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

[Curratum]

Hope you brought your top-tier i7 and 2000-dollar GPU.

I'm playing BT4 on a 5 year old i5 3570k and a 2 and a half year old 1070, 40-60fps. Loadtimes were very slow on a mechanic HDD but I've since moved the game to a SSD and it's not that bad.

Hyperbole doesn't help anyone.

i5 3470, r9 380 4gb, barely holding on to 30 fps, constant drops and stuttering, at just 900p. Hardly hyperbole.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

t games start strong and lose steam past the mid-game, but BT4 is the opposite: the early areas kind of suck, then by mid game you'll have experienced a few decent ones, and by the end-game most areas are good ! Weird.

So it's just like Wasteland 2?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Ok,i must ask you guys. Why don't you like the first map,the undercity? It is dark and brooding,it have good soundtrack to go with it,it is focused mainly on exploration and have unique puzzles connected to exploration,it is mainly combat and no spam puzzles. It is serious question.

2 characters. No full party. No ability to explore/grind. Just walk in a straight line and fight gimped foes. Very boring. Reminded me of a smartphone game.

I'm not doubting that it gets better but I have so much other stuff to play my patience is just gone.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Hope you brought your top-tier i7 and 2000-dollar GPU.

I'm playing BT4 on a 5 year old i5 3570k and a 2 and a half year old 1070, 40-60fps. Loadtimes were very slow on a mechanic HDD but I've since moved the game to a SSD and it's not that bad.

Hyperbole doesn't help anyone.

i5 3470, r9 380 4gb, barely holding on to 30 fps, constant drops and stuttering, at just 900p. Hardly hyperbole.

It's a far cry from running a game at 30fps on a 500 dollar machine to suggesting the game can only run on a 'top tier i7 and a 2000 dollar GPU'.

 

[unfairlight]

If you like Pathfinder Kingmaker, you'll love The Bard's Tale IV!

 

[Jezal_k23]

If you like Minecraft, you'll love The Bard's Tale IV!

 

[BEvers]

They should have made those ads for Grimrock fans, since that's the game BT4 has the most in common with.

Perhaps they didn't think the Grimrock lovers were a big enough group to satisfy their sales targets

 

[Zeriel]

They should have made those ads for Grimrock fans, since that's the game BT4 has the most in common with.

Perhaps they didn't think the Grimrock lovers were a big enough group to satisfy their sales targets

"If you like blobbers, you WON'T like Bard's Tale 4!"

 

[Great Deceiver]

It's true that it doesn't play anything like a blobber, especially combat. However, I am enjoying it and I think there are some good ideas mixed with some crappy ones. It certainly took some effort to design the system, which has more in common with a tactical card battle game with a point system than anything else. I think the main negative point is that it plays very slowly - I'd like an option to disable animations altogether.

The exploration part is not that similar to Grimrock - puzzles are different (they remind me more of first person adventure games) and there's some environmental stuff such as grappling hook points, etc. that incentivize actually looking around. Too bad the rewards are shit most of the time, but it's a nice effort. Maps of actual dungeons have been well-designed so far.

If I had to compare it to Grimrock I'd compare it to Grimrock 2 - which I consider a superior game, but with inferior combat. It's odd because there's too much fighting in Grimrock 2 and perhaps too little fighting in BT4.

 

[BEvers]

Today provided a nice example of how player numbers can be affected by the release of a competitor. Here's BT4's graph for the past two days. Normally, every day looks roughly like yesterday, with a steady rise in the afternoon until about 19:30.

But today, at around 16:40, the player number suddenly began to flatten out, presumably because Pathfinder Kingmaker released at 17:00. If the graph had followed the normal trajectory, it should have reached a peak that was about 250-300 players higher. It seems to me that BT4 lost at least a quarter of its players to the Kingmaker release

 

[Roguey]

Wow, Pathfinder really did crater discussion of this. 15 pages in one day vs 2.

 

[BEvers]

Yeah, Brian is trying to create some movement on Twitter, but it's a ghost town there as well. #243 in the Steam rankings now.

 

[fantadomat]

Ok,i must ask you guys. Why don't you like the first map,the undercity? It is dark and brooding,it have good soundtrack to go with it,it is focused mainly on exploration and have unique puzzles connected to exploration,it is mainly combat and no spam puzzles. It is serious question.

2 characters. No full party. No ability to explore/grind. Just walk in a straight line and fight gimped foes. Very boring. Reminded me of a smartphone game.

