Bard's Tale Kickstarter

[rivethead]

It's pretty good. I've spent quite a while with it yesterday.

There are some complaints that it doesn't have "legacy mode" but screw that (there will be a legacy mode later). It was great when I was like 9 or 10 when the original came out but I don't have time for that crap. My days of using graph paper are over. The automap is fantastic.

Even with that, still fairly grindy type game. I thought it was cool when sitting in the street waiting for my spell points to crank up the sun actually casts a shadow and you can see the shadow move.

There are a few other nitpicks (such as gold/healing) but all in all...I'm amazed what they did with it.

Yes, "legacy mode" is coming soon (probably by the end of this year).

For those interested, you pay one price for the trilogy (I think it's $15). Right now only the first game is available, with BT II coming this fall, and BT III coming this winter. Along the way, legacy mode will be added. This lets you configure a bunch of settings to allow the game to more closely play like the originals. So if you're a sadist and like graph paper or losing three hours of game progress because you die before you get back to the Adventures Guild.....you can enjoy your pain.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

It's pretty good. I've spent quite a while with it yesterday.

There are some complaints that it doesn't have "legacy mode" but screw that (there will be a legacy mode later). It was great when I was like 9 or 10 when the original came out but I don't have time for that crap. My days of using graph paper are over. The automap is fantastic.

Even with that, still fairly grindy type game. I thought it was cool when sitting in the street waiting for my spell points to crank up the sun actually casts a shadow and you can see the shadow move.

There are a few other nitpicks (such as gold/healing) but all in all...I'm amazed what they did with it.

Yeah, my rose-colored glasses have been torn off now that I've spent some time with this. Faithful re-creation and some nice modern improvements to the interface, game saves, graphics, etc. But man, for as much as I remember loving the game back in the Apple II days, a lot of it is driving me batshit crazy now. It's REALLY grindy and slow. Takes forever to get anywhere even in town or small dungeons like the wine cellar. The biggie for me though is complete lack of a "camp", "rest" or some other way to speed up the passage of time to aid healing and recovery of spell points. Standing around in the street spinning in place to pass time and slowly boost spell points and then manually casting heal spells one at a time might have been okay when I was young, didn't know better and had lots and lots of time to play games. These days it's utterly infuriating.

 

[kn51]

Yeah, I hear ya.

Where are you at? Right now all my characters are at level 10, and I'm tooling around sewers level 3. The gold and EXP are rapidly increased and it is now much more enjoyable (yet still somewhat of a pain).

Heck even as a kid I got the clue books. I couldn't imagine (well I did it but don't remember) having to go back to the adventurer's guild to save. Egads.

But I do remember having to "setup" to enter the dungeon. Cast the mage flame. Cast a compass. Have the bard play a song. Cast levitate, etc.

All in all though I'm impressed. There was quite a while where the project was in jeopardy until Krome took it over.

 

[rivethead]

Krome has stated that additional improvements might come with future patches. Maybe they'll address the lack of camp/rest issue?

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Where are you at? Right now all my characters are at level 10, and I'm tooling around sewers level 3. The gold and EXP are rapidly increased and it is now much more enjoyable (yet still somewhat of a pain).

Lower levels, like 3/4. My memory of the game is that it's possible somewhere along the line to have a strong enough party to venture into a dungeon and complete a level or two without needing to run away and recharge. But where I am now it's one or two fights and my party is dinged up enough to need to rest and do nothing to get back up to strength. That's bad enough, it's truly idiotic design to force the player to stop playing in order to be able to play more later. But the really annoying part is that you get stuck into a loop where you fight, need to rest, start resting just sitting there staring at the screen waiting for time to pass and a wandering group of kobolds attacks. Fight the kobolds and even when you win you take another few hits which require a couple more healing spells and you're right back to square one. Wait more, do nothing, another random encounter dings up the party and again, right back where you started. Do that 1000 times and you're eventually strong enough to forego the constant need to rest, but I'm not going to do that 1000 times. It's not fun.

I think back in the day we had a mentality that length of game was important and good. Nobody wanted to spend $40 on an RPG that could be knocked off in 10 hours and you'd hear brags like "it took me 500 hours to get through game x....". Maybe that was good then, but it's not good now. 500 hours of staring at a screen waiting for spell points to recharge is torture, not entertainment. So this one is getting shelved for the time being. If future patches or cheats address this glaring deficiency I'll give it another go. But I'm just left wondering what the appeal was in the first place.

 

[Midwayman]

Lower levels, like 3/4. My memory of the game is that it's possible somewhere along the line to have a strong enough party to venture into a dungeon and complete a level or two without needing to run away and recharge. But where I am now it's one or two fights and my party is dinged up enough to need to rest and do nothing to get back up to strength. That's bad enough, it's truly idiotic design to force the player to stop playing in order to be able to play more later. But the really annoying part is that you get stuck into a loop where you fight, need to rest, start resting just sitting there staring at the screen waiting for time to pass and a wandering group of kobolds attacks. Fight the kobolds and even when you win you take another few hits which require a couple more healing spells and you're right back to square one. Wait more, do nothing, another random encounter dings up the party and again, right back where you started. Do that 1000 times and you're eventually strong enough to forego the constant need to rest, but I'm not going to do that 1000 times. It's not fun.

