Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale IV Pre-Release Thread [RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[octavius]

So TB purists are control freaks?

 

[Mustawd]

So TB purists are control freaks?

Pretty much

 

[tuluse]

Real-time / RTwP is the natural evolution of turn-based with finer movement and combat control so I hope Fargo just goes all the way in the direction of updating Bard's Tale for the new audience.

Interesting reductio, but I don't see how it applies, because RTWP reduces combat control. Unless you're suggesting that grid movement gives you more control.

How do you have less control in a system where you can change orders at any time?

In turn based->pick your orders and you are stuck with them watching the enemy react.
Real time-> you can change at any time
RTwP-> you can freely pause and thus don't have time constraints

There are many reasons to prefer TB to RT or RTwP, but the latter actually give you more control, and the comparison is apt.


Update:

On point. There are a lot of things old games did either our of necessity or cargo cultism that turned out to be good ideas that were fun. A lot of these things were abstractions that a lot of people liked. I've argued a few times that the IE/Fallout style of maps and cities increased immersion by having more abstract cities. When you know you are only visiting certain districts and possibly even portions of those districts your brain fills in the rest. In a Bethesda game when you can see literally the entire town and it's still just 10 houses, it works against itself.

I think gridbased movement in blobbers has a related effect. In this case it's more explicitly "gamey" though. The abstract movement defines and systematizes your interaction with the environment. There are no "you see that mountain you can(n't) climb it" moments because where and how you move is so clearly laid out. That's just one thing that springs to mind.

 

[Decado]

I've argued a few times that the IE/Fallout style of maps and cities increased immersion by having more abstract cities. When you know you are only visiting certain districts and possibly even portions of those districts your brain fills in the rest. In a Bethesda game when you can see literally the entire town and it's still just 10 houses, it works against itself.

This is a great point. Compare the map of Athkatla to the map of Skyrim's "Capital" and notice the huge difference in how each place feels.

 

[Lady_Error]

This is a great point. Compare the map of Athkatla to the map of Skyrim's "Capital" and notice the huge difference in how each place feels.

Psst, you're not supposed to talk about "feelz" since those are "subjective" - just like having fun with a game.

 

[Infinitron]

https://twitter.com/BrianFargo/status/598532127311855616

MoelZ joelofdeath
@BrianFargo Are u going to post the BT4 funding tiers to the forums b4 launching on KS? Could help avoid issues. I'd provide feedback.

Brian Fargo‏@BrianFargo
Yes, we'll be posting our tiers before launch for your perusal.

 

[Zed]

Kickstarter in June according to RPS

Source: tweet without accompanying URL

https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/600284791800516608

EDIT:
here we go
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/05/18/bards-tale-4/

[You’ll need to wait until the start of June to see it in action unfortunately, since inXile still finishing up their presentation for the Kickstarter, but it’s a fully 3D world of both indoor and outdoor locations that looks like a 3DMark demo. The closest touchstones are Legend of Grimrock 2 and Might and Magic X, and it makes both of them look as retro as the games they’re building on.]

combat is phase-based… we can just do a lot more and use everything these cards and these engines can do to make it look great.

It’s party based, you’ll create your characters – the bard, the thief, the character archetypes from the first ones, and NPCs joining up to add personality. When combat starts, the camera will then pull back and your group will be represented on screen or with portraits…

but the play field is dynamically changing so that things are happening based on each turn. You might see the mage on the other side whipping up a spell that’ll take two turns for instance, so figure that you have to take him out.

RPS: So, Bard’s Tale IV. Is it a direct continuation of the story?
Fargo: When I did the comedy version, I didn’t have the rights to the original. Now, I’ve struck a deal with Electronic Arts, so I can do full-on sequels. It will pick up where they left off, though Mangar and Targen are dead. I’m not going to say you didn’t really kill them. But their cults live on, and the reasons for what they did will live on in the next story.

RPS: So what are the Kickstarter plans?
Fargo: It’s coming up on June 2nd. We’re going to be asking for $1.25 million, and we’re going to put at least another $1.25 million in on top of that.​

 

[Infinitron]

Epic Lute: Brian Fargo On Bringing Back The Bard’s Tale
Richard Cobbett on May 18th, 2015 at 2:00 pm.

Having successfully brought Wasteland back to life with the help of 61,920 of its closest friends, Brian Fargo and inXile Entertainment are turning their attentions to another classic RPG – The Bard’s Tale [official site]. Forget the appallingly comedy vacuum from a few years ago, this is The Actual Bard’s Tale IV, both a return to and modernisation of dungeon crawling with a few new tricks up its sleeve. The Kickstarter begins June 2nd, but Fargo gave us a quick preview of what to expect.


