That’s valid and I appreciate the perspective. Inventory could use a rewrite though- oddities like coins taking up inventory slots sometimes and then disappearing into the "purse’ once you move them. It’s just sloppy.
There’s no stash where you can drop off the overflow?
Mike sry that wasn’t a criticism I agree completely with you inventory management is a pain. I reorganized mine into subsections but it is still a mess. May be a patch think for sorting like Krazy suggests in the future.
Another large update last night. Hotfix 4.2 promises much improved loading times for people playing off non-SSD hard drives and fixes to movement issues with certain push block puzzles. There is also a new reported issue with combat bugging if you attempt to charge an enemy who is on an elevated platform or cliff.
I’ve made quite a bit of progress over the holiday weekend and this week. I explored Iwon Rheg completely, obtaining the item I needed from there and advancing the story, finishing off by defeating Mangar himself, for good this time. Then it was off to the Stennish Isles. The seaside village there is probably the most atmospheric location so far in BT4. The fog everywhere, the sounds, the sad and hauntingly beautiful music, and all the little bone piles from which you can summon ghosts to get the story of what happened to the village. One BIG flaw here though…all of the ghosts are the exact same male character model, even the female ghosts. That’s just lazy design. If you want me to use the special ability to summon ghosts to tell me a cool story and immerse me in the game, at least take the time to make them look like the people they’re supposed to represent.
From the seaside village I traveled up into the hills, finding the town and talking with it’s inhabitants. Then it was off to explore the surrounding area, with stops at the temple to solve a mystery, and then the Rookery to advance the main plot. Of course the Rookery led to yet another hellscape dungeon. I really dislike the blood energy circuit puzzles. Very time consuming and you need to get them just right most of the time, with some nodes requiring energy from both sides to activate properly.
Eventually the Rookery and it’s denizens were defeated, and I returned to the surface to sell, heal, craft and clean up some local points of interest. I’m now sitting on the path to Langskaal Castle, getting ready to solve a bunch more puzzles and probably fight many undead before hopefully slaying Lagoth Zanta within.
Puzzles. Last night I played for about 45 minutes on the path to the castle where Lagoth Zanta is supposedly lurking. I spent damn near the entire time doing mixed puzzles that combined moving the stone cubes with fairy golf and some cog wheels. I also fought a couple of packs of skeletons, but mostly I solved puzzles. When I checked the map before quitting for the night, I was no closer to Lagoth Zanta than when I started.
Oh, you’ll love the endgame then. “The bad guys are performing a world-ending ceremony! You must interrupt it before we all die! Better solve these 8-9 puzzles!”
The original games did have puzzle elements, but nothing on the level of what BT4 contains. I actually do like the puzzles in BT4, it’s just that in certain sections it starts to feel like they ran out of ideas for content and just threw puzzles at the player instead to slow the pace of the game.
Oh man, welcome to the club @krayzkrok! No Man’s Sky was the game I just spent 200+ hours in prior to starting Bard’s Tale IV. NMS can be a rough slog at the start, but once you get somewhat established be prepared to give up dozens of hours of your life in pursuit of planetary exploration, space trucking/trading and the quest for the perfect cool space ride. NMS is one of my favorite games of the past few years, and I need to get back to it now that Visions has released. Have fun!
So this conversation led to me jumping back into NMS over the weekend. I figured I would just pop in, play for a couple of hours, check out the changes and additions, then go back to BT4 and futz with more puzzles.
An entire weekend of playtime later (probably 8 hours in total) I had built the submersible exocraft, played through the story that goes along with it (The Abyss update), built/purchased a bunch of upgrades for my submersible, followed the quest line for the community quest (The Visions update) and completed the first part of it, dug up a couple of the new salvageable modules, space traded my way back up to over 150mil units, and dropped through a couple of black holes in search of a perfect world to build a new base on that would have both non-hostile weather and large bodies of water (gotta be able to use my submersible!). Fuuuu…
So this week it looks like I will be splitting my game time between BT4 and NMS. Curse you @krayzkrok! ;-)
Ha! I’m still waiting for the dual monitor split-screen utility that will allow me to play two different full screen games at the same time. That might be the only way I ever make a dent in my backlog! ;-)
I am behind guys sry. I do love this game I have to get back into it. I even like the puzzles when I am sober!
