Bards Tale IV announced

Sounds like people have gotten their key. I haven’t yet for some reason.

I filled out their CrowdOx survey last week. It took a couple of tries to finally figure out where they wanted me to choose between GOG and Steam, but I finally found the right thing, because I got a key almost immediately. But it took me a while to figure out how to pick between GoG and Steam. There didn’t seem to be any way to do so at first.

I think resubmitting the survey a couple times worked for me. I had to do the thing where it said “this will invalidate your previous choices”.

Bleh, apparently I’m blind. Thanks!

Where are we supposed to get our manual and Prima Strategy guide and all that? All those things were listed for us in the Early Bird package, but I couldn’t figure out where I could download that. In the end I figured maybe it will show up on Steam once the game is out. I checked on Steam last night, but the game wasn’t out yet, so there wasn’t any associated documentation.

I just got a link to my strategy guide today. I haven’t looked at it yet.

Oh hey, I just got that email too!

The strategy guide is a straight-up walkthrough with maps and puzzle solutions. It doesn’t have any strategy stuff, no “20 things I wish I knew before I played BT4”.

Finally got my actual game key and the strategy guide email others mentioned. yay! Definitely won’t get to play this anytime soon, but yay!

It is feeling a bit sluggish at the high setting and 2560x1440 on my 1070 gtx, but still playable.

Got my steam key after talking to support, and got the guides etc. just now. Phew.

Is it true no random encounters? If you’re in a tough spot you can’t grind out a couple of levels?

Anyone else notice if their reward email contained two identical downloads of the soundtrack (Disk 1 and Disk 1) and know if there were supposed to be two disks? I sent off a message to support about it, but thought I’d check if anyone actually looked at this stuff or if you’re all busy playing.

[Edit] Ugh. Save points? How’d I miss that they weren’t going to have save-anywhere saves? I absolutely despise save points as they force me to decide if I want to go on not knowing how much time it’ll take. Hope they are plenty and aren’t more than a few minutes apart each, or I’m going to be one annoyed player.

It really loves to crank up my 1080 Ti’s fans. I found that switching it to fullscreen mode with vsync enabled helped a small amount with that. It’s a solid 60fps (capped), but seems poorly optimized.

The tiny FOV without an FOV slider (or config file adjustment) means I’ll be setting this one aside tonight and keeping an eye out for patches. It has that familiar “console port” feel to it for me, but I haven’t played enough to comment further.

ACG recommended it so I have hope that there’s a good game here. It may be a few patches before I try to find it.

I’ve read that sentiment a few other places, and thought “man, what a bummer” until just now when I realized this is Bard’s Tale IV - is this out on consoles? Was the PC version not the primary platform?

edit - It is coming to consoles. Oh man, if they focused so much on consoles that there is where your primary platform is, or it influenced how it turned out on PC that’s kind of disappointing, I have to say. Hopefully it’s patched and in good shape soon!

While I personally find the concept of leaving a negative review for getting a key late/not yet stupid, people without keys have legit gripes. Most kickstarters get keys to backers days before launch. Where as here people were stuck waiting for not just game keys but bonus item keys as well. They already went through this in beta (beta keys showed up over a very spaced out period, like over a day). Guess it didn’t get ironed out.

Um, advice to anyone playing. As soon as you get a quest to go see the review board maybe save before continuing. In Beta, this unlocked the next tier of abilities. But I just did it and they did not unlock.

Also, save before doing anything with puzzle weapons. They were bugged in beta and apparently still are. :/

I did read some of the reviews (this isn’t a game that appeals to me anyhow, so I was just looking around). Some of the negative comments did concern people’s opinion’s of the game itself, and the style of RPG it is. Which of course means, as always, that if it’s not your cup of tea, it just isn’t.

Agreed. I can’t recall who it was with but this is not my first Crowdox issue (although I’m not sure they’ve screwed up in every case I’ve encountered them). Whereas Backerkit has been super smooth. I can only surmise that Crowdox has been doing a ton of work to schmooze people. And maybe not quite as much work to, you know, function properly.

Here’s what I got for the response about the double disk 1:

There are two different rewards, the Original Soundtrack and the Digital Deluxe Double Album - the former contains one CD of music, the latter two. Your tier came with the original soundtrack, which by error contains two copies of the first CD. Hope that clarifies things!

I do think this game will be excellent. Sadly it plays too slow for me atm. I will return to my clear gambling problem in the casinos of Dairy Queen!