There are two vine locations (that I found) in SB Below, and I cleared both of them. Totally love peering through the windows at the weird little scenes you can find all over SB Below. My favorite has to be the tea party (which was in one of the vine areas). =) Nice idea using your phone to help with the geode constellation maps. I used my tablet and called up a Steam discussion post that had all of them (though I did actually go around and collect them all in my Lore inventory too).
I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with both the Elven Shrines and the Code Wheel Shrines. I’ve discovered 7 or 8 Elven weapons to this point, and not one of them actually works in any of the half dozen or more shrines I’ve discovered. With the Code Wheel Shrines, I’ve completed about half of the ones I’ve found, but they usually require at least one element I haven’t found or can’t craft yet. Basically, this means if you want to do either type of shrine you’re looking at a lot of backtracking through areas you’ve already cleared when you finally do find/make/loot the required element/weapon. That’s just sloppy design. There is no reason the elements for Code Wheel Shrines can’t be linked to your progression to that point. Sure, they could require some scouring of the local vendors, or clearing an area to find a stash with a rare element, but you shouldn’t have to travel 3 or 4 areas away from a shrine to find the items needed for it. Same with Elven weapons, no reason they couldn’t be discovered in the region or two following the discovery of their corresponding shrine.
I think at this point I have cleared all of SB Below. I need to revisit Baedish Lowlands to clear the vine-blocked areas, and I’ll be done with it as well. Forest of Inshriach is cleared, and I’m ready to move on to either the next main story area (Sulfur Springs / Iwon Rheg) or try for the Destiny Wand (the Wand of Peace quest) in the Lodge of the Siambra Dhu.
One thing I haven’t been able to figure out. In SB Below, at various places marked by a glowing green symbol on the wall, there are blocks/buttons than can be pushed to be “Activated” and “Deactivated”. Doing so seems to have zero effect on anything nearby, so I assume these are a meta-puzzle that has to be activated throughout SB Below to then open some further secret area…maybe the impassable gate with all the evil looking glowing symbols behind it?
I saw that. I am thinking of starting over because that’s what we do in rpgs to optimize our party. However… this one is so puzzley I dunno. Anyone re-optimized on a rpg start over?
And btw it is 2018 --some of us have babies. No save anywhere feature is just dumb. I dunno how I got so far.
Oh it looks like they did some reorganization of mercenary coins as well. Fancy that. A game that changes all the rules within a few months with patches.
In Bard’s Tale’s defense just a bit the save points were pretty prolific and they had an option to consume or bind which was nice.
Krazy I like the puzzles --for the most part …. but there comes a time when there are puzzles that stretch the suspension of disbelief I this game. In other words maybe there are too many. I am not complaining about difficulty … (though the tower with the 9 digits code was a pain or 8) but I wonder why everything has to be a puzzle. There are great scenes in this game plus some really nice combat.
I tried leaving a puzzle unsolved --and I thought about it all day …. and came back to it. There is a Bard’s tale reason for puzzles. Most of them are NOT had… but…
I will sometimes quit playing a few minutes earlier than I intended at night if I come across a large/complex puzzle because I know if I start fiddling with it there is no damn way I’m going to sleep until that puzzle is solved.
For the curious, here is a link to the patch notes for the Second Sight Update:
The save system can now be toggled between the save totems (which I have come to like over time) and a save anywhere system (where you give up the totem xp). There are a ton of balance changes that mostly favor the player and in some cases reward more tactical play. I am sort of bummed about the damage reduction on Conjurer’s Mark though, as I used that spell as a quick tactical way to eliminate multiple weak enemies in trivial fights. Eve more performance and stability enhancements are most welcome, and lots of minor bug fixes. There really isn’t anything that I can see that would make it worth starting the game over again from scratch. They even added the ability to respect a characters skills (costs 2 mercenary tokens), so you can redesign yourself and your party members for optimal efficiency.
The one thing I’m scratching my head over is the addition of Legacy Mode. That seems like a ton of time, effort and resources poured into effectively making Bard’s Tale IV into Bard’s Tale I. Were people really clamoring for such a thing? Grid-based movement? No auto maps, no auto-resurrect, perma-death? Seems like an enormous waste of time to appease a handful of people.
I agree. I was wondering about this, too. The old games are being re-released; why not go there for a nostalgia fix? It seems like a tremendous waste of time to engineer this into BT IV.
Bard’s Tale 4 may keep the player corralled onto set pathways instead of allowing open world exploration like Skyrim, but it certainly doesn’t lack for impressive vistas similar to Skyrim. Sometimes, when the Celtic music and the amazing view come together, you just have to stop and soak up the atmosphere (assuming there are no pesky Paladins or Cultists nearby).
Also, last night, after much searching, I uncovered the last of the runes and secret activation stones to open the mysterious rune gate in Skara Brae Below. The contents of the chest inside the hidden chamber were slightly disappointing, but mostly because I’m beyond the point where they would have been useful. Solve this puzzle as early as you are able to, and you’ll wind up with something pretty nice for one of your party.
Glad I keep following this thread because I would have missed that big change. Save anywhere? Yes! And I’ll be back playing soon after leaving it be for a while. It was the only major QoL addition that I had been waiting on. I can put up with most anything else.
I picked this up and am looking forward to giving it ago in January. I’ve been skimming this thread, avoiding any specific talk for spoilers but it sounds like it is different enough from other games so it is it’s own thing.
I agree it looks good. And they did a good job with smoke and mirrors plus music to make you feel like you are there. I plan on this one a bit this holiday. Combat is really a lotta fun.
(what I mean by smoke and mirrors is that you feel like you are in a larger environment than you really are… but it’s all good. Game occasionally looks pretty amazing)
Do you want a Pillars of Eternity type game with real time combat, or something a bit simpler and slower? They are rather different beasts. I only played Kingmaker in the first week and it wasn’t really ready. Whilst they have ironed things out with Bards mostly, and it’s very playable now.
I enjoyed BTIV and finished it a few days ago, but it’s got a few rough spots. You can get locked into certain menus, notably the mercenary hiring. Inventory management is a complete disaster and I don’t know what they were thinking- I don’t want to go THAT old school.
Summoned creatures (or at least the shadow) receive a placeholder icon when tallying XP at the end of combat, which just looks tacky. I love the idea behind the skill system, but it doesn’t restrict weapon choice, which I believe is a design decision. This means, notably, that you can hit enemies with arrows without actually having a bow.
Be careful when charging enemy parties, especially on a gradient- you’ll get stuck on geometry and have to reload. Elven weapons are a great idea, but by the time you get a few you’ve outgrown them. I wish that the guardian ability (the one that lets a fighter sponge damage for adjacent party members) was a choice and not an always-on. I hate having one of my fighters just up and die because someone took a good swing at a poorly-armored buddy. Because it’s “true” damage, it ignores all armor on the guardian and boom, I lost a good fighter because of a poor one.
“Gust of Wind” is designed to make ranged attacks less effective, but is also effective against mental attacks for some inexplicable reason. Maxing out the subterfuge skill tree allows you to start combat in stealth and initiate at your leisure, which breaks the combat model.
Very! But then Baldur’s Gate 2 is my favorite game of all time. I love RPGs and I love D&D. PoE2 was good, but I didn’t care for the mythology and really disliked the RPG system.
I learned to be a better inventory manager here. I sorted out everything. You know it isn’t that bad. take a look at your inventory and just sort it to a degree. Then when you run into stuff it just adds to it.
Seriously I get you on inventory management but I learned in Bard’s tale that there is a solution.
