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The Mage's Tale - inXile VR game set in the Bard's Tale universe

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


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/the-bards-tale-iv/posts/1815717

The Mage and The Bard

Hello Exiles,

As you might have already seen, we just announced a new game we're developing: The Mage's Tale! This is a brand-new VR title coming to Oculus, which we hinted at last holiday during our year-in-review video.

The Mage's Tale is a first-person VR adventure set in the world of The Bard's Tale, where you play as a young mage (who else?), using tactile functions to craft and throw spells to defeat your foes. It is a separate stand-alone title, which means you don't need familiarity with The Bard's Tale to play it. It is not directly tied to The Bard's Tale IV either, so it's not required for you to play The Mage's Tale to enjoy The Bard's Tale IV, or vice-versa. And it's great news for The Bard's Tale IV, for reasons I'll explain below! But first, the guys from Tested came by our studio to try the game out, check it out below!

As I touched upon in my year-end message, the NOLA studio has grown quite a lot in the past year, and this project was part of what allowed us to do that - thus accruing more talent in one place, faster than we could have dreamed. But I also mentioned inXile works in a team structure, meaning nearly all our staff are fully dedicated to one project or another. Oculus Studios' publishing allowed us to hire a team for Mage's without affecting the team we were already growing for Bard's, a team that has been hard at work on things we have already been showing you. And I want to reiterate not a penny from our crowdfunding went into The Mage's Tale, in fact quite the opposite as we'll explain below. The crowdfunding monies has been fully earmarked for The Bard's Tale IV's team.

So in a direct sense, The Mage's Tale does not affect The Bard's Tale IV. But there are some benefits... One benefit is that in creating The Mage's Tale, we need to become familiar with and develop technology and tools, just like on any other game. With each game, there is a time investment in getting up to speed on all of that. Since both The Bard's Tale IV and The Mage's Tale are being built on Unreal Engine 4, there is naturally a synergistic benefit between both of them.

But here's the best news for backers: after having seen our videos and screenshots, we saw many of you asking how we're able to build a game this graphically polished on a $1.5 million budget. We're pleased to say that while both games are being worked on by separate teams, many of the environments, models, textures, animations, and other graphical assets that we've been able to use for The Mage's Tale are going back into The Bard's Tale IV. That means we can make The Bard's Tale IV look better, and frees us up to spend more resources to build on that art set, and this helps us get to the vision of what we wanted The Bard's Tale IV to be.

Bottom line - the assets coming in from Mage's allow us to make The Bard's Tale IV a larger game than otherwise possible, with larger levels and more varied enemies. Of course, continued back catalog sales from our other games, and sales of Torment: Tides of Numenera, which is releasing this Feb. 28th, will continue to flow directly into our projects, allowing us to make them that much bigger and better!

This asset sharing is limited to graphical assets, as the two games are very different in design - The Bard's Tale IV being a much more complex game, which is on track to be the rich turn-based dungeon crawler experience we've promised from the outset.

Oh and by the way, all you dungeon crawl fans, we noted some saw the last combat video and thought we ditched grid-based movement. Not at all! We'll be excited to show more traditional, grid-based movement as well as other great features in updates to come!

Brian Fargo
Your Leader in Exile
 

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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
This is similar to what OtherSide Entertainment did with their silly Underworld Overlord game. I guess VR publishers are out there looking for places to spend money.
 

Bester

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Just exudes pure and undiluted creativity. It was Bard's Tale. And now a spinoff with a mage - it's called Mage's Tale. Get it? Was Bard's, and now it's Mage's. Nifty, right?!
 

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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
Just exudes pure and undiluted creativity. It was Bard's Tale. And now a spinoff with a mage - it's called Mage's Tale. Get it? Was Bard's, and now it's Mage's. Nifty, right?!

#Actually, that's what they were originally intending to do with the series back in the 1980s :shittydog:
 

roll-a-die

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If only I had 1100 dollars too upgrade my GPU and buy a VR platform and controllers. And had eyes that functioned for VR. And didn't get vomit level motion sickness from the stuff. And had any desire to play VR games with next gen wii waggle controls.
 

FeelTheRads

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Dude, this VR shit is already dead and it didn't even live.

I don't even know what they're expecting everyone to buy all that shit? It's the perfect thing for popamolers and the LCD so in theory it should work great, but the barrier is way too high.
 

Luckmann

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What a surprise, more time and money from one project down the drain into another project before it's even finished. Apparently it's an inXile staple.
 

existential_vacuum

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I'm just gonna post this one again..
Finally.jpg


EDIT: fixed image hosting fuckery
 
Last edited:

Aenra

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You ever stood still somewhere central, watch people go buy? Nothing novel, you've already seen the new dress trends, the new tech gadget trends; you've already heard all there is to hear in terms of new expressions, idioms and so on.
But somehow, partly your standing still, partly your being relaxed, you realize you're literally watching the future run by you.

Somewhere along the line, you stepped off the train.

That's what shit like VR makes me feel like. It doesn't matter i know i'm right, nor why, nor what the consequences are. All that matters is that i'm off the train, gotta walk back.
 

Father Foreskin

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The Bards tale is immensely benefiting from this. They use the resources and time to make l337 graphix for mages tale and then re-use that shit in bards tale. Just as backers wanted it. Im glad that i stopped putting money into Fargos shithouse after tides of playstation
 

getter77

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Not entirely unexpected I guess given the VR praise and circling that he's been running with for quite some time now---but still an odd way to go about it that only makes a tenuous amount of sense when paired with a rather generous read of the situation.

I suppose things will gain more clarity once the real info dump is unfurled...but they really do need to do something to reduce this sense that they are...staggering about...of late and how.
 

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
Chris Keenan makes a rare appearance on the inXile forums: https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=17162&p=181141#p181159

You're right that it's not the VR technology that will benefit BTIV. Mage's Tale is more action based vs BTIV phase-based combat system. That doesn't translate at all and when building a VR game, if you want it be good, you need to think differently from a design standpoint.

What does heavily benefit BTIV are art assets. We built all character models, props, and environment sets as high-resolution and high-poly assets, then reduced them down for VR. We can take the higher poly assets and pop those into Unreal for BTIV. We're using techniques like vertex painting in BTIV that also make the environments look quite a bit different. Of course, there are tons of unique assets being created for BTIV.

I think people would be surprised at how much the partnership has truly benefited BTIV. I understand that it's normal to be skeptical about these things but as someone who knows the numbers, I can tell you it's a substantial amount.
 

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