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

[agris]

How are people so unhappy about the save system, there's a totem literally every 5 minutes it feels like. Plus there's save on exit.

I don't get it.

 

[Darth Roxor]

How are people so unhappy about the save system, there's a totem literally every 5 minutes it feels like. Plus there's save on exit.

I don't get it.

people are retarded

while journos haven't actually played the game and are compiling 'reviews' based on angry steam forum posts left by retards

 

[Sinatar]

Yea I thought the save system was going to be a pain at first, but there are save totems *everywhere*, so many that they really should have just done save anywhere.

 

[Darth Roxor]

while scanning over the techraptor "review", i found this

In character creation, you pick between a number of races which each has their own passive ability. For example, dwarves can’t move in combat.

For example, dwarves can’t move in combat.

dwarves can’t move in combat.

this is probably all you need to know about the person who "played" the game

edit: actually holy fuck

You save at stone pillars, and some allow you to consume them for a lump sum of XP. When you interact with such a pillar, your mouse will hover over “consume” by default, which will inevitably lead you to mess this up at least once.

wow

Also i like how at one point he says that he was 'toward the end of the game' when there is NOTHING, and I do mean NOTHING specific in that entire revio that would hint at him playing it for longer than 3 hours - seriously, check it out with this in mind, whether it mentions anything specific. It just doesn't.

 

[agris]

Also i like how at one point he says that he was 'toward the end of the game' when there is NOTHING, and I do mean NOTHING specific in that entire revio that would hint at him playing it for longer than 3 hours - seriously, check it out with this in mind, whether it mentions anything specific. It just doesn't.

I haven't read the review, but I'm not surprised. It's apparently common practice, and has been for a long time now, to include saved games at various states of the game for the reviewers. So they can comment on the early-mid-late game without actually, you know, playing the game.

felipepepe I generally agree with your impressions, so I'm a bit confused as to what you find so off-putting about the save system. We're drowning in save totems, do you not use them? The only crash I've experienced is after defeating Mangar shade/shadow/lich/doppleChrist in Mangar's Tower, and there was a save point immediately prior to that. Was not a big deal.

 

[felipepepe]

felipepepe I generally agree with your impressions, so I'm a bit confused as to what you find so off-putting about the save system. We're drowning in save totems, do you not use them? The only crash I've experienced is after defeating Mangar shade/shadow/lich/doppleChrist in Mangar's Tower, and there was a save point immediately prior to that. Was not a big deal.

Because I still get a lot of shit like this:

Now I'm saving as often as I can, but I had over 10 crashes / game-breaking bugs so far. Plus one time when I was solving a block puzzle, pushed the wrong block and got stuck in a place I couldn't exit.

This + a save system that encourages you to NOT save the game is just retarded. Worst, the system adds nothing to the game. You can literally just use the save totems then go back after you finished the area and consume them.

 

[Zombra]

Plus one time when I was solving a block puzzle, pushed the wrong block and got stuck in a place I couldn't exit.

Was there one of those purple runes on the floor? I did the same thing in beta and never realized that the "rebuild stone" song moves blocks back where they started.

 

[ColCol]

felipepepe I generally agree with your impressions, so I'm a bit confused as to what you find so off-putting about the save system. We're drowning in save totems, do you not use them? The only crash I've experienced is after defeating Mangar shade/shadow/lich/doppleChrist in Mangar's Tower, and there was a save point immediately prior to that. Was not a big deal.

Because I still get a lot of shit like this:

Now I'm saving as often as I can, but I had over 10 crashes / game-breaking bugs so far. Plus one time when I was solving a block puzzle, pushed the wrong block and got stuck in a place I couldn't exit.

This + a save system that encourages you to NOT save the game is just retarded. Worst, the system adds nothing to the game. You can literally just use the save totems then go back after you finished the area and consume them.

Just crashed for me after encountering no save spots. Christ Btale you sure make loving you difficult.

 

[ColCol]

Ooh now I'm feeling salty, like the game, but would take pleasure in Inxile dying. Christ barely have any after work free time, fuck.

 

[RegionalHobo]

felipepepe I generally agree with your impressions, so I'm a bit confused as to what you find so off-putting about the save system. We're drowning in save totems, do you not use them? The only crash I've experienced is after defeating Mangar shade/shadow/lich/doppleChrist in Mangar's Tower, and there was a save point immediately prior to that. Was not a big deal.

Because I still get a lot of shit like this:

Now I'm saving as often as I can, but I had over 10 crashes / game-breaking bugs so far. Plus one time when I was solving a block puzzle, pushed the wrong block and got stuck in a place I couldn't exit.

