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Interview Bard's Tale IV Kickstarter campaign launching on June 2nd

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Tags: Bard's Tale IV; Brian Fargo; InXile Entertainment

inXile launched a coordinated media campaign to promote the upcoming Bard's Tale IV Kickstarter today. Here are the basic facts. First, the Kickstarter is launching on June 2. Second, the funding goal is going to be $1.25M, to be supplemented by an equal amount from inXile. Finally, the game will not be using Unity but rather Unreal Engine 4, with a particular focus on an impressive graphical appearance, which perhaps explains the higher-than-usual goal. A whole bunch of sites have reported on this, but the most in-depth coverage is at Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, PC Gamer, and PCGamesN, all of which got the chance to interview Brian Fargo about it. All four are worth reading, but it's the PCGamesN interview by Jeremy Peel that explains most clearly just how faithfully oldschool the game will be. I quote:

You’ll build a six-strong party of adventurers - creating bards, magic-users and thieves from scratch. But in the time-honoured tradition of dungeon crawling, they’ll share just one pair of legs - exploring maze-like environments as a congealed mass behind the camera. Whether that party will appear in battle as portraits or fully-rendered characters is a question of budget, to be settled by the Kickstarter campaign InXile will launch on June 2nd.

The game will snap to a grid for combat which some might call turn-based, but which Brian Fargo calls phase-based - a back and forth exchange of blows and buffs that sees the player cycle systematically through each of their party members. By the time the sixth gets to throw a punch, they might be facing an entirely changed situation.

“You may tell person number one to do whatever he does,” explained Fargo. “But something’s going to happen over the other side of the board which is going to affect what you tell the person in slot number two to do.”

Players aren’t forced to keep to 90-degree angles during exploration - they can unhinge themselves from the grid and stretch their necks in all the ways contemporary first-person games have taught us to expect. But InXile’s environments will be designed at severe right angles, in accordance with the limitations they’ve set themselves.

“The grid does force us to design it a certain way,” said Fargo. “There’s a pureness to it, and a quick understanding of things which is nice. When I’m exploring a world that’s more structured, it’s easier for me to put it together in my head.”

While The Bard’s Tale IV will feature plenty of NPCs and a certain amount of civilisation, it’ll be predominantly subterranean. InXile have set the game around 160 years after the events of the first Bard’s Tale, and in a poetic touch the original city of Skara Brae is now one level down - a ruin buried beneath another, newer metropolis. For inspiration, the team visited Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh - a warren of 17th century streets found beneath the Royal Mile.*

Below the new city, players will find further dungeons, including recognisable locations from the trilogy. That network of caverns will be home to secret doors, and buttons that click but offer no immediate explanation of their function. It’ll house unlabelled teleporters, and areas of total darkness. Levels will be built one on top of the other and make spatial sense, to the extent that falling through a trapdoor will plant you in the logically-appropriate space on the floor below.

Fargo expects that some players will want to map them out on graph paper, “down to a square”.

“You have your smaller puzzles that are right there in the room, but then you have this macro puzzle of how the design of the dungeons are,” he said.

The grid-based conundrums of Legend of Grimrock spring to mind, and Fargo says he’s appreciated the design of more recent attempts at the genre - but believes there hasn’t been a “big, ambitious attempt at doing the dungeon crawl in some time.”

The only contemporary influence he cites by name is The Room - the tactile puzzler about feeling your way into sealed tomes or locked cabinets (“That kind of physical manipulation of the world, I think they did an excellent job”). InXile want some of the same interactivity for The Bard’s Tale, with optional puzzles and riddles that’ll reward patient players with better gear.

That philosophy will extend to item design. Fargo imagines a perfectly ordinary sword you might carry in your inventory for most of the game - until you happen notice a latch on its hilt which, when flipped, causes it to set aflame.

“That constant discovery, within the environment and in your inventory, I think there’s lots of things to be done with that,” he said.
So, can a dungeon crawling blobber based on a 1980s IP make millions of dollars on Kickstarter in 2015? We'll soon find out. It's worth noting that Rock Paper Shotgun's Richard Cobbett got a look at the game's prototype footage, and according to him, it makes Grimrock 2 and MMX "look as retro as the games they’re building on". I imagine that will help.
 

felipepepe

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The grid-based conundrums of Legend of Grimrock spring to mind, and Fargo says he’s appreciated the design of more recent attempts at the genre - but believes there hasn’t been a “big, ambitious attempt at doing the dungeon crawl in some time.”
Yeah, sorry Fargo, you might be more ambitious, but seriously I doubt you'll be delivering anything more impressive than Grimrock 2, especially graphically.
 

