The Bard's Tale IV

[Tawmis]

Anyone else back this up on Kickstarter?

It's getting closer and closer to a release.

[Rath Darkblade]

Um, no...? I thought The Bard's Tale was a very old 80s game?

[Tawmis]

Um, no...? I thought The Bard's Tale was a very old 80s game?

It was! They re-released the first three as a part of the Kickstarter.

New one is done now - I've downloaded it, but not played it yet.

[Tawmis]

The Tale Continues

Hello Adventurers!

David Rogers here.

The time has finally come to, once again, answer the call to adventure and save Skara Brae. Huzzah! The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a real work of passion; not just by our team, but by you, our backers. Thank you all for helping us to further the Bard's Tale legacy. This game wouldn't exist if it weren't for your initial and continued support.

Thank You.

David Rogers
Creative Director

Hello Adventures of Caith!

Jeff Pellegrin, Producer, here. I want to personally thank you all for continue support and patience for The Bard’s Tale IV.

What an amazing experience developing The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep has been. I believe we made some excellent development choices, and produced a title full of great design elements, content, and amazing assets in art, sound, and music.

I want to reiterate my thanks for everyone who participated in the forums, alpha and beta tests. Your feedback, comments, suggestions, and issues reported were all vital elements in the production process. Please keep them coming post launch!

Again, thank you all for bringing the the Bard back!

Jeff “Pacatus” Pellegrin
Producer
Accessing Your Backer Goods

Hi everyone, QA Lead Daniel Dean here just to wish all of you well and provide some information on how to access your digital goods. We have sent you emails from our backer site CrowdOx requesting you specify your choice of Steam or GOG.com key. Once specified, you will receive your key through email.

The game key you receive is for the Standard Edition of the game regardless of what tier you backed at. All your other extras will be available for download from CrowdOx, we have begun sending those emails and you should receive those some time today.

In terms of accessing your in-game items, the "Bardic Brian Skin" PDF comes with instructions on how to activate those items in your game.

Please use our forums and our support desk to let us know of any issues you find so that we can get working on them right away!

We hope you enjoy The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep!

Daniel Dean
QA Lead
The Voices on the Street

As we've been waiting to for the reviews to come in, we've gotten some feedback from some press that we wanted to share here. Since they couldn't be too detailed, they made it up by being especially declarative.

"The Bard's Tale does a great job of taking a modern approach while not losing its roots and old school charm. The voiced dialog, ambient sounds, and chatter of NPCs help create a very immersive adventure." - RPGamer

"'Bard's Tale IV' feels like a mix between such games as 'Legend of Grimrock' or very old 'Eye of the Beholder' series and early installments of 'The Elder Scrolls' franchise, particularly 'Arena' and to some extent - 'Daggerfall'. We have more freedom if compared to traditional crawlers, we are not doing the tango dance when fighting and we can do more things other than looking for that dagger +1 and that one pesky switch."- Gamezilla

and our personal favorite,

"It's a goddamn masterpiece." - ReviewFix/Old School Gamer Magazine

As the team was working some crazy hours to get the game ready, these comments were inspiration for us to keep going. For all the voices that we heard, though, the most important ones to be heard are yours, and today, we get to finally share with you this game that you helped empower us to create. We hope you like it, and we thank you for being a part of this amazing journey to bring back The Bard's Tale. Enjoy the game and welcome back to Skara Brae! You've been missed!

Brian Fargo
CEO/Leader inXile
@BrianFargo

[Tawmis]

So....
Yeah.

GRAPHICS:
And by that - as others mentioned, load times. And lag. So when the game first installed, it installed with HIGH settings for _everything_. When I turned it would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to see the movement. So I went into the settings changed it to MEDIUM for almost everything, leaving a few things High. No change. Changed it all to MEDIUM. No change. Changed it all to LOW, and now I can move, but the graphics look atrocious.

LOAD TIMES:
As others have said - the load times can take anywhere from a minute to three minutes. And this is not an exaggeration.