Inventory filtering is coming along with patch 2.0. I still haven’t made it back to the game after bouncing off it early on, so the more polish they add to it the more it’ll be the play I like when I finally get back into it.
After a month or so of diversions including a return to No Man’s Sky and a complete playthrough of Book of Demons (highly recommended!) I have finally returned to Bard’s Tale IV. It only took one night to hook me back in, as I picked up the UI and the storyline very quickly and was right back in the swing of things almost immediately.
When I had last played, I’d managed to complete The Lost Rookery, and had all the knowledge and the reliquary I needed to make my way to Langskaal Castle and attempt to defeat Lagoth Zanta, What I assumed would be a short walk over to the castle to enter and find Lagoth Zanta has proven to be anything but. I swear it must take residents of the Stennish Isles all day to walk across their town. It’s like those lines at Disney World, where you make your way slowly through a maze of roped off queue, finally rounding what you think is the last corner until the ride…and find an entire second section of more roped off queue line.
So for a good couple of hours of play now I’ve been making my way slowly across the landscape, castle always in sight but always maddeningly just out of reach. I’ve climbed towers, scaled walls, crossed dozens of rope bridges, opened gates, pushed blocks around and defeated an army of brigands, undead and ogres. I fought so many enemies and looted so many containers that I had to use the first Standing Stones I discovered to portal back to Wyre and sell off my excess inventory in the tavern, turning every vendor there into a penniless pauper in the process. I also leveled most of my party to 23, and have them all equipped in some pretty high end gear. Most combats other than boss battles are easy for them now.
Finally, after two nights of singlehandedly sweeping the streets of the Stennish Isles clean of bad guys…I found the entrance to the sewers of Castle Langskaal. I’m looking forward to dodging traps and smacking down more undead tonight in my search inside the castle (finally!!!) for Lagoth Zanta.
Follow up : Holy crap, those traps in the sewers are ridiculous.
While you can disable the fire traps and some of the swinging axes, the projectiles, spears and some of the axes can only be slowed, making it pretty much impossible to complete the sewers without taking decent amounts of damage regularly. Thankfully my party are experts at damage mitigation and crafting healing food and potions, so all those traps served only to annoy me and use up some of my supplies.
The riddle/puzzle to open the entrance to the castle was pretty easy, and I saved for the night just inside the castle door, so next up…Lagoth Zanta! (after what I am sure will be a long, arduous trek through the castle)
Been playing off and on the past few nights. Defeated Lagoth Zanta (which sounds less like an evil wizard lich and more like medication advertised on TV…“ask your healer if Lagoth Zanta is right for you”) and finished up a ton of side quests, most of which had required items or knowledge gained while in the Stennish Isles. Returned to Rabbie in Skara Brae Below, hit the review board up for some positive reinforcement (all of my characters are way past needing unlocks anymore) and did some housekeeping in my inventory.
Rabbie then gave me the next leg of the main quest : Head to the Red Vault and retrieve a weapon capable of nullifying the effects of the relic stolen by Tarjan, the last of the recycled villains from Bard’s Tales past. After much faffing about in the Forest of Inshriach I realized I was missing the Owl pattern for the teleport stone. Picked that up, zapped over to the correct area, and proceeded to work my way through all the puzzles and fights to enter the Red Vault.
Sadly the Red Vault is filled with more of those stupid circuit puzzles which I cannot stand. I’ve fiddled with them and solved enough to get me to the bottom of the vault, where I found the weapon, but to release it I need to solve a circuit puzzle that literally takes up the entire room…floor, walls, even overhead. FFFfffffuuuuu…
Exactly. Expect more of those in dungeons as you progress, including the one I face now, which is so complex that it has sapped my interest in progressing further in the game. I’ll probably just look up the solution so I can move on, as I am not far from finishing the main quest line, and thus the game, at this point, so it would be a shame to quit now.
