Game News The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Released

Ah, yes. Optimizing for best-case scenario is always a great idea. Ask anyone.

Beautifully loaded phrasing - kudos to whomever wrote it.

 

This may be worth to wait for. Faster combat is always welcome. No patch date given though..

 

infi beat you to calling me out. He did so just after surfaced claims that it performs worse than mmx though...
sounds like another botched determinism attempt to fuel meh argumentation of heretics

 

I along with anyone with a two brain cells were right in that the masquerading hack known as Brian Fargo can no longer hide behind their niche market of players as an excuse for shitty games. They are 0-3 in my book hopefully everyone will soon wake up and not give this neanderthal of a game developer any more money as he can not be trusted with even the slightest amount of responsibility.

 

I play it on my home server with 4GB Ram i5-760 with a RX 560 (4GB) on Win 10 and it runs over rarely below 25 and most of the times above 28 frames on medium graphic settings. And the server runs silent, besides the fans for the hard drives. People are just retarded and have fucking everything running in the background.

 

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/09/19/the-bards-tale-iv-review/

BALL STATUS: CRUSHED UTTERLY

 

RPS and especially John aren't exactly monocled connoisseurs of quality RPGs.
He thought Grimrock was the best blobber ever cause his Dad liked it....

I'll be waiting for the Codex Review

 

RPS wouldn't recognize a good game if it paid them 50 euros.

 

I don't think the shilling price of a RPS 'journalist' is that low. I mean they got to pay for their hipster clothing and starbuck coffee.

 

John Walker, you could warn us first...

Now i gave that fuktard a visit.

I must take a shower

 

What a coincidence that your "random" twitter look is a post from a Codex person.

 

I sure didn't like it. Maybe I should have given it to my dad?

Honestly, though, the issues that RPS review raises seem very genuine.
Nobody is arguing the technical shortcomings, which are just - what kind of madness drives people to release games in such a state is beyond me.
But he raises more than just that, like:
The utterly confused intro, the terrible saving system which might just force you to sit through cutscenes again, UNSKIPPABLE FUCKING CUTSCENES AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhh
FOR FUCKS SAKE WHY ARE THEY STILL DOING THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


*cough*
the bad inventory, etc.

 

Well, that's how I learned the game was released. And it's the only opinion I had in my feed.

 

Well I wouldn't know. I immediately closed the tab after seeing John Walker.

So it's Kingdom Come Deliverance Part2?

 

Played a bit till the adventure guild. Some short impressions:

Technical stuff first:

The sound is nice and voice work well done in my book.

Game is not optimized. But not too shoddy either. The biggest problem are actually some graphic settings like motion blurr. It looks absolutely horrible and is horribly implemented. I never got motion sickness in a game before. First time for me here. Deactivate that shit. Deactivate that shit. DEACTIVATE THAT SHIT!. After that the game runs decent with textures on ultra (but not flawless and passengers going by are always sort of out of focus). I have an I7-4770 with 16 GB RAM, Win 8.1 on SSD, but the game on Hdd and GTX 760 with 2 GB VRAM.

Npcs don't catch up to recent standards. Or standards from 10 years ahead. The caracters from The Bard's Tale action rpg with the hd graphics look better. No, I'm not kidding. Some monsters look good though and the dungeon scenery is ok.

Overall the presentation of npcs reminds of RoA Star Trail. But it's still better, really. Quality is very uneven overall.


Now to the rpg part:

The char creation sucks not being able to start right away with your own "hero". Or even better - you own god damn party!

The professions and abilities are... ok I guess. Nothing special and could work. Would have liked to have more portraits / models available (Char models look actually good here with some decent animations)

Exploration seems to be not bad and seems to have potential. Can't really give an opinion here because it's too early, but like I said, it has potential.

So far my biggest problem lies in the combat mechanics. The pooled action point system isn't really my cup of tea but it's not as bad as you might think. Because abilities have cooldowns (standard attack is an ability), you can't just use one guy to do all the work. Abilities are limited to 5 slots per char (with standard attack and moving already taking away 2 slots) basically reducing your combat abilities to that amount in combat. I don't like that. Would have prefered to have access to all abilities and separate action points.

