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

[cainus-lupus]

Token system is more clear to people who doesn't know RPG'd tropes, while less fluffy. It takes trom immersion but ultimatelly makes sense on some level, and your point was it didn't. I've explained it to you using my superior intelligence. Glad I could be of some help.

Let me see if I get this right. You created an account yesterday and have made two posts, both of which are telling me that I'm dumb because I don't like the retarded token system that others in this forum have also called out as being incredibly gamey. Seems smart.

Tell you what, newfag, get back to me when you have some peach fuzz and your balls drop. Maybe then your "superior intelligence" will actually have some credibility around here, but I fucking doubt it. Meanwhile, fuck right off, okay?

I've only pointed out that tokens are other way of doing party rep system, which you clearly didn't get. All other stuff is your projection, really.
Also I'm 33, played (and liked) original "Bard's Tale" (just not on release), going to play remaster (which I own) when they iron it out and plan to buy BT4 (after they patch it out - unfortunatelly, playing new game on release is dumb idea - period, no matter who releases it).
I'm afraid postcount doesn't merit much.

 

[Roguey]

Jesus fucking Christ, inxile, the 4.9 gb patch spent more than 15 minutes applying / unpacking after download, with Steam reporting 30 mb/sec disk usage throughout that quarter of an hour.

Now it's downloaded a 245 mb patch, which I assume is the plot blocker hotfix and it's unpacking that, time remaining 15 minutes 46 seconds. How do you even manage that shit? Is this unpacking all resource files, copying the fixes over them, then compressing them back to .pak format or whatever the hell UE4 uses? How do you need 15 min to apply a 250 mb patch?

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

*Of course we'll have to wait and see how Obsidian handles Outer Worlds

 

[Curratum]

Can't be bothered to rephrase and type this all up again, quoting what I posted in the Steam Patch 1 feedback thread:

I understand the focus of the patch was not performance but ...

Performance is still embarrassing. Load times are a little better but framerates are abysmal, and it has nothing to do with settings, but more with a massive mishandling of the engine.
Even with resolution scaling all the way down and everything on low, I can't go above 30-35 fps on an R9 380 4gb, playing at just 900p.

Framerates are very inconsistent, jumping up and down even without moving the viewport, erratic frame dips and climbs from the teens to 30-something, horrible frame pacing, freezes.
If this is not fixed by Patch 2, I'm afraid you guys deserve every single shitty review you got so far, and them some more.

The game, in its current state, is an embarrassment.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

I'm just going to quote myself

now imagine if it were unity

thank christ its actually unreal, mishandled as it is

 

[cainus-lupus]

Unnecessarily large textures are stupid, yes. But they won't affect performance all that much unless you are running out of VRAM, which I don't think is happening for most users.
So whatever is wrong performance-wise with the graphics, I doubt textures are really to blame here.

I've worked once with one of "Witcher 1" guy on a game. There was great performance issue in "Boar's head" bar, always it dropped framerate to a crawl and they couldn't find a reason. Finally they've discovered that one of modelers put high polly version of boar head prop that had more polygons that the rest of the bar :D
Accidents happen, especially when you work with fairly new crew.

 

[Roguey]

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

I'm just going to quote myself

now imagine if it were unity

thank christ its actually unreal, mishandled as it is

Strong disagreement. ineptile actually shipped two not-completely-horrible-engine-wise RPGs with Unity, so a third one would have turned out decent enough, given their experience with it. BT4 seems to be plagued with "programmers trying to figure out new tech" issues.

 

[BEvers]

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

Speaking of which, the new Wasteland 2 Switch port is also swamped with technical problems.

 

[newtmonkey]

The performance is really bizarre. If I set everything to LOW I get MAYBE 5-10 fps extra over everything set to HIGH, depending on the area, but it of course looks about a million times worse.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

I'm just going to quote myself

now imagine if it were unity

thank christ its actually unreal, mishandled as it is

Strong disagreement. ineptile actually shipped two not-completely-horrible-engine-wise RPGs with Unity, so a third one would have turned out decent enough, given their experience with it. BT4 seems to be plagued with "programmers trying to figure out new tech" issues.

Yup. It should have been isometric dungeon romp in Unity. Especially since weak market potential was evident already in the campaign. Re-use WL2 or TTON technology, focus on improving the combat, add lots of puzzles, add that wonderful soundtrack, and you've got yourself a really solid game without stretching the budget 5 times over only to achieve bug ridden mediocrity.

