Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep - Director's Cut

[Shadenuat]

Or even just take a look at M&MX. That game has many shortcomings, and it's weird that it would go back to step-based movement after full 3D of M&M 6-9, but a fan of M&M would play M&M10 and think, okay, this at least seems familiar. Even though the itemization is mostly shit, the dungeons are boring, and it's got fixed encounters gating you along the linear story, it's "close enough" that you can forgive its shortcomings and enjoy it as a blobber (albeit a very light one).

it at least *GASP* allowed you to create your party without any sawyer chickenshit oh now players can't nowadays go through party creation, oh their brains will explode before they finish writing second character name; while BT4 doesn't even allow you to create your own character (!) before you go through some obligatory tutorial with pre-generated one. sickening.

 

[Darth Roxor]

your actual ability to shoot arrows without having a bow at all

 

[Shadenuat]

this is the new, even more progressive design. previous ones had unlimited arrows, the new best one doesn't even need bows.

 

[PEACH]

Again compare this to Golden Era and Cleveland Blakemore. For more than 20 years they knew exactly who their prestigious prospects were and kept a razor sharp focus on delivering the goods. To all 3500 of us. Now thats how you make an oldschool blobber.

Weren't there also rumors about half the stats/skills in Grimoire not affecting anything?

I haven't played since I finished the game last year (waiting for V2) but I'm pretty sure that skill/stat tooltips have since been patched into the game and that assumption was debunked a while back.

 

[Shadenuat]

wait, with dual wielding perk, does that allow dual wielding bows or are they restricted as an off-hand weapon? someone check. (since dual wielding 2 best stat-sticks while using best actual combat skills regardless of items is best tactic as far as I figured out - because shields do not give as much Strength as 2 1-handers for example; and I think you can use shield +armor skill without shield? did not check that)

 

[PEACH]

Better question is can you dual wield arrows?

 

[V_K]

this is the new, even more progressive design. previous ones had unlimited arrows, the new best one doesn't even need bows.

 

[J_C]

For one it has about 1000 hours of content. Roughly.

You are saying this as if it was a good thing.

 

[cvv]

if game actually looked like Unreal
if there was more good music instead of strange mix of it and deafening silence
if character system casual as it is at least made some sense and was consistent (like the example with weapon proficiencies, highlighted things in abilities and your actual ability to shoot arrows without having a bow at all)
if plot was about something from intro, as for now it's about nothing
if first act was not set in boring as fuck brown slums and grey corridors where you will push many grey blocks
if it was just better presented, paced and designed.

The game is actually pretty good but the presentation might indeed be the main reason why it's flopping. If you take games like Grimrocks or MMX they won't exactly take your breath away either but there's not a single outright fugly thing about them. Everything is just....fine. In BT4 I'm just a few hours in and I've already seen a couple of fugly textures, environs and especially the NPCs. If the dumbasses haven't insisted on free movement they could've hidden a lot of the fugliness behind grid based movement. Altho I still remember the masses wailing about MMX being grid based so you can't win I guess. If DOS or PoE didn't look so pretty and polished they would've gotten the boot too.

Also the blobber revival sparked by Grimrock just isn't as long lived and lucrative as milking the Infinity Engine nostalgia. Grimrock 2 is a huge step up from the first game but it sold only what, one third of LoG1? And MMX flopped completely. Trying to make the lightning strike twice and break an extremely niche market a second time with a 10 million budget old school blobber was always a p. harebrained idea.

 

[newtmonkey]

ability to shoot arrows without having a bow at all

This was like reading the last line of a classic Lovecraft tale

 

[fantadomat]

they dont seem to have a clue about their target audience. If i play a blobber i want grid based movement and complex systems, i dont care about gfx or music. Wtf is that about the weapon skills Felipe posted?! That must be a bug right. I saw somewhere that when you master a weapon skill you get the special abilities on every weapon or something like that. I have no time to play it now so cant check it out.