I have been very much enjoying Bard’s Tale IV, but there are several design decisions that make me wonder just what the hell the devs were thinking. Chief among them is the terrible system of Elven Shrines and Code Wheel Shrines. Both of these are scattered throughout the game, and in nearly every single instance of either one you require either a weapon or ingredients which you won’t find until long after you encounter the shrine, in areas all the way across the map from where the shrine is located. By the time you can do find these things, backtrack all over the map, and use the shrine, the reward is well beneath your level and totally not worth the effort. How hard would have been to take a few moments to place the proper weapons/ingredients for shrines somewhere within the area the player explores directly after encountering the shrine, thereby keeping the sense of exploration and effort required, but making the reward worthy of the task?
Ha! That made me laugh out loud. We’re showing our age, but man, I think I still have a floppy disc around somewhere filled with boot configs for old games. I can’t say I miss tweaking around with EMM386, HIMEM and RAMDRIVE. ;-)
Include me on your petition to developers to include “mid game tutorials”, as I can’t count the number of times I simply started over when returning to a game I hadn’t played in a while because I couldn’t recall how the UI worked or what my plan/strategy/point in the story was.
Played again last night, finally completing that annoying Red Vault puzzle. Turns out I must have bumped something the right way early on in my fiddling, because once I figured out the right flow for the floor part of the puzzle, the wall/ceiling part solved itself, I didn’t have to move anything!
So, special item retrieved, I high-tailed it out of the dungeon. Before I could exit though, Tarjan himself showed up to challenge me. Guess that saves me the trouble of hunting him down. He was an odd fight, as at first I could not seem to damage him or his little magic doodad more than a few points at a time. Then my rogue took his turn, and lo and behold, crits do full damage! It still took about three hairy rounds of combat to bring Tarjan down, but down he went, and I emerged from the Red Vault victorious.
I ported back to Skara Brae Below and over to the Guild to chat with Rabbie and get some instructions for the next part of my journey. Getting close now, I can feel it.
I thought about this game all day even with a ton of other stuff dropping and patches for every RPG that came out last year almost. I have to admit I got over puzzled just a bit… but I believe I will dive back in. The combat mechanics, atmosphere, and just overall interesting stuff lures me. But gosh I dunno if this is the new golden age of RPGS but if they keep dropping patches like they have all year …
NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!
-Uninstall-
And yes, if you’re thinking about returning to Bard’s Tale IV (or buying/playing it for the first time for that matter), I would absolutely wait a few weeks until the huge Royal Necropolis patch and free DLC drops.
The patch will:
- feature a complete overhaul of the terrible inventory system (finally!)
- add controller support
- add additional character portraits for your main character and mercenaries you create
- nearly double the amount of fast travel stone locations
- add a new song called “Struggler’s Lament” which will instantly bypass any main story puzzle you just can’t seem to figure out (by unlocking the door or clearing the path).
- add a new tier of Master Crafted items and buff the stats on later game Elven weapons and unique items
- revise merchants to be more useful in the late game (currently I’m walking around with a bunch of stuff I can’t sell because the merchants are all broke from buying all my other stuff)
So basically, in addition to adding a large new dungeon and quest line for free, the patch will be addressing just about every gripe current players have with the game. If I wasn’t so close to finishing it anyway, I’d have waited to start playing again until after the patch.
I ran into a horrible bug where Mangar wouldn’t attack – just float there passively, while I charge up to him. I contacted tech support about this, but they didn’t want my save file. I’m not hopeful whatever I broke will get fixed, since I’ve read of no other incidents like this. It’s prevented me from moving forward on the story and there’s no way I’m going back and doing all those hours over again to get around some damn bug with the quest flags.