I think back in the day we had a mentality that length of game was important and good. Nobody wanted to spend $40 on an RPG that could be knocked off in 10 hours and you'd hear brags like "it took me 500 hours to get through game x....". Maybe that was good then, but it's not good now. 500 hours of staring at a screen waiting for spell points to recharge is torture, not entertainment. So this one is getting shelved for the time being. If future patches or cheats address this glaring deficiency I'll give it another go. But I'm just left wondering what the appeal was in the first place.

That's old school role playing in a nutshell. If you don't want to get ambushed resting you need to do it somewhere safe. Games saw themselves more as simulators. That's the paper and pencil games they were derived from as well. Nowdays players want an 'experience' handed to them on a silver platter. Back then people would have complained how braindead games are now. I don't know about 500hrs, but certainly difficulty was a way of stretching content that was way harder to produce, and dealing with computers that just couldn't handle the amount of data we throw around now even if budgets were unlimited.

I'm kinda annoyed with games today that auto-heal you after every encounter and you automatically regain all your spells. Takes a lot of the tension from resource management out of the game. All it ends up being is if you can beat a set fight. No risk/reward of do I press on injured, or do I rest? Did my bad tactics leave me beat up? Well I have a lot more incentive to improve is there is a difference between barely winning a fight and dominating your enemy.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

That's old school role playing in a nutshell. If you don't want to get ambushed resting you need to do it somewhere safe. Games saw themselves more as simulators. That's the paper and pencil games they were derived from as well. Nowdays players want an 'experience' handed to them on a silver platter. Back then people would have complained how braindead games are now. I don't know about 500hrs, but certainly difficulty was a way of stretching content that was way harder to produce, and dealing with computers that just couldn't handle the amount of data we throw around now even if budgets were unlimited.

I'm kinda annoyed with games today that auto-heal you after every encounter and you automatically regain all your spells. Takes a lot of the tension from resource management out of the game. All it ends up being is if you can beat a set fight. No risk/reward of do I press on injured, or do I rest? Did my bad tactics leave me beat up? Well I have a lot more incentive to improve is there is a difference between barely winning a fight and dominating your enemy.

I'm with you on the new school, hand-holding thing for short attention span, instant gratification millennials who want victory spoon fed to them in pre-digested bite sized pieces. Having to work is part of the allure, games should be HARD. But it seems that to some bad, lazy designers HARD = time consuming and the sole purpose of some game elements was to make the player invest as much time as possible. Not brains, not strategy, just time. And Bard's Tale is like that. There is no safe place to rest and no way to speed up the process. The BEST you can do is stand on the street in daylight and wait. And wait and wait and WAIT. You will get jumped, guaranteed and you will then fight and you will then use up more hit points and more spell points in those fights and then you wait and wait and wait some more. Lather, rinse repeat. That's not really a simulation, that's just a grind. In a real simulation setting up a defensive perimeter, barricading a room or just going back to the AG would provide a safe space to heal and recharge. Camping does not break the game, it makes it MORE realistic, not less. You just speed up the recharge process so that the same thing happens, players heal, recharge, there's a chance to get jumped, but it's time compressed and happens in 20 seconds of my life rather than 20 minutes or 2 hours. There are a LOT of ways to allow the players to deal with the aftermath of a fight and the necessary recuperation time that don't require the player to stop all progress and stare at a screen waiting endlessly. That's not "old school", that's just stupid. Other old, walk-10, party-based dungeon crawls managed to provide a challenging experience without wasting our time. Personally I loved the way that the later Wizardry games handled things. Camping was realistic, you *could* get jumped and you might get through unscathed. It just streamlined the process and made it faster and less tedious. The kicker was was the world was dynamic and other factions were chasing the same objectives as you. So the more you rested the greater the chance someone else beat you to a key or map that you needed. That was smart design, actions and consequences.

 

[rivethead]

InXile has talked about balancing the old-school difficulty/tension building with the modern expectation of convenience and limited time for play. One of the things they've done with BTIV is use luck stones. These are stones/statues placed throughout the game. If you touch it, your party is instantly healed up and a save point is made. However, you're also given the choice of receiving a small XP bonus instead of the heal/save. If you choose the XP, the luck stone disappears for good.

I thought that was pretty clever. I'm all for giving the player choice.

 

[kn51]

I understand the points. Once you get past a certain level the game gets a lot better. As in you get a ton more gold and a ton more experience where you just pay for your magic points instead of waiting.

Funny thing is I think they adjusted/dumbed down the level requirements so it has never been easier. Got into a pickle earlier in the catacombs. A level 11 spell bailed my ass out of a one-way door.

Always good to have multiple saves with this type of stuff. There aren't no "Reset from checkpoint" type stuff. To be honest I'm not sure how I did it when I was a kid with the loading screens, no quick saving, not automapping, etc.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Always good to have multiple saves with this type of stuff. There aren't no "Reset from checkpoint" type stuff. To be honest I'm not sure how I did it when I was a kid with the loading screens, no quick saving, not automapping, etc.