This + a save system that encourages you to NOT save the game is just retarded. Worst, the system adds nothing to the game. You can literally just use the save totems then go back after you finished the area and consume them.

hey this actually looks a lot better than most scenarios in the game. seems like a dream or mind invasion kind of thing

 

[Agame]

Ooh now I'm feeling salty, like the game, but would take pleasure in Inxile dying. Christ barely have any after work free time, fuck.

After two giant lemons: Numanuma and The Musical Puzzle Adventures of Fyran Bargo, I dont think anyone really cares what happens to Inxile. If WL3 somehow turns out great I will be back on board though. But I am just a Fallout/Wasteland fanboy.

 

[MicoSelva]

I moved the game back to my HDD from the SSD, to avoid pointless writing of terabytes of data, 25GB at a time, with every patch.

I thought redownloading the whole game was a Unity thing, but no, it is just bad programming, since this is UE4. Also, Kingmaker manages small patches despite running on Unity - but it has crackerjack Russian programmers working on it, so there.

 

[Themadcow]

The waste in the software industry these days is insane. 3D simulation, trading, reputation levelling, ship upgrading, inventory, procedural generation and combat were all part of Elite in 1984 and it used just 22kb of memory.

inXile send 1 page 100MB PDF's.

*shakes arthritic fist at sky*

 

[BEvers]

The esteemed and impartial gentlemen at GameSpot reviewed the game and gave it a 4/10, deeming it too casual for their monocled RPG tastes:

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-bards-tale-iv-barrows-deep-review-lament/1900-6417002/

As Gamespot goes, so goes the nation: https://techraptor.net/content/bards-tale-iv-barrows-deep-review

I thought we might get three 4/10s in a row, but no! Destructoid comes to the rescue

https://www.destructoid.com/review-the-bard-s-tale-iv-barrows-deep-524737.phtml

A crappy day in Skara Brae

I'm confused as to the actual title of this game. On the Steam store page, it lists "Barrows Deep" at the end. But in my Steam library, it's just The Bard's Tale IV. Every time I go to type it out, I inevitably forget about that little subtitle. So let's just call it The Bard's Tale IV for now.

I've never played the previous Bard's Tale games, but the bard class has always been my top choice whenever it presents itself. Man, I was really excited when Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn offered a bard class, even if it was just a singing archer. So naturally, I became interested in this Kickstarted renaissance of a series based on bards and their tales.

Well, I can't say this is a tale worth hearing right now.

The Bard's Tale IV is an absolute mess. The framerate is all over the place, and bugs are constantly rearing their ugly head to impede or altogether halt progress. Sure, I'd love to save the world from the biggest baddie who has come from somewhere to ruin everything, but you're kidding yourself if you think it's worth slogging through the muck and the mire of The Bard's Tale IV to do so.

A lot of games will put their best act up front, especially long RPGs. This is absolutely not true with The Bard's Tale IV. While the combat and puzzles are interesting enough in their own right, starting in the dreary grey and brown town of Skara Brae is so...unimpressive. NPC models look like garbage and no NPC is ever moving around. Everyone just stands still in their NPC pose, waiting for the player to come up and speak with them. Even the idle animations are poorly constructed, with poses not perfectly looping and jumping from one position to the next.

Hell, even conversations feel stilted. For whatever reason, the player must hit "Continue" after everything an NPC says. This isn't an issue when they are speaking on their own, but it makes the back-and-forth feel so bizarre. Instead of giving the player their choices, they must hit Continue (which stops the NPC's voice track), and then the choices show up, and then they choose the desired option. It seems small, and it is, but it's just a constant frustrating oddity.

The writing is witty and often funny, and the lines are delivered well. Though again, many of the character models look ugly and have lifeless animations, creating a juxtaposition between what the player sees and what they hear.

I do want to point out that while Skara Brae and the character models are quite unimpressive, many of the environments are anything but. Maybe the point of Skara Brae is to make the player want to get the hell out as soon as possible, just to see something more beautiful. As a whole, the environments provide a stark contrast to the character models and prove that there are certainly talented artists on the team.

Exploring these worlds can be a blast, thanks to the often inventive and exciting puzzle designs. Sure, moving-block puzzles are nothing new, but the game quickly introduces more interesting designs that keep the player on their toes. These aren't always very clear, and color is sometimes a factor (shoutout to my colorblindies), but others are intentionally obtuse with hints excellently strewn about. Solving puzzles is easily the best gameplay element of The Bard's Tale IV.

