Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep - Director's Cut

[Chippy]

Everytime I back one of these games I get pumped enough to roll a boulder up a mountain with my cock - and everytime the latest 'nostalgic renaissance spiritual successor' game comes out - the boulder rolls back down again. All I'm saying is W3 better have some viagra in it because sometimes (not always) things don't get better with age.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

For what it's worth it now climbed up to Mixed.

 

[Bohr]

That said, I predict that Wasteland 3 with co-op gameplay will be a hit.

At least those 'cinematic closeups for conversations' could generate some prosperous ME:A style memes and a nice publicity boost.

Anyway, Steamspy still looking dismal, wonder what the weekend peak will be like.

Perhaps an endorsement from a streamer will help.

 

[Xeon]

Yeah, not sure if InXile can stay open if even WL3 bombs, they already had 2 bad sales in a row, a third one will probably break them. Tho not sure if that matters as well since I think Fargo said he'll be retiring after WL3 so not sure what will happen to InXile after he leaves.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I think they might recover since this time they'll be going back to basics instead of experimenting with pointless shit.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I think Fargo said he'll be retiring after WL3 so not sure what will happen to InXile after he leaves.

Brother Gestapo takes over and launches the first ever nazi-RPG. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole JarlFrank thing was his doing in order to take out any possible competition.

 

[BEvers]

Great news!

 

[Serus]

Water is wet
I'm hard as a rock.
InXile always shits the bed
Infinitron likes cock.

Not bad, I see a lot of potential but you are still far from the great master of BT4/inxile themed poetry - ProphetSword

 

[fantadomat]

PoE1 both had tacked up Stronghold,

In its defence BG2 had strongholds for all the archetypes. The problem was that it was poorly made and pointless,the could have focused the whole game around it,and it would have been far better one. But Sawyerd wanted to inject his retarded drivel about gods being bugs. It was amazing how he managed to fuck up a sure win scenario.

 

[Mortmal]

The streamer I was watching just got stuck in combat mode, he lost about half an hour. "If I was still enjoying the game I'd give it another go, but oh whoops, it's uninstalled"

Forced replays of the exact same content are pretty much the worst thing you can do to a streamer. Should have gone for another save system

Stuck in combat mode happens quite often, i think its the rogue delayed AOE arrow ability that cause it , but not sure. A few months of testing could have saved the game, first impressions matters, i dont think streamers will play this again after its heavily patched .Unless they go for a console release and completely fix it.Fix the performance problem and bugs and it could be contender for best "RPG" of the year.

 

[fantadomat]

Anyone else being disappointed by how useless and buggy the puzzle weapons and legendary weapons are? They all get hyped to high heaven by songs,books and challenging dungeons,yet they end up worst by the equipment you have. Also the fucking puzzles get bugged and don't show as interactive when you inspect them.

 

[Nyast]

I've gotten past the mid-game, and I must say the areas are looking better and better, visually. They're looking really nice compared to the beginnings of the game.

Unfortunately, gameplay and map design suffers from major flaws ( no surprise, it's far past what was in the beta so it was never externally tested ).

There's this gigantic labyrinthesque forest, but the progression is extremely linear with tons of combat. But more than combat, there are tons of "wisp" puzzles, which consist of rotating panels to force a small wisp to fly a certain path.

The principle this puzzle is based on is easily understood by the player after 2-3 of these puzzles. It wouldn't be so bad.. except the game stretches these puzzles to no end. Dozens of them. I'm not joking. I was about to throw my computer out of the window by the 10th one. What the hell were they thinking ? It's repetitive ad-nauseam, there aren't even variants or surprises to these puzzles, they're all the same, just set up differently.

Now I've reached a dungeon, which uses a different kind of puzzle ( based on rotating plates on the ground to form a path between two points ). Again, they're repeating these puzzles ad-nauseum. The worst part is that this dungeon has a single save point, right at the beginning. So I spent an hour solving these puzzles, killing mobs, etc.. After I completed the dungeon ( I got to the final goal and got the artifact I was supposed to retrieve ), it was around midnight, I told myself I'd just go back to the entrance of the dungeon to save and quit. What could go wrong ? I had emptied the dungeon, it was just a couple corridors to walk back..

Well, no, fuckers. Right before back-tracking to the entrance they placed a BOSS FIGHT. One around a corner, which you can't notice from a distance, ambushing you. A very hard one actually, the boss has 59 ARMOR - he's impossible to kill unless you've got a party with abundant spells/mental attacks. Which wasn't how my party was setup.

( For those unaware, ARMOR acts as a constant reduction to attack damage. So if your attack does 15 damage and the opponent has 14 armor, his hitpoints will be reduced by 1 ). Armor absorbs damage for every single attack, you cannot destroy armor except with very special abilities, which few characters have. Now, to give you an idea, I do not have a single character that can do more than 59 damage in a single attack. At this point of the game, your stronger physical attacks are in the 20-25 range. Only spells or special abilities are able to bypass armor; needless to say, few characters can use these attacks and they cost mana points, which also take turns to charge... wtf.

I lost an hour of game and I'm about to ragequit. What were they thinking, ffs ?

 

[toro]

Have yet to experience crashes or game restarting bugs or anything of the sort - but, I'm currently unable to take the practioner skill known as harmonic shielding, and I have no clue why. I should have the prerequisites for it. I think either it's a bug, or I'm really stupid and not noticing something.

Have you reach tier 3 in the skills tree?