Again compare this to Golden Era and Cleveland Blakemore. For more than 20 years they knew exactly who their prestigious prospects were and kept a razor sharp focus on delivering the goods. To all 3500 of us. Now thats how you make an oldschool blobber.

The game is not bobber per se,it is closer to the old party based jrpgs in my book. Still exploring is fun,atmosphere is good if you manage to run it on ultra. For the weapons....well kind of. The active abilities are usable with all weapons you can equip to the character,passive skills only affect the weapon. There is different passive skills that effect single type of weapon.

 

[cvv]

Nope, it's definitely a blobber. First person, party based. A blobber.

 

[V_K]

Nope, it's definitely a blobber. First person, party based. A blobber.

Doesn't it have to be an RPG to be a blobber though?

 

[BEvers]

Did we ever learn what happened to the Golden Onion wishlist goal?

 

[Nyast]

Again, the game does not look like crap. At least, not all the times. They simply made the mistake of putting the worst areas at the beginning of the game.

Yeah, you're not going to get AAA quality, no matter what, but this is what you get 10 hours into the game:

 

[Darth Roxor]

there is a typo already in the potato intro

i know because the game always starts in polish for me even though i always switch it back to inglese

although when it starts in potato and i access the settings it says 'deutsch' under language so i dont even know who to trust anymore

 

[Jimmious]

Yeah it seems that the initial dungeon area is the crappiest visually. Not very smart.

 

[moraes]

Wtf is that about the weapon skills Felipe posted?! That must be a bug right. I saw somewhere that when you master a weapon skill you get the special abilities on every weapon or something like that. I have no time to play it now so cant check it out.

Not a bug. Design choice. Your character can use any ability he has learned with whatever weapon he has equipped, weapon types just improve relevant abilities, for example your rogue can use his ability to shoot arrows without having to equip a bow, but all short bow type weapons reduce the cooldown of the ability to shoot arrows by 1. So weapons are not a limiting factor, they just serve to further specialization. It's not the biggest of the game's problems, just a weird design decision.

 

[BEvers]

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

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a shoddy old mess burying some nice ideas

Are you nostalgic for The Bard’s Tale? I certainly played them back between 1985 and 1988, but being under 10, that was a very long time ago. I don’t really remember them with any special degree of affection. And I’m certainly free of the peculiar reverence of those for whom such cows are too sacred to criticise even the decades-later follow-ups (subtweet). What I’ve been playing for the last couple of days is a bit of a crap RPG with some nice puzzles, and a decent combat system. And if that’s faint enough praise to damn The Bard’s Tale IV, I’ve done my job already.

The Bard’s Tale IV is a shoddy thing. Immediately looking dated, it begins in a giant clumsy mess: half-arsed, poorly Photoshopped, mostly static image budget cutscenes interrupting each other, dialogue crashing, the scenes jumping about so much I thought I must have accidentally skipped something and started over. I hadn’t. (Because of course you can’t skip cutscenes.) Failing to introduce itself in any meaningful way, establish its world, even tell you who you are, where you are, or what you’re doing, it just assumes you’re au fait enough with first-person RPGs to just muddle your way through.

Instead, relying on your having played enough other similar games to understand what its outdoor sections are flailingly attempting to be, you just start talking to people, and walking toward quest markers, for want of anything else to do. And from there on, if have you the inclination, it’s perfectly possible to slide awkwardly into that groove and get on with things.

Getting on with things was very much my overall feeling of The Bard’s Tale IV. Seemingly without any distinct personality or atmosphere, instead it feels like the most generic of fantasy worlds (elves, humans, dwarfs, etc, they don’t get on) with the most generic of quests to complete (go there, talk to them, kill that lot, find that thing). It really only finds its identity when in the extensive puzzle dungeons, yet plagues these sections with so many issues. Not least technical ones.

Even running on a GTX 1080 it couldn’t hit 60FPS on anything above Medium, frequently stuttering and struggling on High or Ultra. Which is bad enough for any new release, but when the game manages to make the Unreal engine look at least ten years old, quite mystifying.

