Game News Bard's Tale 1 Remaster Released

[Infinitron]

Tags: inXile Entertainment; Krome Studios; The Bard's Tale Trilogy

Krome Studios and inXile have released their remastered edition of the classic dungeon crawler The Bard's Tale. Originally released by Interplay back in 1985, in recent years The Bard's Tale was only available as an inferior port bundled with inXile's 2004 Bard's Tale action-RPG, so this is all-around good news for the genre. As explained in last week's Kickstarter update, buying the trilogy will grant you access to the second and third games when they launch later this year. You've already seen the launch trailer, so I'll just post inXile's press release here:

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – Aug. 14, 2018 – inXile Entertainment, the studio led by Interplay founder and industry icon Brian Fargo, is proud to announce the release of The Bard’s Tale Trilogy, a complete remaster of the legendary series that helped define the RPG genre. Featuring updated graphics and optional quality-of-life gameplay improvements, The Bard’s Tale Trilogy is the ideal way to experience the dungeon crawling challenge that made the original games beloved classics. The title is now available for Windows PC on both Steam and GOG.com with a retail price of $14.99.

Features of The Bard’s Tale Trilogy include:

• Remasters of all three original The Bard’s Tale games. The first volume, Tales of the Unknown, is available today, with The Destiny Knight (fall 2018) and Thief of Fate (winter 2018) arriving later in the year.
• A uniform playing experience across all three titles without the need for emulation or compatibility concerns.
• Create a party in the first volume and play it across all three volumes to create a heroic narrative all your own.
• For the first time, play as male or female across all three games. Also includes other quality-of-life changes such as automapping for all three games, spell access, and updated equipment/inventory management.
• Updated art that holds true to the spirit of the originals, featuring never-before-used character art by series creator Michael Cranford!
• An opportunity for new players to experience the events that led to The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep and The Mage’s Tale!
• The final content to be released will be a Legacy Mode, a set of options which allows players to make the titles play similarly to the 1980s originals… with all the challenge that entails!

Like the announcement says, the remastered Bard's Trilogy is available now on Steam and GOG for $15. As of this writing, game keys have yet to be mailed to backers of The Bard's Tale IV. Some kind of technical issue related to adding GOG support, apparently. Hopefully that won't take much longer.

 

[Sacibengala]

Yeah, 10 hours and counting...

 

[Country_Gravy]

Pretty lame that a software company can't figure out how to give away software.

 

[Sacibengala]

Got my key right now. But I had to redo the survey BS. Choose the platform in the first step, go to the last and confirm. Got the key by e-mail.

 

[Country_Gravy]

That was a hassle. I'm going to play the shit out of this with my kids. Raising the next gen of incline.

 

[Contagium]

I grabbed these the second they were available. With a lack of good dungeon crawlers out there, these will at least let me alternate between an isometric perspective/dungeon crawler pattern of game playing for a while...

And keep me from plopping down cash on the inevitably disappointing Underworld Ascendant any time soon.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

This will be 10 times better than any game released today.

 

[DemonKing]

From the Kickstarter update sent out yesterday:

Finally, the original games are very challenging. We encourage you to band together to pass along advice and discoveries, whether on the Steam or GOG forums or our own official forums. I think that I can safely speak for many older players that while we fondly remember having to figure stuff out on our own, it certainly would have been nice to have the internet back then to help with some things!

I finished #1 & #3 back in the day without assistance. #2 I folded and bought the cluebook because some of those riddles were ridiculous and completely blocked further progress if you couldn't solve them. I would argue Grimrock 2 was far more difficult than even that with regards to esoteric puzzles (But I guess that had the advantage of the interwebs being available to help out...).

 

[grimace]

Does this remaster play better than the original played thru DOSbox?

If so, in what way?

 

[Humanity has risen!]

I'm disappointed that you can't minimize it into a tiny window, I expected that.

 

[Roguey]

in recent years The Bard's Tale was only available as an inferior port bundled with inXile's 2004 Bard's Tale action-RPG, so this is all-around good news for the genre.

Good news is having to pay money for a 30 year old game with minor interface improvements and an awkward attempt at updated graphics. xD

 

[Morkar Left]

Does this remaster play better than the original played thru DOSbox?

