's-bounty-likes.

I like you. Here, have a hug.

You should know it's been ages that people keep on making the mistake between strategy and tactic. It is not hairsplitting at all, you shouldn't make fun of his explanations, "au contraire" I think you could learn a lot through all the useful links he posted.

Please, don't make petty comments to people willing to share their knowledge (and taking time doing so).

Well... He may be right that strategic and tactical have different meanings. Great to know, thanks a lot. But then comes reality, with humans and all their little imperfections and living languages. Just a amusing example: In german we have the funny word "Quantensprung" (english wiki). It means (simplified) that an electron is going through the smallest possible change of it's quantum state. But when someone says "It's a Quantensprung!", he's talking about a huge change. A significant step forward. Something ground breaking. Now there are two ways to deal with it. First: You can accept that the word lost it's original meaning (smallest possible change of the smallest part of an small atom) and understand what the person vis-à-vis said. Second: You can pull a JadedOne...

Sorry, but to me it was abundantly clear what kind of game Blackguards is. I didn't expect a mix of Command & Conquer and Morrowind, because GOG wrote "and this time it's a RPG" in their announcement and put "strategy" as a genre tag. And to be absolutely honest: When I read "Blackguards, a new turn-based strategy RPG, explores this very question. You will discover over 180 unique hex-based battlegrounds...", it becomes even clearer what kind of game Blackguards is, although GOG did place "RPG" as first genre tag and misused the word strategy. As I said: There are two possibilities. Accept reality, or pull a JadedOne. It's hairsplitting!

Just look at his last paragraph... Yes, I said it is an RPG. A turn-based tactical RPG. That's just a subgenre. A better definition of the genre. The same as JRPG, cRPG, party RPG, ... But still a RPG (Yes, Blackguards may be very light on the dialogue side. But that's pretty much a standard for this subgenre, turn-based tactical RPGs). What does he make out of it? That I'm trying to have it as both, as a RPG and something else, just to cover all his possible arguments. So why should I even consider answering anything more meaningful than "have a hug"?

Sorry, but I just think it's useless to discuss with someone who get's upset because the genre tags say "rpg / strategy / fantasy" instead of "fantasy / tactical / rpg" (or even worse "fantasy / puzzle / non-rpg") -.-

After playing the demo I'm certain now that I will purchase this game. I've played many types of RPG's in my day and the reasons I like BG are listed below.

1. The graphics are nice and from many screen shots you see on the web, running them in hi res on my 27" the look great and not too blurry as I had feared.

2. The battle screen is very intuitive and I felt comfortable with the control of my characters almost immediately.

3. I actually like the fact that you aren't spending countless clicks of the mouse just traveling from one area to another. The map gives you waypoints that you select and when you arrive you go to battle or enter a town to rest up, heal or buy weapons, armor or rations.

4. Even the demo which is a little dated I believe when compared to the full release is very stable and I have found only one bug in the inventory screen when placing armor. Not a big deal at all.

Overall, it's a very polished and well designed game IMO. I love action RPG's and I've enjoyed strategy RPG's but I've never played a 'tactical' RPG that I can remember (been playing RPG's since the late 80's) and I must say, I love it and love the control it gives me.

Before listening to anyone on this message board (including myself) play the demo. If you don't like fairly linear games you may not like BG. There's some wiggle room in this regard but maybe not enough for non-linear game lovers.

The demo is available on PC and Mac. Just google. The price is steep but I am going to shell out the $40 for it, if that tells you anything. For those on the fence.

Cheers,
mr

I have a question regarding having to loot the battlefields before the fights are over. I get that part, but when this is first brought up in the game, it's by the dwarf saying we need to look in the crates. But I can't tell if I'm getting anything from breaking crates or if I'm only getting loot from actual treasure chests on the battlefields. I am looking online, but figured someone here would know. I'm going to feel like a moron if I've been unnecessarily drawing out battles so that I can break all the crates. :)

Yes I understand your point. I myself consider people should stop calling videogames RPG because every one have a personnal definition (ranging from 'every video game is a rpg' to 'there aren't true rpg in videogames'), which in my mind are all defensible points of view. I was a bit upset to see the 'strategic rpg' because it feels like more and more words have less and less meaning in this industry, no surprise then that so few games meet people expectations.

Well... That's one point where I'm not really happy with the game. The wheel menu looks glutted (but thankfully every character has it's own bar for hotkeys, so you just need the menu to assign hotkeys) and somehow I can't get used to the way they highlighted the active hex. But I only looked into the game for two hours (I just left the crypts of Neetha), so... yeah, I'll give it some time there...

But one point that really bothers me, is the inconsistency of the wheel menu... Let's say you're going to cast "Balm of Healing" from the ring menu. You do a right click on some random hex field (to open the ring menu), you choose the spell and then you choose your target. Everything's fine. But what happens, when you do the right click on a hex where a character is placed? In this case you skip the last step. You don't have to choose a target. The spell is casted immediately on the character placed on this hex. I can see why they did this (you already chose the target while opening the menu), but I think it's... suboptimal... It happened to me twice, that Zurbaran healed himself (I always do the right click on the character whose menu I want to open) instead of Naurim -.- That's where I've learned to use the hotkeys.

I'll end up using the hot keys myself, eventually. I think the game is solid overall and keeps me coming back for more. I've just gone through several RPG's in the last few weeks trying to find one that would hold my interest. Oldies and not so oldies but this one I have enjoyed.

The wheel menu is one thing I definitely agree with TB on. It could have been done much better.

hmm, I watched the WTF video, thought hmm maybe they need to do some rebalancing in some of the fights, but as your experience is different and it was simply a bad strategy he used I'm tempted again.

Sadly I think I just lost an ipod with some expensive ear phones, got to the train and that part of the bag was open, so unless I left them at work I'll probably have to save up for a new set. No game for me today.

This guy finished the battle in less than 6 minutes, although he lost his main character to a falling stalactite. But I think he's playing on the lowest difficulty, because his "strategy" essentially was to rush forward and to hit everything that moves oO But even this worked way better than to wait for your charcter to be surronded and... well, killing him with your own fireballs.

It's official: Total Biscuit sucks at this game :P

ps. Hope you'll find your iPod at work.

Thanks for that, yes turns out I must have got distracted before I put the iPod in my bag and it was on my desk at work after all. Not sure how long iPods will be still available for, apparently they now only make up 2% of apples sales, I guess it is all iPhones and the like these days.

As for Blackguards I'll grab it next time it is on special as I don't think I'll have time to play it for a while.