 

[theSavant]

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

I'm just going to quote myself

now imagine if it were unity

thank christ its actually unreal, mishandled as it is

Strong disagreement. ineptile actually shipped two not-completely-horrible-engine-wise RPGs with Unity, so a third one would have turned out decent enough, given their experience with it. BT4 seems to be plagued with "programmers trying to figure out new tech" issues.

Fully agreed.

Also the graphics couldn't have been much worse anyways if they had chosen Unity. The character models look like 2009 artwork at best, and Unity is capable enough for that.
Also Unity is a game engine that works best with small-medium-sized level hubs compared to open world - which is exactly what BT4 is. The performance couldn't have been much worse either (MMX was more open world or giant map in comparison)

I don't get, why they didn't build upon their experience. It's almost as if every choice made for BT4 went the wrong way...
- hey, we must use Unreal Engine, because Unreal Engine is a name which alone will give us success
- hey, we must attract hipsters, casuals, and make animu, weaboo, Skyrim, WoW cardgame mix
- hey, we must be build a new studio first

and the result is: "hey"... what have you done I'm getting headaches...


PS: this is exactly what gives BT4 or the blobbers genre a bad name. By doing too many experiments at once instead of building upon a foundation and making minor increments, messing it up is almost implicated. Why didn't they take these risks with a successor of an already established game? I.e. for Wasteland3 (which builds upon Wasteland2)? Nope. Wasteland 3 is still Unity Engine. No taking risks with Unreal Engine. They didn't build a new studio for it. They didn't delay it. They only make a handful increments in gameplay.
But BT4 got all the shit. All the heavy load was put on BT4. Which eventually broke it... who would have thought? (although I can say this in hindsight, in the first year of the kickstarter these thoughts actually crossed my mind. The whole manner the project was approached felt wrong).

 

[cainus-lupus]

The performance is really bizarre. If I set everything to LOW I get MAYBE 5-10 fps extra over everything set to HIGH, depending on the area, but it of course looks about a million times worse.

It can happen if they screw up assets or shaders, maybe some scripts. Then game works good until offending element is shown, killing your FPS. Settings won't help you much then because shadows, AA etc. are not the bottleneck here.
Good information is - after they sit down checking it object by object it should be easy to fix. Especially if players tells them where/when those hiccups occurs.

 

[fantadomat]

The only settings that actually affect performance are the shadow setting, the ambient occlusion checkmark and lowering (or raising) screen percentage. Everything else can safely be left on high/ultra, with possible exception of view distance.

EDIT: of course it goes without saying that with shadows on low and AO disabled the game looks absolutely terrible, worse than Oblivion.

I agree with you. I posted screenshot on medium and it runned like shit. After i killed the shadows the game runs well on ultra textures with AA on. I looks decent and it runs ok.

newtmonkey turn off the shadows and the game will run better.

 

[agris]

These are the guys who created a 1 page PDF that weighed in at 100mb. Some kind of enlargement spell at play I assume.

Holy shit, how is the "Four Rewards Card" a 100 mb pdf? It's a single power point slide converted to pdf! It doesn't even have an insane DPI, it pixelates easily.

 

[Cross]

Only inXile* would make one actually miss Unity.

I'm just going to quote myself

now imagine if it were unity

thank christ its actually unreal, mishandled as it is

Strong disagreement. ineptile actually shipped two not-completely-horrible-engine-wise RPGs with Unity, so a third one would have turned out decent enough, given their experience with it. BT4 seems to be plagued with "programmers trying to figure out new tech" issues.

That's some interesting revisionist history. Both WL2 and T:ToN ran far worse than they had any reason to considering how they looked (e.g. T:ToN was unplayable on the same laptop I used to play PoE, and somehow still looked worse). If the same people who coded those games were in charge of of a Unity-based BT4 (which, as a first-person 'full' 3D game, is inherently more demanding), I doubt it would have been well optimized, or at least not much more than the current game.

It's a moot point anyway, since the development of this game was apparently outsourced to New Orleans, so it's not as if InXile could have leveraged their experience with Unity even if they wanted to.

 

[agris]

(e.g. T:ToN was unplayable on the same laptop I used to play PoE, and somehow still looked worse)..

It's true, Numanuma ran like a dog on release as well. I was shocked.

 

[Roguey]

Both WL2 and T:ToN ran far worse than they had any reason to considering how they looked

True, but better than BT4. My 2012 rig ran them both fine. I'm not so certain that BT4 would be more demanding than Wasteland 2, which was also fully 3D.