I learned that lesson the hard way with an early release of Betrayal at Krondor. I only had a single save slot because back then hard drive space was at a premium. Open, make progress, save over the old save, make more progress, save over that one, etc. There was a bug in that release that corrupted saves and I lost a character that was about 2/3 of the way through. D'oh!

I kind of enjoyed mapping, getting out the graph paper and a pencil to fire up a new game was part of the ritual and it was a skill just like quick reflexes are an asset in action games. Good maps were important and improved the gaming experience. That might have been influenced by my real pen and paper D&D sessions. I did not enjoy the disc swapping for saves in some early games on my Apple II. Insert boot disc, then insert scenario disc, then insert the save disc with your party on it, then the play disc, then to save swap out the play disc for the save disc, save and change back to the play disc. ARRGGHH!!

 

[Craig234]

I don't miss graph paper, but part of the immersiveness and reward in a game is the player having to make an investment, and that was that.

 

[nakedfrog]

I finally fired up BT1 on Friday too. Lost one guy, decided "meh", I'd have that slot open for summons/wandering monsters. If I play a bit more tonight, I might hit level 2 with some characters. Got a wandering barbarian in my party right now, he hits for 4-16 so that's pretty good for right now.
Yeah, just sitting around waiting for the spell points to regenerate isn't great.

 

[Coalfax]

Go to Roscoes Energy Emporium..

 

[StinkyPinky]

I wish someone would remaster Might and Magic 6 and 7.

 

[nakedfrog]

Go to Roscoes Energy Emporium..

Trying to save up for plate armor, here!

 

[Borealis7]

I wish someone would remaster Might and Magic 6 and 7.

#MeToo
6 was damn scary to play at some areas like Mire of the Damned at lower levels and that castle near the end of the game, and i loved 7 so much!
i tried playing MMX: Legacy but bugs just killed it for me.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Go to Roscoes Energy Emporium..

Sure. Because when you're on the third level of a dungeon what you really want is to walk to the stairs and go up a level, walk across that level to find the stairs and go up another lever, walk across that level to find the exit portal, walk across town to get to Roscoe's, wait for 8 hours of game times to pass until the store opens, spend all your gold, walk back across town to get to the dungeon, down to level one, walk to find the stairs, down to level two, walk to find the stairs, down to level three, back to where you were just to keep playing again. Nothing enhances the gaming experience and keeps you involved like a nice refreshing 2 hour break in the action where you can't make any progress.

 

[Coalfax]

APAR out, go to Roscoes (Which btw is NEVER closed, only the Review Board and Garths close at night) walk back, APAR down.

Also, this game was created in the 80's here a little slog was acceptable and encouraged. Its the games of today that cater to the "I need this now crowd" that added in simple things like instant camp and refresh.

 

[Craig234]

#MeToo
6 was damn scary to play at some areas like Mire of the Damned at lower levels and that castle near the end of the game, and i loved 7 so much!
i tried playing MMX: Legacy but bugs just killed it for me.

MM6 had something scarier than other RPG's: when it teleported you into a building filled with Minotaurs.

 

[nakedfrog]

APAR out, go to Roscoes (Which btw is NEVER closed, only the Review Board and Garths close at night) walk back, APAR down.

Also, this game was created in the 80's here a little slog was acceptable and encouraged. Its the games of today that cater to the "I need this now crowd" that added in simple things like instant camp and refresh.

Yeah, I played it in the 80s, one of the first CRPGs I ever played (this, Wizardry, and Phantasie).
It wouldn't have been an issue for them to add camping even back then, being heavily based on D&D of the time where you'd just tell your DM you wanted to make camp for a few hours.
I was literally in Garth's about to buy that plate armor, then he suddenly declares that he's closed for the night and boots me out into the street unceremoniously.

 

[kn51]

Once you get down into the catacombs I'm finding things shift from "yeah, a pain" to ridiculously smooth sailing.

 

[Juiblex]

I finished the game. The game was so ridiculously easy... If you didn't have to leave the dungeon to get spell points you could finish it in 10 hours or so. It took me 15 hours to beat it. Im not sure why people are complaining. Most levels the stairs are actually really close to each other. All you need to do is phase door thru a wall. Once you get far enough you get a mage staff. Which refers spell points. Also there are roscoe rooms in dungeons which also regen spell points.

 

[Midwayman]

FWIW I read a trick on healing without getting encounters
1) Party attack
2) Every defends except the bard
3) plays their healing song
4) keep defending until HP is full

 

[kn51]

Yeah, if you are facing some weak enemy it works out quite nice.

There is a point where the game "breaks" due to quick saving. Meaning it is trivial to attempt challenges.

Catacombs level 3, get a sorcerer up high enough to cast a red dragon. Enter the room with 69 wights. 10-12K per visit.

 

[rivethead]

InXile put out an update yesterday. They put in five times the money they said they would. By my math, this $3 million game is really a $9 million game (original plan was $1.5 million from backers, $1.5 million from InXile).

Talk about under-promising and over-delivering......