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Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale IV Pre-Release Thread [RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
!! http://www.pcgamer.com/bards-tale-4-first-look-reinventing-the-dungeon-crawler/

Bard's Tale 4 first look: Reinventing the dungeon crawler
We go to inXile for an exclusive inside look at Brian Fargo's return to the world of The Bard's Tale.

We're standing in the most beautiful dungeon I've ever seen in a game—which happens to be a lush green forest peppered with highlights of orange and red, not the dank catacombs I think of when I hear the word ‘dungeon.’ And when we start walking forward, peering side-to-side and climbing a set of stony stairs, there's something else odd: our free, unconstrained movement, a far cry from the rigid step-by-step, block-by-block exploration of classic dungeon crawlers. This is what it looks like to build a new game in a genre as old as PC gaming itself.

Developer inXile has invited me to its studio for an early look at The Bard's Tale 4, the first game in the series since 1991. After the blinding glare of a bright southern California morning, the inXile office, a floor above a local surf shop, feels a bit like a dungeon itself. But a cool one—it's small and intimate, decked out with Christmas lights and artwork for Wasteland 2 and only the occasional baby doll hanging from the rafters. For the next hour, I'll get to see a game that feels at once delightfully old-fashioned and tantalizingly new. The Bard's Tale 4 is the first dungeon crawler that's really grabbed my interest since I sat on my dad's lap playing the original Bard's Tale circa 1993, getting lost in the endless streets and abandoned houses of Skara Brae. Partially because, damn, is it ever pretty, but mostly because inXile is walking a tricky tightrope of nostalgia and innovation.

"We're keeping the important parts of Bard's Tale, incorporating that into a package keeping modern sensibilities in mind," says Brian Fargo, who helped design The Bard's Tale with his friend Michael Cranford in 1984. It was one of the first games developed at Interplay, which he founded in the early 1980s and left in 2000 after a corporate buyout dramatically changed the company. His team at inXile, which he founded in 2002, is small—Fargo likes to talk about them being scrappy, and finding clever ways to punch above their weight with games like The Bard's Tale 4—though they're a bit bigger than the team of a half-dozen that made The Bard's Tale one of the most popular RPGs of the 1980s.

Fargo lays out how much of this new Bard's Tale is staying true to the classic dungeon crawler formula. Party-based? Naturally. Turn-based combat? Of course. Exploration is still core to the game, and you'll be finding secret doors and treasures even when you're wandering the Forest of Inschriach, where our demo started.

"We even allow you to keep on a grid-based system," Fargo says. "There's something to be said for the precision of true-mapping. When things are just pure open world, it's a different mapping sequence than when I can know exactly what square I'm on. So that's another option here, that you can lock onto a grid and know where you are, even though it looks like free movement. Which it is—you can have it either way, basically."

Building the world of The Bard's Tale
The Bard's Tale 4 isn't the first dungeon crawler to have above-ground 'dungeons,' of course—2014's Legend of Grimrock 2 starts on a picturesque beach—but it's amazing how different a dungeon crawler feels the second you're not snapped to a grid. Creative director David Rogers explains that in level design, everything is aligned to a grid, so fans can break out the graph paper and map their own dungeons if they wish. "They can play on hardcore mode and be able to orient themselves in a dungeon, and have a sense that maybe there's a secret room behind here, because I've mapped this out and I can tell there's a gap, and I feel like there might be something behind this wall," he says.

VP of Development Chris Keenan chimes in that at the same time, it was important to them that The Bard's Tale 4 didn't look look it was on a grid. "Sometimes I've seen, like, Legend of Grimrock and those types of games, it still has that feel—everything is very squared off and angled," he said.

One thing The Bard's Tale 4 definitely has in common with other dungeon crawlers is the eerie stillness of its world. There is animation, of course: Particles float in the air, plants sway slightly in the breeze. Later, when we enter a proper dungeon beneath a castle, goblins patrol its stone hallways. But this is more like walking through a painting than the busier simulation of a world like Skyrim's or The Witcher 3's.

