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

This keeps coming up and you're never able to explain why this is such an important bullet point for you.

Putting aside the claim that inxile are the best non-indie crpg developers currently and putting aside the false equivalence of your slavering comparisons to troika, I'll ask you once more: can you even articulate why it matters that non-indie developers are working in the genre? So far the fruits of this AA re-entry into CRPGs have been disappointing by and large, while many of the indie releases have been outstanding. What exactly concerns you so much with playing something with more than a modest budget? "Enough is as good as a feast" seems appropriate here.

aweigh and others have countlessly given examples of better blobbers, and if you are looking for better isometric equivalents to wasteland 2 or TTON I'm sure you'd get recommended plenty of those as well. After reading dozens and dozens of your posts all making the same claims, I've never been able to grasp why you're making them in the first place. Further still, I don't think anyone here would turn down a game that they genuinely enjoyed if inxile somehow fumbled into making one. The point is that they aren't making those mythic games as far as most people are concerned and you'll have a hard time convincing anyone to pity a company that doesn't make shit they actually enjoy.

The pokemon / metal gear argument is especially misguided as if MMX and inxile's games being unsupported by the community somehow overshadows the huge praise that games like underrail, age of decadence and the expeditions titles received and continue to receive. I'm not going to make an itemized list, but there are dozens of games people here actually like and won't shut the fuck up about liking (which is good). Trying to make the argument that garbage like wasteland 2 is under-appreciated only because people lack the sophistication to enjoy it just makes you look extremely retarded and like you have an incredible case of tunnel vision

 

Sawyer and Avellone

 

Mmmm, okay, gonna keep supporting InXile, so, we will get true genre pushing features like retarded Larian style co-op multiplayer and XCOM cinematic cameras on Wasteland 3, my God, imagine if InXile didn't exist to deliver such impressive features, RPGs wouldn't be the same.

 

> doing puzzles for like 3 hours
> no banter from the companions, nothing
> just killing mobs and the occasional narration from some mouths,
> reached a puzzle with required me to construct a bridge,
> build bridge, solved another puzzle,
> tried to go back but there is no bridge because the world has reset for some reason,
> only option is to die,
> revive before the bridge puzzle,
> done it again, the same thing
> rage quit, uninstall.

This shit was not tested.

Edit: I'm a retard. I did not resolve completely a cog puzzle :/

Sorry.

 

Honestly I wish I'd run into this bug while playing. The banters aren't bad but I'd prefer them to be mute so I could attach my own story and personality to each character like older blobbers.

Got through the first mages tower I hope puzzle design gets better so far it feels by the numbers easy, or maybe I'm just too use to these kinda thins now.

Also, for arguments that we need this game to be successful to popularize the genre again outside of indie studios I would warn that's a double edged sword. Like Divinity: Original Sin 2I had fun with it and could still play it but it's no where near as good as D:OS classic was for me and I'm worried other developers might see Larian's successes and do more of the same. I'd argue you'd be better off trying to get people to buy Bard's Tale 1 remaster.

Still I wont say people shouldn't play BT4 just that if you have too large of a back log or just not enough time there are plenty of other games to try while they optimize and "fix" BT4 with patches.

 

To celebrate the release of BT4, here is chapter 2 of Fargo the Baptist:

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After Sven the Divinity had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee.


When Fargo the Baptist, who was in bankruptcy proceedings, heard about the deeds of the Divinity, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”


Sven replied, “Go back and report to Fargo the Baptist what you hear and see: The cRPG genre is in Renaissance, the Shadows-run in Hong Kong, those who have leprosy are cleansed of their Torment, the deaf hear the echoes on the Pillars of Eternity, the dead who wander the Wasteland are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the grognards. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”


…


“Truly I tell you, among those grognards born of women there has not risen anyone greater than Fargo the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of incline is greater than he. From the days of Fargo the Baptist until now, the kingdom of incline has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until Fargo. And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Gygax who was to come. Whoever has ears, let them hear.