If so, in what way?

in recent years The Bard's Tale was only available as an inferior port bundled with inXile's 2004 Bard's Tale action-RPG, so this is all-around good news for the genre.

Good news is having to pay money for a 30 year old game with minor interface improvements and an awkward attempt at updated graphics. xD

The game is a complete rewrite as you can see from screenshots alone. Gameplay is altered too and now seems to be same through all three games. And I doubt that the significant bugs (which were different between computer systems) will still be there. All in all this seems to be best version available to play these games if no gamebreaking bugs occur.

The only things that suck are having no manual. There are ingame hints *sigh* but even in The Bard's Tale there were the manuals included. And second for a "classic" game ridiculous hardware requirements and a lot of hd space. Though playing this on a cheap netbook when travelling is probably not possible.

 

[Roguey]

And second for a "classic" game ridiculous hardware requirements and a lot of hd space.

500 mb

Since they rewrote everything I'm surprised they found it acceptable to make your view into the world that tiny window to the left. That kind of thing was outdated even by the early 90s.

Change the resolution from 4:3 to 16:9, but waste the vast majority of it.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

It's $5.36 in my region. Can't wait for the torrent version, wanna play it! If I play it for 10 hours, I promise to buy, Fargo. Don't you worry, old boy, keep on churning these babies out.

 

[Morkar Left]

I agree they could have done the view window a bit bigger or better use the part of the text screen more efficiently (like putting the map there as well and the button banner) but it's a remaster, not an adaption after all. There are very few remasters out there which have that much effort put into it. Of the top of my head I can only think about the Monkey Island remakes, Wonder Boy, Outcast and the Wasteland re-release.
Nobody has to buy the BTT if he thinks it's not worth his 15$. I got it for "free" as a backer but even if not I would have bought. It seems like a very good job so far but I hope they will tweak and improve it still a bit.

 

[Infinitron]

Remember Krome are doing a Wasteland remaster too, that should be even better than inXile's previous Wasteland rerelease: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=10927

P. cool guys.

 

[Ovplain]

Never played the originals, paid no attention to the development of these 'remasters,' but for some reason I'm oddly excited about them now. Dunno, they look good to me, I'm sure I'll at least try 'em sooner or later!

 

[Scroo]

Did they tune down the amount of insane combat encounters? This was a major stopper for me when I tried the originals a few years ago.

 

[Squid]

Remember Krome are doing a Wasteland remaster too, that should be even better than inXile's previous Wasteland rerelease: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=10927

P. cool guys.

That seems interesting. So is the bundle only going to be available prior to remaster's release? Also, does anyone know if this bundle will be available on gog? I have Wasteland 1 and 2 on steam but I'd rather have them on my gog account.

 

[Sacibengala]

There is no Autoattack feature or I am missing something?

 

[Mortmal]

Just got my key and downloading..says 550mo needed?! The game was holding on a floppy disk on amiga, not even filling it.

 

[Morkar Left]

Did they tune down the amount of insane combat encounters? This was a major stopper for me when I tried the originals a few years ago.

I have the impression it's reduced. But I only dabbled around for half an hour in the city. Can't really how it will be later in the game. But I guess they had this in mind because you get more XP for encounters than in the original game. I hope they go more into detail about the changes...

 

[Mortmal]

Did they tune down the amount of insane combat encounters? This was a major stopper for me when I tried the originals a few years ago.

No, but it has SSAO and bloom.

 

[Darkzone]

I agree they could have done the view window a bit bigger or better use the part of the text screen more efficiently (like putting the map there as well and the button banner) but it's a remaster, not an adaption after all.

Hey then there would be some people who would also complain about the window size and that it doesn't look like BT, because the window size is to large.

The music has been also reworked and sounds added to the game. I personally don't like the Adventurers Guild music because it is to fast / restless. But otherwise the reworked trilogy seems to be worth the $15.

 

[Roguey]

Hey then there would be some people who would also complain about the window size and that it doesn't look like BT, because the window size is to large.

All they have to do is move all that text to the bottom over to the right and have a nice large window on the left.