"When you get into a dungeon crawl experience, you don't have this really dynamic, changing environment, the frenetic feel of combat going around, constantly moving your camera," Keenan says. That's why Bard's Tale 4 is being built in Unreal Engine 4, and what I've seen running in real time looks just as nice as the little slice of gameplay video inXile has released so far.

"We want to push as much effort into the visual effects, the characters, the animation, the personality of the guys you're fighting against. A lot of the time these games can get pretty dry."

Dry wasn't a problem for The Bard's Tale 3, which involved an element of time travel and fighting enemies including Nazi soldiers and mutant bikers. The Bard's Tale 4 is unsurprisingly skipping that bit of the series' history and instead expanding on the lore surrounding the city of Skara Brae and the world of Caith, which was never fleshed out in the original trilogy.

That's a good opportunity for an early dose of nostalgia. "In the first Bard's Tale there was a map of Skara Brae and you would expand it," Fargo says. "[In Bard's Tale 4] Skara Brae is now the first dungeon. A town has been built on top of Skara Brae. If you remember what Skara Brae looked like, in the grid, it's exactly the same."

To the south of Skara Brae is the trap-infested Forest of Inschriach, with a civilization of woodpeople inspired by the Scottish Picts tribe. Skara Brae and the forest are two of the game's ‘culture centers,’ locations with their own personality and history and races. Rogers rattles off several others that will be in the game: Elves, Trow, Einarr, and Baed. Though I don't see any friendly NPCs in my demo, only enemies, they'll be in the game to talk to for quests and lore and bits of useful information.

"These are places where friendly (or at least not murderous) NPCs reside," Rogers elaborates. "This is where you shop, get quests, talk to people about local rumors, etc. Cultural centers are the one place in our game we don’t consider dungeons. They tend not to be trap-ridden or teeming with monsters. It’s a place where you can catch your breath and not worry about being jumped at every turn."

Rogers says there are more than 20 dungeons in The Bard's Tale 4, and the forest gives me a rough idea of how its world will fit together. It's made up of five dungeons "that are connected to one another, and to some extent have relationships to one another," he says. "There's the hub dungeon, and then that branches off to these other dungeons that are connected to it. And then connected to that five dungeon super-dungeon are two other dungeons that you delve into through a level load. So where one dungeon starts and where one dungeon ends, to a player might be kind of hazy, but we plan them out in discrete chunks of challenge, and each one sort of has its own narrative arc that it goes through."

inXile wants exploration in The Bard's Tale to let you stumble upon what it calls "aspirational content," which is one of my favorite bits of game design that I've never put a name to—an alluring, insurmountable challenge discovered early on that makes you feel like you've discovered something off the beaten path. If you're bold and skilled, you can push through at a low level—like, say, braving the skeleton graveyard in Dark Souls or defeating the Midgar Zolom that prowls Final Fantasy 7's world map—but you're more likely to return 30 hours later and beat your former tormenter into the ground.

"It is nonlinear, so we allow people to go in and get their ass kicked and kind of learn a lesson," Keenan says. "Go OK, mark that on the map, make sure I come back later."

That's our cue to dive into the first live demonstration of The Bard's Tale 4's combat system inXile has shown to anyone outside the studio. We load up a new area, Castle Hangskall, and Rogers sets the stage: Tarjan, the villainous Mad God from The Bard's Tale of old, has sacked the Einarr Isles and holed up in the throne room of Castle Castle Hangskall. The King has asked you to retake it, and the ghost of a former castle worker clues you in that a key you need was dragged off to the torture chamber in the pocket of another unlucky soul. We set out to go find it.

A new take on dungeon crawler combat
Like most dungeon crawlers, you roam the halls of The Bard's Tale 4 in first person, and control and represent a whole party—up to six characters, in this case—not an individual protagonist. Once you get into combat, though, The Bard's Tale 4 does combat differently than any dungeon crawler I've seen. Suddenly it's like a mini tactics game: a 4x4 grid slides into view, and battles place a heavy emphasis on positioning. Your heroes get eight spaces, and the enemy party gets eight spaces. Every character has a 'move' ability, but some attack abilities also integrate movement.

