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

[Ulrox]

As an obsessive fanboy, I think we should all talk about how amazing this game is, and why fargo is the salvation of mankind.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I'm reading the discussions on steam right now. My favourites so far are "Why is the game so ugly?" and "is this really bad?". Lots of butthurt and drama going on.

I was honestly shocked after seeing the game in action now. comparing this to trailers/videos prior to release is quite frankly bizzare.

when they released that trailer, i was like : nice, my kickstarter money is going to be worth it. very sad now.

Even if I ignore everything else, I just cant wrap my head around the fact that this is a UE4 game which looks like it was made in 2008. How is it humanly possible to make UE4 look so bad?

It looks terrible.

Wow, another con dev to add to my avoid list.

Completely agree with you, it looks like developers just lied to us in this trailer.

nah man, as much as i liked Wasteland 2 this here is just a scam.

Oh yeah, they have a patch road map and they appreciate your beta feedback, unlike the actual backer beta (and alpha) feedback, which they have pretty much ignored. Hence the sad state of the game.

I'm always amazed when people complain about the graphics not living up to prerelease video's/screenshots. I noticed it immediately, saw that the characters were like beefed up Oblivion characters (barely) and moved on.

What a terrible flop. I could not imagine that this VERY VERY VERY LONG, backing project could end up this bad.

damn im sad now i regret buying it but i should have waited since it is inexile we are talkin about and i don't really trust them too much

I've watched a full let's play from the very beginning and it looks atrociously shallow and unfinished at this point.

The game is very bad. Its buggy, graphical inferior to anything released in the last 5 years, combat is designed badly(u have people do nothing the entire phase of combat), slow loading, makes people physically sick thanks to bad FOV and many other bad traits. But the number one reason its bad is because they copied a card game design and admitted to it. This is hearthstone 2.0 but thats an insult to hearthstone. This isn't an RPG, its a card game and to pay for its development they kickstarted it with the Bard's Tale name.....marketing genius. They had to make a roadmap to fix all the bugs....which were identified years ago but ignored.

going through some of the comments on the rockpapershotgun forumthread for the game and it appears that the game wasn't even created by the veterans in the company: Instead it was appearantly created by a newly started subdivision of the company of new people?

Would certainly explain why it has zero to do with the originals and in general is a clusterfu** of design decisions that is more remniscent of a checkmark list without thought going into it. The "we need to turn in the papers tomorrow! let's start on them tonigh!" feeling certainly doesn't get lessened if this is true.

Eiserg have been on a crusade to de-legitimize any complaint that have been uttered towards the game. I am starting to suspect the overwhelming backpadding from a few like this caused the devs to tottally ignore the myriads of complaints that were comming from others. Maybe because it is always more fun to get praise than to sit down and accept hard criticism. The effect is the crapped out launch where most of the things beta testers told was a problem are still there unchanged. the few things they did change they also seemed to do without really reading what testers wrote (like: free respecs at any point is not a good design, you need to limit it", devs solution: No respecs at all, which people are now complaining about).

 

[Great Deceiver]

It's a very common kind of mistake that developers make when they're trying to promote a product that was essentially made for a niche audience. They try to attract a broader market by overemphasizing ancillary features (like graphics), which they know they can't possibly be competitive on against the huge budget popamole games in the market today. Also, voice acting, and all that sort of fluff that the core audience of the game doesn't give a shit about (even if some of them feel it's a nice bonus) - this all means pulling resources from truly important things such as Q&A and elementary bug testing.

Therefore, it's entirely predictable that this broader audience they have tried so hard to capture with their misguided marketing campaign will turn on them when they realize that these superficial, ancillary features are not what they expected (being used to glitzy bling from so-called AAA games), because they don't give two shits about actual gameplay (which, in BT4's case, is actually pretty good).

On the other hand, the original, niche audience that the game was ostensibly made for is also disappointed because core features of the game were sacrificed to make room for ancillary features - i.e. bugs, bad performance on less capable machines (oldfags more often than not can't be arsed to upgrade their shit more than once in five years), systems that although promising aren't fully fleshed out and seem quite dumb when you think about them, etc.

This sort of fuckup falls squarely on the producer. It's about the (mis)allocation of scarce resources.

 

[felipepepe]

The weird thing is that the game isn't ugly, it's inconsistent. There's some things that's very high quality (mostly things they showed in the trailers, like the goblins) and some things that look like crap, like the NPC models.