Load times are outrageous, around a minute and a half just for going outside of a building, and then there’s the wait after that for all the textures to slowly appear around you. Meaning I’ve taken to playing a mobile game at the same time as Bard’s Tale because the downtime is ludicrous. Also that gives me something else to do when it crashes to desktop.

The one immediate highlight is the voice acting, a broad cast of Scottish accents delivered with undeserved enthusiasm, which only starts to fall apart once any other accent at all is attempted. A man spoke to me in Franglais with an offensively bad, um, Spanish accent? Meanwhile one actor’s attempt at German could risk another world war. But when Scottish, all is lovely!

The problem is, what they’re talking about is not quite so clear. It’s been 33 years since I played The Bard’s Tale on my ZX Spectrum, and I’m never quite sure if I’m supposed to be remembering what this game’s all about. It’s 30 years since the preceding Bard’s Tale III! If that’s the case, I’m going to venture that this was perhaps not a great plan. And if it’s not the case – as I suspect – then this is some woefully cruddy storytelling. Characters speaking in pure Lore, after a “the various races hate each other and killed their gods” generic opening.

What this game is good at is puzzly dungeons and turn-based combat, but it still finds ways to make both frustrating. It’s a shoddiness that just permeates everything.

For instance, enemies. I’m going to get on to why I rather like the combat, but before you engage in it you’re required to check that you’ve a chance against the foes. To do this, rather than just something sensible, you have to walk close enough to them (there’s no proper sneaking, and no visual indication of whether they can see you) until pointing the camera at them eventually shows a numeric value above their heads, indicating the strength of their mob. Now, in any normal universe, you’d then be able to compare this number to the one earned by your current crop of companions, except no. Your gang doesn’t get a number! It’s like they got halfway through implementing the system, and then gave up. Instead you rely on a traffic light system for the number mobs have, with green fairly simple, yellow a tough fight, and red impossible. But gosh, when it comes to the ambiguity of yellow, it’s infuriating not to have any notion of how close you are to them!

Now, this would be a minor annoyance if saving weren’t such a colossally badly handled system. Instead of a quicksave that absolutely would have sufficed, there are standing stones scattered around the world, that allow you to one-time save, or even sacrifice the opportunity for a save in order to gain extra XP instead. An idea that would have been great in another game where progress wasn’t narratively driven! Losing a fight doesn’t mean having to start that encounter over, but potentially being dumped miles back, the wrong side of a bunch of conversations you’ve already had, inventories you’ve juggled, items you’ve bought and sold in shops… because you literally couldn’t save anywhere between. It’s a disastrously stupid idea.

Then comes the inventory, a mad mess of bad ideas. You’ve multiple pages of masses of space, five lots of 7×5 grids. Once a page is full, the game will dump new items into the next available squares on the next free page. Except if you move a pile of somethings, let’s say grappling hooks, to the second page, the game can no longer find them. Pick up a new grappling hook, still have space on the first page, and it’ll start a new stack there. And does this for all stackable items. So as it creates this sprawling clutter, it lets you navigate by filtering for item types, right? Food, weapons, armour, trinkets? No. Not at all. Because I guess they hate you? It’s awful.

But there are good bits! The combat takes place on a four-by-four grid, a pool of action points shared between your crew for each turn, spent combining many different ability types, attacks, spells, and special two-turn moves in imaginative ways. And it works pretty well, in an even fight. It makes levelling up feel meaningful, as you add a new skill to a character, and then see how it fits into your fighting style. Gosh, I’d love to see a turn-based system like this used in a far, far better RPG.