It's a moot point anyway, since the development of this game was apparently outsourced to New Orleans, so it's not as if InXile could have leveraged their experience with Unity even if they wanted to.

Did inXile's programmers really jump straight from ToN to Wasteland 3? Something to look up when someone updates mobygames with the credits.

Even if that is the case, they still get some benefit from not having to build everything from scratch.

 

[agris]

aweigh can you riddle me this? I want to use your advice and run BT4 in my native 2560x1600 resolution for borderless fullscreen window reasons, but have the renderer scaled to 1920x1200 because I don't possess a super computer. I assume I use ResolutionDownscalePercentage and not sg.ResolutionQuality because ResolutionDownscalePercentage is what changes when you move the in-game slider.

So, because this in an inXile game, the slider percentages don't map onto the ResolutionDownscalePercentage values 1:1. For example, ResolutionDownscalePercentage=56.25 puts the in-game slider at 12%. So here's my question: how do these percentages work? Don't even worry with what the in-game slider shows, who knows what drugs the UI coders were on, lets work with what the engine sees aka ResolutionDownscalePercentage.

Does this percentage work off of the linear screen coordinates, i.e. 1920/2560 = 0.75, or on the area of the screen, i.e. (1920x1200)/(2560x1600) = 0.5625? Neither value gives me the same performance boost I get from setting the scale to 100%, and running the game in full screen 1920x1200 - which, if I understood your previous posts correctly, it should. Also, when running in scaled mode, the game is significantly blurrier than full screen 1920, despite being the non-native resolution.

 

[biggestboss]

I really want to buy this game despite every force in the universe implying that doing so would be an awful decision. I have a question for those who are playing: how linear is the game? All the footage of the game that I've seen so far makes it look like you're very much just going through steps for everything.

 

[unfairlight]

My hot extreme money saving tiPPP of the day if you want to buy something but hesitate is pirating it. Piracy is never wrong and everyone who says it is is a cuck. Fact.

 

[ProphetSword]

I really want to buy this game despite every force in the universe implying that doing so would be an awful decision. I have a question for those who are playing: how linear is the game? All the footage of the game that I've seen so far makes it look like you're very much just going through steps for everything.

So far, it is extremely linear. There are probably people who are much further along than I am (currently in Kylearan's Tower Basement), so they may be able to give a better indication about if it opens up afterwards. Truly, at this point, buying this game is a terrible decision. I keep wanting to love it, but everything about it is just awful and an experience in utter frustration (and I'm not even having all frame rate issues that others seem to be having, plays just fine on my laptop...it's everything else that sucks).

Save your money, that's my advice. Wish I could go back in time and give myself the same advice.

Pick it up on a huge sale or in a bundle down the road if you're really interested.

 

[Belegarsson]

Gentlemen, may I ask why...

... dwarfs in this game aren't short...

... and has no beard...

... and generally look like blue waffle cosplaying orc?

 

[fantadomat]

Gentlemen, may I ask why...

... dwarfs in this game aren't short...

... and has no beard...

... and generally look like blue waffle cosplaying orc?

The same reason why elfs are all green except the head.

 

[TT1]

Beside bugs, is there anything made by InXile in this game? Puzzles, PR, support, portability... how many contractors are in this game?

 

[aweigh]

agris

I have been playing around with this myself because this is the first UE4 game I've played where the numerical value in the .ini setting doesn't correlate 1:1 with the in-game value. For example I'm currently using a numerical value of 80 in the .ini file which translates to 58% in-game slider. Sorry I can't be of more help with this one.

EDIT: Also I assume your monitor is 16:10 then? That's the one that has 1980x1200 as native, and this should be the sharpest looking resolution you can use. You should always scale your native resolution down using downsampling/upscaling/whatever instead of changing the rez from your native; only change your native rez if there is simply no other way, like the game doesn't offer any options for this kind of thing.

When you sample down or up nvidia cards (and I assume AMD cards as well) use a special kind of bilinear filtering which is why you get a softer look, and sometimes if the game specifies it (most UE4 games do) then it will instead use whatever filtering method for up/downsampling they coded into the game. I believe the highest quality one UE4 uses is bicubic something or other.

So y eah, it is different from simply changing your actual resolution since changing your actual resolution doesn't utilize any digilta filter, however sampling is better 100% of the time for the mere reason that it doesn't affect 2D elements / UI elements (which changing the monitor rez does).

 

[turkishronin]

How's the combat speed? Is there options to speed up the fighting animation or just skip it?