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

[Biggus]

The numbers aren't pretty. Wonder if they'll have anyone left to do the next patch to fix the hotfix that fixed the patch?

 

[aweigh]

if only it had better combat it would've been a contender...

though even with a true combat system (instead of the card game shit) it still would've bombed on launch because of the horrible performance and plethora of bugs and stuff.

 

[newtmonkey]

The combat is not bad, it just takes 15 hours for it to finally get interesting (and then shortly becomes braindead).

There are two major issues with the game: the slow pace and the performance.

There's nothing that can be done about the slow pace. This is coming from someone that actually likes the puzzle/combat/exploration mix. It really takes a good 10-15 hours for the game to finally get interesting, where you feel are you actually building a unique party rather than just choosing the single optimal perk every level for each character.

The performance is simply nuts. inxile, to their credit, contacted me to gather info to possibly help performance issues, but it's simply nuts. I don't have a top of the line system, I use a "gaming" laptop because I also use it for work, but when I bought this thing a year ago it was simply top of the line. I can run notoriously unoptimized Fallout 4 on all ULTRA settings and I get 45-60 fps, with periodic drops to 30 fps. Dropping BT4 to all LOW settings, even dropping the resolution down to 1280x720, I still get sub 30 fps in some areas. But there's NOTHING HAPPENING in these areas, so I have no idea why the performance is so low. It's not like the game has complex AI or physics, so it's really a mystery.

On top of that, this is something people won't realize until WAY after the refund period. The first demanding area in the game is probably 15-20 hours in, depending on how thorough you are. The latest patch made it much worse for me, but even before then, I was getting 25-30fps in this area.

I would say the performance is the biggest issue with the game. The kind of people who are interested in this thing are not rocking top of the line hardware. I'm fine with turning settings down to low or whatever to get a nice framerate, and I am even fine with 25fps in busy areas. But when I am standing on a road looking at three trees with absolutely nothing going on, the fps should not drop to 15fps, that's just nuts.

 

[Gord]

though even with a true combat system (instead of the card game shit)

What exactly is it you consider so similar to card games , if I may ask?

 

[aweigh]

The fact that it uses the same mechanics? Devs did it intentionally, it's not a "secret".

https://www.gamecrate.com/preview-b...ep-shows-influence-hearthstone-and-room/19160

 

[Gord]

Maybe it's because the last card game I played was Gwent in Twitcher and Hearthstone is like 5 years ago, but to me mechanics seem quite different.
Exception being maybe the choice of equipment for bonuses and of skills (due to the 4 skills limit), if you want to consider this equivalent to the deck building of card games.
But thats imo too minor for bringing that up quite so often.

 

[theSavant]

The game is good, a very good blend of first-person exploration with 'crawler combat. I enjoyed the 30 hours I spent with it and will go back sometime after Kingmaker. It's a good game, stop hating on the great Brian Fargo!

Ooooookaaayyy? I don't believe you. It's reading more like this:

Praise praise praise! I played half of the game, but then threw it in the corner to play Kingmaker.

Enough said.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Ooooookaaayyy? I don't believe you. It's reading more like this:



Enough said.

To be fair, Kingmaker was more anticipated and more my genre (isometric CRPGs) than Bard's Tale. BTIV was good and I shall return to it later, but Kingmaker is going to eat up all of my gaming time right now. The game's just too good.

 

[J_C]

The numbers aren't pretty. Wonder if they'll have anyone left to do the next patch to fix the hotfix that fixed the patch?

Grimoire: 0.

 

[Bohr]

Grimoire: 0.

Sometimes the more prestigious titles are only appreciated by an elite few

 

[J_C]

Grimoire: 0.

Sometimes the more prestigious titles are only appreciated by an elite few

Haha, A Long Road Home > Grimoire! J_C, the ultimate indie developer!

 

[Themadcow]

BT4 now has only slightly more players on Steam than the BT1-3 Remasters, just 5 weeks after launch.

