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

[ga♥]

kickstarters beta backers are immune to bad performance? To be honest I have the impression the more devs listen to people while developing the more likely it is to becoming a turd. I have the feeling this is what happened in Numenera. I may be wrong, but I believe this is the reason the kickstarter era failed to deliver 1 single fucking decent game.

 

[BEvers]

I thought they didn't go Early Access so they could keep selling the beta at a premium on their homepage

 

[Bohr]

inXile tried once not to use the Early Access model once and look what happened. Seems it's risky to rely on Kickstarter beta backers alone. Early Access buyers could have made it clear that the bad performance was a big deal.

Yep, these days betas in KS games seem more like token efforts to sell higher tier packages than full scale tests. I guess some people have misgivings about early access games but it's surely better than a launch like this - particularly given inXile's obvious shortcomings in terms of in-house QA.

 

[BEvers]

Nevermind, I forgot that their pre-orders were sold exclusively through Xsolla. Steam takes 30% of revenue, but Xsolla only takes a stunning 5%! (and has truly awful customer service in return) If they had gone EA, they would have been forced to sell through Steam and lose 25% of their pre-order revenue.

 

[fantadomat]

Darth Roxor ,mate do you know the bell combination for the tower in the forest after you leave the city for first time? The fucking retard that is coward was supposed to tell me but he doesn't and the door is magically locked.

 

[aweigh]

How do we not have a smug Fargo face rating tag yet????

 

[MRY]

I don't pretend to know anything about managing projects or developing RPGs (Fallen Gods has been five years of wrong turns and false starts), but it does seem to me that inXile might have fared better had their three games in some way used similar pipelines or engines or design approaches, such that lessons from Wasteland could be utilized in TTON, lesson in TTON used in BTIV, etc.

 

[BEvers]

They did have Mage's Tale to prepare them for Bard's Tale 4. Same engine, many of the same assets, and both made in the New Orleans studio. MT is at 75% positive on Steam, reviews say it feels "polished".



They must have gained a number of helpful insights from that, but it clearly wasn't enough to deliver a technically polished BT4.

 

[aweigh]

VR aficionados rate any shit VR game with a positive rating. You can't trust the reviews on VR products yet, not until everyone is using the technology and honest reviews begin showing up; for now it is just early-adopters justifying their purchases.

 

[imweasel]

Seems it's risky to rely on Kickstarter beta backers alone.

Nah. The performance issues were brought up numerous times by beta testers, but Inxile did nothing to address them. Just read some of the reviews on Steam.

The engine programmer(s) were delivering very shoddy work and should have been replaced, but they were given a free pass instead. That said, Inxile seems to have some pretty serious management problems.

 

[Roqua]

I've never been more ashamed to belong to such a lowbrow, short sighted community of retarded children.

At least if this was some sort of cult like Jone's Jonestown cult I could at least take solace knowing you would all die soon from drinking Kool Aid. This is just a retard cult that destroys the companies that make the things we claim to like.

All the nonsense being said is the same shit people said when ToEE and Bllodlines came out. Good thing Troika closed down, right guys? Also the same shit that was said when MMX came out. Good thing there won't be an MMXI, right guys? The crpg world is much richer and well off that shit developers making shitty rpgs close down, like Troika and the MMX team.

Thumbs up kids - you are all doing God's work, protecting us from the evil crpg makers.

 

[M. AQVILA]

What a shit game, even by InXile standards.

 

[Strange Fellow]

This is just a retard cult that destroys the companies that claim to make the things we like.

Fixed.

 

[Roqua]

This is just a retard cult that destroys the companies that claim to make the things we like.

Fixed.

The same type of people like you were saying the exact same shit to me when ToEE and Bloodlines came out. Its funny how history repeats itself. I bet you claim to love Troika now, right?

 

[BEvers]

Seems it's risky to rely on Kickstarter beta backers alone.

Nah. The performance issue was brought up numerous times by beta testers, but Inxile did nothing to address them. Just read some of the reviews on Steam.

It's not like the beta discussions were private, you can read them right here: https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=18993

Will it work with highly reduced graphic settings so I can actually play it reasonably this time? :geek:

The graphics look good, though the framerate certainly isn't at 60fps (running a 1070 and I have 32GB ram). Some late texture load-in type of stuff, typical in a beta.

