Why Should We Help?

Time to get started on the next game. Having removed all the characters from the party when they were still under the spell effects from Curse's final fight, their strengths are pretty ridiculous. The gauntlets of ogre power that the citizens of Verdigris provide went to Daenerys because she was the only one with strength less than 20. Other ability scores are also affected by the ioun stones and whatever. But the correct scores are stored in the characters files, and as I recall, going through a pool of darkness will return them back to the originals. That's in the next game, though. I don't really have the inclination to go and edit the character files again; if a bug in the game is to my advantage, I'll let it be.

As partial compensation for all the extra damage the party can inflict, I've set the difficulty level to Champion, now that there is such a setting. Well, I would have done that anyway, since I've found that provides an appropriate challenge; I've never played on a level lower than Adept (except for the final fight in Pools, which I really needed to make easier...). I don't think the difficulty level affects anything other than monster hit points: they go in proportions 2:3:4:5:6. With all the dragons flying around, the differences can really be a matter of life and death.

Blades also seems to be the first game where the party is not out for themselves. In Pool, the council was paying for all the missions, and in Curse, the sigils are a curse to get rid of. But here, I don't think any reward was mentioned and the townies are certainly not giving any for helping them. They give some stuff in the beginning (but very little, considering that it's their fault all the old stuff went missing) and provide free training and healing, but that seems to be it.

Ardhiel also dual-classed to a magic user. He was a 12th level thief so it's going to take quite a while before he gets to use those abilities. No matter really, a thief isn't that useful anymore in the game. (I hope there aren't any spots where a thief is necessary that I just don't remember because I've always had a thief with me...) Otherwise the party composition remains the same. I'll need to see how the party is arranged in combat to see what is the proper ordering. I'll want to keep Janna off the point position because of her low HP, and think carefully whether Ardhiel or Daenerys should be the most protected; Daenerys because of her lower HP or Ardhiel because Daenerys needs space to move to more advantageous places for casting spells. Well, I don't usually spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about those kinds of things.

The interface is slightly more annoying than in Curse. In Curse, the movement keys were always available and the menu was key-controlled. Selecting the active character was done with keys other than the cursor keys. Here, these two are separated and it's always necessary to select Move to move around and exit from that when you want to do something else. The same in combat, in Curse just pressing a direction key started moving without the need to select Move explicitly, but not here. And the biggest annoyance that I found out in one of my first combats: manual targeting does not allow centering. Targeting those fireballs and ice storms just became a bit more difficult.