Wyrmlord
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2008
- Messages
- 28,904
I always thought it was one of the most boring, contentless games I had ever played.
Its random encounter system was one where simply standing in the same place for a while could trigger an encounter. How on earth do encounters spawn randomly in real-time, while you move around the world in frozen time?
Let alone the illogicality of the nature of these spawns, the game's manual told you that you should go around knocking and opening the door of every empty house in the town, because it will help you find these random encounters for levelling up. Of course, random encounters can spawn whether you are outside or inside or just standing still, and it's a wonder why going into every empty house of the town was a means of finding enemies to fight, when you can do so just by leaving your characters waiting in a single spot.
Of course, the random encounter system was one of the most arbitrary that I have ever seen, and without the intelligently placed difficulty curves you see in Wizardry 6. Your encounter at any point of time can be anything ranging from a dog to a dozen powerful wizards.
The only thing that seemed to come out The Bard's Tale was that a French developer of Amiga games used The Bard's Tale formula to make two very giant, very bloated, very detailed, and very extensive games that are notorious for being the largest and the most loaded RPGs ever made with a giant world with dozens of classes with dozens of skills with dozens of possible options in encounters - meaning that they simply took The Bard's Tale, found a very large prime number, and exponentially increased it by that number.
All in all, I'd say you could take away The Bard's Tale, and not much would be lost in the history of RPGs.
Its random encounter system was one where simply standing in the same place for a while could trigger an encounter. How on earth do encounters spawn randomly in real-time, while you move around the world in frozen time?
Let alone the illogicality of the nature of these spawns, the game's manual told you that you should go around knocking and opening the door of every empty house in the town, because it will help you find these random encounters for levelling up. Of course, random encounters can spawn whether you are outside or inside or just standing still, and it's a wonder why going into every empty house of the town was a means of finding enemies to fight, when you can do so just by leaving your characters waiting in a single spot.
Of course, the random encounter system was one of the most arbitrary that I have ever seen, and without the intelligently placed difficulty curves you see in Wizardry 6. Your encounter at any point of time can be anything ranging from a dog to a dozen powerful wizards.
The only thing that seemed to come out The Bard's Tale was that a French developer of Amiga games used The Bard's Tale formula to make two very giant, very bloated, very detailed, and very extensive games that are notorious for being the largest and the most loaded RPGs ever made with a giant world with dozens of classes with dozens of skills with dozens of possible options in encounters - meaning that they simply took The Bard's Tale, found a very large prime number, and exponentially increased it by that number.
All in all, I'd say you could take away The Bard's Tale, and not much would be lost in the history of RPGs.