RPS: So, The Bard’s Tale IV. It’s been a while!

Fargo: I never would have thought I’d be sitting here in the year 2015, talking about The Bard’s Tale. If you remember, back in the day the dungeon crawler used to be the biggest RPG category – Might and Magic and Wizardry and all those – and it’s always been near and dear to my heart. I was a big D&D player, so exploring dungeons was right up my alley. I loved it back then, I love it now, I’ll love it in the future. I love the tightness of mapping things out, and being teleported and put in dark areas and all that.

RPS: Swearing at the spinners…

Fargo: Yeah, exactly. We like to torture you just a little bit. But you look at something like Demon Souls, people like a little torture! As long as there’s a sense of you getting better each time.

RPS: And as long as it plays fair. The bad dungeon crawlers were always the ‘walk down the corridors, suddenly fall down a pit’ type, versus the ones where you see the details and see the designers have made a place rather than just a maze.

Fargo: And the ones where the players can blame themselves are even better – they pushed on, knew they shouldn’t, paid the consequence. We’re bringing all those elements back. But what we’re also trying to do is something much more ambitious than what’s been done before.

[You’ll need to wait until the start of June to see it in action unfortunately, since inXile still finishing up their presentation for the Kickstarter, but it’s a fully 3D world of both indoor and outdoor locations that looks like a 3DMark demo. The closest touchstones are Legend of Grimrock 2 and Might and Magic X, and it makes both of them look as retro as the games they’re building on.]

RPS: It definitely looks amazing…

Fargo: One of the great things about the kind of game it is is that we have so much more bandwidth for effects. It’s not multiplayer, we don’t have 40 things running around at once, combat is phase-based… we can just do a lot more and use everything these cards and these engines can do to make it look great. I think people are going to be really pleasantly surprised; seeing us showing off our visual chops and what we can do. For starters, unlike the traditional approach, where you only get a third of the screen for the movement space, we’re going for full immersion.

RPS: It’d be great for the Oculus Rift.

Fargo: Doesn’t it just scream VR? You’ll be wandering around in this first person mode, and you can either be snapped to a grid, moving ten feet at a time, or click off the grid and wander around more freely. We really get the best of both worlds there.

RPS: Obviously, one of the things I was going to ask was how close it would stick to the original, Wasteland 2 being quite different in style to the original. This one though seems a lot closer to what people remember from the series.

Fargo: Absolutely. It’s party based, you’ll create your characters – the bard, the thief, the character archetypes from the first ones, and NPCs joining up to add personality. When combat starts, the camera will then pull back and your group will be represented on screen or with portraits…

More impressive than “There are 99 bandits in this alley, trust us!”

Fargo: In this day and age, that’d be a bit tough for people, to see one guy and think “He’s really 100!” For the combat, I like the flow of something like Hearthstone, where it’s phase-based, but it’s not just attack-attack-attack. That was in the original, and I don’t think that works any more. But the play field is dynamically changing so that things are happening based on each turn. You might see the mage on the other side whipping up a spell that’ll take two turns for instance, so figure that you have to take him out.

RPS: I’ve heard quite a few strategy designers looking at Hearthstone of late for combat systems, not least the simplicity and ease of learning the system.

Fargo: I’ve used the example before and they went “What? Hearthstone? That’s a card game, how does that apply?” What it does though is that you can get into it very quickly, but it’s still a very deep game. The original Bard’s Tale combat was just attacking and that won’t cut it. I want the players to be using their brain throughout the combat.

Cool. So what would you say is The Bard’s Tale’s niche, like Ultima’s morality and Wasteland’s setting? What’s its ‘thing’ that you think has helped it hang on?

Fargo: Well, in the beginning, it was bringing sound and graphics to a new level for the dungeon crawl genre. It was really about Wizardry, and that didn’t have colour and animations and so on. We were bringing that level of expertise to the table, and in a way, we’re kinda doing that again. To me, that was the big breakthrough – making a game that’s super deep but still pushes the graphical boundaries.

By the way, it’s the 30th anniversary of the first game, so serendipitous in terms of timing. When we shipped Wasteland 2, most people were like “Brian, we love it…. now, Bard’s Tale IV?” We’re going to do all the things people love about the series. We talk about graphics and some people think we’re just focusing our effort on that, but we totally get that this has to be a difficult game and it needs all the trappings. Secret doors, puzzles… have you played The Room?