I start to get an idea for how complex these battles could become when Rogers runs into a bumbling crowd of goblins. Combat starts and the goblins bicker with one another in an example of a 'flavor moment' inXile plans to build more of into combat. Rogers uses an ability called Passing Slash to slice one of the goblins as he moves past it.

"That's really great for focusing fire, because I get to select a target to move through, and sort of like a sword dancer they're able to leap to another position and change places with another character, putting them in position to attack," he says. "So we do a lot of positional play. I can knock enemies away, levitate and move them. There's a dagger attack called Slinking Strike that advances them backwards, so it's really great to have a rogue in the front row, and he uses that attack and that can switch a Fighter or something into position to guard for him."

Keenan offers another example: bleed an enemy, causing them to take damage whenever they move, then ping-pong them around the map with other strikes to compound the hurt. It's a huge shift from traditional dungeon crawling, where your individual heroes have no positioning to account for whatsoever.

"When you think about the Might & Magic 10s and those types of games, the design space is already set up for you. If you're going to play a priest or a wizard, they're going to be in the back row," Keenan explains. "There's never a good situation where you put them up front. Same thing with warriors, they're always going to be in the front row. It really only left a couple classes that you could kinda switch around. That's when we started thinking, it doesn't leave for a lot of room for possibilities. So that's where the movement came from. Now we kinda tempt the player to take their cloth, weak-armored characters, move them up to the front row for a huge attack, and put them in harm's way as well."

It's a bold challenge to convention for a sequel to a game that essentially defined those conventions. But another core concept in Bard's Tale 4 is even more heretical: getting rid of basic attack and defend. You equip each character with four abilities ('move' is a universal fifth). Each turn, you'll have a limited pool of 'opportunity points'—Rogers likens these to mana in Hearthstone of Magic: the Gathering—which you can spend on the abilities of any character in the party. If you want to spend an entire turn blowing through your Fighter's entire repertoire of attacks and ignoring the rest of the party, that's up to you.

This opens up some exciting risk-reward tradeoffs. Focus on certain party members too much and you might blow through all their ability cooldowns, leaving them helpless later in the fight. But if half your party goes down in a tough battle, you'll still have just as many opportunity points to use with the remaining characters, an advantage you don't have when every party member gets a single-action turn.

In addition to opportunity points, there are also spell points magic users spend to cast abilities. These attacks will be low cooldown, but wizards will have to meditate to build up spell points in battle, limiting how often they can fire off powerful spells. It's a simple system, but again quite a departure from the usual RPG setup, where each character enters battle with a mana pool that balloons as they level up.

Also simple: there are three basic types of damage in The Bard's Tale 4. Physical, mental, and true. Physical damage has to surpass armor, while mental damage can circumvent it. Crucially, mental damage also affects a mechanic called focus. Units can go into focus when they trigger a defensive stance or a powerful charge-up attack, and hitting them with enough mental attacks can break them out of it. True damage, like poison, can't be reduced by armor or buffs and has no effect on focus.

In one of our first battles, a goblin huddles into a focus move called a coward's defense, and Rogers uses a bard's attack—fueled by drinking a little elven wine on the battlefield—to break its focus and open it up to physical attacks. Later, a lumbering enemy called a Fachan charges up a powerful blast attack that will clearly decimate any of our units lined up in front of it. He's got to break its focus or get out of its way. He chooses the latter, using a levitate spell to move it to another row, where its attack will fire off harmlessly.

The numbers driving all this are easy to calculate—in the battles I saw, most attacks were in the single digits and health pools were in the low double-digits, and those won't be growing exponentially. InXile wants the math to be discernible at a glance.

"We wanted to make sure a lot of it was about the kit you have equipped," Keenan says, as Rogers barely scrapes by in a battle against a handful of goblins and two more powerful Fachan. "He would have access to way more skills than he has placed on his bar right now. As you go through dungeons you get a sense of what things are working and what aren't, and you change your kit around a little bit."