And as I’ve mentioned, the extensive dungeons do well at asking you to solve multi-part puzzles, in ways that are reminiscent of classic late 80s/early 90s first-person dungeoneering. Well, let’s be honest, in ways that are reminiscent of Legend Of Grimrock, as that game series has clearly been used as a stepping stone between the two. Free movement here makes for more complicated possibilities, although it does frequently let itself down with a rather naff cog-based puzzle repeating itself far too often. But you can really sink your teeth into a lengthy underground romp, despite the dreadful map (it doesn’t label areas, and doesn’t let you move up and down between floors, because good grief, everything about its UI seems like a mission to be as unhelpful as possible.)

But the thing is, as good as those elements might be, the game’s colossal issues step in to ensure they’re spoiled. For instance, Alguin’s Arboretum is possibly the first enormous dungeon you’ll encounter, and I have had a decent time in there. Right up until, after a long and extremely dull puzzle sequence involving mixing colours together (it manages to make even this hokey old idea tiresome with its inventory), I went through a door and was “surprised” by some enemies. Some enemies far too strong for my party, killing members with their first hits.

In any sensible game, I’d either restore my quicksave from before I opened the door, or get checkpointed back to the other side. But this is not a sensible game, and the last opportunity to save was absolutely ages back, before I had to trudge my way through those crappy puzzles, goodness knows how far back. So against my ability to do anything about it, it’s threatening me with dreary repetition. As it happens in this instance, because I’m bloody amazing, I managed to eek through the battle with one member alive on their last scrap of health. Yet it didn’t make me think any more fondly of the moment. Which immediately took me from thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m being too harsh on this game, it’s really finding its feet in this dungeon…” to, “Oh you piece of shit.”

And then the dungeon’s final battle was a ridiculously tiresome over-powered enemy who required multiple attempts, on the wrong side of a very long, very awful unskippable cutscene, until I got lucky enough for the baddy not to randomly slaughter my entire party in two hits. What fun.

I feel absolutely certain this will find an audience who’ll defend it, no matter how flaky the tech, how awful the writing, how outstandingly dull the characters. (Oh, they try to do BioWare Bants between themselves, which is so far off the mark, and only laughable because, despite wandering them around for hours, I’d literally no idea what their names were, let alone if they had a personality.) Because people love old things made new, and people love pretending that something crappy now reminds them of something crappy from back when their backs hurt less and they could stay up past 10.30 in the evening without feeling it the next day.

For me, despite a genuinely good combat system, and the moments of respite found on occasions in the dungeons, I’ve had a predominantly dull time with The Bard’s Tale IV. It’s a very dull game in most respects.

 

[newtmonkey]

RPS REVIEW - BARD TALES IV
Just like you, fellow gamer, I too played these "Bard Story" games that were released from a range of years stretching from 1985 to 1988 according to wikipedia and never the many games in the "Brad's Tales" franchise that followed but let me tell you, fellow gamer...

 

[Darth Roxor]

Seemingly without any distinct personality or atmosphere, instead it feels like the most generic of fantasy worlds (elves, humans, dwarfs, etc, they don’t get on) with the most generic of quests to complete (go there, talk to them, kill that lot, find that thing).

very nice that this is never a problem with all the other shit games you always happen to peddle, you piece of shit

linking to rps should be a bannable offence

 

[taxalot]

Be honest. Nobody here even wanted this game in the first place.

 

[newtmonkey]

Even when RPS is right, they are completely insufferable.

 

[Gord]

i know because the game always starts in polish for me even though i always switch it back to inglese

although when it starts in potato and i access the settings it says 'deutsch' under language so i dont even know who to trust anymore

It does always say Deutsch for me, too, only it is indeed Deutsch.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I went through a door and was “surprised” by some enemies. Some enemies far too strong for my party, killing members with their first hits.

As it happens in this instance, because I’m bloody amazing, I managed to eek through the battle with one member alive on their last scrap of health. Yet it didn’t make me think any more fondly of the moment. Which immediately took me from thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m being too harsh on this game, it’s really finding its feet in this dungeon…” to, “Oh you piece of shit.”

I was surprised by insanely stronk impossible enemies and could not reload so instead I clenched my teeth and actually managed to power through the fight and win FUCK YOU GAME