Overall I think the general idea with positioning and the various actions is good. Channeling your magic is a nice idea, too.

But - ofc there's a but - the fixed amount of damage you always do combined with the 100% hit "chance" is retarded. Really retarded. It kills every ambition of taking chances (because there are no chances) and excitement. Combat gets just too predictable. Maybe some accountants may like that. I'm only a half one at best though I don't know.

My take on the char/combat system would be to give weapons a short damage range between 1-3 as a base at least and don't give a 100% hit chance. Armor should mostly provide Armor class and not just give hitpoints as a stat bonus. You regenerate hitpoints by eating a meal btw or drinking a potion. At least there it should have been obvious how retarded the current armor mechanic is then. Giving weapons a damage range would prevent to make armor too powerful if it gets added to armor class btw

Another dumb decision is to let groups all attack at once! It's either your party strikes first or the enemy. Without a system of chances in effect it should be obvious how such a full strike mentality is a bad idea...

Overall an agility stat would have worked wonders. It could reduce the 100% hit chance of attacks by an % amount depending on how high the stat is. And it could regulate who attacks first in which order depending on the agility stat. Stormattacks could provide a bonus on the stat in the first round of combat. Agility could even influence the movement similar to the boots.

And if we're talking about randomness; they better get some respawning monsters in. The game has a high danger of falling completely into the determined trap which will kill every rpg in my book.

For loot it's too early to say anything about it but it has potential. There doesn't seem to be too much loot but there's always something new to leave you motivated or give you something useful it seems.

The save system is ok I guess. I like the idea of not using a savepoint and instead get some XP reward. But I would have liked to have a save anywhere feature (which could cost a small amount of XP or use a special item that falls to dust after use or is only usable with a long cooldown). I'm just too old by now to not being able to instantly quit the gaming session when I want.

 

Is the bards tale remastered thing on gog worth getting?

 

It's fine, the Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut will fix all the performance issues in a year or so.

 

Damn, this is so painful to watch. 45% user score and 4th page of top sellers 2 days after release. That means mere lower hundreds of copies being sold per day.

 

What. The. Fuck.

I don't have performance issues (SSD), but the game is not at all what they advertised it to be.

For some reason, I cannot even switch to grid movement because the box in the options menu is greyed out and unclickable.

Even something as basic as movement is retarded. The left and right keys are not for turning, but for stepping to the side - and in free movement mode you cannot reasign the turning keys (Q and E). You also cannot turn with the mouse while walking forwards. So you always have to stop, turn, then walk again.

Despite the edgelord hate, I loved Deadfire from the start - but this thing looks like a dumpster fire at the moment.

 

Might be nvidia related again, seems radeon users have not much problem.

 

wasteland 2 was the best attempt so far, but I could not finish it. I did play like 50 hours though, so I got my money worth. I am sure I will try wasteland 3. The best thing we probably will get from all of this is the old bard tale remasters, they are very good so far

 

The game might be a mess full of bugs but if you look past that it's a really fun game, it just does everything different from what you are used to.

 

pathfinder kingmaker is higher on that list and its not released yet

 

It's really, really hard for me to imagine any RPG which fits this description and is still any good

(THC determinism isn't a problem for me, just the entirety of that quoted bit as a whole)

 

It's really not that bad, chess is a game with no rng, does that means it is predictable and not fun or pose no thought/strategy?

You can actually replace your standard attack so the sentance above is kinda wrong , you have 4 abilities, 1 move, 1 trinket ( item ) ability and while your party is limited in "action points" ( opportunity points ), you have many passive abilities at work, some of them do have %chance - like a chance to get your cooldowns reset or stun an enemy not just crit damage - so there's your RNG fix, you also have spells and special abilities like taunt that do not use ability points at all. Even the "move" ability is not that simple, you have a variety of boots to wear , each one modifying your move ability - do you want a free move?, a double move? a move that gives you spell points or leave a trail of enhancement for your party members?
There is a lot going on.