You have to look at the big decisions here, and most of them have been abysmal:

• Putting development in the hands of a young, inexperienced studio (inXile New Orleans) who clearly had little understanding of the BT series
• Going way, waaaay over the top on puzzles - never a massive feature of the series
• Significant restrictions on character classes and party composition - in a genre where fans can spend hours just mucking about with builds
• Making the starting area one of the ugliest and most boring in the game
• The performance and bugs. Sweet baby Jesus, what did they test on? Not to mention issues with motion sickness / FOV
• Combat that could be interesting, but marred by stupid enemy AI, lack of enemy diversity and plenty of "I WIN" buttons after the first third of the game (see skills)
• Lack of any kind of respec option (the beta testers simply suggested adding a cost, not removal...)
• Unbalanced loot tables / distribution that make the last half of the game pretty unrewarding from a gear point of view
• Choosing a save system that is ill matched to the rest of the game. It would have been OK for a combat/exploration focused game.
• Changing fundamental aspects of the lore around the BT series because... apparently Brian likes Scotland a lot

Chief among these though is putting the big design decisions in the hands of a team who were neither inspired or educated by the original Bards Tale games. It's strange when I watch the interviews with the team during the development process that the right things were being said "We don't want level up points to go into boring +% damage skills" (that's exactly what happened) or "We have this crazy puzzle designer who we have to hold back sometimes" (well, clearly not enough). Seems they just bit off more than they could chew.

 

[theSavant]

I saw a german review on youtube and found it pretty good. It's really only German, so if you don't understand it... (though it offers subtitles which can be autotranslated by youtube). He addressed all major issues.

The reviewer actually found the puzzles not that bothering, he actually found them good... but then in the comments' section:
> Some guy says: "that the huge amount of puzzles probably turns off replay value."
> Reviewer says: "that he actually wanted to replay the game with a 3-character-party, but then - considering he had to do all these puzzles again - dropped it."

Whew... inXile... good job, when even enthusiasts give up. Every attempt to replay is drowned by bad design decisions. What a shame. Did you even play your own game? Do you even like your own game?

I can also see myself playing the game only once and then never again. When I uninstalled the game some weeks ago (because of my bad computer), I coincidentally used GOG's Cloud-Save function for the first time. I never used Cloud-Saves before, because who needs this shit? Guess what, now I'm glad for it. So whenever I buy a new computer, I'll continue from there instead of starting anew, and be done with it earlier.

 

[Gord]

You have to look at the big decisions here, and most of them have been abysmal:

• Putting development in the hands of a young, inexperienced studio (inXile New Orleans) who clearly had little understanding of the BT series

[...] Chief among these though is putting the big design decisions in the hands of a team who were neither inspired or educated by the original Bards Tale games.

Actually I suspect that the studio got the task long after it was decided which way BT4 should or should not take. And the Kickstarter made it clear that it would likely not be super close to the original trilogy. I can kinda understand them, too. BT1-3 is a niche in an already niche genre. Who knows, maybe the whole BT1-3 Remastered project got born also out of bad conscience for deviating too much from the old formula? As a way to give something to the old fans?

• Significant restrictions on character classes and party composition - in a genre where fans can spend hours just mucking about with builds

In the genre yes, but not in the series. BT4 actually for most classes offers more possibilities for individual character building than the old trilogy.
Nevertheless, I do agree with your sentiments on many of the other points. I did mostly enjoy the game, but that doesn't mean that they didn't screw up many things there.

 

[Bohr]

But will there be puzzles at the door?

 

[Sacred82]

"I wanted to replay Grimrock but then doing the puzzles again turned me off"


gj tard

 

[theSavant]

So... when is that Jesus-Patch coming?

