Game News The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Released

[Grauken]

Well, the problem is we expected an RPG, not a chess game

 

[Tigranes]

Again, I'm fine with a deterministic system, it's not really 'RNG or death'. I'm just not sure what the combination of cooldowns, shared action points, ~4 abilities, fixed damage & guaranteed hits does, other than turn the game into a weird kind of merry-go-round masher.

Of course would love to hear that it plays quite differently than that.

 

[Rpguy]

Again, I'm fine with a deterministic system, it's not really 'RNG or death'. I'm just not sure what the combination of cooldowns, shared action points, ~4 abilities, fixed damage & guaranteed hits does, other than turn the game into a weird kind of merry-go-round masher.

Of course would love to hear that it plays quite differently than that.

I find the combat much more diverse than the best blobbers like might and magic/original bards tale/Wizardry , if you just stand and spam basic attack or a damage spell you will find yourself dead unlike most of the fights in the above mentioned games.

There are fights where you have to move or use special interrupts on enemy special attacks, you can do stuff like levitate an enemy monster in front of another enemy beholder that is about to cast its uber spell so it would hit it instead of you etc.

 

[Invictus]

Untamed bush is great

Yes it has this wild 80 porn vibe

 

[Grauken]

Again, I'm fine with a deterministic system, it's not really 'RNG or death'. I'm just not sure what the combination of cooldowns, shared action points, ~4 abilities, fixed damage & guaranteed hits does, other than turn the game into a weird kind of merry-go-round masher.

Of course would love to hear that it plays quite differently than that.

I find the combat much more diverse than the best blobbers like might and magic/original bards tale/Wizardry , if you just stand and spam basic attack or a damage spell you will find yourself dead unlike most of the fights in the above mentioned games.

There are fights where you have to move or use special interrupts on enemy special attacks, you can do stuff like levitate an enemy monster in font of another enemy beholder that is about to cast its uber spell so it would hit it instead of you etc.

So it's a poor man's tactical RPG. Why not play Goldbox games or KotC or ToEE then?

 

[Rpguy]

Again, I'm fine with a deterministic system, it's not really 'RNG or death'. I'm just not sure what the combination of cooldowns, shared action points, ~4 abilities, fixed damage & guaranteed hits does, other than turn the game into a weird kind of merry-go-round masher.

Of course would love to hear that it plays quite differently than that.

I find the combat much more diverse than the best blobbers like might and magic/original bards tale/Wizardry , if you just stand and spam basic attack or a damage spell you will find yourself dead unlike most of the fights in the above mentioned games.

There are fights where you have to move or use special interrupts on enemy special attacks, you can do stuff like levitate an enemy monster in font of another enemy beholder that is about to cast its uber spell so it would hit it instead of you etc.

So it's a poor man's tactical RPG. Why not play Goldbox games or KotC or ToEE then?

Because I already played them

 

[Jaesun]

Oh shit I backed this. Gotta check my emails....

 

[Haba]

Oh shit I backed this. Gotta check my emails....

The first and the hardest puzzle is getting the key from their backer website.

 

[ArchAngel]

It's fine, the Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut will fix all the performance issues in a year or so.

If BT4 sales are any indication, Inxile will not exist in a year or so.

 

[Sirbolt]

So, decided to give it another go yesterday. Had like 40 minutes to play something. Five minutes load time to load the save in the Adventurers Guild. Five minutes load time to exit. Then went on to walk towards the first quest, dutifully following the marker. Noticed strange stuttering, then everything froze. CTD time. Booted the remake instead. Made a stupid mistake that killed two frontline party members. Had actual fun trying to get out from the dungeon alive...

And no, nothing running in the background and a rig that runs most games at 4k...

 

[CyberWhale]

It's fine, the Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut will fix all the performance issues in a year or so.

If BT4 sales are any indication, Inxile will not exist in a year or so.

They shouldn't have gone over the budget every single time they made a crowdfunding campaign.

 

[Theldaran]

And therefore they celebrate neo-noir CP77 (could be an exception in nihon)? People are stupid and don't know what they want and therefore instead of good things like CB we get the shit, like DB and OP.

There are several reasons as to why we don't get pieces like CB anymore.

One could be the lack of audience, as I hear that Japanese salarymen (the average office worker adult) have it hard, I just read a text the other day where the fucker slept like 5 hours a day, worked regularly from 9 to 9 and even worked some Sundays. In this environment there are hardly any adults left to enjoy something like CB. Provided they have any time left, they'd probably want something fluffy to relieve stress.