RPS: On iPad? Yep.

Fargo: I just love the way they handle the physical manipulation of items within the world. Even just opening a chest, turning a knob, feels satisfying. And their puzzle design was extremely clever. I like everything about that, and I’m taking it as it applies to even things like your inventory. You might have a dagger in your inventory that you’ve been using for hours, but then you spot a latch, flip it, it lights up blue and you realise you’ve had a magic dagger all along. Or you find a sword hilt and put an item in it and it does one thing, and then you add another later… a really deep physical integration with the environment.

RPS: And presumably you’re keeping the original Bard class, drinking and singing…

Fargo: Of course! The bard with his drinking and singing and his buffing. That was a fairly new innovation at the time, that you could do things that would buff the entire party. I’d also be remiss to not mention the singing. I hired one of the top Gallic singers in the world to do original music for us. The heritage of The Bard’s Tale is really Scotland, and Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands. I was there a month ago and-

RPS: I’ve always wondered – with Bard’s Tale and Ultima… what do RPG designers have against Skara Brae? It’s always being buried or blown up or reduced to ashes. It really does seem to be the whole genre’s punching bag at this point.

Fargo: You’ll be returning to it, and it’s almost a couple of hundred years in the future and both the old Skara Brae and its dungeon have been built over.

RPS: Oh come on! It’s an entire city wearing a red shirt!

Fargo: Yes! But we had to return to Skara Brae. It’s actually where I filmed my Kickstarter video.

RPS: Looking back at the old RPGs, one of the things that popped to mind while playing revival projects is that there seems to be a distinct difference in vibe – the originals tend to be much looser with reality. Bard’s Tale for instance has bits where you time travel to Rome and Hiroshima, Wasteland had its strangeness in Highpool… do you think the genre can still support that kind of wackiness?

Fargo: I think people want more tight, coherent universes. In some ways, Bard’s Tale 3 went a little off the rails with that kind of craziness, and people want logical explanations for more now. Everyone’s watching things like Game of Thrones and getting more of a sense for what a coherent world is, and they like it. You can have some humour, but it serves you well. People like to lose themselves in the worlds and crave the extra immersiveness.

RPS: Do you think people are less tolerant about being surprised though? For instance, Wizardry began as fantasy, but by mid-series was pretty much a sci-fi series.

Fargo: I call those my “Cabin in the Woods’ moments. I love it when fiction takes you down a rabbit hole that you never expected. But I don’t think you have to take people out of the universe to do it. We did it in Wasteland for instance where you go into Finster’s brain, but it’s not like we brought Martians into the scene. I think there are ways to go about it without going completely out of the world.

RPS: So, Bard’s Tale IV. Is it a direct continuation of the story?

Fargo: When I did the comedy version, I didn’t have the rights to the original. Now, I’ve struck a deal with Electronic Arts, so I can do full-on sequels. It will pick up where they left off, though Mangar and Targen are dead. I’m not going to say you didn’t really kill them. But their cults live on, and the reasons for what they did will live on in the next story.

RPS: Obviously, Wasteland 2 becomes very tied to the original game by the end. Is that an active decision to keep things connected for the old base?

Fargo: Well, two parts. I think we have to tell a story that works on its own even if you didn’t play the original. But what I like is that if you did play the original trilogy, you’ll get a lot more insight. Back then, we didn’t explain a lot – it just was what it was. In Wasteland 2, I think we did a great job of making things hold together that probably didn’t in the original. We want to do the same things with this. Take something like, when Mangar surrounded Skara Brae in ice in the first game – why? What was the point of that?

RPS: I was just surprised that Wasteland 2 does get so deep into things like the Cochise AI after the first half just seemed to have a few familiar faces.

Fargo: Well… we like to pay off people who played the first games, which could be as simple as talk of being attacked by 99 beserkers.

RPS: The kid in Highpool…

Fargo: …and his dog, right. If you played the first Wasteland, you’re thinking “I don’t want to go NEAR that dog”, while if you’re new, it’s just a quest. That experience adds a gravity to the situation that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

RPS: So, it can’t really be ignored… that reboot from a few years ago? How does that play into the Bard’s Tale series/continuation?

Fargo: It’s really in a universe all of itself. I’m still proud of the game. It was a very funny product, and since gone to iOS and Android and become one of their top games. At the time, I didn’t have the copyright, and I couldn’t get a PC roleplaying game financed – it was impossible. So, it was a console focused approach, we decided to do a parody… there were a lot of factors. But I think you’ve got to put it over on one side, and now we’re doing the real sequel that everyone’s been waiting for.

RPS: Do you think there’s any clash there, from people expecting this to be a comedy?

Fargo: People all get it. It’s been explained, and I don’t see that as too confusing. The only thing that’s really coming across is that we’ve dialled up the Scottish mythology we used for it. There’s some great folklore for us to draw upon.

RPS: With adventures, it’s relatively easy to point to them and go ‘that’s an adventure’. With RPGs though, there’s a lot more variance in the genre, especially at the moment – Divinity, Pillars of Eternity, Torment, Wasteland, Fallout, all have such a distinct style to them.

Fargo: Yeah, it’s true. Even with something like Torment and Pillars of Eternity, you can say they look similar… but from a gameplay perspective, Torment is about 750,000 words… more words than the Bible and light on combat, and a very different experience.

RPS: Most do seem to have taken a heavy focus towards the narrative, but is Bard’s Tale going to be more mechanics focused than some we’ve seen of late?

Fargo: Well, yeah. We’re going to have a fraction of the words that Torment has, but we can’t help ourselves when it comes to reactivity and interesting dialogue. It’s going to be far more robust than the first three, with different religious factions and a full world to draw upon to feel properly rich.

RPS: Sounds good. (pointedly) How about giant spiders?

Fargo: You can’t have enough of them, right?

RPS: (silence) I guess I’m just asking if you want to make the BEST RPG ever, or…

Fargo: You know, I’m not too keen on rats or spiders. We like to have some familiar things, so that people are at home. But the other part is that we want things you haven’t seen a lot, so we have the likes of the trow to draw on and avoid the familiar tropes. We’ve got the Nuckelavee, this horse creature. The selkie, which is a creature that lives half at sea and half at the land… those are the three that jump to my head at the moment. If you remember a lot of the creatures from the Bard’s Tale comedy, I think we did a pretty good job of drawing from the lore for that. Discovery is a big part of an RPG, and it’s hard to feel like you’re discovering anything if all the creatures and dungeons are the same.

RPS: So what are the Kickstarter plans?

Fargo: It’s coming up on June 2nd. We’re going to be asking for $1.25 million, and we’re going to put at least another $1.25 million in on top of that.

RPS: Thank you for your time.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-05-18-inxile-reveals-the-bards-tale-4-kickstarter

Brian Fargo's vision for The Bard's Tale 4
Kickstarter launches next month. First "promo screen" released.

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 18/05/2015

inXile Entertainment has revealed its plan for a The Bard's Tale 4 Kickstarter - and its vision for the game, should it be successfully crowdfunded.

The Californian developer of previously successful Kickstarter projects Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera will launch a Kickstarter for The Bard's Tale 4 on 2nd June 2015 - the 30th anniversary of the original game. The Kickstarter will ask for $1.25m and if it's successful, inXile will put in $1.25m on top, boss Brian Fargo told Eurogamer.

The Bard's Tale 4 is a sequel to Interplay's Gaelic-flavoured The Bard's Tale trilogy, a series of fantasy dungeon crawlers that began life in 1985.

Fargo's plan for 4 is to return to Skara Brae for a "true dungeon-crawling sequel" to The Bard's Tale trilogy. Fargo promises maze-like dungeons with puzzles and riddles you can explore from a first-person perspective. inXile has the full rights to use everything from the original games, so expect features such as teleporter zones and magic mouths to return.

InXile used the Unity game engine to build Wasteland 2 and Torment, but it's switched to Epic's Unreal Engine 4 for The Bard's Tale 4. The developer will use photogrammetry to create in-game 3D objects from photos of architecture, taken in Scotland during a research trip. Photogrammetry is the graphics technique used to map real textures, as seen in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

InXile, which is currently working on the console version of Wasteland 2 as well as Torment, is around 40 people, and of those only a few are working on The Bard's Tale 4 right now.

"The game itself doesn't exist," Fargo tells Eurogamer. "Really it doesn't start to exist until after we have a campaign. But the visuals are real. When we start to show some of the screenshots and in-game footage: that's all how it's going to look."

We don't have any screenshots or gameplay footage, but we do have a "promo screen", as inXile describes it, below. This is, essentially, a proof of concept image rendered using Unreal Engine 4. "That's one of the unique things about Kickstarter: you don't know what your budget is, so there are certain things you may do differently depending on the funding levels," Fargo says. "Certainly, graphically, this is absolutely what it will look like."

The Bard's Tale 4 promo screen.

While The Bard's Tale 4 is a sequel to the original trilogy, it ignores the more recently-released The Bard's Tale, developed by inXile and published by Vivendi in 2004. This game was unlike the others in the series in that it was intended as a humorous spoof of the fantasy role-playing game genre.

Fargo explained how that game came to be (the video, below, is a Let's Play of its early moments).

"When I got the trademark for Bard's Tale, I didn't have the rights to use any of the copyright material, so I had to do something off the beaten path. I didn't have to make a comedy of course, but I was kind of in a cheeky mood, and what happened was, I'd just left Interplay and it was the first time I wasn't working hard for, I don't know, 17 years, so I took time off and organised my CD collection, and I did a lot of things I'd been wanting to get time to do. And I also played a lot of games. And game after game kept sending me into the sewers to kill rats, and I thought, 'I cannot believe after two decades I'm still doing this stuff!'.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be funny to make a game where the protagonist was such that he had played too many role-playing games - wouldn't that be kind of fun?' That's where that one was born.

"The people who were expecting a proper Bard's Tale sequel, they were caught off guard. And then there was the people that didn't have any expectations and they really adored it.

"But it's very different to what I'm doing now. It's almost like that existed in a universe all unto itself."

Over the years, Fargo has tried and failed to convince publishers to fund development of sequels in inXile's treasured franchises. His struggle to secure funding for new Wasteland and Torment games is well documented, but he has also had his fair share of disappointment while trying to get an old-fashioned dungeon crawler green lit.

"I was doing a product for somebody once and I said, 'Can I use the words dungeon crawl?' and I was actually forbid from saying the word dungeon or crawl while in the room with this publisher," Fargo recalls.

"It was hilarious. I was working on a game for them and said there were elements of dungeon crawling and they said, 'Don't you ever say that word again.' They were seriously against the concept!"

With the advent of crowdfunding and inXile's previous success on Kickstarter, however, Fargo has a realistic shot at making The Bard's Tale 4 a reality - a game he's particularly passionate about.

"I don't know what game could be more near and dear to my heart than Bard's Tale, not just because it was a seminal old game for me and put me on the map, but it's the kind of game I love," he says.

"I grew up playing Wizardry and Dungeons & Dragons. It's right up my wheelhouse for stuff I love to do."

Fargo will be hoping nostalgia for the series fuels the Kickstarter for The Bard's Tale 4. The Kickstarters for Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera were successful in part because of backers' desire to play new games in series they loved while growing up.

"A lot of people grew up playing The Bard's Tale," Fargo says. "There was a great article recently in Forbes magazine about Notch and how he grew up playing The Bard's Tale. People have a lot of fond memories of it. And it's important for me to make sure that people who are fans of the original trilogy are comfortable and happy with what we're doing."

And, Fargo says, inXile is keen to make fans of the original trilogy happy with the new game.

"When I make these games for me I move onto the next one and onto the next one, but for a lot of these people it's like they finished playing it yesterday," he says.

"You have to recognise that. There are some things you have to do in order to be a true sequel.

"The things that made it work are it's a party-based role-playing game; it's not an action game - you're using your brains not your reflexes; exploration is a big part of that, and being able to map dungeons out square by square.

"And those games were very difficult; in that particular case you couldn't save your game anywhere but we were teleporting you and giving you no magic zones and magic mouths and there were puzzles and riddles, so to me, it's got to be all of those things that made those great.

"But what it's not going to be is where the dungeon is in the upper-left-hand corner and the text is scrolling by. That would be a huge mistake."

The Bard's Tale should not be considered an open-world game, such as Skyrim or Witcher, Fargo insists. It's "a little more tightly contained". The Legend of Grimrock is perhaps a better comparison.

The Bard's Tale 4 has a "dynamic phase-based" combat system that sees the player issue commands before watching them play out, but the game will keep the player on their toes.

"You need to make all your decisions but the playfield is going to be dynamically changing," Fargo says. "If I say, 'Attack a guy,' but he's already been killed, I don't want to try re-attacking him for example! That's kind of stupid. So to have it so that your side of the table does make all of its moves but it's kind of dynamically changing - we're calling it dynamic phase-based just so we can capture what we're trying to do."

The folklore behind The Bard's Tale 4 is inspired by the Orkney Islands in Skara Brae in Scotland, and the soundtrack and lyrics take cues from Scottish culture, inXile said. Fargo has already hired Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, who worked on Pixar movie Brave, to contribute to the game.

"We have original music being created for the game and it's just fantastic," Fargo says.

"For me, immersion is everything, that's why it's the graphics, it's the ambient sounds, it's the music, it's the singing - it's bringing it all together."