 

[BEvers]

Why I won't be finishing The Bard's Tale IV

This isn't a review, so I won't approach it as I normally approach a review. I'm no longer sure it's appropriate to review a game after finishing about 1/3 of it, unless it contains the same content repeated again and again. The Bard's Tale IV isn't that kind of game. It's not procedurally generated but is a hand-crafted game with many different areas, and it introduces new content each time the player enters a new area. I tend to review games I finish, which is why as one of my readers complained I tend to give "good" or "very good" reviews. I actually finish most games I play, but there is a decent minority of games I don't. Those fall into two categories. The first are the games I give 4-5 hours to before I realize I just can't be bothered with and the latter are the long games, like The Bard's Tale 4 IV, that are fun enough to continue with, but at some point are just no longer appealing when I have many other games in my backlog. I started after about 15 hours thinking about abandoning my The Bard's Tale IV game but came back to the game a couple of times before actually quitting, so I actually played 20 hours before throwing in the towel.

The Bard's Tale IV's Ambition: Its Charm and Its Downfall
The Bard's Tale IV is an ambitious game. The original games were dungeon crawlers, with the focus on combat and leveling up your party, with some cool puzzles and traps thrown in, and the occasional story snippet. The Bard's Tale IV offers a full-blown story with quests, companions, and lore. There are secrets, traps, and many, many puzzles. There is also, of course, combat and character advancement. It's a game with authentic Scottish musicians, and fully voiced characters. In short, it tries to do a lot with its limited budget. I find it admirable to try to excel in so many areas. I find if you're going to fail, it's better to fail ambitiously than to fail be being forgettable and nondescript.

The Bard's Tale IV does succeed in some areas. Its biggest success is in the area of sound. Sound is an afterthought in a lot of games. I'll also freely admit that I can turn off the sound in games and still enjoy a game for its gameplay or story. I think if sound is important to you in a game, then you probably should play some The Bard's Tale IV just to see what the game accomplishes here. The voice acting, performed by Scottish actors, is genuinely good, as is the quality of the music, and Scottish folk music isn't what I prefer to listen to. The game also features bard songs. You use these songs to solve environmental problems. One songs blasts through weak walls, another rebuilds stone structures, another lets you talk to dead spirits, and yet another reveals hidden stashes of treasure. It's a typical element in The Bard's Tale IV, that you will come across areas that you can't access, and which you can return to later with the right song in order to open up a whole new area. Also, a number of the game's many riddles are sound oriented. Magic mouths will also address you upon your approach, chanting out their riddles.

The Bard's Tale IV's core systems, namely its puzzles and its combat work well. The puzzles are for the most part logical. You learn how to solve a puzzle, such as getting a fairy to fly to a patch of mushrooms. First you learn to turn a totem with 4 faces. Choose the correct face and the fairy flies where you want. Then you encounter the same type of puzzle again, but its more complicated. Soon you are faced with guiding multiple fairies or turning six totems to advance.
Also combat works fairly well, and as I understand it was built around card game mechanics. Your party starts with two characters, but you have 4 actions (called opportunites). Each character has four skills and one piece of equipment they can use in combat, so its like having 10 cards you can play in combat, but you can only choose and play 4. When I quit I had 5 characters in my party (so like 25 cards) and my practitioner could summon a wraith who had 2 more abilities, so I had the possibility of 27 actions, but it's actually more complicated than that, as some actions required preparation, and because moving characters also require a point of opportunity. When you only have 4 actions, you really consider what the best course of action is, especially since like its predecessors, you simply can't save anytime you want in The Bard's Tale IV, meaning that losing combat can erase a fair bit of progress. So you have to be careful who you fight, what you equip and how you fight, because lack of caution and perception can be brutally punished.

The game also features an impressive crafting system. A large part of the loot you find are crafting materials. You can also find or buy a number of crafting recipes from inns. These let you make food, which you can use to heal outside of combat, potions and talismans that can be used in combat. There is no healing skill and only a limited amount of buff skills, so potions are actually pretty useful to have in tough battles. Also, you'll need alcohol for your bard to sing bard songs. Lockpicks and grappling hooks, which are important for accessing new areas and finding treasures, can also be crafted. Many things, like poisons, potions, and talismans can only be crafted buy spending a skill point on the appropriate crafting skill. The crafting system is in general easy to understand, but useful and deep. Especially when brewing potions you'll need to make some choices about how best to use your resources.

