Well of course it was - BT III was supposed to get all those improvements, but it was decided not to compromise them because Fargo didn’t want all that to be given to EA (the exit from EA was in the works at the time). Dragon Wars was much the better game.
Ohhh yes - Awesome!
Corsair - I hope its not rude to ask, but will you be a part of this?
I missed this post, sorry! That is awesome news - I assume that is Olde skulle?
Oh wow, nostalgia overload. When I was growing up in the 80s my brother and I would play BT1 constantly. We must have beat it 3 or 4 times. Getting starts was always the hardest as any random house would wipe your party. But once you got up a few levels it balanced out.
Pass the light at night!
Ohhhh, I got into RPGs way past when these original games were popular so I totally missed them. Would love to give the new one a try.
Olde Skuul. Yup.
Olde Skuul is in Seattle, I’m in SoCal. Maybe a character in the game will be in honor of me (Heineman’s joke was instead of being Redbeard from BT III I’ll be Whitebeard - sigh).
Well, if they need playtesters, there’s a bunch of us up here who would love to help out I’m sure.
Wow. I played Autoduel, Ultima IV and Bard’s Tale on my C-64. Plugged into a small color TV. Yet I was so completely sucked in by them… That was around the first time that I started have lost time episodes. My then wife was not at all amused. By that or my CompuServe bills.
Can we get a Centauri Alliance sequel?
Dragon Wars was amazing.
Of the Bard’s Tales, unlike many I preferred 3. It had those crazy prestige classes like Chronomancer and Archmage. Good stuff. But really, Dragon Wars was a better Bard’s Tale. As was Wasteland, really.
Chronomancer was great! I loved Witherfist. The concept was just so MEAN.
I’m hoping that Bard’s Tale IV will be like Bard’s Tale I through III as a blobber with portrait-focused textual combat. Doubt they’ll be brave (foolish?) enough to do that, though – just like they used a more Fallout-like combat approach with Wasteland 2 instead of the Wasteland way (which was like Bard’s Tale).
Backed the dirty pirate level! I want closure, dammit! Mr Braben gave it for Elite, and this will make me free!
I say that backer level and thought it was great. Not that I have any need for absolution, mind you. :)
All in all, I’m kind of on the fence with this one, having never played any of the old Bard’s Tale games. On the other hand, I very much like what InXile has been doing with Kickstarter so far, and I suppose I might enjoy this game. How exactly do the Bard’s Tale games play? Is it just a series of dungeon crawls interspersed with visits to town to stock up on equipment and pick up quests? How do the games differ from something like Eye of the Beholder or Wizardry?
Hahaha, I saw that. Pretty great :)
Wish 'em the best of luck on this one. I never played any of the Bards Tales, so I dunno if I’m necessarily in from the word go, but I do like they work they do!
Clearly should have written my post faster. . . dammitall :P
Very similar to classic Wizardry. First person dungeon crawling, abstract combat. Combat is abstract in that you don’t move people around. Unlike EoB, or Dungeon Master, it’s not real time. You enter in each character’s action and then execute the turn (different games using this method have varied between I Go/You Go and all actions being queued based on some sort of initiative order). Lots of loot. How much this game will differ is hard to say. They do specifically talk about combining character abilities in some fashion, which could easily spice up combat. Various games in both Wizardry and BT toyed with adding some mechanics in to the abstract combat. E.g. weapons that could strike from the back row into melee combat. Or adding distance (which affected some of the spells you could cast, and whether you could even do melee combat), and the ability to (r)eposition (but this is all handled “in combat”. You aren’t literally moving around in the gameworld while it happens. There’s no taking advantage of terrain, or two stepping, or anything like that).
One thing Bard’s Tale did was that it had a more elaborate setup for mages relative to Wizardry. There were two starting classes with different focuses: Mages (some buffing, some damage) and Conjurers (lots of summoning, some other utility and a little damage). One could eventually however switch to Sorcerer (much stronger overall class). Advancing in Sorcerer allowed one to switch to Wizard, which was death on wheels. Switching classes did not remove the ability to cast previously learned spells. IIRC it also boosted one’s spell point pools to really epic levels once you did a lot of leveling in various classes and then switched. While Sorceror and Wizard were clear upgrades, there were still useful spells in the base classes (some buffs and such) so it worked out pretty cool. Someone who mastered all 4 classes was considered an “archmage”, all though this didn’t change anything (my parents feigned being impressed well enough at the dinner table). BT 2 added Archmage as an even more powerful class. III added spell casting classes after Archmage. IV apparently wants to do something like this for every class (I doubt each class will wind up with that many options), which could be really interesting.
The Bard was unique though ultimately kind of dumpy. They could play songs, each song representing a long lasting buff. That was cool, and you could switch songs (# of plays based on level IIRC, you needed to drink booze at taverns to refresh them). They couldn’t fight for shit though. I bet that gets changed in IV.
I backed this right away, of course.