Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Game News inXile developing The Mage's Tale, a VR Bard's Tale spinoff for Oculus, to help fund Bard's Tale IV

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
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
Tags: Bard's Tale IV; Brian Fargo; InXile Entertainment; The Mage's Tale

Many people have wondered how inXile were planning to develop The Bard's Tale IV with the meager $1.5M budget raised by its Kickstarter campaign. Opening a studio in New Orleans where costs are cheaper was one way, and today we learn of another. You may be aware of the currently ongoing virtual reality gaming fad. It seems that the VR platform owners are out there throwing large sums of money at anybody willing to develop a game for their systems, as we've already seen with OtherSide's Underworld Overlord. Taking advantage of this, in a new Bard's Tale IV Kickstarter update, Brian Fargo introduces The Mage's Tale, a Bard's Tale VR spinoff for Facebook's Oculus.

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!
It's said that the original Bard's Tale trilogy was initially supposed to have had each game focus on a different class, with the sequel being The Archmage's Tale. This sure is a strange way of fulfilling that promise.
 

Urthor

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2015
Messages
1,872
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Basically they took Oculus money because they are desperate to not have Brian Fargo's poor retarded baby die a horrible death. Bard's Tale still looks like a really shitty UE4 demo and will continue to be until it flops on release.
 

CRD

Cipher
Patron
Joined
Dec 23, 2014
Messages
297
Divinity: Original Sin 2
My god, they are worse than Tim schafer with money management, they need 2.5 kickstarters per game.

At this rate they are going to shut down inxile before the release of 1 or 2 more games.

I mean, I have spent "lot" of money on early access titles and kickstarters that I knew they were more probably than not to fail, but right now with inxile no one should give them a single euro. They can't be trusted, is not that you can have at least some hope, is that right now you are just waiting for the bankruptcy announcement more than a bad game.

The only good thing is that at least they made a public announcement about it, so maybe I am completely wrong and they are confident about the game.
 
Last edited:

TT1

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 25, 2016
Messages
1,479
Location
Krakow
Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
So, they can make useless projects, but they cant deliver the paided strech goals. Oh, ok.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice, Fargo. Keep the good work.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Every time I've talked with Brian, he's rhapsodized about VR. To the extent any of the inXile projects could be deemed his passion project, this might actually be it. Having never done VR, and having always viewed it as more than faintly ridiculous, and having never understood how it could work without some kind of tactile feedback*, I've never really been able to hold up my side of those conversations. But I'm pretty sure this isn't some wacky fundraising trick so much as a fetish for VR. :)

(* I think VR can conceivably work in the context of a cockpit space sim where the controls themselves are the tactile feedback. What I don't understand is how a walking around game would work.)
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,378
WQiSRcc.png
 

Kem0sabe

Arcane
Joined
Mar 7, 2011
Messages
13,076
Location
Azores Islands
As I said before... Inxile is a fucking ponzi scheme, their various kickstarters are just a means to fund day to day costs.

This will end in bankruptcy.
 

Rostere

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jul 11, 2012
Messages
2,504
Location
Stockholm
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 RPG Wokedex Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
They will be judged by the performance of Torment 2.

If it turns out to be a good game, then they can be a Ponzi scheme for all I care. If Torment 2 sucks, then it just means more money from me to the next Iron Tower game instead.
 

Gunnar

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 10, 2016
Messages
819
Does anyone else remember the far off days when inXile was an underdog indie developer looking to give niche RPG gamers what they'd been crying out for for so long? Now they're Interplay++.

Fargo is a used car salesman, what a load of bullshit all of that was. We can expect VR choplifter next I suppose.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Torment is life and death for InXile, the game is good, not Wasteland 2 "good" but really, really good, people will keep interested otherwise there is no reason to support those shenanigans, a VR game that is more than some gimmicky demo requires the same resources as a real game, unless Tech Land is supporting this, it is highly questionable if it is a good idea to pull funds from InXile to do this and right now that InXile's reputation is bruised, it reeks of desperation.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
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
Torment is life and death for InXile, the game is good, not Wasteland 2 "good" but really, really good, people will keep interested otherwise there is no reason to support those shenanigans, a VR game that is more than some gimmicky demo requires the same resources as a real game, unless Tech Land is supporting this, it is highly questionable if it is a good idea to pull funds from InXile to do this and right now that InXile's reputation is bruised, it reeks of desperation.

Oculus (ie, Facebook) is supporting this.

Cash-rich owner + new hardware platform = big bucks for anybody willing to develop an exclusive. It's how Microsoft consolized PC gaming studios with the original Xbox back in the day. I doubt this will be as successful though.
 

Fry

Arcane
Joined
Aug 29, 2013
Messages
1,922
Oculus (ie, Facebook) is supporting this.

Is that documented somewhere?

Oculus Studios' publishing allowed us to hire a team

Seems pretty clear, no?

Yes, but I mean legal details.

This explains a bit...

They [the Oculus funded studios] all own their own IP. If they want to bring the sequels out on someone else’s platform – awesome – that’s good for VR.”
 

Seaking4

Learned
Joined
Sep 4, 2014
Messages
362
As I said before... Inxile is a fucking ponzi scheme, their various kickstarters are just a means to fund day to day costs.

This will end in bankruptcy.

It's a bizzare one though. Because normally you find new people to take money from in a ponzi scheme. For the most part, Inxile keeps tapping the same people with their kick/figstarters.
 

Darkzone

Arcane
Joined
Sep 4, 2013
Messages
2,323
The Puke's Tale. Tales of the cold sweet.
How inXile has managed to make the players puke through their game.
 

Pentagon

Educated
Joined
Jan 17, 2017
Messages
69
Location
Cascadia
Every time I've talked with Brian, he's rhapsodized about VR. To the extent any of the inXile projects could be deemed his passion project, this might actually be it. Having never done VR, and having always viewed it as more than faintly ridiculous, and having never understood how it could work without some kind of tactile feedback*, I've never really been able to hold up my side of those conversations. But I'm pretty sure this isn't some wacky fundraising trick so much as a fetish for VR. :)

(* I think VR can conceivably work in the context of a cockpit space sim where the controls themselves are the tactile feedback. What I don't understand is how a walking around game would work.)
I've done VR before, it's pretty mindblowing. Everything looks more real, since it has actual depth. I'd compare it to the jump from older pseudo-3D that games used to have to the real 3D we have now. A grid turn-based blobber would actually be pretty neat for VR since the slow walking and turning would eliminate a lot of the motion sickness people report. I'm not sure I'd do long sessions with it, because I'm not playing Wizardry 8 for the immersion, but it'd be fun to do in hour-long bursts.
 
Self-Ejected

vivec

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 20, 2014
Messages
1,149
So.. I haven't been following up with this. What's wrong with Bards tale?
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom