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

[KeighnMcDeath]

That ... and the Cereal Pals are my new friends.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Why do people hate Melody though

 

[cvv]

Ok so I'm gonna sound like a total retard but how can I into the combat in this game? Started playing today, got into the upper city, killed the wizard, pushed through the fight with the 50HP paladin and archers.

But the next fight is with two 50HP paladins and an archer. Five attempts so far and to be honest, I'm kindda stumped. I got two PCs, the default Fargo bard and the trow rogue. How do two lvl 3 characters with 24HP between them whack three 10 lvl mobs with a 127HP total, doing about twice the average damage than me? What am I missing? Can I get around this fight? Can I hire more party members? This early in the game I don't have exactly truckload of choices with gear loadout or skills.

It's something really dumb I'm missing isn't it...

 

[Zombra]

High level encounters are placed as "don't go here yet"s.

 

[cvv]

High level encounters are placed as "don't go here yet"s.

But it's rrright on the edge of "high-level". And the quest compass is point me there. Am I supposed to grind in the undercity first?

I've watched Cohh playing this and he did beat the fight early on but he had a different starting char, not the Fargo bard but some sort of full-plate armored warrior or some such. Don't tell me I can't progress unless I start the game with a different PC.

23:00

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I just beat that fight the other day, it was definitely a difficulty spike
your thief guy can easily solo the heavy armor dudes using caltrops + stealth to move to the other side of the map, my melody got knocked out quick

playing on the highest difficulty btw

 

[cvv]

your thief guy can easily solo the heavy armor dudes using caltrops + stealth to move to the other side of the map

Yeah, just beat it this way. The key to the combat seems to be exploiting the derpy enemy AI. On paper mobs are so insanely overpowered compared to you because they can't into even basic tactics.

 

[cvv]

Some thoughts after 8 hours or so. Man, this is the Baggy McBaggins of all mixed bags.

First of all I just finished Operencia. How does an indie game created by three hungry Hungarians look incomparably better than a game by a midsized professional American developer? The first town in BT4 looks barely better than the old Gothic and I'm not even exaggerating too much.

I hate the movement system. They wanted to appease both the grid lovers and the muh-free-movement fags and the resulting hybrid is ugly. Grid movement is unwieldy and confusing since the game isn't purpose-built around that. Interactables and important environmental elements are often at the edges of your current viewpoint and moving around is weird since the world isn't angular. After a while I gave in and switched to free movement which is slow and janky.

Moving on, BT4 is yet another game that can't help but messing with your party willy nilly. Go turn in a quest, have a party member removed with all their equipped shit because fuck you. Ok, reload (pain in the ass, depending how far is your last save point), unequip everything from a said member, go back, turn in the quest, have the member removed, use your merc token to hire a replacement. Literally 5 minutes in get another character for free and also fuck you, your party roster is full.

Who playtested that shit?

I also kindda hated the on-rails early game and the overpowered mobs you're facing. Game can't into smart tactics so it throws massive numbers at you. Not a gamestopper for me but it is annoying.

- But I do love the combat. RN I have only 4 members, I can imagine the complexity will go up nicely with the full roster
- I like the chardev, with tons of skills and specialization options (altho Int seems like a dump stat from the first glance)
- I do like the music, it's often annoyingly repetitive but overall nice
- I also like the writing, this one definitely goes to BT4 over Operencia (that game proudly boasts a fanfic level writing by a modestly gifted 10 year old)
- And I also like the itemization, I've always been fan of restrictive gear in the Wizardry/Grimoire fashion (PCs can't wear anything they find; wizards in full plates mess with my autism, fuck that noise)
- Also as I'm leaving the starting town the game starts looking much better.

So yeah, a mixed bag but not uninstalling yet.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the game's loading time/performance is awful for how the graphics look

 

[vortex]

Ok so I'm gonna sound like a total retard but how can I into the combat in this game? Started playing today, got into the upper city, killed the wizard, pushed through the fight with the 50HP paladin and archers.
But the next fight is with two 50HP paladins and an archer. Five attempts so far and to be honest, I'm kindda stumped. I got two PCs, the default Fargo bard and the trow rogue. How do two lvl 3 characters with 24HP between them whack three 10 lvl mobs with a 127HP total, doing about twice the average damage than me? What am I missing? Can I get around this fight? Can I hire more party members? This early in the game I don't have exactly truckload of choices with gear loadout or skills.