I'm willing to bet that they were made by very different teams under very different circumstances... and budgets.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I don't think it looks bad at all (terrible NPCs being the exception, but that doesn't really matter that much). The environments are quite atmospheric and monsters look cool for the most part. There's a lot of outsourcing in game development these days so the variation in quality is understandable.

However, they made a very crucial mistake in starting opening the game in what is probably its worst-looking area by far. It's very optimistic to think that the general popamole audience will give you the benefit of the doubt and play past the 2-hour refund window to see something better. In today's market, first impressions are everything, especially when you consider the powerful incentive of Steam's refund window.

 

[Morkar Left]

The game fails because

1. butchered release with lots of technical difficulties
2. some rather bad looking npc models (not such a big problem, just out of proportion because of 1.) and no experience how to properly handle a 3d engine
3. it didn't live up to the expectation of rpg fans thanks to some suboptimal design decisions / ignorance of what people expect to be in rpgs (And I'm not talking about 50 year old butthurt fanboys of BT1 who want the same game again but somehow missed the remastered version)

If it weren't for those things the game would have probably sold at least half as much as Grimrock 1 and received praise all over the internet.

The weird thing is that the game isn't ugly, it's inconsistent. There's some things that's very high quality (mostly things they showed in the trailers, like the goblins) and some things that look like crap, like the NPC models.

I'm willing to bet that they were made by very different teams under very different circumstances... and budgets.

I guess the npc models were just bought from some 3d store and slightly modified (some scottish stuff added). Maybe from the unity asset store and just took over to UE4, someone should check this out.

A lot of assets seem to come from some generic 3d models you can buy in a store, too. It just a lot better looking there because human 3d models are really difficult to make (especially with animations).

The goblins, trow and other unique models are handcrafted together with most of the spell animations for the game and probably belong to the most expensive assets of the game.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Politician Thanks for the steam drama, things settled down here, it's getting boring.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah the frustrating thing is that while Torment was pile of garbage beyond redemption, with BT4 there is actually a good game in there, hidden under all the mess. The core dungeon crawler - exploration, combat, puzzles, is quite good, the soundtrack is great, it's just other shit dragging it down.

Also Morkar has a point. Your average Steam buyer expects a specific sets of features from an RPG, a Bioware formula basically. They want their highly customization character models so they can make pretty waifu to masturbate to, they want their quirky romancable companions. Deviate from that set at your own peril.

And you know. Some of the contentious features are not a result of some mythical consolization and peddling to mass market, but they came from our own fan feedback. Zombra is apparently single-handedly responsible for lack of respecs, although I agree with him that respecs are an abomination that has no place in something aspiring to be a hardcore RPG. But it's causing a lot of butthurt on Steam. Same with save system, which a lot of old heads on official forum wanted to be more restrictive.

 

[Darth Canoli]

IHaveHugeNick
You don't give people what they want, you give them what they need.

Besides, restrictions like this are always going to backfire, if respec is available, you can avoid to use it, same for saves, but if it's not allowed, you're fucked if you want more flexibility or if you want to stop playing whenever you want, like it's supposed to be in a modern PC RPG.

 

[Shadenuat]

They just had to do good presentation (rule #1) and make game *work*. If you can't do even that doesn't matter what is there hidden under the pile of bugs.

 

[Mortmal]

Is it weird to anyone else to see these quick post-release patches fixing huge things? "Oh, now we're going to patch framerate so the game can run. We didn't bother to do that in the last 3 years but since feedback indicates players want the game to run we will patch that in by next week."

It must be some clever anti piracy schème...

Envoyé de mon Redmi Note 5A en utilisant Tapatalk

 

[fantadomat]

I just downloaded the patch...

The so called fix for the game breaking bug is that it won't happen to people in the future while all those that got it and have no back up save should start over. I am trully impressed how bad their programmers are,even i with the help of google will manage to make a trigger that reset the quest triggers and then trigger all the triggers until the one you are on,thus making the quest progress normally. I mean,this is next level of incompetence,is their programmer a former rugby player? They could have made it so that it just ignores the other trigger and the npc is spawned. Fargo is truly shitty retard,hope their whole company go down and burn to ashes....with all the devs inside.


PS:Fargo your wife is fucking the handy man!

 

[Serus]

IHaveHugeNick
You don't give people what they want, you give them what they need.