In most other aspects The Bard's Tale IV's successes are limited at best. Let's take its story and characters for example. You've got great voice actors, so you should give them something memorable to say, right? The Bard's Tale IV goes the humorous route, which is a tough route to go, as jokes are hard to pull off. There are a few that made me smile though, like when a Fichti priestess told my group they'd have to impress her goddess, and my trow thief muttered he'd never impressed anyone before, so how was he going to impress this goddess? Unfortunately, though, most of writing is forgettable, as are most of the npcs you meet and most of your companions. Throughout my playthrough I felt that the story, companions, and npcs were a huge waste of potential and resources that didn't add much to the game. While I am all for a good story in any game, traditionally stories are at best minimal in dungeon crawlers, so if you don't do it well, why do it at all?

Or let's take character advancement. It's for the most part very limited. On the other hand, unlike in many games, your choices are important. Your characters don't get hit points or damage bonuses when they level up. They get this only from investing skill points or by being able to use new equipment, which also is available only from using skill points. There are a few active skills, and most of these are significantly different from one another. This makes it feel like you should think before choosing how to spend your skill points, especially since you can only bring 4 active skills for each character into combat. If you could bring more into combat, you'd see how limited the skill system is, since there just aren't that many skills to choose from. Your opponents (except the occasional boss) use the same skills your characters have access to, which makes their attacks seem repetitive after a while.

The Bard's Tale IV visuals are also a mixed bag. Some dungeons and outdoor areas look pretty good. Others don't. When you inspect a puzzle weapon, you get to see some very fine looking item. The characters in general look bad, or perhaps they are meant to look like the muppets, in any case even if its intentional that doesn't make it any better. You're given a starting character, who I quickly wanted to ditch to make my own character, but I found the character models so limited and so unsightly that I decided to not even bother. That despite the fact that I love to customize the appearances of my party in most other rpgs.

Trying to do so many things well is often a challenge. So as I played through, I wanted to like The Bard's Tale IV better than I actually did, while wondering often if it would have been a better idea to have tried to be better in fewer areas, and actually have succeeded.

The Bard's Tale IV's Identity Crisis
I'm a The Bard's Tale IV backer, and one of my first rpgs was The Bard's Tale III, a game I finished and have very fond memories of. It's the game that got me into Wizardry type games, and I still enjoy their successors, whether it's something like Stranger of Sword City or Grimoire. I didn't play the beta but I did read the forums, so I had very low expectations when I started The Bard's Tale IV, seeing as many other backers were unhappy with the gameplay presented in the beta.

The Bard's Tale IV sold itself on Kickstarter as a dungeon crawler and an RPG. Traditionally dungeon crawlers (also the original The Bard's Tale games) are built around building up characters, exploring a dungeon, and fighting monsters. Many of these games have traps, puzzles, bits of lore, and a rare quest to add variety to gameplay. That this formula still works today can be seen in many turn based as well as action dungeon crawlers like Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Might and Magic X, and the Legend of Grimrock. I'm personally a fan of dungeon crawlers and play not only mainstream ones, but also a number of obscure indie and japanese dungeon crawlers.

To put it simply the number of skills, the amount of equipment, the scope of character advancement, and the variety of monsters in The Bard's Tale IV would be far too little to support a traditional dungeon crawler, where one spends around 50% or more of game time in combat. That they are sufficient for Bard's Tale 4 is a testament to the fact that the vast majority of game time is dedicated to solving puzzles. Normally when you enter a dungeon floor in a traditional dungeon crawler you wander through a huge number of corridors and have to do your best to not get lost. That's not a problem in Bard's Tale 4 at the beginning, because most paths are shut off by doors that are closed until you find the right key or right switch, or are blocked by a barrier you don't have the right bard song for to open, or a monster encounter which your party can't defeat. That means most levels almost have a "puzzle like" feel. While many areas are optional to come back to, I had the feeling of being fairly constrained in where I could go in the 20 hours I played. While puzzles, switches, and keys aren't unusual features in dungeon crawlers, The Bard's Tale IV is so chalked full of them that you can hardly move without running into one.

