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

[Alienman]

This Unreal 4? Thought it was unity.

 

[felipepepe]

Can you make a comparison in graphics between this and a AA game you think does a better job?

Legend of Grimrock still looks waaaay better - not only LoG2, but even LoG1, an indie game from 2012. Hell, that Quimera looks worse than Might & Magic X's re-used assets.

But who cares, let's talk about what really matter: gameplay!

Of which there is none. It's been 16 months since the Kickstarter and we're still getting tech demos.

 

[Saxon1974]

Hmm, no idea how the game plays from that. Looks good for an Indy title graphically though. I like the key concept where some.places should be too hard for low level characters. I worry they are making a huge realm to explore; with a low budget title sounds like its a bit more than they can chew. Didn't feel too much like Bards tale either.

 

[Haba]

god those plastic monsters.

why oh god why

 

[Grauken]

Can you make a comparison in graphics between this and a AA game you think does a better job?

Legend of Grimrock still looks waaaay better - not only LoG2, but even LoG1, an indie game from 2012. Hell, that Quimera looks worse than Might & Magic X's re-used assets.

But who cares, let's talk about what really matter: gameplay!

Of which there is none. It's been 16 months since the Kickstarter and we're still getting tech demos.

Imagine somebody took LoG's graphical fidelity and did a Wizardry-type game, man that would be heaven

 

[Melan]

Bard's Tale didn't have mindblowing graphics either (though it was good for its time). However, it had immense battles with 30 Freeboters (10'), 20 Razzle-Dazzles (10'), 10 Man Manglers (20') and 5 Earth Magicians (40'), and complicated mapping puzzles. None, absolutely none of that is in evidence.

 

[Bubbles]

edit: I just hope the dungeon maps are something near a wizardry level of complex.

We asked about that last year!

“How much experience does the Bard's Tale 4 dev team have with puzzle and dungeon design? Do you have someone on the team who's an expert on making secret rooms and hidden switches for a first person game?” (Bubbles)

Brother None mentioned that the BT4 team was based on the core team of WL2, and that the work was once again a team effort. They did not have any puzzle experts on the project. They were talking to people from a PnP background for a fresh perspective, and were also thinking about bringing in design specialists. Finally, BN mentioned “Joby Bednar” as a team member who wasn't very well known, but who was “good at puzzle design.”

“If Bard's Tale 4 wants to appeal to a Codex audience, you will have to convince us that it will be a better blobber than Grimoire. How are you planning on doing that? Is the team playing Grimoire to see what the competition is doing?” (Bubbles)

Brother None seemed slightly surprised by the question. “I've played the demo, but I'm not sure if anybody else on the team did.” He did not consider the two games to be in competition at all; Bard's Tale 4 was only taking the old blobbers as a "template", much like the relationship between Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 1. Meanwhile, Grimoire seemed to be a continuation of the Wizardry games, which was “a different thing.” He did, however, mention that he liked what he'd played of Grimoire so far.

 

[Parsifarka]

The environments are fine tо me, but the shadows (look at the river in the first shot) are broken and the enemies are crap: is the beard of the giant made of paper? The Doom-3 like spider is blandly generic and the dragon has a pitiful quality, the kind of model you want to hide instead of throwing it in front.

 

[Grauken]

Bard's Tale didn't have mindblowing graphics either (though it was good for its time). However, it had immense battles with 30 Freeboters (10'), 20 Razzle-Dazzles (10'), 10 Man Manglers (20') and 5 Earth Magicians (40'), and complicated mapping puzzles. None, absolutely none of that is in evidence.

When it came out Bard's Tale graphics were kind of mindblowing, when compared to something like Wizardry

He did not consider the two games to be in competition at all; Bard's Tale 4 was only taking the old blobbers as a "template", much like the relationship between Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 1. Meanwhile, Grimoire seemed to be a continuation of the Wizardry games, which was “a different thing.”

I don't even, ... how does that even compute, utterly simplistic design for morons or what

 

[Infinitron]

edit: I just hope the dungeon maps are something near a wizardry level of complex.

We asked about that last year!

Since then, they've since hired David Rogers: http://www.rpgcodex.net/tags.php?id=1742

They were still building the new studio back in 2015: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=10154

So I wouldn't take anything that was said back then all that seriously.