"You can't switch them out in combat, but as you progress your character you gain access to new and different weapons, and the weapons carry abilities with them," Rogers adds. "So you might be using this one skill combo you've been using for awhile, and you like it but you've been doing it over and over again. That's when we hand you this new type of weapon with objectively better stats. It's really tempting for you to now bring that in, because it's better, but now you have to think about how can I incorporate this clearly better weapon and this new ability into my combo, and what new things can I really switch around to optimize it?"

As if the tactics game connection wasn't blatant enough, you learn new abilities from weapons and get to permanently equip them once you've mastered them, just like Final Fantasy Tactics.

"Which, for the record, is my favorite Final Fantasy of all of them," Rogers grins. "I actually borrowed my friend's PlayStation to play that."

Dungeons left to build
The Bard's Tale 4's combat system, with its shades of Japanese tactics games and willingness to ditch some generic RPG basics, excites me more than anything else inXile has cooked up. It's something new for a dungeon crawler, a potentially great reason to roam those beautiful hallways and forests.

The one obvious shortcoming in my early look is the 2D character portraits for your party that appear at the bottom of the battle screen. Their simplistic animations feel crude and cheap paired with the 3D enemies behind them. The character art itself is nice, but there's a stylistic mismatch there that just doesn't work. I hope to see that smoothed over by 2018, when The Bard's Tale 4 is set to release.

There's still so much of The Bard's Tale 4 I haven't seen. There's a conversation system with NPCs, which Rogers confirms is in there. There's the inventory and other menus for abilities. There's using items outside of battle and crafting potions. There are environmental puzzles, which Rogers shows me one of. We reach the torture chamber of Castle Hangskall, following the trail of the staffer whose key we needed to collect. The puzzle (delivered by a classic Brian Fargo magic mouth) is a hunt for symbols spread throughout the chamber; deciphering a riddle lets us deduce the order of those symbols and unlock the iron maiden where the key ended up.

It's a nice mental challenge, but also unabashedly gamey: I can't stop wondering why those symbols were randomly painted on objects in the room, including a pile of skulls. That didn't exactly feel natural, but it's one puzzle of likely dozens. And if more of The Bard's Tale 4 is as creative as inXile's idea for special items called puzzle weapons, I can see myself exploring every inch of a dungeon looking for its secrets.

"Puzzle weapons are weapons made by the elves that basically have security systems installed into them by their original creator," Rogers explains. "You have to solve one or more puzzles found directly on the weapon to unlock its dormant magical power. So you might solve a riddle in order to know what colored gem to insert, which activates a power flow maze, that leads to another puzzle in which you have to enter some information about the elven house who crafted the weapon, and culminate in a final puzzle, ultimately unlocking a special passive ability for your weapon, like lighting enemies on fire when you strike them. Some weapons have one simple puzzle, while others might be a gauntlet of puzzles. We wanted to provide some real tangible benefits to delving through lore, and also make the act of discovering a magic item a little more meaningful, and the start of a new journey rather than the end."
 

vortex

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This got some Alien/Morrowind vibe.

ShockingImaginaryHornedtoad-size_restricted.gif
 

santino27

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Combat sounds like a slightly more dynamic evolution of Lords of Xulima.

The wobbly portraits and character selection for combat still kill me though.
 

YES!

Hi, I'm Roqua
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So, is Grimoire being a smash hit going to help or hurt with sales of BT4? I think it can only help in most cases, with some fake rpg likers too butthurt to try a new blobber as the only small lost sales. I think it is also causing peripheral interest in real blobbers and people witll pick up Wiz7/8 and MMX again, and may even help Star Trail sales when it comes out soon.
 

Themadcow

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Yeah it'll help BT4 sales and hopefully even given Fargo the balls to enforce a decent difficulty level rather than playing to popamole sensitivities.
 