Combat is nowhere near as interesting, but it's not awful. The developers were inspired by Hearthstone's gameplay, and it sure shows. Combat takes place on a 4x4 grid in turn-based fashion. Characters have a limited amount of abilities that can be equipped, so players must choose which ones to utilize in battle. The key to combat is balancing the resources available each turn. Bards can drink alcohol to use abilities, magic users need to acquire Spell Points, and everyone taps into the limited "Opportunity" resource for certain abilities.

Winning requires at least some thought, though once I discovered a winning strategy, battles played out essentially the same no matter what. It doesn't help that the AI is as dumb as a doorknob. Enemies are also limited by resources, and it seems as if they give no thought as to how to best spend them. Certain enemies will not move for turns as others try to wail away on the player.

Animations also tend to play out slowly, making actions feel delayed. Some moves are "channeled," meaning they take more than a single turn to execute. After the enemy takes its turn and those moves are to be used, there is usually this awkward and terrible delay where the moves simply don't happen yet. I had luck hovering over the character who needed to use the move to sort of...remind them, I guess? The whole process feels frustratingly clunky.

Plus, leveling up isn't exciting. Leveling grants a skill point that can be used in that character's skill tree. In the early going, it's neat -- new skills! Can't wait to use them! So cool! Then, for a while, characters will level up and be shoehorned into taking a node that adds +3 to some stat. Oh, that's good I guess. What's the next node? Oh...also a stat boost. Well, that skill at the bottom seems neat at least, even if it takes another 12 hours to unlock. There is also an entire tree dedicated to crafting that someone needs to take, so they more or less "waste" their skill points to unlock new crafting recipes.

Oh, and the inventory system is absolutely useless. Everything is just thrown into an inventory grid with no way to filter or sort or anything that RPGs have had for an eternity. If inventory was limited, then I could understand it; there is no need for a sorting option when you can carry relatively little. However The Bard's Tale IV allows for pages upon pages of inventory and there's a distinct lack of frequent merchant NPCs. After a while I basically gave up on the inventory entirely. I knew where my potions were, and if I looted something good, it was on the last page. Everything else? Who cares anymore.

The archaic save system also poses problems. There are locations around the world that allow the player to either save the game or "consume" the save point for extra experience, forgoing the save. The issue is that things like crashing or geometry bugs can halt progress, forcing the player to reload their last save. After I lost a chunk of progress the second time due to things out of my control, I never consumed a save point again out of straight-up fear that the game would crash and I would lose time. Plus, the experience boost is paltry for the risk that is being taken.

Okay, let's end on the most positive note there is: the music. Holy cow the music in The Bard's Tale IV is (appropriately) fantastic. Booting up the game and hearing "A summer's day in Skara Brae..." just brings a huge smile to my face. I'm at the point where I'll queue up The Bard's Tale music while playing other games -- it's that good. The Gaelic music fits perfectly with the game's theme and setting, and I'll often find myself stopping just to listen to some random NPC sing their little tune.

Listen, if you're reading this in the future, go and check the recent Steam reviews. My guess is that they will be rather positive on the game. A lot of the issues are tech-related: crashes, geometry bugs, load times, and framerate can all be fixed with patches. As of now? The interesting puzzles and fantastic music are not worth suffering through the bugs, lackluster models, and mediocre combat and skills. If your interest is piqued here, wishlist it and come back at a later time; I have no doubt that this game will reach its potential, but it's just not even close right now.

4.5
BELOW AVERAGE

 

[felipepepe]

I'm gonna echo Roxor here and say this dude probably didn't even play half of the game. No, tech is not the biggest issue with Bard's Tale, not BY FAR.

 

[agris]

Oh, I'm not defending it. The review was crap, and these guys clearly only feel empowered to bandwagon - I'm sure Oblivion and Fallout 3 were the best things ever, until a few years later they could wisely write about the limitations and sacrifices made by those games.. that Skyrim and Fallout 4 fixed, ofc.

 

[TT1]

Hey Fargo, I have $20 bucks here if you need.

 

[theSavant]

Is the game really 40 hours long? I thought I could make a "quick run" through the game on my shit computer, if it's only 20 hours long (doing the bare minimum quests). But if it's 40 hours, then it's too much of an eyesore. So how long did it take you guys?

 

[Reinhardt]

So how long did it take you guys?

Until first gamebreaking bug?

 

[BEvers]

 

[FeelTheRads]

Pepe sounds ready to set the world on fire.

 

[J_C]

Pepe sounds ready to set the world on fire.