While development of The Bard's Tale 4 will lead on PC, inXile is considering a console version, which comes as little surprise given Wasteland 2 is heading to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

"It's not our emphasis in the beginning,2 Fargo says. "I find that my audience is very PC centric, and they want to make sure we're focused on that, which we are.

"This one lends itself to console even more so than the isometric ones of course, but yeah, it's something we're going to keep heavily in mind of course, but we don't like to think about it too much, because when we're making our day to day decisions about how to make it the best that it can be, we don't want people to think we're making any trade-offs for the PC."

 

[Zed]

when Guido Henkel hears about this:
"oh my god this is exactly what Deathfire would be. the world is so unfair. fucking pop idol game designers!!! no room for true indies.

I invented the dungeon crawler"

 

[Infinitron]

Looks like there's a media blitz.

Potato articles: http://gry.onet.pl/artykuly/brian-f...zywrocic-dawny-blask-dungeon-crawlerom/j7jlvl
http://www.gram.pl/artykul/2015/05/18/bards-tale-4-zapowiedz.shtml

 

[Zetor]

So Wiz8-style (I assume that's what they meant with the "dynamic phase-based" thing) blobber with both fixed-step and freemove? I can live with that... though I wonder if freemove is just going to be a flavor / fluff thing with the encounters bound to tiles instead of placed anywhere in the world.

 

[Athelas]

inb4 downgrade

The Bard's Tale 4 has a "dynamic phase-based" combat system that sees the player issue commands before watching them play out, but the game will keep the player on their toes.

"You need to make all your decisions but the playfield is going to be dynamically changing," Fargo says. "If I say, 'Attack a guy,' but he's already been killed, I don't want to try re-attacking him for example! That's kind of stupid. So to have it so that your side of the table does make all of its moves but it's kind of dynamically changing - we're calling it dynamic phase-based just so we can capture what we're trying to do."

Nothing that's described there has anything to do with a phase-based system.

 

[Zed]

It's funny how they contact fucking potato websites, but a fansite responsible for side-campaigns raising thousands of dollars don't get a whisper of exclusive info or anything like that.
Really embracing the new era of crowdfunding and fan interaction, dudes.

 

[Infinitron]

inb4 downgrade

The Bard's Tale 4 has a "dynamic phase-based" combat system that sees the player issue commands before watching them play out, but the game will keep the player on their toes.

"You need to make all your decisions but the playfield is going to be dynamically changing," Fargo says. "If I say, 'Attack a guy,' but he's already been killed, I don't want to try re-attacking him for example! That's kind of stupid. So to have it so that your side of the table does make all of its moves but it's kind of dynamically changing - we're calling it dynamic phase-based just so we can capture what we're trying to do."

Nothing that's described there has anything to do with a phase-based system.

Why not? You give all of your guys orders at once, so if one of them kills an enemy, the guy who acts after him shouldn't attack that enemy too.

Phase-based doesn't necessarily mean they act simultaneously, only that they receive orders simultaneously. Actual actions can still be "turn-based".

 

[vonAchdorf]

Why not? You give all of your guys orders at once, so if one of them kills an enemy, the guy who acts after him shouldn't attack that enemy too.

What's new there? That's how all the dungeon crawlers do it. If you ordered to attack an enemy who has been slain, the character will attack another one. Elminage Gothic has the same system. You give orders for your whole party at the beginning of your turn, then it plays out turn based.

 

[Infinitron]

Why not? You give all of your guys orders at once, so if one of them kills an enemy, the guy who acts after him shouldn't attack that enemy too.

What's new there? That's how all the dungeon crawlers do it. If you ordered to attack an enemy who has been slain, the character will attack another one. Elminage Gothic has the same system. You give orders for your whole party at the beginning of your turn, then it plays out turn based.

Oh, it's not new. Fargo's just being silly. Which is also not new.

 

[Zetor]

Yeah, it's just Fargo overselling things as usual. There ARE some differences in how dungeon crawler games handle the "my target is dead/unreachable" situation, though. In most games, party members just retarget another enemy within the same group, but do nothing if the entire targeted group was wiped out or worse yet, waste abilities/spells on nothing -- ie. the full-hp cleric casts the heal spell on himself because the fighter died before the spell could go off.

Some games are smart enough to retarget the enemy in the next group automatically and abort/smart-retarget spells if the target becomes invalid mid-cast, which is I think what he was getting at. Wiz8 stands out here by potentially retargeting every time an enemy enters or leaves melee range, including weapon auto-swaps between ranged and melee to react optimally... but that's also because Wiz8 doesn't abstract enemy groups as uniform clumps standing behind each other (which I assume BT4 will do).