Grauken

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I'm not sure it will have much of an impact if any at all. Grimoire harkens back to a different, more old-school approach, in terms of presentation, UI and general design, and aimed at a more niche audience. Bard's Tale's audience is niche as well, but its a bigger niche due to its more modern look and lack of controversy around their creators (well, its inXile, so there's a little bit of blowback on the codex, maybe)
 

DeepOcean

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More than willing to play Grimoire AND this thing, it is just a question for InXile to not fuck it up but we live on a weird world where I trust more on Cleve than InXile.:lol:
 

DeepOcean

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I'm not sure it will have much of an impact if any at all. Grimoire harkens back to a different, more old-school approach, in terms of presentation, UI and general design, and aimed at a more niche audience. Bard's Tale's audience is niche as well, but its a bigger niche due to its more modern look and lack of controversy around their creators (well, its inXile, so there's a little bit of blowback on the codex, maybe)
I'm worried, no way they can with 1.5 million dollars do alot of content with this kind of graphical fidelity, playing a highly linear walking simulator pretending to be a blobber isn't my idea of fun. I hope they aren't giving graphical show off a bigger priority than decent content to get this "audience". I stench of popamole on InXile still makes me cautious.
 

SausageInYourFace

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
They are taking a huge financial risk in creating a blobber in the first place, even more so after Numanuma flopped. They better make this real good and even then it might not help them.
 

Parsifarka

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I only cared about this because Grimoire wasn't released yet. In a post-Grimoire world I can't be bothered with inXile's crap. And you shouldn't either; you either buy incline or decline, and the former has the name of a golden baby.
 

Darkzone

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I'm not sure it will have much of an impact if any at all. Grimoire harkens back to a different, more old-school approach, in terms of presentation, UI and general design, and aimed at a more niche audience. Bard's Tale's audience is niche as well, but its a bigger niche due to its more modern look and lack of controversy around their creators (well, its inXile, so there's a little bit of blowback on the codex, maybe)
I'm worried, no way they can with 1.5 million dollars do alot of content with this kind of graphical fidelity, playing a highly linear walking simulator pretending to be a blobber isn't my idea of fun. I hope they aren't giving graphical show off a bigger priority than decent content to get this "audience". I stench of popamole on InXile still makes me cautious.
1.5 million plus the 1.25 million from inXile. For 2.75 million you can do a lot if you hire east europeans and if you are using the UE4 engine, but inXile wants control over a project, while not using the control to its benefit.
 

trimethylsilyl

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Wasn't Grimrock 2 a financial disaster even though the first game was mildly successful? I can't see how this game can end up differently, the market hasn't really changed since then (except for the addition of Cleve's game).
 

Grauken

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Why do people always equate RT blobbers and PB blobbers, makes me think they are imbeciles
 

Grauken

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Sure, sure, similar to how people who like Baldur's Gate type of games are into Jagged Alliance, RTwP combat is basically the same as TB combat
 

V_K

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Wasn't Grimrock 2 a financial disaster even though the first game was mildly successful?
The first game wasn't "mildly successful", it sold ~1 mil copies on Steam only (it was later ported to tablets), which allowed the studio to expand and spend 2,5 years on Grimrock 2 without any kickstarters.
LoG2 sold about half as much, which is still a considerable number, and had a much higher price (25$ vs 15$), so in terms of revenue it probably wasn't that much worse than LoG1. Very, very far from being a financial disaster.
Of course, they both had an unfair advantage over BT4 in actually being decent to good games.
 

pippin

Guest
Grimrock 1 popped in many "best of" lists on its release year, because it had pretty graphix and fooled people into playing a game which they would never play normally. It also came out on a time where kickstarters were still promising.
 

Dorateen

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The significance of Grimoire is that finally the codex has a high profile uncompromising dungeon crawler to represent the genre. MMX:L and Bards Tale IV are often not taken seriously because of streamlined design decisions, or shady developers. But with Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, people have to sit up and take notice.
 

Jaesun

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Agreed. Sadly I don't even expect this game to have even 10% of the massive depth that is currently in Grimoire.

It will be another casual friendly dungeon romp. But that's ok, if it at least is enjoyable, but I have NO expectations on it being a complex dungeon crawler. Which is sad, based on the earlier BT games.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Was expecting a PoE2 update, got this instead: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/the-bards-tale-iv/posts/1914099

No mention of Techland. :M

Update 38: Everything Old Is New Again

TL; DR: Bard's Tale (2004) news, Backer Portal Update, Tuning Up the Legacy: Grid Movement, BT4 in PC Gamer, inXile at E3, Contest Winner, Crowdfunding Corner

The (Other) Bard's Tale Makes A Triumphant Return
Hi all, Paul here. The latest "big news" for inXile is the remastered (and "resnarkled") port of inXile's first title, The Bard's Tale!


