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

[BEvers]

Chris Keenan is answering tech support posts at midnight local time on a Friday night: https://steamcommunity.com/app/566090/discussions/0/1733213724901877971/

 

[Bohr]

Wonder how big the weekend peak will be

 

[Themadcow]

EDIT: New patch is out now. 5gb. Holy shit.

5gb is nothing. These are the guys who created a 1 page PDF that weighed in at 100mb. Some kind of enlargement spell at play I assume.

 

[Themadcow]

The combat system is odd. Under no circumstances can it make sense that one character would have all the opportunity in combat, and another just sits there twiddling their thumbs.

Of course it can. In terms of visual explanation, I appreciate that these moves are called "opportunity". I enjoy that circumstances don't afford every person a chance to do something every x amount of time like clockwork. Physical combat is far more chaotic than that. Watch a boxing match, you'll see that the contestants don't each swing exactly one punch every six seconds. They wait for good opportunities, then make a flurry of moves. In a group situation opportunities will open up for some while others are still looking for a window. Try walking through a narrow door at the same time as a friend - you can't do it, there's not enough room. Even though you both have the same amount of time to spend, one of you has to wait for the other to go through. Think of Opportunity Points as an abstraction of this idea and it makes sense.

That explanation makes sense for one, maybe a few fights... but it's not very likely to happen constantly is it?

 

[BEvers]

Blocker is apparently fixed now Don't know if it's retroactive, devs asked people with the bug to contact them.

 

[Zombra]

That explanation makes sense for one, maybe a few fights... but it's not very likely to happen constantly is it?

Yes. Watch 10 different fight scenes in 10 different movies. Count the number of punches (sword swings, gunshots etc.) each character makes. Are they all the same number in every scene?

 

[cainus-lupus]

Those tokens are abstraction representing your growing cred among adventurers. The more shit you accomplish, the more trustworthy other companions will find you and there will be more possible recruits.
It makes sense if not taken literary. Like many systems in RPG's.

There are numerous better ways to handle it, such as the NPC saying something like: "You don't yet have a good enough repuation to hire adventurers to join your party," and then that is backed up by some kind of reputation system. So, no, tokens are not a good abstraction...it's a complete shit abstraction.

I'm waiting for patches and then will play it. Looks decent.

It's isn't. But, feel free to toss your money to the wind all you want.

Token system is more clear to people who doesn't know RPG'd tropes, while less fluffy. It takes trom immersion but ultimatelly makes sense on some level, and your point was it didn't. I've explained it to you using my superior intelligence. Glad I could be of some help.

But if you hate the game, you hate it, gotta vent those burning emotion. If it helps you can tag my posts with some insults.

 

[Curratum]

Jesus fucking Christ, inxile, the 4.9 gb patch spent more than 15 minutes applying / unpacking after download, with Steam reporting 30 mb/sec disk usage throughout that quarter of an hour.

Now it's downloaded a 245 mb patch, which I assume is the plot blocker hotfix and it's unpacking that, time remaining 15 minutes 46 seconds. How do you even manage that shit? Is this unpacking all resource files, copying the fixes over them, then compressing them back to .pak format or whatever the hell UE4 uses? How do you need 15 min to apply a 250 mb patch?

 

[Serus]

Except the spells are actually prepared. I don't think it was ever been really intended to mean that you learn and forget them everyday.
Wording is stupid, but so is hanging on to it as a proof that "omgf lollol vancian is so stuuuupid".

Well, there's a lot of other unexplainable stuff to it, like the inability to use a higher-level slot to memorize a lower-level spell. It's not a terribly plausible system, however you spin it. The proponents of Vancian seem to hang on to it forcing the player to prepare and manage spells as resources, but in CRPG with no scouting mechanic it has exactly the same effect as BT's masteries - you figure out a universal combination, and just push on without varying your tactics. Or you use die and reload as a substitute for scouting, which isn't the greatest of designs either.

