Bards Tale IV announced

This game now takes up more room on my hard drive than any other. Even more than Bioshock Infinite with it’s two expansion packs. Even more than Pillars of Eternity II. I’m going in!

Three problems, any one of which place it into the “not even on sale” bin for me. Ugh. I was looking forward to this.

Anyone else having the audio get screwy every once in a while? It will all the sudden get extremely loud and distorted, if I hit escape to go to the menu it will stop, and seems to also correct itself on its own after a few seconds, but very annoying. About to hit level 7 on my main character.

This is a terrible game. Everything is linear, and they will put overpowered groups to block paths to move you along - the only problem being is that these groups will occasionally spot you before you can tell how strong they are, and then it’s back to the last saved slot, which is by checkpoint saving at save posts. Disappointing.

I played it for about an hour last night. By default, the graphical settings are all on Ultra. I hit autodetect and they changed to high, and my game went from being a slide show to being semi-playable. But then I was opening a barrel and everything slowed down again. I went to settings, and everything had somehow changed back to Ultra. So this time I changed it to Medium, and this time the frame rate stayed around 30fps, which was even more playable than before.

Overall I am really enjoying it. The opening movie sets up a fantastic premise. That was really important.

I somehow ended up putting 5 hours in this yesterday. It’s definitely a corridor RPG so far. Areas that aren’t in the main quest are cut off from you. It’s linear so far. There are a few side quests, but they are also cut off. I don’t know how far I am in the tutorial, which is very extensive, and I hope the game opens up more. I’m playing on a zombie computer. It’s cobbled together from a compact Dell, with a SSD, a Ryzen 5, and a 1070 video card driving a 144hz monitor. It runs fine on Ultra at 1440p. I’ve had a few slow downs, but it generally runs well.

All that being said, I had an absolute blast playing this, rails and all. The combat so far has been tough, but I think fair. I started with a Bard character but quickly switched to a fighter. Now that I have a full party I may juggle him back in since I have a better handle on how this game plays.

I think the ACG review was spot on so far. Between this, and DQ XI, I should have enough gaming ahead of me to last through the next few months.

You must not own XCOM 2 with the WotC expansion. :-)

I see there’s a third party FOV trainer available for the steam version.

  1. Download and extract the rar
  2. Run the executable and leave it running
  3. Launch the game
  4. Use the added hotkeys for increasing or decreasing the FOV.

fov

This may not work after the game is updated with a patch, but hopefully they’ll keep updating this until, or if, the game officially supports FOV adjustments.

Edit: The FOV trainer is a few posts below the ultrawide tweak on the page.

Shipping without support for things like FOV adjustment in 2018 is criminal.

Definitely. I will say that I do like that they always have mouselook enabled. That’s something I’ve often had to enable with workarounds like autohotkey in other games.

They posted a patch release roadmap. It should have a FOV slider built-in later this week among other things.

Edit: Reading through it, I think the game will be in the state it really should have been for launch in 2 or 3 weeks.

That’s probably going to be about perfect for when I can finally dive in. Thanks for posting the road map, good stuff.

Mapping the save points will make it a bit better to judge whether I want to continue playing. Dropped out last night because I didn’t know how long I’d be playing beyond one of the totems. Save points have always been a sucky way to keep someone in your game and, today, is a very consolish method of saving.

Haven’t played enough to judge whether I’m going to like it. It seems very limited right now. Created a rogue and if combat is too hard, those save points mean I’ll likely be putting the game on easy just to not repeat anything.

Doesn’t it save when you exit in addition to the totems? I’m not a fan of the checkpoint system either, but I thought you could exit anytime and maintain your progress. I’ll have to check after work.

What they should do is allow you to save and exit at any time, in addition to the savepoints already implemented. That stops savescumming but allows you to stop playing when you need to do so.

I feel pretty strongly that every game should have this, no exceptions.

Agreed. Does this not have that? I played the little intro segment, then got analysis paralysis when it came time to create my character, and quit. It popped up a little message that when coming back I would be in the same spot but that it wasn’t a full save.

Hey, man, that’s technically a Frankenstein computer, not a zombie computer. :-)

In case someone else manages to miss it early on, a member of your party getting to 0 hp only incapacitates them and if you win the fight they will be alive with 25% of their hp afterwards. Did a few fights over before I apparently took the time to read the pop up. Also if you run out of healing potions and had them equipped in the trinket slot on someone if you make more they will not automagically be in that slot again.

It is definitely on rails, and I was kind of bummed out you can’t really go exploring into random buildings like the earlier games, but I’ve been enjoying it with the exception of the audio going nuts on me every once in a while.

I think one of my favorite things is the opening screen when you load up your in progress game. As you go progress through the game, the bard sitting there by the fire is telling the tale of your adventure. It is a nice little touch.

So, I’m still enjoying it a bunch, but some of the issues are starting to become more pronounced.

The biggest by far is a lack of inventory sorting. There’s a ton of stuff to pick up, from crafting supplies to equipment, to consumables. There are about 4 or 5 pages to your inventory and each one is a grid that you play inventory tetris on. There is absolutely no way to sort, or filter your main bags. Lore items and quest items are in separate compartments, but the rest are all jumbled. I’m usually a fan of inventory like this, but I at the very least expect a sorting (or optimizing) function.

Another issue is traversal. There is no way to warp back to base, or through previously explored areas. You have to slog through it again. This includes finishing a dungeon and having to run out. At least so far.

Lastly, the map is dumb. There a large legend that takes up the lower middle of the map screen and no way to move it or close it. Who does that? Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve messed with it for quite a bit last night.

All that said, I still enjoy the game :) My first real “dungeon” was a doozy, full of secrets, traps, puzzles, etc. It is glorious!

I have very similar thoughts. I like the game a lot, although the flaws are rather obvious. It’s a bit of a messy / janky experience at the moment but I am putting up with it as it is otherwise hitting the mark for me.

Autosort is coming in a futre patch apparently, although no time line on that.