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

[mondblut]

experiments with innovative mechanics because he thinks his audience is sophisticated and this isn't 1985

If "innovative mechanics" you "experiment" with are fucking garbage, blame yourself.

Innovative? He probably meant "dumb down".

Probably? That's right there in english - yiddish shillspeak dictionary.

 

[Lacrymas]

Why are all the screenshots so blurry? It kinda hurts my eyes looking at them.

 

[theSavant]

It does run pretty badly for how it looks (I get around 40-50 fps on a 1070 with an ancient i5 3570k) and load times are pretty atrocious (in retrospect I shouldn't have installed it on my larger mechanical HDD, should have installed it on the SSD). There are microstutters when you open your inventory or when you loot a container that are pretty annoying.

I have the feeling that all those modern 1080 cards are pretty shitty,most game that people whine that chugs their cards run fine on my 580. It could be also drivers,my are pretty old and lack all the spyware of modern patches.

You ain't wrong with that. It's not the first time I have read that games run shitty on super-high-end cards (including overheating etc.), while they run just fine on mainstream cards. I remember that happened in Dying Light too. Every "enthusiast gamer" complained because their GTX 970, 980, 980Ti fucked up, while 750Ti and even 960m gtx mobile gpus ran the game flawlessly :D Never buy the latest "shit" (literally)...

Regarding the long loading times: I don't get people complaining about loading times when they use an HDD. It has been known for years, that the loading times in games have become unbearable, if you use an HDD. People should have known by now, but no...

 

[Hamster]

The design philosophy is so fucking warped on this game it really makes you ponder. Why cut down 90% of the mechanics and remove things like classes, rolls and itemization and remove party creation, because I assume they wanted to appeal to casuals, but then decide to go with a strict checkpoint system for saving? It's just... dissonant.

Again, cut down what exactly. Maybe you care to elaborate? The old games have been as simple as it gets already.
You still have classes (fewer, admittedly, but you gain skills to differentiate them, which was not possible before) and itemization is worse now why exactly? It wasn't that meaningful to begin with, imo.
They did remove most of the RNG, true.
Also you have far fewer spells (most of which were useless or redundant anyway, though).
Still, I don't see how they have dumbed it down so much, here.

I would find it more convincing to argue that they have not used the chance to actually introduce some proper ruleset to the series...

We need a "decline enabler" button.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Puzzle weapons are pretty damn cool.

 

[Curratum]

Is there anything in this game that is not bugged?

Why are all the screenshots so blurry? It kinda hurts my eyes looking at them.

Because the only two options for antialiasing the game has are FXAA and TAA.

FXAA makes everything shimmery and horrible, while TAA just blurs the living fuck out of every single thing, hence the look of the screens.

 

[aweigh]

Gord is officially the dumbest fucking shill I've ever seen on the Codex.

 

[TT1]

Ok, so I just realized this game is not for me. I can enjoy puzzles once in a while, but 10+ puzzles in a railroad forest, or several puzzles dungeon after dungeon... Definitely not for me.

Sorry, Fargo, maybe next time (probably not).

 

[theSavant]

I can't play the game, but for those who play a question:

When, or rather at what point in the game is it possible to trash the whole party and create all members from scratch? How early in the game?

 

[newtmonkey]

Thanks Nyast for the info!

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I have become Zombra, Destroyer of Bards

 

[cvv]

Aslo what inxile hate? I am uneducated on the drama angle apparently.

I think the inXile hate started with the pile of hot dogshit that was Numanuma. Entirely deserved. A lot of people also hate Fargo specifically, for some reason.

inXile is alright in my book. WL2 DC is fantastic, Numanuma is garbage and BT4 is a good game that just needs a few more months of cooking. Nobody is perfect, everyone fucks up now and then. For the final verdict imma wait for WL3.

 

[Themadcow]

inXile forums already getting mad at sea's respec post:

Um, maybe one or two people had a full objection - but I think you're missing the main point which is that free respec was fundamentally broken due to the way skills/crafting works, and that most of the feedback (in this forum) was to place a form of disincentive such as gold, XP or token cost on the process (or maybe even a free one every 5 levels?). So, instead of thanking the backers for calling out the fundamental issues with free respec in the beta... you try and throw them under the bus on the Steam forums?

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&p=200732#p200732

My suspicion is that they removed respec because it was bugged in some way and are now using the "Zombra asked us to do this!" defense as a fig leaf.

Yeah, that's me getting pissed off at the response. Respec in the beta was broken, massively fucking broken as hell (want to pick a lock? respec to lockpicking, then respec back *sea lion clap*). Maybe one or two mega-Grognards wanted it removed completely, but there were more calls either to keep it (meh) or apply a cost of sorts in order to stop people abusing the system. To be honest, many people assumed that respec in beta was "beta only" to encourage testing of multiple builds.

So yeah, to pin the removal of respec completely on those evil backers who want a more classic/hardcore experience was not cool.