The Bard's Tale (2004)


A spin-off of The Bard's Tale classic series, the 2004 PC, PS2, and Xbox title was an action RPG where you played as the titular Bard (voiced by Cary Elwes), star of the game and center of his own universe, complete with his own narrator voiced by the late, great Tony Jay. The game was praised in particular for its comedic elements and its soundtrack, most especially its rendition of folk classic "Beer, Beer, Beer, or An Ode to Charlie Mopps".

Recently, we partnered with our friends at Square One Games, who worked on the Android and iOS versions, in order to bring it to PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. You can get it now in North America and Europe via the Playstation Store. While it isn't directly related to the classic Bard's Tale trilogy, or The Bard's Tale IV, we're thrilled to bring the game to a new audience, and if you played the game back in the day and want to revisit it on PS4, now's a great time!

Backer Portal Update: Almost There...
You may remember from our last update that we're redoing our Bard's Tale IV backer web site in partnership with CrowdOx. We are working with them to finalize the transition. However, it's taken a bit longer than we anticipated on account of some required platform changes to bring over all the data smoothly. As soon as things are ready, you will receive an email prompting you to confim your pledge details, and of course, we'll also post an update to let you all know that's coming too. Once that happens, you will be able to once again track and access your backer rewards on CrowdOx, as well as change your contact and shipping information.

And now to switch gears into Bard's Tale IV production news, I'm handing over the update to Greg Underwood, who's here to talk about interpreting classic series elements for the new game.

From Player To Programmer
Hi, my name is Greg Underwood and I’m a Senior Programmer here on the Bard’s Tale IV team.

I joined inXile specifically to work on The Bard’s Tale IV, because the game means a lot to me. In a very real way, the original Bard’s Tale is responsible for starting me on the path to my Games career. I played the original games when they came out for the Apple IIgs and back then I was a broke kid and games were a thing friends shared, either by lending or, well, to be blunt, copying. If you had a computer with two drives it was your duty to make copies for your friends! That’s how I originally came across The Bard’s Tale – a friend gave me a copy they’d made, hand-written label and all. Most of the other games in that exchange were soon forgotten as I played The Bard's Tale.

Over the next months I slowly mapped it out, working with other friends to figure out the puzzles and the exploits to gain levels (Catacombs level 3, the 36 Ghouls & 69 Wights fight over and over was a revelation). Eventually I got to the final level of Mangar’s tower and found the final room. I knew Mangar was in there - it was the only room I hadn't entered in the only map I hadn't finished. Even after figuring out it was the last room it took me a solid week to work up the courage to actually go in. What would this most epic of fights be? How could my party survive? Had I leveled up enough? Would my spells even be effective?

When I finally worked up the courage and entered the room... nothing. Crash. The pirated copy of the game just crashed!

f35d4cdca57f762646be8f76c1150993_original.gif

No Mangar for you, Greg!

I tried again – another crash. A third time – crash. Eventually it dawned on me that this was no accident, rather a deliberate copy protection mechanism. That set me back – how could the game know it was copied?! The earlier tricks of asking for street names was clever, but also easy enough to get around – when my friends and I were stymied by that we took an afternoon to go around to every square in Skara Brae and find out the street name and mark it on our map. But this – this was some next-level technical wizardry. I didn’t know then about the tricks games developers were using to prevent piracy – “empty” sectors on the drive that had very specific gibberish in it that the disk-copy programs would skip.

So I did what had to be done – it was time to buy a copy. I scraped together what cash I could, did a few chores for a bit more, skipped lunch at school for a day or two and finally had enough cash. I went to Microcenter and bought a copy of the game. That act – actually paying money - my money! - for a game got me thinking. I had just given someone at the store money for a game. I didn’t understand all the ins and outs of games industry commerce but presumably that meant the store then gave some of that money to the people who made the game. Someone had just gotten paid, indirectly, by me, to make a game! This was a revelation and opened a new world of possibilities. Perhaps… some day … that person who got money to make games … could be me?