“To what can I compare the Codex? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:


“‘We played turn-based combat for you,

and you did not dance;

we sang of RTwP,

and you did not mourn.’


For Fargo the Baptist brought back old-school series, created new lore and experimented with innovative mechanics, and they say, ‘He has a demon of decline.’ The Divinity came with multiplayer, colorful WoW graphics, diablo loot, level scaling and retarded armor mechanics, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of story fags and weeaboos.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.”

 

Shitposting won't, but review-slamming it on Steam will.

 

Did they turn off grid-walking for some reason? For me, the option to switch to it is grayed out and unclickable.

 

You are overestimating the codexian trolls ruining games meme, review bombing because of bugs and bad performance is pretty much the rule on steam, InXile should be aware of that. Actually the only way for your game to get mixed review on steam is to get involved on some big controversy like loot boxes or the game being really bad on a technical point of view. It was a big mistake for inXile to release the game on this state.

 

It seems to me that comparisons to Troika are unfair. Troika was forced to ship Bloodlines by their publisher if I remember correctly, whereas InXile are using Kickstarter.. Also, Bloodlines always looked fantastic in my opinion, the NPC faces in Bloodlines still look really good to me, whereas the faces in Bard's Tale IV, and the graphics in general, look really janky to me.

 

It feels like this game has had no marketing whatsoever. Nobody knows about it. The few people who are aware of it are having performance issues and the like, so yeah the situation is very bad. inXile needs to get their shit together fast, every single project so far has seemed mismanaged. They're like an even worse version of Obsidian's early days. At least when Obsidian was putting out broken games you still had stuff like KOTOR 2 and MotB, what does inXile have?

 

They've said it wouldn't be in-game at launch, and will be added/enabled in a later patch. Kind of ridiculous, but at least they were upfront about it.

 

dlc

 

Let it die.

 

To be perfectly frank, there IS an inXile game people should buy, that is tied to this one. The Bard's Tale Trilogy remastered is excellent (even though we only have the first game for now), and is costs $20 less. It is not only everything you would hope a modern remaster of a blobber would be, but is also (for those that care about this) "in the spirit of the old games" because they ARE the old games. For $15, it's a no-brainer. And it has a Very Positive score on Steam because it deserves one, just as IV has a mixed score because it was released as a pile of unoptimized horseshit.

 

I have BT Trilogy on my wishlist, but am waiting until all three games are finished with the legacy options enabled (I want to set the EXP awards back to the original values, which I read is one of the options).

 

I bought it, along with Graveyard Keeper (which I like simply from a concept level) with my refund money from IV. No regrets.

 

You know what's kinda funny? The few people who know about it buy the game, and then their god damn 4790k + GTX 1070 (or similar) PCs can't reliably run the game, and then everyone at inXile is absolutely shocked that reviews are negative.

 

This is, in fact, exactly what happened. I bought my Helios 300 laptop (not top of a line, but a GTX 1060 that set me back a $1000) specifically so I could run most new games coming out for the next couple years on high settings at an acceptable frame-rate. Bard's Tale IV was one of those games I had in mind. When my investment was made worthless in regards to their game, I did what I rarely ever do, which is get a refund.

 

Electryon

(I used my refund money to get Kingdom Come Deliverance)

 

That was a thought I had this afternoon, but then I realized I would probably just be trading one buggy mess for another.

 

Maybe InXile will make more money from the BT Trilogy than BT4 and have some kind of epiphany that gamers do really want old school style gaming systems and the next game they make will not be a steaming pile of turd.

 

Wizardry I-V polished up in the same fashion would sell like hotcakes to a certain audience, especially since they aren't even digitally available by any legal means.

 

Just like that underworld wannabe I keep forgetting the name of, this one looked like time poorly spent, and in all the wrong ways. All that's left is a game nobody asked for but might be an ok mobile game with 3-5 months of patching. I never played the Bards Tales, that was way before my time, so I do want to try this remaster trilogy.