Athelas

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Uhm, there is a sentence in the post that addresses precisely what you're saying.
So, can a dungeon crawling blobber based on a 1980s IP make millions of dollars on Kickstarter in 2015? We'll soon find that out. It's worth noting that Rock Paper Shotgun's Richard Cobbett got a look at the game's prototype footage, and according to him, it makes Grimrock 2 and MMX "look as retro as the games they’re building on". I imagine that will help.
 

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Well, that's prototype footage. The final game might get downgraded. :)

In the interviews, it's compared graphically with Ethan Carter. How impressive does that look? Better than Grimrock 2?
 
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1.25M is a steep goal, but I don't think there can ever be enough blobbers in this world for me, so I'll be doing my part when it launches. The oringal BT trilogy are actually some of the most glaring omissions from my "games I've played" list. This seems like a good reason to rectify that. Anyone know of a good way to acquire them and get them running on a Windows 8 machine?
 

Darth Roxor

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1.25 mln sure is an ambitious number

Still, I much approve of using UE4 over Unity. Fuck Unity. And UE4 is cheap enough for the '+++ graphixxx' goal to actually be reasonable.
 

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Uhm, there is a sentence in the post that addresses precisely what you're saying.
So, can a dungeon crawling blobber based on a 1980s IP make millions of dollars on Kickstarter in 2015? We'll soon find that out. It's worth noting that Rock Paper Shotgun's Richard Cobbett got a look at the game's prototype footage, and according to him, it makes Grimrock 2 and MMX "look as retro as the games they’re building on". I imagine that will help.
Grimrock 2 is a finished game I can play now and looks amazing. BTIV is a prototype, being described by a game journo with obvious exaggerations amidst a Fargo-driven hype campaign.
 

abnaxus

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Zeriel

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1.25 mln sure is an ambitious number

Still, I much approve of using UE4 over Unity. Fuck Unity. And UE4 is cheap enough for the '+++ graphixxx' goal to actually be reasonable.

Agreed, the "No Unity" and "there is a grid if you want" and "we want to make a dungeon crawler bits" actually got me from tepid zero interest to cautious hype once more. I'm not sold on the combat, though, zooming out to show the players in a blobber seems like a big no no.
 

Shadenuat

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In the interviews, it's compared graphically with Ethan Carter. How impressive does that look? Better than Grimrock 2?
Naturally, but Fargo exaggerates their ability. Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a Myst-like (graphical design speaking), 3D but a quest in a very small area that is painstakingly modeled and detailed to the point of photo realism. You can't make an RPG with a hundred dungeon levels which would all look like that.
 

FeelTheRads

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Of course it's an exaggeration. Furthermore, there likely won't be hundreds of dungeon levels and I assume the dungeons will be made of tiles which they can reuse.

Anyway, I'm curious and I always like to hear Fargo whisper sweet nothings in my ear.
 
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LeStryfe79

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Notch will make sure this is funded. In fact, Fargo should have a 100k pledge available for co-producer title and royalties. I'm gonna guess this gets 2.7 mil.
 

Charles-cgr

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It does look like there's a lot of focus on how it looks (while acknowledging that traps, puzzles and gameplay overall won't be forgotten). The opposite would fare better, but Fargo is a very good marketer. He isn't going to say graphics are low priority in a pre-campaign interview.
 

Zeriel

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Notch will make sure this is funded. In fact, Fargo should have a 100k pledge available for co-producer title and royalties. I'm gonna guess this gets 2.7 mil.

If the graphics pitch is impressive enough, I could actually see this doing Torment numbers or even better. It's hard to say.
 

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I'm not sold on the combat, though, zooming out to show the players in a blobber seems like a big no no.

Wot aboot RoA?:M

It's not clear to me that what Brian described in the RPS interview is necessarily the Arkania-style zooming out to a classical tactical combat view with movement etc. If the game was really doing that, you'd think the other interviews would have picked up on it as well, because that's a pretty major thing.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
 

Zep Zepo

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*rubs jew hands*

Waiting to rage on un-textured cubes and default Unity Physics and Texture image options.

Zep--
 

Darth Roxor

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The way I see it, it could be either zooming out to a RoA style situation, or borrowing Wiz8's facing/reach circle and turning it into a full-blown battle screen.

I ain't gonna complain about either.
 

Doma

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Not sure how I feel about a third kickstarter, though.

Oh there are going to be a lot more than 3.

Fargo has praised kickstarter and badmouthed publishers like crazy.

He will continue with KS for as long as he can.
 

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