I spent the next several years playing more games (including, of course BT 2 and 3) and learning more about computers and software. When it came time to do my Senior project in high school I made a game based loosely on both The Bard’s Tale and Might And Magic (another favorite of mine at the time). That got me nominated for a scholarship, and I believe helped get me placed directly into the College of Computer Science when I went to university the next year. The Bard’s Tale also helped influence the people I became friends with – more than once I connected with people over having played the games. While earning my degree I continued playing as many games as I could get my hands on and working on all kinds of game projects on the side. The plan hadn't changed and as I approached graduation I started applying to game companies. But I was caught in the classic catch-22 when new to a field – they all wanted to see experience before they would give me a job that would let me get the experience they wanted to see. I found my solution in the form of doing some contracting work on flight simulators for the US Air Force – I figured that military simulators are pretty close to games, so maybe that would work. Since then, I’ve worked for a number of companies both in the games industry including EA, Ubisoft, United Front Games, and outside games at places like Dreamworks Animation. Some of the most notable projects I've been on would be some of the Command and Conquer games, FIFA soccer, Need for Speed, SimCity, and a movie credit in Sharktale. I’ve worked in a wide range of positions one a wide array of projects. All because having to buy The Bard’s Tale got me thinking...

Which is also why I backed the BT IV Kickstarter as soon as it came out! I paused for a second on the “Absolution” level contribution, but then remembered I had (eventually) actually paid for my copy, so didn’t require it. And later, when the backer email came out saying they were hiring… well, I had to apply. These were some of the people who shaped... well, my entire life. I wrote what I hoped wasn’t too much of a fan-boy cover letter and hit send. And what do you know? After some back and forth on the details and time...it worked out and now here I am! It has been an amazing journey so far!

Tuning up the Legacy: Grid Movement
What are the duties of a Senior Programmer on Bard's Tale IV? Well, it varies a lot from day to day. A lot of the code I’m working on is plumbing-level stuff – handling loading and in-memory storage of game data, building the components we’ll use to make the puzzles and traps in game (kind of like Lego-bricks for code), save and load of game data, etc. I also range up to do some UI implementation or bolt in the occasional player ability. Another aspect of my job is to act as a voice for the fans on the team – my experience as a player and fan of the original games is part of why they hired me. And so far, they’ve been great about listening to my suggestions and working to incorporate them. A few of those are in the works and today I'd like to introduce you to the first returning mechanic: grid movement.

RPGs back in the day were built on a grid, both because it was familiar (via table-top games like D&D) and because computers and software wouldn’t be able to handle proper 1st person free movement for another 10 years or so. Early RPGs like The Bard’s Tale not only used a grid, but the fact that it was a grid was often part of the puzzle of the game. You knew there were hidden areas on the map because it was a grid and your careful mapping (on graph paper, no less! No automappers yet) shows there’s a spot you can’t see how to get to. That’s an aspect we wanted to bring forward into this new Bard’s Tale game, so supporting a grid-based movement mode has always been a high priority.

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The (original) Bard's Tale


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Pictures courtesy of The Bard's Tale Online



However, time has moved on and we want to take advantage of the many benefits of free movement, too. For instance, it allows for more natural, organic, outdoor areas. It also helps areas you wouldn’t think of as being overly organic or natural, like castle or dungeon interiors. A nicely laid out building interior has a lot more soft corners and curves to it than you’d at first think based solely on the floorplan. More importantly, while parts of the building align on a grid seldom do level designers align the entire floorplan to a grid. Finding a system that works with both a free-flowing world and grid based movement presents some interesting challenges. Take for example this screenshot of the interior of one of the castles:


Note: This shot is set up with debug lighting to make it easier to see what's going on - final art will look much less plastic!