I'm not doubting that it gets better but I have so much other stuff to play my patience is just gone.

Nigga that is like 10 minutes,it is like whining that BG2 makes you walk around alone until you free your cellmates...

 

[BEvers]

Sounds like good news for the people who don't want a respec mechanic:

 

[Gord]

Are you a bunch of wussies? Respec, pff. Back in the days the respec option was called "Start a new game".

In other news, I just finished the fight against Mangar's Shadow. Was pretty cool actually, as it had me experimenting with equipment and skills.
I had to change my loadout and tactics quite a bit in comparison to normal mobs to beat him.

 

[Roqua]

So you had it on 'normal' - Such a rookie move.

Seriously though - what RPG can you name where the actual combat/combat AI is not a cakewalk on normal these days?

AoD, Blackguards, Underrail, Grimoire (at the start at least), lots of them. I think having the game be good only when you put it on hard, and hard not being more hard, is one of the few valid criticisms of this game.

This trend really needs to stop. The popamoles and their philosophy have impacted this aspect of games far too significantly where it being normalized has to be fought back against.

 

[2house2fly]

If the game is good when you out it on hard, I don't see the problem with it not being good when its not on hard. Just put it on hard

 

[BEvers]

http://gamingtrend.com/feature/reviews/not-ready-for-showtime-the-bards-tale-iv-barrows-deep-review/

Not ready for showtime — The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep review

The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep was always in a precarious position. Spanning from 1985 to 1988, the three original Bard’s Tale games were classic dungeon crawlers, filled with challenging combat and devious traps. Since then, the series has mostly languished, with the exception of a few nebulous reboots and spinoffs. Still, The Bard’s Tale series is one most people are familiar with, at least as a name they heard in passing at a vintage game store once.

With such a long gap between installments, developer inXile had a lot of decisions to make about which aspects of the game they should modernize and which should remain untouched, as monuments to a bygone era. And well, they certainly made some decisions. To be blunt, The Bard’s Tale IV is a ragged, janky mess. While it brings some interesting innovations to the dungeon crawler (most notably its clever turn-based battle system), none of them outshine what’s being done by other games in the genre’s recent renaissance. They’re certainly not enough to overshadow some of the bafflingly old-fashioned parts of the game’s design, like its limited save system and terrible, unsortable inventory. And even if the game’s high points weren’t already completely outweighed by its flaws, the legion of sometimes game-breaking bugs that infest it would dash any hope of enjoyment for even the most nostalgia-crazed fan.

The Bard’s Tale IV does offer a lot to like, at least for a while. You can read our impressions of the game’s first eight hours for a more detailed look, but suffice it to say that the game starts out as a mostly fun journey through an underground city full of secrets and side quests for the player to discover. Playing either as Melody the Bard or a self-created character (made with a very limited character creation system), you explore the city of Skara Brae from a first-person perspective to discover why the local church has suddenly launched an fantasy-racist Inquisition and burned down your favorite bar. To do so, you’ll assemble a fairly bland adventuring party to get into fights and solve the innumerable puzzles that the people of this world have inexplicably scattered around. After retreating to the sewers of Skara Brae to plot your escape from the city, you’ll travel through elven forests, cursed ruins, snowy Nordic-ish villages and even the obligatory lava level in order to — well, frankly I lost track of what I was doing about halfway through. Though its environments often look great, the levels are always just a series of tight, linear corridors, even when they’re painted to look like a wild forest or snow-capped mountain.

The story is pure fantasy fluff, serving as little more than a shove out the door to get you on your way. You’re on the trail of an Ancient Evil, who turns out to be controlled by a different Ancient Evil, who is protected by worshippers of another Ancient Evil, but then — imagine my shock — yet another Ancient Evil turns up to thwart you when you get too close! Despite the plot being impossible to maintain interest in or even remember, the writing itself isn’t bad. You’ll read and hear plenty of clever or clever-ish dialogue from townsfolk — often far more than you want to. Though the background characters usually look like they were rejected from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for excessive lumpiness, their dialogue is accompanied by voice acting that’s lively and performative enough to distract you from the bits that aren’t particularly good. Your own party members are more henchmen than characters. When they speak up, it’s mainly to snipe at each other in a way that’s meant to approximate witty banter, but just made me question why this group of people who absolutely hate each other stick together at all.