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamesn.com/the-bards-t...teland-2s-creators-have-always-wanted-to-make

Introducing The Bard's Tale IV: the sequel Wasteland 2's creators always wanted to make
By Jeremy Peel, 7 hours 40 mins ago, 2 Comments

Brian Fargo and InXile know that there are some things that need updating, and some things that don’t.

With Wasteland 2 wrapped and the bulk of the studio now heads-down on their Torment sequel, a tiny team have begun production on a follow-up to the Bard’s Tale trilogy - which finished in 1988 under Fargo’s direction at Interplay.

The Bard’s Tale IV is not isometric. It’s not a sprawling, literary adventure across strange lands. It’ll instead be a first-person dungeon crawl, like its namesake. The Bard’s Tale had a far narrower scope than Wasteland - and InXile will keep it that way with an adventure that promises to be both intricate and deep. Bedrock deep.

You’ll build a six-strong party of adventurers - creating bards, magic-users and thieves from scratch. But in the time-honoured tradition of dungeon crawling, they’ll share just one pair of legs - exploring maze-like environments as a congealed mass behind the camera. Whether that party will appear in battle as portraits or fully-rendered characters is a question of budget, to be settled by the Kickstarter campaign InXile will launch on June 2nd.

The game will snap to a grid for combat which some might call turn-based, but which Brian Fargo calls phase-based - a back and forth exchange of blows and buffs that sees the player cycle systematically through each of their party members. By the time the sixth gets to throw a punch, they might be facing an entirely changed situation.

“You may tell person number one to do whatever he does,” explained Fargo. “But something’s going to happen over the other side of the board which is going to affect what you tell the person in slot number two to do.”

Players aren’t forced to keep to 90-degree angles during exploration - they can unhinge themselves from the grid and stretch their necks in all the ways contemporary first-person games have taught us to expect. But InXile’s environments will be designed at severe right angles, in accordance with the limitations they’ve set themselves.

“The grid does force us to design it a certain way,” said Fargo. “There’s a pureness to it, and a quick understanding of things which is nice. When I’m exploring a world that’s more structured, it’s easier for me to put it together in my head.”

While The Bard’s Tale IV will feature plenty of NPCs and a certain amount of civilisation, it’ll be predominantly subterranean. InXile have set the game around 160 years after the events of the first Bard’s Tale, and in a poetic touch the original city of Skara Brae is now one level down - a ruin buried beneath another, newer metropolis. For inspiration, the team visited Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh - a warren of 17th century streets found beneath the Royal Mile.*

Below the new city, players will find further dungeons, including recognisable locations from the trilogy. That network of caverns will be home to secret doors, and buttons that click but offer no immediate explanation of their function. It’ll house unlabelled teleporters, and areas of total darkness. Levels will be built one on top of the other and make spatial sense, to the extent that falling through a trapdoor will plant you in the logically-appropriate space on the floor below.

Fargo expects that some players will want to map them out on graph paper, “down to a square”.

“You have your smaller puzzles that are right there in the room, but then you have this macro puzzle of how the design of the dungeons are,” he said.

The grid-based conundrums of Legend of Grimrock spring to mind, and Fargo says he’s appreciated the design of more recent attempts at the genre - but believes there hasn’t been a “big, ambitious attempt at doing the dungeon crawl in some time.”

The only contemporary influence he cites by name is The Room - the tactile puzzler about feeling your way into sealed tomes or locked cabinets (“That kind of physical manipulation of the world, I think they did an excellent job”). InXile want some of the same interactivity for The Bard’s Tale, with optional puzzles and riddles that’ll reward patient players with better gear.

That philosophy will extend to item design. Fargo imagines a perfectly ordinary sword you might carry in your inventory for most of the game - until you happen notice a latch on its hilt which, when flipped, causes it to set aflame.

“That constant discovery, within the environment and in your inventory, I think there’s lots of things to be done with that,” he said.

InXile have clearly enjoyed conceiving a smaller scale adventure, after the overland rambling of Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera - the latter of which Fargo claims holds “more words than the Holy Bible”.

“If you have 30 hours of readable content, that’s like making 20 movies back to back and having them all work together,” he said. “With Bard’s Tale it’s lighter on that kind of heavy fiction, but more on the discovery of things yourself.”

*The Bard’s Tale’s Scottish streak continues with a Gaelic soundtrack and placenames sourced from the Orkney Islands.