The other could be the lack of talent. CB was very experimental, even if its core was something like a John Woo movie. There are hardly any producers willing to take such a risk. Therefore they play it safe. However, it's just the trend of all anime to deliver few blockbusters and a lot of filler.

If you enjoyed CB, maybe watch Steins;Gate, which is regarded as Seinen (young adult audience) and provides a good drama-filled, science-inspired, challenging ride. One of the best blockbusters of the last years.

All in all, the classics from the 90 are not returning.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

You should all just get some decent harddrives and you will have faster loadtimes. The game is not at fault here

 

[Lyre Mors]

The game is not at fault here

Not exactly sure about that, but yeah, everyone's computing life would be much improved with an SSD.

 

[thesheeep]

You should all just get some decent harddrives and you will have faster loadtimes. The game is not at fault here

A game that looks like this should run fast on every computer produced in the last five years. And certainly not have loading times above 90 seconds (!!!!) for anyone.
There is no excuse for this shoddy programming - there are fast loading, better looking games made in Unreal 4 AND Unity by many developers with much smaller teams. The game is 100% at fault.

 

[Zeriel]

wasteland 2 was the best attempt so far, but I could not finish it. I did play like 50 hours though, so I got my money worth. I am sure I will try wasteland 3. The best thing we probably will get from all of this is the old bard tale remasters, they are very good so far

One thing I don't get with the remasters is why all the dungeons (including the town at night, which for some reason is treated like a dungeon) have a completely fucked up minimap, where turning makes the entire axis of the minimap turn with you. It makes the minimap unusable in dungeons. A really minor nitpick, I admit, I just don't understand why it's there.

 

[thesheeep]

One thing I don't get with the remasters is why all the dungeons (including the town at night, which for some reason is treated like a dungeon) have a completely fucked up minimap, where turning makes the entire axis of the minimap turn with you. It makes the minimap unusable in dungeons. A really minor nitpick, I admit, I just don't understand why it's there.

That's not actually in the dungeons (or not restricted to them).
To be honest, I didn't play the remaster that long - not really my cup of tea, WAY too much grind -, but I had this minimap rotation in the starting town out of nowhere.
My guess is that it is related to some kind of key combo as it went away when I restarted (reloading alone didn't work) the game. Or a bug, of course.

But, yeah, minimaps that rotate with the player are a plague. Works somewhat with GPS/navigation system if you move by it, but is atrocious for actually figuring out where you are.

 

[Martyr]

A game that looks like this should run fast on every computer produced in the last five years. And certainly not have loading times above 90 seconds (!!!!) for anyone.
There is no excuse for this shoddy programming - there are fast loading, better looking games made in Unreal 4 AND Unity by many developers with much smaller teams. The game is 100% at fault.

when Serpent in the Staglands was released I had loading times between 100 and 130 seconds - on a computer that could run Witcher 3 at highest settings.
such high loading times are more tolerable in a game that looks like Bard's Tale IV than in a Serpent tbh.

 

[Zeriel]

That's not actually in the dungeons (or not restricted to them).
To be honest, I didn't play the remaster that long - not really my cup of tea, WAY too much grind -, but I had this minimap rotation in the starting town out of nowhere.
My guess is that it is related to some kind of key combo as it went away when I restarted (reloading alone didn't work) the game. Or a bug, of course.

But, yeah, minimaps that rotate with the player are a plague. Works somewhat with GPS/navigation system if you move by it, but is atrocious for actually figuring out where you are.

Strange, for me it didn't happen in the starting town. Only dungeons and the town at night. And that's through countless saves/reloads, the behavior never changed for me.

 

[thesheeep]

A game that looks like this should run fast on every computer produced in the last five years. And certainly not have loading times above 90 seconds (!!!!) for anyone.
There is no excuse for this shoddy programming - there are fast loading, better looking games made in Unreal 4 AND Unity by many developers with much smaller teams. The game is 100% at fault.

when Serpent in the Staglands was released I had loading times between 100 and 130 seconds - on a computer that could run Witcher 3 at highest settings.
such high loading times are more tolerable in a game that looks like Bard's Tale IV than in a Serpent tbh.

That's like saying "If I have to take a dive in shit, I would prefer the shit of the young lady over the fat dude's."

Who wouldn't? But it's still shit.

 

[Tacgnol]

A game that looks like this should run fast on every computer produced in the last five years. And certainly not have loading times above 90 seconds (!!!!) for anyone.
There is no excuse for this shoddy programming - there are fast loading, better looking games made in Unreal 4 AND Unity by many developers with much smaller teams. The game is 100% at fault.

when Serpent in the Staglands was released I had loading times between 100 and 130 seconds - on a computer that could run Witcher 3 at highest settings.
such high loading times are more tolerable in a game that looks like Bard's Tale IV than in a Serpent tbh.