Also I hope the FoV can be changed, the current config seems significantly narrow and low than what I'm used to in first person games, can already feel that motion sickness flaring up.

The framerate feels like it's stuck down at 30 or so, regardless of graphics settings (and my machine is a high-end custom built gaming beast, capable of running highly demanding titles at 2560*1440@165). I really really hope this isn't being done on purpose to equalise performance with console ports, and the FOV feels like it's stuck down at 60-70 range which makes it just plain look distorted to me.

all the special effects thrown on the scene when entering a fight absolutely kill my framerate. I see maybe one or two frames before the game eventually jumps to the grid view.

Indeed, I already submitted a feedback about the lack of FoV slider and arbitrarily capped 60fps through the google doc.
Both things are pretty unforgivable in this day and age and I too was getting some motion sickness and was finding the experience pretty unpleasant after a while.

Really hoping these are just Beta Build shortcomings which will be rectified in the final build..

The main question for me is... will it have Ultrawide graphic settings? So far I've finally got BT4 to hold to 3440x1440, but it has some serious lost real estate on the left/right sides. And while you could try to stretch the images, it looks horrible. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Game is unoptimized as hell and the UI and mouse movement is slow (and I have a decent pc), understandable for a beta of course though.

As far as crashes and so on, I hope they'll take the time to polish those out, even if it means slipping past October. In the end it doesn't matter too much when it ships, but people will remember the bad experience if it has too many game breaking bugs.

This. Don't rush it. If there's significant (respectible, constructive) criticism, it should really be considered, and if that pushes the release a bit more, better to release an improved product than rush one that will garner more ire, just to be out sooner.

All from mid-July.

 

[Strange Fellow]

This is just a retard cult that destroys the companies that claim to make the things we like.

Fixed.

The same type of people like you were saying the exact same shit to me when ToEE and Bloodlines came out. Its funny how history repeats itself. I bet you claim to love Troika now, right?

Troika is alright. Not one of my favourite devs, but yeah, they made CRPGs at a time when no one else did.
All snark aside, if you enjoy these games I hope InXile survives to make more. However, with all due respect I don't really know you well enough to pay $35 just so you get to play fun videogames. If you need me, I'll be over here playing the kind of CRPGs that you find mindless and boring.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I bet you claim to love Troika now, right?

I for one always loved Troika's games, to the point that it's probably the only other company I will admit being a fanboy of (besides Black Isle, obviously), but never even really liked an inXile game.

You're trying too hard. Not saying there aren't plenty of idiots here and a lot of retarded newfags and Bethesdards, but inXile are just incompetent on all levels.
And while I actually believe their intentions were good with W2 (though I guess that's an optimistic view) and were held back by their incompetence, I don't think they even have those good intentions anymore. Now they're essentially trying to peddle the usual garbage: durr old-schol gaem but ready for the modern audience. And if not even their heart is in the right place, that means they can just fuck off.

 

[Roqua]

This is just a retard cult that destroys the companies that claim to make the things we like.

Fixed.

The same type of people like you were saying the exact same shit to me when ToEE and Bloodlines came out. Its funny how history repeats itself. I bet you claim to love Troika now, right?

Troika is alright. Not one of my favourite devs, but yeah, they made CRPGs at a time when no one else did.
All snark aside, if you enjoy these games I hope InXile survives to make more. However, with all due respect I don't really know you well enough to pay $35 just so you get to play fun videogames. If you need me, I'll be over here playing the kind of CRPGs that you find mindless and boring.

There is a huge difference between people ignoring games that don't interest them, and people going out of their way to sabotage companies that make games that don't interest them. Have fun playing your Pokeman and Metal Gear games.

 

[Strange Fellow]

I'm not going out of my way to sabotage InXile. I don't owe them any money.

 

[Curratum]

I'm not sure what Roque is raging about.

Yes, it's better off not to have more piles of shit like MMX. Yes, it's better not to have clusterfucks like ToEE. I'd much rather play a fucking animu JRPG like DQ XI if it's done right and is sufficiently polished instead of more Unity garbage.

The RPG world is not richer, it's just dead as a doornail and will remain that way. Everyone had a go at resurrecting it and everyone failed. Pillars 1 was barely passable, Numenera was abysmal, BT4 shat the bed just now, Underworld Ascendant is about to do it again in two months. Everyone who was at some point known for making good RPGs is obviously no longer able to.