Besides, restrictions like this are always going to backfire, if respec is available, you can avoid to use it, same for saves, but if it's not allowed, you're fucked if you want more flexibility or if you want to stop playing whenever you want, like it's supposed to be in a modern PC RPG.

You're wrong about that. If you make a significant design decision (for example saving everywhere vs limited saves) then you design your game around it - or at least you are supposed to. The player can't just "avoid" it because the whole gameplay is (should be) balanced aroundd said design choice. Think of (decent) permadeth games vs multiple saves games. The former aren't simply the same games as the latter ones minus the ability to save. They're different games, designed and playing differently.
I'm not saying that BT4's gameplay is well designed around its save system - I wouldn't know, maybe it's not and in this case it wouldn't matter. But as general rule, what you're saying is incorrect.

 

[J_C]

Inxile had one job, to polish the game up to release. There are 2 kind of indie games: one is a very low budget game, which has decade old graphics, and only attracts the niche. This game can afford to be a bit buggy at release, because people see that it is a low budget game. This is Grimoire.

The other type which has quite a lot of marketing, it has multi million dollar budget and actually looks pretty good on screenshots and trailers. This game attracts a wider audiance, which wants a polished game on release. This is BT4. Brian should have known that for this wider audiance, they had to polish the game. They have nobody else to blame than themselves. I wish them luck, and I hope they can iron out the bugs in a few months.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Politician Thanks for the steam drama, things settled down here, it's getting boring.

Backers crying in the InXile forums. They feel betrayed:

So you can imagine that my expctations toward the game have been quite high. And why not, what could go wrong? InXile has just finished a nothing less but fantastic Wateland 2, where it kept the spirit of the old Wasteland and brought me a and my friends many fantastic hours of gameplay and "remembering the good old times". Played Wasteland 2 to the end 3 times already, being now in mid of 4th time, just a great game. So with InXile we have a good studio for Bards Tale IV, a good example on how it can be done (Wasteland 2), lots of backers and money - nothing can go wrong, right?

Then, yesterday evening, my friend an me start to play the game. Unbelievable, this is sooo wrong. Running around with predefined characters like in a shooter game for kiddies, really? We were running around for a good 4 hours, collected 4 Chars and were able to make only 1 on our own. Mercenary Tokens, really? What the hell were Devs thinking? You develop Part 4 of a fantastic series of 3 games, which defined a whole game-genre of "creating a party of characters" and then you change it all to running around with pre-defined Chars? I mean, what the hell, even if someone wants to play like that to the end of the game, why would he ever start it a 2nd time? The speacial thing about legendary games like Bards Tale ist that you can play and finish it a hundred times. Each time you create a different Party and have new fun, thats Bards Tale. What were Devs thinking when changing that genre-defining feature in Bards Tale IV?

I am not making any connections between my fathers death and the game that this turned out to be, but i still felt this enormous betrayal, like when a good friend all of a sudden tells you he never liked you. So no, i for the most part am not able to accept what this became. For me, its not so much the Bugs, the Poor Optimization. For me, it is like you took one of my most cherished memories, and made it bad.

So, never expect me to argue reasonably when it comes to Bards Tale. Never. This is emotional.

Sorry for the rant, but i felt the need for people to understand why i am reacting the way i do.

That's an ocean of tears. Tragic.

 

[Morkar Left]

Also Morkar has a point. Your average Steam buyer expects a specific sets of features from an RPG, a Bioware formula basically. They want their highly customization character models so they can make pretty waifu to masturbate to, they want their quirky romancable companions. Deviate from that set at your own peril.

And you know. Some of the contentious features are not a result of some mythical consolization and peddling to mass market, but they came from our own fan feedback. Zombra is apparently single-handedly responsible for lack of respecs, although I agree with him that respecs are an abomination that has no place in something aspiring to be a hardcore RPG. But it's causing a lot of butthurt on Steam. Same with save system, which a lot of old heads on official forum wanted to be more restrictive.

Hey, that's actually not what I meant. I meant rpg players who are somehow familiar with old school rpgs (be it to have played BG EE, Grimrock or the latest Vogel game). More character variations, yes. Some kind of sensible respec and a good presentation of the skills and how they are supposed to work? Yes. Having some kind of alternative save system? Or at least make it clear that you can stop playing the game and come back at any time because it has a permasave when exiting the game? Yes. Having actual rpg mechanics as a baseline for character skills? Yes. But I don't think that the average steamer interested in this game expected romances at all nor did journos expect that.