That's not inherent to vancian system as a rule, only to its early DnD implementations. You can have a vancian system where higher level slots can be used to memorize lower level spells. Hell, you can have a vancian system without "levels" of spells if you think about it. Vancian means a system where spells needs to be "memorized (or prepared)" each time before use and after a single use you "forget" them, regardless of presence of "levels".
For the record - I'm not a fan of Vancian systems myself* but if you are going to criticize them, then criticize for the correct things.


*

Spoiler

an ideal system for me would be one where spells except the most basic ones require costly and hard to obtain materials limiting the usage - of curse it requires a working game economy which is a challenge to make in itself. An example of this system would be Darklands' alchemy

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Not drunk enough yet, instead I decided to try The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians from my Steam library and ended up playing it for 70 mins straight. Seems pretty good so far, Real time blobber without dance of death, though you can use the real time nature of the combat to flee from combat and draw enemies into traps. XD

Got about 1/3rd that bottle left, so let's see if I wake tomorrow morning with some ugly broad in my bed—I mean, Bard's Tale IV purchased and sitting in my Steam library!

Try the 7th Circle, if you want to play a turn-based roguelike single-char blobber with a good horror mood, it's more competent than BT4

Holy Shit, tried the 7th circle. Absolutely loving it so far. and the soundtrack so far is simply superb.

As a huge bonus absolutely no KAWAI KANCER like Labyrinth of Dusk.

 

[V_K]

Except the spells are actually prepared. I don't think it was ever been really intended to mean that you learn and forget them everyday.
Wording is stupid, but so is hanging on to it as a proof that "omgf lollol vancian is so stuuuupid".

Well, there's a lot of other unexplainable stuff to it, like the inability to use a higher-level slot to memorize a lower-level spell. It's not a terribly plausible system, however you spin it. The proponents of Vancian seem to hang on to it forcing the player to prepare and manage spells as resources, but in CRPG with no scouting mechanic it has exactly the same effect as BT's masteries - you figure out a universal combination, and just push on without varying your tactics. Or you use die and reload as a substitute for scouting, which isn't the greatest of designs either.

That's not inherent to vancian system as a rule, only to its early DnD implementations. You can have a vancian system where higher level slots can be used to memorize lower level spells. Hell, you can have a vancian system without "levels" of spells if you think about it. Vancian means a system where spells needs to be "memorized (or prepared)" each time before use and after a single use you "forget" them, regardless of presence of "levels".
For the record - I'm not a fan of Vancian systems myself* but if you are going to criticize them, then criticize for the correct things.


*

Spoiler

an ideal system for me would be one where spells except the most basic ones require costly and hard to obtain materials limiting the usage - of curse it requires a working game economy which is a challenge to make in itself. An example of this system would be Darklands' alchemy

Oh come on, when we're talking CRPGs, Vancian is basically synonymous with DnD. Nobody's calling the Magic Candle or ADoM systems Vancian, even though they also have a memorization aspect.
For the record, I'm all for reagent-based systems. Unlike Vancian, they're both plausible and flexible, while retaining the resource management aspect.

 

[fantadomat]

Found a new obstacle

Not gonna lie, this screenshot is making me get dangerously close to buying the game.

HP bloat doesn't necessarily translate to difficulty (or well done difficulty anyway). It could just be horribly obnoxious, tedious and time consuming for all I know.

Well it is not that bobby,you could down it in like three turns if it wasn't for the armour. I found the boss battles in this game interesting,at least the side ones. The main bosses are underleveled by the time i get to them.

 

[theSavant]

So I skimmed through the "Premium Strategy Guide", which was announced to have everything in it - basically a "cheatsheet" for professional players who want to plan out everything in advance... or so I thought.