 

[Zombra]

I like the talk about the four keys.

Finally watched the video. The art style of the creatures doesn't grab me either - somehow they don't blend into the environments, even in the shots where they show a goblin wandering by in the background or whatnot. I liked the birds and "fluff" animals, but even they felt scripted. It all feels very ... deliberate? It made me want to go back and play Dragon's Dogma where even though the spawns were predictable, they felt like a natural part of the world. And why didn't that water move at all?

Of course, visuals can slide if gameplay is good. If. We didn't see any, but again, what they're actually talking about in the update sounds cool.

 

[Darkzone]

All nature assets ripped from Boy and his Kite. Temporal AA. Thank god I got a refund in time. This is not what I was hoping for when I backed. I was expecting much more professional things of them.

Hey there are good assets in Boy and his Kite, and i intend to use them also. But for other plants you can invest some 20 dollars per month and make yourself some. And for some 340 dollars you have enough plants from the marketplace for several games. So this could mean that inXile is not even dedicated to pay 200 -340 dollars in a year for nice plants.

 

[Grauken]

one major problem I have is that to me this whole thing just doesn't feel like a Bard's Tale game

M&M X, for all its faults, still felt like a M&M game, this just doesn't have any B'sT vibe at all

also would be nice to see some actually gameplay, even if just pre-pre-pre-alpha state

 

[Bubbles]

Even the WL3 Figstarter is going to launch with a gameplay trailer. Makes you wonder if there are any difficulities with BT4's design process right now.

 

[Infinitron]

Even the WL3 Figstarter is going to launch with a gameplay trailer. Makes you wonder if there are any difficulities with BT4's design process right now.

Well, for Wasteland 3 they can mock up some gameplay in Wasteland 2's engine. They probably have some form of working BT4 gameplay at this stage, just not as polished as they want.

 

[Mustawd]

Infinitron is probably right. There's a huge leap in quality with the new vid compared to their very first vid (which was supposed to be in-engine).

Maybe Excidium II is right in that inXile just sucks at making pretty games. *shrug*

 

[Infinitron]

I wonder if anything resembling the area from that first video will be in the final game.

It all looks fine to me though.

 

[Excidium II]

Ugly vomit grafics, Shit mechanics.

 

[Saxon1974]

Still just not enough to judge really. I think Fargo wants to keep the feel of the Bards Take games so I hope that is the case. Not ready to bash them yet

 

[Jimmious]

Graphics were not too bad for my taste but the last dragon thing was...awkward for sure.
I did like the song though, nice singing. I like that they give emphasis to the music, it being a Bard's Tale and all

 

[Dorateen]

As for Bard's Tale IV, this will be more Might & Magic than Wizardry, going by the recent update that puts an emphasis on exploration and inventory puzzles.

And I'm OK with that.

 

[Doktor Best]

Isn't BT4 still a long way off? This is just a tech demo/teaser, which looks really good to me by the way.

Also, why are you comparing Witcher 3 to BT4? The amount of resources is not close to being comparable.

The artists' workflow is the same whether you're making Witcher 3 or BT4. Witcher 3 simply has more stuff - a shitload of cutscenes with mocap

Witcher 3 doesnt use mocap.

We couldn't use motion capture because the game is just too big. We have thousands of lines of dialogue, and we translated them into several languages. So that was just impossible. We could have done motion capture for the English facial lip syncing and then just added subtitles, but we didn't want to do that. We created the lip animations from scratch for the characters. But the system was very flexible; it would take three to four days to create a completely new face that has the same motion capability as any other character.

There's no difference between the main characters, secondary characters, and crowd characters. They all represent the same quality. It needed tweaks for the 3D software engine to make it work, but it worked well overall.

 

[Bester]

Witcher 3 doesnt use mocap.

Totally not mocap:

Not mocap:

 

[octavius]

Bard's Tale didn't have mindblowing graphics either

The Amiga version did. Not quite as mindblowing as the graphics of Fairy Tale Adventure and Defender of the Crown, but still...Man, I miss those days when I could still be impressed by nice graphics.

 

[Apexeon]

Millions of dollars can't buy passion.

No passion in that art.