Fortunately, murky motivations have never been enough to stop video game heroes from a righteous killing spree, and that’s where The Bard’s Tale IV most consistently succeeds. When you encounter an enemy in your first-person exploration, you’ll have the chance to initiate a sneak attack, but they’ll get the same opportunity if they see you first. Combat is difficult, sometimes frustratingly so, and letting your enemies get the first strike can immediately shatter any chance of coming out of the fight alive. When a battle begins, you’ll shift to a third-person view behind your party as they line up on a 4×4 grid with their opponents across from them. From there, the two teams take turns thrashing each other until one comes out on top. On your turn, you use a pool of opportunity points shared between your characters to move and attack. The pool is quite limited to start, giving you only one or two chances to attack per turn, but it grows as you progress through quests and gain skills. You also have plenty of ways to conserve or recover points through abilities or equipment that grant free movement or attacks. Casters also have their own pools of spell points that they gain either through meditation (for the Practitioner class), or getting shit-faced (for Bards). Wisely using your opportunity and spell points is key to combat, and it’s thrilling to set up a combo with characters granting each other free attacks and playing off debuffed enemies to stretch your turn as far as you can.

The combat system is far from perfect, though. Outside of battle, you choose a deck of abilities that you unlock by leveling up. You can only take four such abilities into combat, and you can gain a few more from certain pieces of equipment. If you want to use items such as healing potions, they’ll also take up a gear slot. It leaves you tightly restricted in how you build your character, as certain abilities become absolutely necessary later in the game. You’ll need to equip armor-breaking abilities and attacks that can interrupt casting just to stand a chance, and healing items are near necessities, as there are very few other recovery options. Spellcasters are particularly hurt by this system, as you’re forced to choose just four abilities from their much larger collection of memorized spells. Oddly, my Bard was the one who had it the worst. Bard spells are focused on buffing and debuffing, and most are fairly situational. In order to have even half of the options I wanted at a time for my Bard, I had to leave her without any attacks at all. Bards can only gain spell points by drinking booze, and drinking too much stuns them for a turn, leaving them always feeling at a slight deficit. Working around these limitations can be fun, but it often feels like the game is laying out a bunch of fun toys for you to play with, then sneeringly pulling most of them away. While the game’s early combat challenges you to improvise your way through varied fights, in the end you’ll likely be stuck using the same loadout each time just to get around your enemies’ defenses and pull off the one strategy that always works.

Similarly, the game’s puzzles start off compelling and eventually become little more than time sinks. There are only about six basic puzzle types you’ll find throughout the game, with a few additional one-offs scattered throughout. Some are inspired, like rotating bird totems to frighten or entice fairies through mazes, but they grow old through sheer repetition. If you liked a puzzle the first time through, I hope you like it the 10th time, because you’ll be going back to the same well a lot throughout the game. There are hours-long chunks of the game where you’re solving increasingly complex versions of the same puzzle cut with breaks for combat, and at a certain point it just gets exhausting. One interesting thing about the puzzles is that you’re largely left to figure them out on your own. In a few instances, you’re given in-game signs or tutorial prompts that teach you the ropes, but usually you’ll just wander into a room with a bunch of weird contraptions in it and have to figure everything out for yourself. It’s a bold move that sometimes left me feeling a little lost, but having to figure out how the puzzles work rather than just how to solve them made me feel a lot more invested in them at the end. The game is also stuffed with entire dungeons worth of non-essential puzzles and riddles that you can skip completely over if you want to, though they’re usually worth investigating.

I certainly have quibbles with the combat and puzzles, but if those were my biggest problems, I would still call The Bard’s Tale IV a pretty damn good game. Unfortunately, the whole thing sits on an incredibly shaky foundation that’s just waiting to collapse. While the developers have put out a “patch roadmap” (straining the line between retail release and early access to its breaking point), the game in its current state is just riddled with problems. On the relatively minor end, it can’t maintain a consistent framerate if you’re doing anything more than looking at the ground no matter what graphics settings you use. More severely, the game is packed with bugs that can hobble you in combat. I’ve had armor pieces fail to apply their stats to my characters, items in my inventory not show up in combat, damage-over-time and delayed attacks refuse to trigger, and abilities that cause self-damage reduce characters from full health to one HP regardless of how much damage they’re supposed to do. Early on, I had to restart several times when battles just didn’t end when the last enemy was slain. That hasn’t happened since the retail release hit, so it may have been fixed, but it’s been replaced by full crashes mid-battle, when walking through certain areas, and once during a loading screen.