 

[toro]

That Mangar's tower bell puzzle. Anyone have the bell combination at the end of the puzzle? I did the sides and pulled the lever.

First you read the runes on the skulls front .. and back, green and red . Then you place those combinations on the wheels according the colors. Then a lever appears in the blood pool, it will raise the skulls, read them like music notes.
Ring the bells in that order 5342142321
Now go to the end, enjoy boss fight not dropping any loot....

Did you beat the boss's shadow or the real boss?

 

[Gord]

I wonder if the starting/city area was done very late in production so they lacked time for polish, or whether it was done very early and never touched again.
Anyway, they actually manage to produce some nice visuals at times.

 

[BEvers]

 

[Roqua]

You nincompoops can revise history as much as you want - especially since most of you weren't born or in diapers when Troika, Sir-Tek, and SSI were around. My defense and arguments were exactly the same with troika as they are now with inXile. History proved me right then when ToEE and Bloodlines were getting shit on by high-brow crpg hating children and console-shill retards. I truly hope it doesn't again, and inXile can stick around producing high-quality crpgs at a decent rate. But judging from the changes I read from WL 2 to WL 3 all your retardation is affecting their development, and now they are trying to make games for retarded kids instead of crpg fans. Hell, BT4 was probably a lot liter crpg system wise because of you fucking morons and your hate of real crpgs.

You can spew all the retardation at me you want, invent new fancy buttons to convey just how deep you think I am wrong not to jump on the hate-bandwagon and amuse your hipster child buddies - but that won't make me less right or your hipster taste somehow good, your short sightedness less harmful, or change the fact that none of you stupid pansy ass bitches not retarded or low T virgins.

No matter how much I am attacked by retarded words and buttons one thing will always be true - I may be ugly but at least I ain't got no money. Put that in your pipes and smoke it you gravy sucking dogs.

TLDR picture summary for the truly stupid amongst you again-

 

[Roqua]

Incline defender reporting for duty, Sir!

 

[Mustawd]

Fucking scam artist is up there with that prick that made Broken Age, both incompetent managers.

Add the Coles to this as well.

 

[Agame]

I'm just really confused how someone could conclude that the heart and soul of Bard's Tale was the first person perspective and then strip out full party creation, stat system, item systems, most of the classes, random battles, and then add a dumb skill tree and CCG-style combat.

Well, the heart and soul of Bard's Tale as originally conceived in the 1980s was "sassier, more marketable take on Wizardry with better graphics and music".

In general, creators from Brian Fargo's generation tend to look at these things from a different perspective. What some gamers have retroactively reinterpreted as Great Works were for them merely...products.

Sadly this is true. When you see someone like Jon Van Caneghem making shitty mobile games its heart breaking. But the reality is they are just guys who want to make money and happened to be in the right place at the right time when the crpg industry took off. Brian Fargo would probably also be making shitty mobile games right now if he hadnt jumped on the nostalgia kickstarter money bandwagon. (But then it is looking more and more like BT4 is actually designed as a mobile game, that cannot run on mobiles...)

 

[Bohr]

Another successful outsourcing/intermediary

 

[Mortmal]

That Mangar's tower bell puzzle. Anyone have the bell combination at the end of the puzzle? I did the sides and pulled the lever.

First you read the runes on the skulls front .. and back, green and red . Then you place those combinations on the wheels according the colors. Then a lever appears in the blood pool, it will raise the skulls, read them like music notes.
Ring the bells in that order 5342142321
Now go to the end, enjoy boss fight not dropping any loot....

Did you beat the boss's shadow or the real boss?

Shadow one, then the skeletal horde, with huge trouble, battle stuck all the time.

 

[2house2fly]

Hoping to hear on the forums soon from someone, anyone who likes this game

 

[Lahey]

 

[Gord]

Have yet to experience crashes or game restarting bugs or anything of the sort - but, I'm currently unable to take the practioner skill known as harmonic shielding, and I have no clue why. I should have the prerequisites for it. I think either it's a bug, or I'm really stupid and not noticing something.

I've earlier been unable to take the skill opposite to it - meaning harmonic shielding and two others form a group of three and HS is to the right. I assumed that you can take only either the one to the left or the one to the right of the middle one. Not sure if that is true, though. Anyway it doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.

I'm just really confused how someone could conclude that the heart and soul of Bard's Tale was the first person perspective and then strip out full party creation, stat system, item systems, most of the classes, random battles, and then add a dumb skill tree and CCG-style combat.

Maybe because most of the things you listed were already as simple as they come? I'm repeating myself here, but BT1-3 weren't especially complex or deep games:
Stats were random and leveled up randomly, too, until you would max them all out eventually, making them not exactly very meaningful in the long run.
Classes (which were not that many to begin with) were simple with little to no way to differentiate them (magic users having slightly more). The skills actually do give you ways to build your chars somewhat differently now outside of just choosing different weapons.
Item systems? Yes, you had items in the old games, you have them here. There were some restrictions back then, there are now. You would find better items over the course of the game, you do so now, etc.
Random battles? Ok, apparently some people really do like grinding. Eventually I just got a bit bored by them.

Now, I'm not saying that BT4 is the best shit evar. There are certainly things I would have liked to be done differently (amongst them e.g. char/party creation).
However, people apparently forget to take off their rose-tinted-glasses when they think about BT1-3, or just confuse them with other games - because much of that stuff was never there to begin with.
They could be fun games, for sure, but they were never great examplary cRPGs, imo - rather relatively simple dungeon crawlers.