My personal take on the game is that it's... OK. Sure, a buggy and resource hogging mess of programming (makes my GTX1070 wheeze like an 90 year old Marlboro advert model at 1080p) but the game beneath is a half decent attempt at trying to 'modernise' the classic blobber experience. The game smacks of team inexperience, which may be the case given that it was produced by a new studio (inXile NOLA) - and I can't believe for a second that there was a core of people who loved BT1-3, or Wizardry, who were making the big design decisions. That said, the combat is mostly interesting, the game world seems quite varied and the puzzles don't take over the game... thankfully.

Give it a couple of patches and I think we'll end up with a game that's worth playing in it's own right, but certainly fails to live up to the promise of being a true sequel to the original games.

 

[FeelTheRads]

massively fucking broken as hell (want to pick a lock? respec to lockpicking, then respec back *sea lion clap*).

The fuck, that's not respeccing, that's a debugging tool.

 

[bataille]

So... another buggy game by InXile made in one, passionate motion. Will definitely check it out in half a year or so when all the problems have been resolved. From the look of this thread, many negatives can be ignored, and the genuinely interesting parts make this mental effort worth it. In the meantime, don't despair, Frian Bargo!

 

[Volrath]

So... another buggy game by InXile made in one, passionate motion. Will definitely check it out in half a year or so when all the problems have been resolved. From the look of this thread, many negatives can be ignored, and the genuinely interesting parts make this mental effort worth it. In the meantime, don't despair, Frian Bargo!

Ineptile won't be around that long anymore.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, I was willing to wave off Nunanuma as a one off mistake on account of Fargo having a supposedly rather nasty divorce and leaving the production to his idiot henchmen. But $10 million blobber should've been a slamdunk and it certainly has no right launching as undercooked as this.

 

[Ulrox]

Have yet to experience crashes or game restarting bugs or anything of the sort - but, I'm currently unable to take the practioner skill known as harmonic shielding, and I have no clue why. I should have the prerequisites for it. I think either it's a bug, or I'm really stupid and not noticing something.

I've earlier been unable to take the skill opposite to it - meaning harmonic shielding and two others form a group of three and HS is to the right. I assumed that you can take only either the one to the left or the one to the right of the middle one. Not sure if that is true, though. Anyway it doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.

I wrote on the steam forums to figure out what was up, and the replies said something about not being able to go down certain paths after you'd crossed a line or something, so it appears it's not a bug, just potentially ruins my build, and I may want to start over, don't know, might be able to fix it, still don't know the rules behind what you can and cannot take. Hopefully I'll be able to find clarification on it soon.

Have yet to experience crashes or game restarting bugs or anything of the sort - but, I'm currently unable to take the practioner skill known as harmonic shielding, and I have no clue why. I should have the prerequisites for it. I think either it's a bug, or I'm really stupid and not noticing something.

Have you reach tier 3 in the skills tree?

I'm on the second tier of skills in the skill tree.

I have become Zombra, Destroyer of Bards

I thought you were an obsidian developer.

 

[Nyast]

I can't play the game, but for those who play a question:

When, or rather at what point in the game is it possible to trash the whole party and create all members from scratch? How early in the game?

It's progressive. You get mercenary tokens as rewards for some quests, or find them as treasures in some chests. Note that the amount of party members also gets unlocked progressively with the plot ( as some NPCs join your party ), so in general I'm finding that you always have enough tokens more or less matching the amount of room in your party.

So the short answer is: pretty much any time after 2-3 hours into the game, but to unlock all party members will take much, much longer ( whether you use NPCs or custom party members ): maybe 15-20 hours ?

 

[belated]

So has anyone sat down and made a code wheel for offerings, or found any smart ways of easially figuring those code wheel offerings out? I have a code wheel pdf, but not an actual code wheel.

In case no one has answered yet, https://gamejolt.com/games/btwheel/368934 worked for me when I tried it yesterday

 

[Curratum]

I am trying really hard but can't understand why certain individuals here feel some strange urge to defend the game or the studio behind it.

 

[fantadomat]

I have become Zombra, Destroyer of Bards

I thought you were an obsidian owner.

Fix it for you mate.



Also we finally know how humanity came to be . That ancient mystery finally solved,thanks Fargo.

 

[Ulrox]

So has anyone sat down and made a code wheel for offerings, or found any smart ways of easially figuring those code wheel offerings out? I have a code wheel pdf, but not an actual code wheel.

In case no one has answered yet, https://gamejolt.com/games/btwheel/368934 worked for me when I tried it yesterday

Thank you very much, you are a hero!

 

[BEvers]

So has anyone sat down and made a code wheel for offerings, or found any smart ways of easially figuring those code wheel offerings out? I have a code wheel pdf, but not an actual code wheel.

In case no one has answered yet, https://gamejolt.com/games/btwheel/368934 worked for me when I tried it yesterday

Thank you very much, you are a hero!

That one's good, but this one is a lot better: https://jsfiddle.net/xk3obtcL/3/embedded/result/

(from https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=19463 )

 

[Mortmal]

The design philosophy is so fucking warped on this game it really makes you ponder. Why cut down 90% of the mechanics and remove things like classes, rolls and itemization and remove party creation, because I assume they wanted to appeal to casuals, but then decide to go with a strict checkpoint system for saving? It's just... dissonant.

yes its odd, not only that, no skill respect and the puzzles...Either they are at putt putt level,most of them, but for one or two half the forum is asking for the solution.