Congratulations on playing your first RPG game!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Ok so I'm gonna sound like a total retard but how can I into the combat in this game? Started playing today, got into the upper city, killed the wizard, pushed through the fight with the 50HP paladin and archers.
But the next fight is with two 50HP paladins and an archer. Five attempts so far and to be honest, I'm kindda stumped. I got two PCs, the default Fargo bard and the trow rogue. How do two lvl 3 characters with 24HP between them whack three 10 lvl mobs with a 127HP total, doing about twice the average damage than me? What am I missing? Can I get around this fight? Can I hire more party members? This early in the game I don't have exactly truckload of choices with gear loadout or skills.

Congratulations on playing your first RPG game!

But the fight is essentially a puzzle on the highest difficulty, especially if your main character is a bard who will go down in the first round or so.

 

[cvv]

the game's loading time/performance is awful for how the graphics look

I played this game at launch for about an hour and the performance was beyond hillarious. In the DC version it's still not ideal but the improvement is noticeable.
That said I don't generally give two fucks about graphix detail, resolution or FPS so it's not a big deal for me either way.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That said I don't generally give two fucks about graphix detail, resolution or FPS so it's not a big deal for me either way.

I'd agree except I still have pretty bad loading times, it sucks when a quest has you leave an area then immediately leave that area to go somewhere else. Getting flashbacks to pillars of eternity.

 

[cvv]

Jesus fucking christ I just realized I've been playing on Hard the whole time. 12 hours in and I've been mashing my head against some fights like against a concrete wall because I went into this blind, without metagaming, without minmaxing. Thanks Christ I can lower the difficulty on the fly.

You're free to retard me liberally.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

lower the difficulty

 

[cvv]

lower the difficulty

There was one fight in the KelThuzad's Tower (whatever, the first mage tower) I couldn't push through, mobs always nuked one of my chars in round one no matter what I did and it went downhill from there. I couldn't respec (no tokens left) and a restart with different chars and strategy was lol no. This was the only solution.

So far I like the early game on Normal a lot. Ideally Normal would be a tiny bit tougher but whatever. I expect sliding the difficulty up again mid-game when the curve inevitably plumments, as it does with almost every RPG ever.

 

[V_K]

This thread should be renamed to "cvv loses his codex cred".

 

[cvv]

This thread should be renamed to "cvv loses his codex cred".

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

the game's loading time/performance is awful for how the graphics look

I'd agree except I still have pretty bad loading times, it sucks when a quest has you leave an area then immediately leave that area to go somewhere else. Getting flashbacks to pillars of eternity.

This has been discussed earlier in the thread, and the answer to slow loading times is to install the game on a solid-state drive. I had originally installed the game on my mechanical hard disk drive, and transferring it to my SSD cut loading times to a few seconds at most.

So far I like the early game on Normal a lot. Ideally Normal would be a tiny bit tougher but whatever. I expect sliding the difficulty up again mid-game when the curve inevitably plumments, as it does with almost every RPG ever.

I started the game on normal, but after finding it too easy in the first dungeon increased to the highest difficulty setting and kept it there aside from one or two boss fights. The regular enemy mobs simply aren't much of a challenge on normal difficulty.

 

[thesheeep]

So I just started the game and... wow, that must be the worst performance I have seen in a game since T:ToN.

Their programmers do not improve much, do they?

It's kinda ridiculous. High FPS for 5-10 seconds, then a full second or so of <10 fps. This repeats throughout the game.
On both Windows and Linux

Pretty sure a GTX1070 + a good CPU should be able to handle this badboy.

Edit:
But I do like that they added that oldschool-technique of having to turn around 360° upon entering a new area to get less lag.