As you can see, the floor plan might be a straight hallway with 90 degree turns, but the art team has done their job in decorating the area and making it feel lived in. This landing with columns, candle stands, benches, and the stag statue create various obstacles to the movement grid system (visualized here as black squares with the yellow arrows connecting them). This layout is a first pass, partially automatically generated using a system I built to take some of the workload off our designers. This allows us to spend more time later on fine-tuning the level to our satisfaction.

You can see how the grid of nodes coming up the stairs wouldn't work well continued down the area between the columns. We will most likely adjust the grid to have a single path go down the center of the columns, and it may or may not line up cleanly to let you walk between the columns in grid movement mode (I've drawn the likely path in red below).




Another concern is how combat relates to movement nodes. A natural assumption is that combat can only happen on a movement node, but movement nodes and combat placement have somewhat conflicting requirements. Movement needs to feel regular and natural, following halls and turns. Combat needs to be placed such that all enemies can line up on their combat gird positions and not be placed inside of a wall. So we decided we needed to split out a separate combat placement grid from the movement grid. I then built tools to help identify if a given combat placement would have concerns with overlapping props or be too close to a wall. This lets the art and design teams go through a level and adjust the placement or collision settings on various objects and make sure there are viable combat start positions available.

Here is an example of the movement grid (changed to green lines here) and combat grid (red, with obstructions noted by the yellow lines). This particular area obviously still needs some attention from level design and art to clean up so combat can be sure to have enough space to start.







As you can see, even with a tool that generates nodes for you, there's still a fair bit of work to make it all fit and feel just right, something worthy of those players who remember the graph paper days. This is just some of what I've been working on for The Bard's Tale IV and I'm looking forward to talking about more in the weeks and months to come.

-Greg

ICYMI: An In-Depth Look at The Bard's Tale IV in PC Gamer
Hi everyone, Paul here again. Shortly before E3, PC Gamer visited inXile's Newport studio to take a look at The Bard's Tale IV. Their coverage of that visit appeared in this article. It is a great read for those of you who may have missed it when it came out.

The Bard Tells Tales at E3
In June, the inXile crew hit E3, led by Bard's Tale IV team leads Jeff Pellegrin and David Rogers. For inXile, E3 was mostly behind-the-scenes meetings with business partners, but the team found time to hit the expo floor and meet up with some fans and old friends. Here are a few pictures from the event.

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Hanging out with fellow Louisiana devs Pixel Dash (based out of Baton Rouge)


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Pictured with representatives from LED and GNO Inc., two of the economic groups that are helping drive Louisiana's tech growth


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Jeff with Final Fantasy XIV Producer Yoshi-P


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"Don't mind us, fellas. Just borrowing the dragon for Bard's Tale IV. We'll bring it back!"

And the winner is...

You may recall in our last update that, courtesy of the generosity of one of our backers, we offered up folks the opportunity to write an item description for something in the game. After the random drawing, we are pleased to announce the name of our winner...

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*drumroll*
...Dean Ferguson!

Dean, please check your inbox here on Kickstarter. We've dropped you a note! Looking forward to working with you!

And the winner will be...
We have to admit:that we were overwhelmed by your support and the sheer number of entries. We loved the excitement and comments the contest generated, and so did the backer whose generosity allowed for it. Thanks to your enthusiasm, we are running the same contest again - not courtesy of another backer, but serving it up like the bard's favorite drink: this one is on the house!

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Please let us know in the comments section of this update by September 15th if you'd like be considered, and we'll have another drawing.

Crowdfunding Corner
This month, we feature two Kickstarter projects that caught our eye. The first one is in its final stretch: a sRPG called The Iron Oath which promises tactical combat and a narrative with reactive depth. Click on the picture to check it out.




The second game features another tabletop initiative from our pals over at Obsidian. They've teamed up with indie developer Danny Zondervan to create Scrimish, a fast-paced card game that utilizes Obsidian's "Pillars of Eternity" characters and concepts. Click on the pic for gameplay demos and details.




That's it for now! See you again as soon as the Backer Portal goes live!

Until next update,
Paul Marzagalli
Public Relations & Community Manager
@phimseto

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