In conclusion, The Bard's Tale IV was just too much of a puzzle game for someone like me to enjoy (I like puzzles in limited number, but not as the basis of a game). The question is if it would be a good game for traditional puzzle game fans. Again that's not me, so its just a supposition of mine that The Bard's Tale IV has a number of features that could be very frustrating for someone used to puzzle type games, but with little experience in dungeon crawlers. The first is the save system, which is essentially a check point system, meaning if you get wiped out in combat, you'll lose a good deal of progress. As a dungeon crawler veteran I'm used to such save points, know when it's a good idea to backtrack to save, or what tasks to finish before using one of the rare save points. In the few puzzle games I played you never had to replay content like cut scenes or combat, because most of the in- game time is actually spent thinking about how to solve a puzzle, not running around the screen. The combat, at least initially, is not all that easy either. While I didn't die that often, I found myself challenged, and I think I used my abilities and skill points pretty efficiently for the most part, but I think a beginner could easily be overwhelmed by a game that demands decent character building and combat tactics, at least in its early stages.

While I find it courageous to stick with one's vision and create something new and different, you need to find the right audience to market that game to. To name the game after a very old dungeon crawler, you're going to draw fans of that genre, who might be disappointed to be getting something other than they bargained for. To attract new fans you're going to need to find them and show them why your game would be interesting to them. I'm not sure whether The Bard's Tale IV's developers wanted to make a puzzle game, but felt like they needed to include some hard core dungeon crawler features to placate Kickstarter backers, or whether they actually believed that they were making a dungeon crawler, but got so carried away with puzzles that they unintentionally created the kind of gameplay that they did. In any case The Bard's Tale IV is neither a traditional dungeon crawler nor a traditional puzzle game. I think you'd actually have to be a fan of both genres to enjoy the game, and if that is true, then instead of broadening their player base, the developers narrowed it to what I would guess would be a pretty small segment of gamers.

Some Personal Thoughts
Most of the games that I don't finish, I don't bother writing about. Just like the games aren't worth my time, I don't feel like its worth the effort to write anything about them. But I am emotionally involved with The Bard's Tale IV. I was very excited about backing the game, and about a new entry in what was a very good series in the 1980s. I was also excited about a new InXile game, as I loved Wasteland 2, and thought Torment was also quite good. But the primary feeling I got when I was playing The Bard's Tale IV, even when I was enjoying its good parts, was disappointment. Not because The Bard's Tale IV is a horrible game, but because it has some very good ideas, and does some bold and groundbreaking things and I still couldn't enjoy it. I know players who like puzzles as well as dungeon crawlers, and who appreciate The Bard's Tale IV's great sound as well as its whimsical atmosphere, really enjoy it and can overlook its faults. I know I would have made the game differently, and I can't help thinking that The Bard's Tale IV was a missed opportunity, which makes me sad.

https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/why-i-wont-be-finishing-the-bards-tale-iv-462.html

 

[Bohr]

Criticism from the Watch always reminds me of the old Denis Healey quote that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was "like being savaged by a dead sheep".

 

[Themadcow]

I think he's hit the nail on the head with one part though:

In any case The Bard's Tale IV is neither a traditional dungeon crawler nor a traditional puzzle game. I think you'd actually have to be a fan of both genres to enjoy the game, and if that is true, then instead of broadening their player base, the developers narrowed it to what I would guess would be a pretty small segment of gamers.

Certainly the Steam player numbers would back up the 'small' bit. It's staying ahead of the Remasters, but not by much.

 

[BEvers]

inXile tweeted a review from September today:



Are they deliberately snubbing the Watch?

 

[Themadcow]

This game needs a Monty Markland style expose of the story behind BT4. I wonder how many people were secretly opposed to making it a puzzle game with hearthstone inspired combat?

 

[TT1]

Why people are still talking about this game?

 

[Sinatar]

Why people are still talking about this game?

Why did you bump the thread?

 

[Mightmagic]

Why people are still talking about this game?

Because it's a good game.