What I expected:
- detailed weapon descriptions, which weapons exist, how strong they are, where to find them, who can equipp them, if they do magic damage, all elven weapon riddles solved
- detailed armor descriptions, which armors exist, how much protection they give, where to find them, who can equip them, if they have magic protection, if "full armor sets" give extra bonus
- detailed description of all spells in the game
- detailed description of all available recipies, potions, how to mix them, where to find the ingredients
- detailed description of every skill available in the game
- detailed description on how to solve all riddles in the game
- detailed description on how to find all secrets in the game
- detailed description of all monsters in the game, including their attacks and weaknesses
- detailed description of all quests and their rewards, where to get all mercenary tokens

What I got:
- a rough walkthrough of the game map-by-map

 

[Morkar Left]

Played a bit further now till you can finally start to make your own party (and have a roster of 4). I can see now why they don't give you a party right from the start. They need the npcs to introduce you to the story (even if not that well done). Still it is a really bad decision to not let you create at least one character right before you start. It would actually pull you in more instead of letting you begin with a char you haven't created. Especially when you get introduced to the game with some "chosen one"-lines right from the first npc you talk to...

The npcs you travel with are ok and I can live with it. You can finally get your own goons anyway. BUT the token system is dumb. If you let me hire mercenaries let me do it by paying money to them (one-time fee is ok) and don't hand me out some gamey tokens.

The game picks up and is actually fun and I played 5 hours straight with it. All in all the game is just released waaay too early and lacks a lot of optimization, polish and clarification (as reported here and everywhere else already). Early access would have been the better choice in the end. Seriously, I'm worried that they just needed the cash (BT Remastered isn't fully finished too). I hope Torment and this butchered release didn't break their neck. But you can't say that they just wanted to do a cash grab with BT4. It's a labour of love regardless the end result.

The world is a good fantasy-world by the way. The scottish/irish style grew on me fast and with the songs and the voice acting and the superstition remarks it creates a good style that is unique enough to other fantsay worlds. The graphics on the other side are all over the place, not just the quality but with regard to style as well. Short example; the starting screen has the old-school picture from the first BT with hobbits and dwarves sitting around the bard. But in the game there are no hobbits (that's ok, they don't stand out anyway) and the dwaves look completely different in style. There they should have followed the original to stay consistent.
I don't get the complaining about the setting. It's a relatively traditional fantasy setting (with some quirks) and I like it. As for the quirks and being traditional... Really, I'm sick of all the pretentious settings trying too hard to overdeliver. If I want to play a fantasy game I want a fantasy setting. Period.

The UI is unintuitive. You have these "world-interaction" songs which I would have preferred to have as skills or just actions to take but whatever. At least you shouldn't be forced to have to right-click to open the gui, then click on abilities and then pick the right song just to be able to open a wall in the gameworld. Just install the buttons in the world-view ffs. They could look at BT Remastered how it's done with the interface-buttons. And if you're at it incorporate the skills you can use outside of combat (like the Hide in shadows ability from the rogue, and a searching for traps skill when open chests wouldn't be bad to have either) as well.

Oh and please, please make another tab in the inventory where all the crafting trash lands. Really, really annoying to have to sort that arund all the time (and double annoying with such an unoptimized build).

The weapon skills are absolutely missleading in its naming. Since you can use most skills with any weapon anyway just call them different combat moves without connecting them in name with a weapon. Where a certain weapon type profits additionally from a skill just mention it in the description. And clarify more clearly where one skill choice closes another out (armor choices, command choices!).

And please, please inXile consider to give one standard action to everyone regardless of the opportunity pool. The standard action should be available to everyone when he doesn't use another action that costs opportunity and allow the char his standard attack, casting spells (only through this action) or move. Still don't like the limited selection of skill-slots where I have to choose and pick my skills if I have a broader selection. Very annoying and complicates the whole skill system further without providing anything.

All in all rework and streamline the skill system. Consider to scrap the whole attribute skill "trees" and just give one attribute point to freely choose on a level up (maybe just every second or third level with regards to balance). Magic spells seem to be too few.