MOVEMENT:
This might be something in the game that I've not figured out yet - but some monsters can move back a space - so that certain attacks you have can't reach. It's easy enough to move side to side, but the fact that you can't move forward while in combat to attack monsters is annoying. Maybe there's a way to move forward during, but if there is - I've not found it.

CUSTOMIZATION OF CHARACTERS:
One of the great thing about RPGs these days is being able to customize your character. Their looks/height/hair/eyes/etc. - this game has none of that. You pick a class, then a Race - and depending on the region you're given one specific look. This is trivial, yes, but it was disappointing that I could not change my hero to look how I wanted to them.

THE GOOD:
It's not all bad. With my graphics turned to LOW and waiting for load times; I did find that the game was enjoyable from what little I played before my patience wore thin. Some aspects remind me of THIEF ("Stick to the shadows so you're not seen!").

CONCLUSION:
Hoping an update comes out to fix some of these things, but until then it's too much waiting and being pulled out of the game, because you get bored and read a book or comic until the screen loads. And the forced LOW graphics don't make the game visually pleasing.

[Tawmis]

We will see if this does anything - they JUST released a patch:

Hello everyone!

Today, we are pleased to get you the latest patch for The Bard´s Tale IV: Barrows Deep.

Patch 3 introduces additional enhancements to graphic settings, character art, localization, as well as further addressing remaining issues like ability bugs, optimization of loading times, and stability across the game.

With Patch 3 done, please allow us a few personal words: Here at inXile, we are always committed to making quality RPGs, and we are totally devoted to what we are doing. The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a game that we poured our hearts into, and every single one of us is very sad that the release of the game we are so proud of was overshadowed by performance issues. Of course, we wish that we had caught these things at launch and have been working overtime to correct them as quickly as we can. For those of you affected, we are truly sorry for any bad experience that you might have had.

We hope you will enjoy the changes and if you do, we would be very grateful for a user review if you haven't written one yet. Of course, the same applies if you were forced to write a negative review in the past, but would be so kind to reconsider now if the issues that prevented you to enjoy the game were addressed in the meantime.

Thank you very much for your patience, and your ongoing support. It means the world to us.

With Patch 3 being released, we are now focusing on our original goal of enhancing the game by adding many additional features after launch. Legacy Mode, controller support, and grid movement will only be some of them and we will talk more about those items and more in the near future. Friends of Mac and Linux will also be happy to hear that we are working on those versions as well.

For details on this patch, please check out the notes below:


Stability:
- Improved how our graphics benchmarking determined the correct graphics settings for your system.
- Several optimizations for improved performance.
- Players who played in non-English languages and encountered issues with placing cogs into gear puzzles and had their save files corrupted should now have working save files again.
- Fixed a crash related to using Jarnel’s Eyes in certain dungeons.
- Fixed a crash related to skipping the post combat screen after defeating Mangar for the 1st time.
- Fixed several combat placement bugs across the game.
- Fixed a crash in the Cellars of Kylearan's Tower caused by defeating Mangar and then defeating any remaining fights in the dungeon.
- Fixed a bug relating to how push-blocks reset themselves after being pushed into a hole multiple time. They'll now properly reset each time Stone Remembers is sung.
- Fixed a crash relating to using Mangar’s Mind Jab in the fight against Mangar.
- Fixed several issues relating to certain performance actors not saving properly after escaping to main menu.
- Fixed an issue in which players could not access vendors after reloading a save game under some circumstances.
- Fixed an issue in which hidey bides wouldn’t work correctly if you exited the game before looting the cache or the cache reset itself.