 

[cvv]

Already switched back to Hard and thinking about Legendary. Difficulty collapsed way sooner than in most RPGs. Once mobs can't one-shot you and you get a few skills and spells you blow everything away.

Thinking back I specced my party in the most unoptimal way possible. If I metagamed a new run now I could roll on Hard without too much trouble. On Legendary tho I imagine some of the fights, especially once the mages start appearing, would be super rough.

 

[Latelistener]

So, they downgraded the graphics but it's still runs like shit?

 

[cvv]

This morning the game crashed, had to hard reset my PC. When I booted back up the Load button was greyed out. I went white in the face, remembering reading about corrupted saves from the vanilla. Had to start a new game, create a new save slot and luckily then I could load my old saves again.

Jesus, this game must've been a hot mess at launch.

 

[cvv]

So am I correct to assume the Dwarven Ruins/Fort Garendon area is an unfinished stump of a planned DLCs? At least that's what I gathered from the scant info I've found. I don't supposed we'll ever play that one....

 

[cvv]

Finished, 50+ hours on Hard. Minus the Haernhold DLC, explanation below.

Pros:
- Well, it's a party based, turn-based blobber. That's always a fixed buff of +100 points for any game in my book.
- Puzzles but...
- Combat but...
- Music but...
- Itemization but...
- Chardev

Cons:
- Basically, all the pros with the buts.
- Puzzles are great, challenging juuust right for my dumb ass. But there are too many of them. TOO MANY. They stopped being exciting halfway through. Soving 391st dwarven cog puzzle or 256th shuffling blocks puzzle was really getting old late game. But I always did everything for some reason. Most of the puzzles are really smart. What kind of person comes up with these? That must take some real quality autism. Kudos.
- Combat is a fun core wrapped in a lot of annoyances. This game brought back my beloved system - outside of combat you're a blob, in-combat the view switches to a grid. There have been only a precious handful of cRPGs like that - Betrayal at Krondor, Albion, Shadows over Riva (not counting Homam-likes). Not aware of any other. That alone is a big plus for me however the system is woefully half-assed. Why going with this weird, janky version inXile? Why not implement a proper combat grid? There's so much effect shit happening, you can't see statuses, you constantly misclick and it's overall very annoying.
- Music is fantastic in its concept - just short, simple Celtic tunes sung now and then. But most of them are too simple and repetitive and if you play a game for 50+ hours they WILL drive you crazy. Everytime you come back to the Guild and hear that stupid song Rabbie is singing you wanna cut your head off.
- Itemization is the biggest mixed bag. There are fantastic ideas - the puzzle weapons for example. But again, they totally ran out of ideas with those. What was probably designed to be the "oh em gee look what I've found" moment soon becomes "meh another elven trinket, probably worse than my own weapon". There are too many of them and they're mostly samey. The rest of gear and items are p. good, there's a well developed crafting (doesn't mess with loot and is useful at the same time, a rare thing in RPGs).
- Chardev is on the simpler side but I did like the design and how acquiring talents can have huge impact on the game. Is gud.
- Game is ugly when it starts and remains so for the majority of the run. Many indies today manage to look not only more pleasant but also more expensive. The world is well designed but it's never atmospheric, never produces any feels whatsoever. The retarded story and plot doesn't help either - find the McGuffin to kill the evil wizard. InXile did a few novel, risky things with this game but they sure as shit aren't mapping new territories with the writing.
- Loot was mostly infuriating. InXile is one of the studios that is completely clueless about the effort/reward effect. There are optional puzzles, hidden areas, even entire dungeons where after a heroic struggle you open a door, there's a golden chest on the pedestal and inside.......60 coins. Even mid- or late game when you have 10k+ gold and money are completely useless. It's so baffling to me how so many devs get such a basic, fundamental thing so goddamn wrong.



All in all, a good game but way too long for its own good. The entire thing is too bloated by about 40%. The stuff that's there is solid but it's stretched too thin over a too vast a surface. I was ready to move on at about the 30 hours mark and I still got 20+ more to go. Especially the Stennish Isles part was fucking neverending. I nope-noped from the idea of getting into the DLC, I was way too glad the whole thing was over.