The skill system and combat as such works and it has a certain flow that fits "blobbers" but providing tactical choices on top.

But I still think the game would highly profit from respawning monsters on places where it makes sense (patrolling guards on the street, thieves and patrolling paladins in Under-Brae, haven't been in the wilderness so far) and an initiative system in place instead of every group making its action at once (maybe skilled-based if you really want to make it that way).

 

[Nyast]

How far into the game am I if I'm after the Sentry Castle and cleared most of the first area outside of the city?

It's hard to answer since we don't know how long the game is, since nobody finished it and we're stuck in the main quest. But if my guess is right, you'd be at around 25%, I'd say.

 

[aweigh]

What would one call this kind of turn-based system? My preference is for one where turn order is determined in advance and orders are taken and queued and then executed alongside the enemy orders in the following round (i.e. Wizardry).

I don't like this way of handling turns, and it kind of highlights how gimped the underlying systems are because of the limited opp. points.

EDIT: oh, and one of the many gems found while browsing the game's steam forum:

I'm especially disappointed how far away from The Bard's Tale from 2004 this game is. I don't care what they call it, the one most people loved was the one from 2004. Because it wasn't a standard RPG - it was a hilarious and amazing experience. This here just seems so terribly out of date and boring. And on top of that it's horribly optimized and oversized...

 

[FeelTheRads]

So let me get it straight. You're saying that games that use Vancian magic systems have deliberate story intentions for how they're "supposed" to work and what they're supposed to look like in the fiction of their settings ... intentions that are implicit but never described, not in design documents nor anywhere else, yet wholly different and disassociated from their systems' literary source?

I have no idea what you're babbling here. You're saying that because Jack Vance's books are the "literary source" then it's supposed to work exactly as it does there? It can't be just inspired or an interpretation of that?

Yes. Despite your angling,

What angling? I assumed your problem is with the memorization aspect since that's the thing many mention when criticizing the system. Durr so stupid how u forget haha. And, you did in fact mentioned this thing so I went by your words alone.

That wouldn't explain why a wizard could cast 60 fireballs and 200 lightning bolts in a day but be totally unable to cast a single door opening spell until tomorrow, as we have here.

Retarded bullshit. In fact you can't do that. And by the fact that you have different slots for spell levels, you can actually cast however many fireballs you have and then still cast as many door opening spells as you have.

So, yeah, if you just start making up bullshit, I'll just go on assume your problem is with the memorization aspect which is pretty much as stupid as having a problem with turn-based combat for not being realistic cuz lul what the enemies just wait for you to hit them hahaha

 

[Gord]

BT1: 10 classes
BT4: 4 classes

BT1: 6 Races
BT4: 4 Races
[...]

Since when are higher numbers automatically better? It's also besides the point I'm trying to make.

I do agree that having more good content is usually preferable to having less of it.

But take the number of classes - what use are 10 of them if most played very similar? Warrior and Paladin e.g. had 0 practical gameplay difference, iirc.
Monk played the same again, with the exception of not needing armor as much. Now that's a big difference here.
Hunter had crits, but again you could only choose who to attack or not to. Rogue was somewhat more interesting due to the way Hide worked, but damage output was too low and trap disarm was done better by spells.
And after mid-game, non-magic classes were mostly pointless except as meat-shields, since combat was all about casting MIBL, maybe with the occasional DMST for good measure, over and over.
Your magic users would typically switch through all classes (BT3 behaved a bit different, I think) so you would end up with the same spells in the end for all of them.
Talking about spells. Of the 80 or so spells you would be using maybe 10 because the rest was either redundant or plain sucked.
And what's that obsession with the random encounters and grinding in the old BT, anyway? Who really likes grinding? Go play an MMO for fucks sake.

And that was BT combat in a nutshell - attack with the melee guys, so they don't just twiddle their thumbs, cast the highest damage spell or occasionally use a buff/heal/debuff with magic users. It was the same few buttons 95% of the game.
In comparison even the relatively simple iteration in BT4 has more potential variation.