To make matters even worse, The Bard’s Tale IV clings to an archaic save system. You can only save your progress at designated shrines scattered around the map, and you can’t re-activate a shrine you’ve saved at once until you first use another shrine. This is bad enough when you get one-shotted in an unexpectedly difficult battle after a long series of puzzles, but it’s reason enough to uninstall the game when you’re forced to backtrack because the game crashed or you got stuck in a wall.

Stacking The Bard’s Tale IV’s many progress-erasing bugs with its inadequate save system, you get to the game’s core problem: it simply doesn’t reward you for the time you put into it. Even if you don’t have to replay sections because of a crash, you may still have to do it because you lost a battle with enemies 10 times tougher than the rest in the area, or because the abilities and equipment you spent in-game resources and real-world time to earn don’t work right. It’s a game that takes 30 to 40 hours to complete, but doesn’t offer any compelling reason to finish and often asks you to repeat slight variations on the same task for hours on end. There is a good game somewhere at the center of The Bard’s Tale IV, with exciting combat and challenging puzzles, but it’s lost under layers of drudgery and instability.

The Bard’s Tale IV could be a fun — but seriously flawed — game if it weren’t hamstrung by technical problems. Its frequent framerate drops, bugged combat abilities, and crashes are compounded by an archaic save system that makes it far too easy to lose progress. Though it features some great combat and challenging puzzles, they’re not without their own flaws, and become extremely repetitive over the game’s 30–40-hour playtime.

5/10

 

[biggestboss]

Literally waiting with bated breath to convert Kingmaker money into Fargo money

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I'm playing BT4 on a 5 year old i5 3570k and a 2 and a half year old 1070, 40-60fps. Loadtimes were very slow on a mechanic HDD but I've since moved the game to a SSD and it's not that bad.

Hyperbole doesn't help anyone.

Yes, I've just moved my installation of BT4 to my SSD, and it now loads even the larger levels in a few seconds. Though this won't be an option for those limited to potato computers.

 

[newtmonkey]

I'm about 14 hours into BT4, though this included the time that I played before I refunded and then later rebought the game to give it a second chance.

The performance is all over the place, but I am running on a "gaming" laptop that was fairly high end when I got it 1.5 years ago and I get between 30-60 fps in most areas on all Ultra settings (excepts shadows down to High). Sometimes you'll run into an area where seemingly nothing is going on and the fps plummets to 20 fps, which is crazy, but 30-60 fps is not bad at all for an RPG; even at 30 fps it's smooth and responsive, so there's that.

If I were to redesign the game to give it a better first impression, I'd just have it start in the undercity straight away. You can get through the initial Skara Brae area very quickly, but the weird performance mixed with poor graphics and a bunch of NPCs just standing around running through their animation cycles leaves a poor first impression. I mean, the undercity itself is basically a tutorial, but unlike with Skara Brae above, you get a nice mix of combat and puzzles (and at least get to make your own character by that point). I really do think that the developers added the initial Skara Brae section at the last minute.

After the undercity, the game just gets better and better, and all these 0.2 hour reviews on Steam are total nonsense (except for those that simply could not play the game due to bugs etc of course). The reviews whining about performance are absurd; yeah, it's not optimized well, but you also don't need 60fps locked at all times on all ultra settings for this kind of game. There's obviously nothing wrong with the reviews complaining that the game is nothing like BT1-3 (they also typically are by people that have at least put in 10 hours or so). I went in expecting something similar to BT1-3, so I understand that. But once I set that aside I began to enjoy it for what it is, and it's fine. As a simple blobber made to "update" the subgenre for the modern age, I would rate it much higher than M&MX in terms of combat, puzzles, environments/dungeons (especially), and even "atmosphere" (of which M&MX had absolutely zero).

 

[ColCol]

I don't see why people need respec when they give you so many mercenary tokens......


I'm still enjoying the game like 12-13 hours in. It's sad that they fucked themselves with a shit release and a horrible starting area.

 

[newtmonkey]

I don't see why people need respec when they give you so many mercenary tokens......

This is a very good point. I've made 5 characters so far (including starting character) and still have several tokens left only 14 hours in. When you make a new character they are leveled to around your current party level and you can spend all the skill points on whatever you want. The mercenary token are basically respec tokens, in a sense.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The best ever artistic rendition of the notorious AD&D spell Bigby's Fiery Pimp Slap.

 

[Bohr]

The game is increasing its Steam rating by around 1% / day, now up to 52%. In two months it will be at 113% positive.

Just 10% behind Grimoire, which is pretty fucking harsh on Grimoire.

Not the only stat where it's closing in on Grimoire