 

[Infinitron]

I moved the game back to my HDD from the SSD, to avoid pointless writing of terabytes of data, 25GB at a time, with every patch.

I thought redownloading the whole game was a Unity thing, but no, it is just bad programming, since this is UE4. Also, Kingmaker manages small patches despite running on Unity - but it has crackerjack Russian programmers working on it, so there.

 

[MicoSelva]

Yeah, I noticed this correlation, but it is most likely a coincidence - I rarely visit Steam forums (not to mention inXile forums), but my guess is there are many complaints about the size of patches out there.

Pepe sounds ready to set the world on fire.

Some men want to watch the world burn, but not felipepepe, he just wants to start a flame in your heart.

 

[BEvers]

Strange how there's now a surge of reviews two weeks after release. Not a single one of these has been positive.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/games/review/the-bards-tale-iv-barrows-deep

The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep

There’s a pub you might stumble across some ways into The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep where you’ll find a writer scribbling in his notebook. He grumbles that he’s writing a world of his own to whisk him away from the troubles of the one where he currently resides. Skara Brae, the Scottish-flavored fantasy realm of the original Bard’s Tale trilogy, as well as this successor from inXile Entertainment, has seen better days: cultists in thrall to an ancient evil wander the countryside, and a fanatical human-supremacist religion persecutes elves, dwarves, and other races. The writer hopes to dodge conflict by creating an escapist fiction of his own, one that he insists contains a better place devoid of knights or necromancers and “dungeons or dragons.”

A fourth wall-adjacent setup like this is typical of the game’s sense of humor, where enemies in turn-based battles scream “Why do we wait?!” The writer and his work parallel the very role served by Barrows Deep, which lets its players unplug from the horror of their newsfeeds for a few hours with the promise of fantasy. The game makes a comedically incisive point: that escapist entertainment, whether it’s a video game or a book being written by a character in that video game, is still often riddled with conflict. It doesn’t eschew problems so much as reframe them in ways that make them easy to digest and triumph over. Similarities between injustice in the real world and in Skara Brae don’t go anywhere profound, but they’re not really meant to. Instead, the cultists and zealots exist to provide easily identifiable opposition in a context where if you gain enough levels and learn enough of the systems, you can triumph over the bad guys in simple, straightforward fashion.

Appropriate, then, for such a straightforward philosophy to come out of what is a very straightforward role-playing game, a callback to an older style of dungeon-crawling that funnels you along linear corridors, through enemies, and into puzzle rooms. Each location is limited and squared-off as if designed for the grid-based movement of the original trilogy. Though Barrows Deep offers complete freedom of motion, it still feels admirably disinterested in the more free-form approaches that dominate modern RPG design; your way forward is firmly on a narrow path, and you will stray from it only occasionally.

Although the game includes books to read on history and mythology, its focus is less on world-building than the simple, straightforward pleasure of its main mechanics: puzzles and combat. Puzzles in Barrows Deep are clever and occasionally challenging and, above all, quite frequent. You can play long stretches without fighting at all, which lends the block-pushing and fairy-chasing and circuit-building an equal sense of purpose. Puzzles fit in well with turn-based combat that, with a focus on positioning and strategic combos, often feels like a puzzle in itself. Fights accommodate some truly powerful mixes of the right skill buffs and equipment abilities that can outright bypass the limits placed on the game’s more devastating moves.

While it’s true that the puzzles and enemies change from one area to the next, each area is long enough for similarities to grow tedious. Puzzle solutions offer little variation, while battles against the same handful of enemies rarely, if ever, force you to deviate from your usual strategies. Characters can take only a handful of skills and a single item into battle, all of which must be changed individually if you want to experiment. There’s no way to create presets to easily swap between, and switching party members means traveling all the way to the game’s main hub across several insufferably long load screens. Worse, the lack of automatic inventory sorting makes it a nightmare to find equipment that complements new skillsets. Such limitations are meant to shave a daunting array of choices down to a more manageable number, but what they actually do is make the game straightforward and monotonous.

The inventory problem, at least, is set to be addressed. Barrows Deep launched in a messy state that’s only partially been smoothed over by post-release patches for various performance issues. There’s still a ramshackle quality to the game, what with its framerate stutters, lengthy load times, and delayed animations that prolong combat. InXile’s latest doesn’t necessarily feel incomplete, but there’s clear work left to be done, and how future fixes will improve the flow of the game—or if they will at all—is anyone’s guess. As of this writing, though, Barrows Deep is a shaky throwback that, despite occasional success in its stripped-down, straightforward approach, suggests that maybe simplicity and escapism has limitations of its own.

6/10