InXile are finding that the relative simplicity of their new game works to their advantage. Where Wasteland 2 ran on Unity and Torment licensed the Pillars of Eternity engine, The Bard’s Tale will build on Unreal Engine 4 - and the studio are able to go deeper and prettier with their environments than they have before.

“Oftentimes you end up having to give up a lot of your bandwidth to multiplayer, or AI, or 40 guys running around the screen,” said Fargo. “The beauty of this kind of thing is that I’ve got all the horsepower to myself.”

That means particle effects, flowing hair and rippling fabric all at “full tilt” as the player moves through a dungeon. And InXile are using the same photogrammetry techniques employed inThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter to import objects into the game - capturing old tombstones with their moss and worn letters intact.

“Visually, it can be a masterpiece,” said Fargo.

The Bard’s Tale IV is mostly ideas and potential at this point, as Torment was when it hit Kickstarter. InXile have their vision document, and the next stage will be to hash out the combat system with “basically stick figures”. A tight group of three or four developers, including Wasteland 2 lead Chris Keenan and art director Maxx Kaufman, are ensuring they’ll have something for the bulk of the company to work on when they roll over from Tides of Numenera.

This is not the first time InXile have rebooted The Bard’s Tale. In 2004, without the rights to use locations like Skara Brae, they made a game that couldn’t have been more different. With controller-friendly hack ‘n’ slash combat in the vein of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, a pre-set character and a plot that sent up classic fantasy, it now seems emblematic of the struggle that was getting RPGs made a decade ago.

Its protagonist, a snarky Bard inspired by Fargo’s quest encounters with too many rats in too many cellars, acted like he’d played too many RPGs in an industry that clearly felt it didn’t need any more.

“There was no way I was going to get anybody to finance a PC role-playing game,” remembered Fargo. “It had to be more action, console-oriented.

“It was this elevator pitch stuff that you had to do. I was trying to do some straight-up role-playing games, and I couldn’t have people yawn more at me.”

Fargo is still fond of the game InXile compromised on a decade ago, which recently enjoyed a second wind on iOS and Android. But he’s happy to fence it off as a “universe unto itself”. It’ll have very little influence on the new game - a proper sequel. Fargo invites a comparison: if he is Mad Max creator George Miller, then The Bard’s Tale IV is his Fury Road.

“Bard’s Tale is about as close to my heart as you can get,” he said. “It really launched me and Interplay onto the scene.”

But this isn’t simply personal wish fulfillment. In its day, The Bard’s Tale vastly outsold the original Wasteland and Planescape Torment. And even since the hugely successful Wasteland 2, InXile have fielded more requests to make another Bard’s Tale than anything else.

When the studio return to Kickstarter to bottle enthusiasm for a third time, they’ll be asking for $1.25 million - a figure they’ll match themselves, and which at a minimum would put them within the same budget ballpark as Wasteland 2.

It’s a long way up - but if they can make it, they’ll be able to dig a long way down. Long live the dungeon crawl.

 

[Athelas]

Yeah, I suppose 'we will have the same combat system as a billion jRPG's in existence' doesn't sound quite as promising as 'we have a new 'dynamic phase-based combat system'.

Initial goal will be set at 1.25 mill, apparently.

 

[Zed]

Fargo invites a comparison: if he is Mad Max creator George Miller, then The Bard’s Tale IV is his Fury Road.

lmao

 

[Metro]

Muh immersion. Muh occulus rift!

 

[LESS T_T]

More media blitzin':http://www.pcgamesn.com/the-bards-t...teland-2s-creators-have-always-wanted-to-make

Players aren’t forced to keep to 90-degree angles during exploration - they can unhinge themselves from the grid and stretch their necks in all the ways contemporary first-person games have taught us to expect. But InXile’s environments will be designed at severe right angles, in accordance with the limitations they’ve set themselves.

“The grid does force us to design it a certain way,” said Fargo. “There’s a pureness to it, and a quick understanding of things which is nice. When I’m exploring a world that’s more structured, it’s easier for me to put it together in my head.”

So it's basically grid-based with optional free movement, huh.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

The Kickstarter will ask for $1.25m

Yeah... That's not gonna happen.

 

[Metro]

Grid based as God intended. The 'unlock your screen' crap has been in blobbers before and is largely pointless... except for those of you who play with a bottle of lotion by your side and 'unnnngh unnnngh' to the scenery pretending you're actually THERE!

The Kickstarter will ask for $1.25m

Yeah... That's not gonna happen.

They'll easily get that.