But with you retards you can't even start any actual discussion about the merrits or failings of a game. Because everything is always inevitably decline, and heaven forbid you might point out that in order to decline something you would have to start from any actually meaningful kind of elevation.

I never claimed the Bard's Tale games were super deep or complex, that's what makes this so odd. The first game in the series should be the baseline for a sequel. Content is king. More levels, more characters, more classes, more items, more spells, more feats, more monsters, more everything.

More is only better if it is meaningful and good enough quality. Otherwise it's pointless filler.
Yes, it would be far better had they delivered a game with more complexity and content of good quality. They didn't. It's still a fun game, despite its shortcomings (just like BT1-3 were).

 

[theSavant]

Reminder that reviewers don't even play the games they're paid to review. Not a single one mentioned that it's impossible to complete the game(without a Dev explicitly warning you to carefully avoid an area or your save is fucked)

What a joke

Yep. What a joke. Now we know they are all bullshitters. All of them. No exceptions. It was already suspicious when all these reviews only had screenshots from very early parts of the game. What a joke these shit-talkers are. Fuck them. Fuck them all. Didn't even play the game. Just wanted to bring out their review first to get more clicks and

 

[aweigh]

Unrelated to anything above but I just spotted this comment and found it amusing:

I just extracted some of the textures in this game. 2k textures are 10-16mb. LOL so big. No idea why crate textures are 16mb.. and there are a ton of crates in this game. I wonder why it runs poorly.

"Boss! Boss! I finished making all of the crates and barrels in 4k ready textures!"

"Good, good, now just put those things anywhere you can't think of something else to place, you know, pad it out real nice so it looks more dense"

"Oh sir, you're so brilliant!"

[Suddenly the source of both voices becomes silent and our hero Brian Fargo stops talking to himself as he notices that someone is knocking at his door]

 

[Gord]

Unnecessarily large textures are stupid, yes. But they won't affect performance all that much unless you are running out of VRAM, which I don't think is happening for most users.
So whatever is wrong performance-wise with the graphics, I doubt textures are really to blame here.

 

[ProphetSword]

Token system is more clear to people who doesn't know RPG'd tropes, while less fluffy. It takes trom immersion but ultimatelly makes sense on some level, and your point was it didn't. I've explained it to you using my superior intelligence. Glad I could be of some help.

Let me see if I get this right. You created an account yesterday and have made two posts, both of which are telling me that I'm dumb because I don't like the retarded token system that others in this forum have also called out as being incredibly gamey. Seems smart.

Tell you what, newfag, get back to me when you have some peach fuzz and your balls drop. Maybe then your "superior intelligence" will actually have some credibility around here, but I fucking doubt it. Meanwhile, fuck right off, okay?

 

[newtmonkey]

So I ended up getting this again since the patch seems to have fixed the worst of the bugs.

Was running at mostly "high" settings at 30-40 fps, but dropped down to like 20 in the Adventurer's Guild, just figured, well, it is what it is.

Turns out it was using my integrated graphics card lol. Runs much better now.

I've put a couple hours into it now, and I guess I echo what most of the people here have said. The environments are very nice and pretty fun to explore (though small and linear, at least for now). The character building seems pretty lame and combat is definitely pretty dull at first with only 1 or 2 characters up to this point.

The singing is pretty annoying, dunno why people are flipping out over some lady doing the laundry and humming to herself. I did like the FMV tavern scenes lolz.

 

[Nyast]

Main quest bug still not solved by the patch. It seems like reloading an ancient save is the only solution. GG, Inxile.

 

[aweigh]

The only settings that actually affect performance are the shadow setting, the ambient occlusion checkmark and lowering (or raising) screen percentage. Everything else can safely be left on high/ultra, with possible exception of view distance.

EDIT: of course it goes without saying that with shadows on low and AO disabled the game looks absolutely terrible, worse than Oblivion.