Gameplay:
- Fixed several issues where certain doors and puzzles were not saving when exiting to the main menu or to desktop.
- Fixed a bug that caused Sharp, Keen, and Honed puzzle weapon boons to reduce your damage to 0 when you critically hit with a dagger or a bow ability.
- The description of the Wrecking Ball passive has been updated.
- Fixed a bug that caused 2-handed weapons to corrupt your characters stats when equipping and unequipping that item after purchasing skills.
- Fixed a bug in which the bridge to the Orkan Rookery could get stuck if you ran into it while it was assembling.
- Fixed a bug that resulted in Arthur de-spawning if you defeated the ritualists around him, but save/loaded your game before speaking with him.
- Fixed several instances in which waypoints were not deactivating when you switched which quest was being tracked.
- The Power Rush passive and status effect have a clearer description, and now correctly work with AoE abilities.
- Lute of Compulsory Cavorting no longer has question marks in its description and its Drunk effect works properly.
- Fixed an issue in the Sentry Tower that resulted in buttons on the 3rd floor getting stuck in the depressed position if you exited the game before they reset themselves.
- Removed extraneous waypoints in Castle Langskall.
- Fixed an exploit that allowed you to dupe items inside the merchant inventory.
- Fixed an exploit in which you could duplicate items via offering statues.
- The Guardian passive now has a clearer description of what it's doing.
- Fixed an issue with status effects, like On Fire or Rend, stacking from different sources and not correctly calculating the effect. If two status effects aren’t the same strength, they’ll no longer stack on one another, and instead create a new stack.
- Fairy Powder Bombs will now play their explosion when they detonate, and will no longer harm your own team.
- Lowland Park Whisky now changes your next melee attack damage type to mental damage, as intended.
- Traps in the Sulfur Springs are now more lethal.
- Fixed a bug in which caltrops could trigger on dead enemies, causing caltrops to not trigger properly on living enemies.

Etc.
- A Sharpness post process effect and slider was added, which allows you to adjust how crisp or blurred the game appears.
- Anti-Aliasing & Post Processing settings are now updated when you adjust your Effects Quality in the options menu.
- Running the game in borderless window mode will now correctly match your monitor’s current resolution.
- Greatly improved the user interface when playing with 4:3 aspect ratio.
- Improvements to non-English localized text.
- Several graphical updates in Baedish lowlands environment.
- Fixed an issue where several settings in the Options menu weren’t properly saving.
- Updated the mesh seen in the inspection window for staves and Lowland Park Whisky.
- Street signs, offering altars, and elven altars now properly display in the correct language, based on your language settings.
- You can no longer choose to not help the Selkie sisters. When destiny calls, you answer.
- Fixed several backer quotes in the Main Menu.
- Fixed a bug in which the music on the Main Menu would stop playing after completing screen calibration.
- Fixed several typos in character dialogue.
- Updated how fullscreen tutorials show text in other languages, better accounting for increases in text size after translation.
- Adjusted the amount of time subtitles stay on screen.
- Fixed several issues relating to localized text over-running its boundaries in the interface.
- Added additional audio in a few areas where it was missing.
- Updated Fairy Golf music so that it plays through the entire fairy gold arena.
- The crafting menu now displays how many of a given item will result from crafting.
- Additional decals, statues, and effects added to Skara Brae underground.

Known issues to watch out for until fixed:
- If you escape to the main menu during the final animated scene in the game (the cinematic after defeating the final boss), your save file can get into a state in which you cannot complete the final step of the main quest. To avoid this issue, please allow all the animated scenes to play out without exiting the game.
- We found that player’s have a small chance to suffer odd behaviors, including crashes, when using a practitioner’s dragon breath & conjurorer’s mark on groups of skeleton enemies.
- Player’s zoning into Skyhenge for the first time have a small chance to experience a crash. This only happens on the first time transitioning into the zone.
- Player’s summon creatures that last till the end of combat will create a checkerboard icon on the victory screen.
- Tarjan boss fight can be completed without utilizing the hungering blade by using the melting boon from puzzle weapons.This is an exploit and not as designed.

Best,
The team at inXile

[Tawmis]

Their "patch" is redownloading the entire 27GB game, all over again, with the updated files.

They don't have a an actual "patch" for Patch 3.

This is ridiculous.

Even more so if there's still issues.