That's like saying "If I have to take a dive in shit, I would prefer the shit of the young lady over the fat dude's."

Who wouldn't? But it's still shit.

Exactly.

A game should not have massive loading times running on a fast SSD in this day and age.

This whole thing just reeks of InXile technical incompetence, similar to many of the technical issues that Wasteland 2 has suffered through its various versions and incarnations.

 

[Darkzone]

And therefore they celebrate neo-noir CP77 (could be an exception in nihon)? People are stupid and don't know what they want and therefore instead of good things like CB we get the shit, like DB and OP.

There are several reasons as to why we don't get pieces like CB anymore.
One could be the lack of audience, as I hear that Japanese salarymen (the average office worker adult) have it hard, I just read a text the other day where the fucker slept like 5 hours a day, worked regularly from 9 to 9 and even worked some Sundays. In this environment there are hardly any adults left to enjoy something like CB. Provided they have any time left, they'd probably want something fluffy to relieve stress.
The other could be the lack of talent. CB was very experimental, even if its core was something like a John Woo movie. There are hardly any producers willing to take such a risk. Therefore they play it safe. However, it's just the trend of all anime to deliver few blockbusters and a lot of filler.
If you enjoyed CB, maybe watch Steins;Gate, which is regarded as Seinen (young adult audience) and provides a good drama-filled, science-inspired, challenging ride. One of the best blockbusters of the last years. All in all, the classics from the 90 are not returning.

This post deserves a brofist from me, because it is based on some thoughts that might be correct or not.
I don't necessarily agree on the premise of the first argument, but the conclusion of the implication still can be true: There is no adult audience left in Nihon, for an adult anime series. That the work ethic kills slowly the japanese people is also true, but not necessary the correct premise for the conclusion.
I have seen a video or read an article about the manga creators / drawing atists and the contained the statement was that the earnings are quite low even for outside of Tokyo area / Kantoo plain and nealry all of the profits are kept by the companies. And this could be also a valid reason for the lack of capable or experimental creators / artists. Companies on the other side want to make profits and sell what sells and maximise everything towards the sales. Therefore there is only a limited space for experimentation and everything that receives not the best reception or a limited audience will be discarded.
Either way the brain fuckery by intricate story and story telling seems to be an relict of a bygone era and the juvenilization / infantilization of adults and adult populations is increasingly proceeding as indicated by the SJW movement.

 

[Zeriel]

Reminder that the same people who made

managed to create a better blobber than fucking InXile. Sure it had huge performance problems too, but at least they nailed the core gameplay. I don't even know what to say at this point. I guess blobbers are just over. It was a nice run, lads...

Spoiler

BTW, I'm actually playing Labyrinth of Refrain right now. If you can stand weeb stuff, it's pretty decent. The story is depressing as fuck, and the gameplay systems are a little odd, but I say that in a good way, it's got a quite interesting approach to party-building. It's its own beast, but I'd say its at least an 8/10, and its got that nip obsession with 100 hr playthroughs, secret bosses, and all that jazz, so if you're autistic like me it's okay.

 

[Rpguy]

wasteland 2 was the best attempt so far, but I could not finish it. I did play like 50 hours though, so I got my money worth. I am sure I will try wasteland 3. The best thing we probably will get from all of this is the old bard tale remasters, they are very good so far

One thing I don't get with the remasters is why all the dungeons (including the town at night, which for some reason is treated like a dungeon) have a completely fucked up minimap, where turning makes the entire axis of the minimap turn with you. It makes the minimap unusable in dungeons. A really minor nitpick, I admit, I just don't understand why it's there.

That's actually intended. You need to cast the compass spell then the map works normally

 

[Zeriel]

wasteland 2 was the best attempt so far, but I could not finish it. I did play like 50 hours though, so I got my money worth. I am sure I will try wasteland 3. The best thing we probably will get from all of this is the old bard tale remasters, they are very good so far

One thing I don't get with the remasters is why all the dungeons (including the town at night, which for some reason is treated like a dungeon) have a completely fucked up minimap, where turning makes the entire axis of the minimap turn with you. It makes the minimap unusable in dungeons. A really minor nitpick, I admit, I just don't understand why it's there.

That's actually intended. You need to cast the compass spell then the map works normally

Ah. That would have been nice to know.