EDIT: In fact basing the game on npcs you are taking along and forcefully limiting the number of party members at the beginning is actually the epitome of bioware gameplay. And it was a mistake to bring this in a game which is supposed to be partybased right from the start.

My impression is that they expected a turnbased Grimrock with some good rpg additions like npc dialogues and one or even more resting hubs and wilderness to explore. And regarding to turnbased they probably thought at Devinity OS or Darkest Dungeon like systems just in first person.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

It's a very common kind of mistake that developers make when they're trying to promote a product that was essentially made for a niche audience. They try to attract a broader market by overemphasizing ancillary features (like graphics), which they know they can't possibly be competitive on against the huge budget popamole games in the market today. Also, voice acting, and all that sort of fluff that the core audience of the game doesn't give a shit about (even if some of them feel it's a nice bonus) - this all means pulling resources from truly important things such as Q&A and elementary bug testing.

Therefore, it's entirely predictable that this broader audience they have tried so hard to capture with their misguided marketing campaign will turn on them when they realize that these superficial, ancillary features are not what they expected (being used to glitzy bling from so-called AAA games), because they don't give two shits about actual gameplay (which, in BT4's case, is actually pretty good).

On the other hand, the original, niche audience that the game was ostensibly made for is also disappointed because core features of the game were sacrificed to make room for ancillary features - i.e. bugs, bad performance on less capable machines (oldfags more often than not can't be arsed to upgrade their shit more than once in five years), systems that although promising aren't fully fleshed out and seem quite dumb when you think about them, etc.

This sort of fuckup falls squarely on the producer. It's about the (mis)allocation of scarce resources.

W2: the game has ugly graphics, but it tries to cater to its audience without compromises; mechanics are challenging to casual standards; tons of combat. 800k units sold.

ToN: costs more than the triple of W2; better graphics, but terrible purple prose and almost no combat; zero resource management. 170k units sold.

BT4: costs more than ToN and it’s a “look at me, I'm trying to be a Bethesda game now”; ignore it's core audience and it's own franchise. Sells like shit.

Can you see the pattern? The more you try to throw your audience under the bus to achieve a bigger audience, the worse are the results.

 

[Curratum]

At least now I understand all the "Hey, Popular Game That May Not Even Be an RPG fans! Do you like Said Popular Game? Then try Bard's Tale 4!" advertisements.

 

[DeepOcean]

Makes me wonder whether they just kicked it out thinking nobody will care about the glitches.

That would be bizarre, steam reviews are pretty forgiving to design issues but they have zero tolerance towards game stopping bugs and glitches, anyone that had even a little experience on browsing steam would notice this. When the average steam user see that mixed rating in there, it is automatic assumption of being some shit produced by a shovelware factory as most games on steam are.

 

[ArchAngel]

Codex is the last place I would expect people to be asking for respec option. There is one like in old games = start new game.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Can't stop playing BT4 I know I should wait for it to be polished, but I'm just having too much fun. Still not very far in, just got to the mage's tower dungeon, but it's a pretty decently designed dungeon I must say.

 

[fantadomat]

Can't stop playing BT4 I know I should wait for it to be polished, but I'm just having too much fun. Still not very far in, just got to the mage's tower dungeon, but it's a pretty decently designed dungeon I must say.

If only i didn't have a game breaking bug....

 

[BEvers]

Codex is the last place I would expect people to be asking for respec option. There is one like in old games = start new game.

Restarting a game halfway through can be great fun, provided the game isn't mostly linear, has some random encounters, and/or allows for full party creation

 

[Themadcow]

I for one am shocked at the poor sales. After all, removing all recognisable gameplay from the series and handing a beloved 30yr old franchise over to a new studio helmed by a bunch of milennials with fuck all knowledge of blobbers should = $$$$$$$$

Still at least these kids know how to use UE.

 

[Nyast]

Can't stop playing BT4 I know I should wait for it to be polished, but I'm just having too much fun. Still not very far in, just got to the mage's tower dungeon, but it's a pretty decently designed dungeon I must say.

If only i didn't have a game breaking bug....

I feel for you. That bug happens at like half of the game, you're like 25-30 hours in at that point. I was lucky to still have saves prior to the bug, so I only lost an hour. I certainly would be raging now if I didn't have saves and had to redo the whole game.

Maybe you can try contacting a dev and ask if they can manually fix your save ? I saw that happen for other games. Another person is trying to, see that thread and good luck:

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=19541