I'm not sure why people should put up with garbage just to somehow "keep RPGs alive" in their imagination, when in reality those games are long dead and gone. Good thing you fucking neckbeards can still go and replay Wizardry 7 for the sixteenth time and bask in your superiority.

 

[BEvers]

I replayed Wizardry 8 twice this year, it was good both times.

 

[Roqua]

I bet you claim to love Troika now, right?

I for one always loved Troika's games, to the point that it's probably the only other company I will admit being a fanboy of (besides Black Isle, obviously), but never even really liked an inXile game.

You're trying too hard. Not saying there aren't plenty of idiots here and a lot of retarded newfags and Bethesdards, but inXile are just incompetent on all levels.
And while I actually believe their intentions were good with W2 (though I guess that's an optimistic view) and were held back by their incompetence, I don't think they even have those good intentions anymore. Now they're essentially trying to peddle the usual garbage: durr old-schol gaem but ready for the modern audience. And if not even their heart is in the right place, that means they can just fuck off.

When I made the same arguments when people were actively sabotaging Troika I used Sir-Tek and SSI as examples, and people said the same thing - they were fans of SSI and Sir-tek but Troika didn't make ToEE enough like BG2 and had bugs/wasn't optomized, and Bloodlines wasn't enough like Gothic and had bugs/wasn't optimized.

History repeats itself. You don't like the best non-indie crpgs developers we have during this time. Great. That doesn't ean I should not try hard to defend them in hopes sane people realize what they are doing. If your kind didn't do this to Troika, and if people supported SSI and Sir-Tek when they needed sales, it is inarguable we would all have tons more crpgs now that made the world of crpgs better, richer, and with more options for those with particular and quality taste.

But, short sighted savages gonna savage so I any effort on my part is probably trying to hard.

 

[Roqua]

I replayed Wizardry 8 twice this year, it was good both times.

If this community didn't suck so bad and supported crpg devs you would probably be able to also replay Wizardry 9-14 this year too if you wanted. And JA 3-7. Etc.

 

[Ulrox]

All the nonsense being said is the same shit people said when ToEE and Bllodlines came out. Good thing Troika closed down, right guys? Also the same shit that was said when MMX came out. Good thing there won't be an MMXI, right guys? The crpg world is much richer and well off that shit developers making shitty rpgs close down, like Troika and the MMX team.

Thumbs up kids - you are all doing God's work, protecting us from the evil crpg makers.

Certainly, there might have been a MMXI if the game had gotten more success, but internally ubisoft created the game because one dude kept going around telling people that :"we should make a might and magic game!" Ubisoft didn't actually want to do it, but they took a chance on it, and it didn't pay off enough I guess.

But yeah - it's much much easier to peddle stuff to kids, because they will love your game regardless of how horrible it is. Look at call of duty 4's reddit. the game is an unoptimized shitty mess, and all you can find on that subreddit is praise for the developer and lots of success for them. Adults, well, we just get tired of games, life, everything, and stop having any sort of passion for anything. It's the same thing every other day anyhow. Which is why giving in to cynicism can be very dangerous - which is why I try not to spend too much time on the codex, as I don't want the cynicism to take too much of a hold.

 

[Mortmal]

So I read the past 10 pages and what I learned is that Bard's Tale 4 is not an RPG, weapons are boring and all the same and it's ugly as sin.

Who was this game made for? Why did they use the name Bard's Tale? I don't get it

Past the introduction and first dungeons you finally have enough tokens to make your own party with the builds you want, so its not all that bad and allow some combinations and strategy. Game isnt ugly , plenty of spell effects , great soundtrack.There's lot of rage against this game because of performance issues and when you include a console save system ,you better have a console polished game that dont CTD or wipe your inventory.Checkpoints are not too rare however you get more xp if you consume them, so 2 hours without saving and suddendly get a CTD , no surprise people will get mad.Played a few hours without trouble but right now in mangar's tower in got 2 crashes within 15 min, a fight not ending , and a trap triggered a CTD.
Its a good game, having lot of fun with it,exploration and puzzles are great dungeon design as well. Its probably overbashed but they really gave the stick to beat them.