Bards Tale IV announced

Games
102

No, I start with 4 now (I think it’s the result of an ability or the item I used to upgrade to four party spots, probably the latter). That’s separate from the very useful Trowl ability to gain a point back when it kills something. Or, I dunno, refund the cost of the one used? I’m sure the wording matters but I’m not clear on what it is. I should point out there are abilities that can be used that do not cost a point. The Rogue’s hide in shadows ability is one such (it’s called something else but you’ll know it when you see it).

That Trowl ability is very useful, I’ll note.

right now nothing of the sort is possible. I start with no mana, and it takes awhile to get it built up (getting 2 in a turn requires using meditate - costs an action point - or getting lucky with the targeting of a non mana using ability and then getting+1 frrom the Innter Wahtsit passive next turn). So I can get to 4 mana in two turns basically and cast something big on the third (the “big” in question is an arcing lightning spell the dagger mage dude has, but it has a 1 turn channel time so it’s turn 4 before he’s done damage). Again, I’m like level 7 tops so that’s just not very many abilities yet and who knows what’s coming down the line. I have barely looked at both the “whomp them” classic mage tree or the meditation tree (I forget what it’s called) and we haven’t even gotten into the sub classes yet. I don’t even know where those are, but they are out there.

So, yeah, probably more to come :P

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104

I sort of lied. The specializations do appear to be baked into the skill tree.

Here’s some screen shots.

skill%20tree
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The big globes seem to be the specializations. Ok, see that bright yellow chain thingy? That’s a tier. There are 3, the first tier is filled in with the slightly yellow/goldish background (and, probably tied to that, I have every 1st tier spellcraft ability).

You can’t take skills in tier2 or 3 until the Review Board approves it. They approved me right away once I got a quest to go see them (at level 6 or 7 or something). Saying “well, you haven’t done anything noteworthy since we saw you last [never] but your accumulated deeds mean you may advance”. So I’m a ways from specializing. I don’t even know if that stuff is mutually exclusive. The Sorceror one - over on the left side - gives an ability where you get mana whenever an enemy does (I think I read that right). So that sounds pretty awesome.

Archmage (the big, unconnected one at the bottom), gives like 3 active skill and some other abilities. Actually, I’m inclined to think you could grab all of this stuff right now. It fits the first game.

inventory
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The inventory! Also doubles as a character screen. That’s my dwarf fighter selected. He’s wielding the puzzle sword. That 25 con is also his hp total. This game is not easy on the default setting, IMO. You don’t get health on level up. Just from con. There are skills that boost attributes but level 1 is worth +1 point. I’m not sure those are great early investments. OTOH, the only other place to get hp is gear. Room for tweaks, perhaps. The inventory is shared by the party. I have 4 pages, which includes two upgrades I have purchased (“backpacks” that cost 50 gold each). I have an axe, and a sword, and some elven mail, and a broach, and a bucn of crafting stuff. No earthly idea what the crystal things (on the second row) are for; if items are used in crafting they will say so. I have a hunch on the books I am about to follow up on (found them as loot in various places).

eq
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That’s my hood. The +1 spell points just means my max spell points. Need more con. Ole Yennifer has Dragon’s Flame(?), arcane something or other (it’s the afformentioned bolt spell that currently does 6 or maybe now 7 damage, I should check), and meditate equipped as her active abilities. Incidentally she is some sort of vague human “outlander” who is immune to several conditions. Elves get +1 mana and a 30% bonus to intelligence, but I wanted to be immune to stuff instead. And so now I am. Immune. To some stuff.

consider
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So here’s me considering a few guards. The blue highlighted “shoddy wall like structure” in the background can be interacted with. I can probably either (1) just open it or use (2) song of breaking some stuff or (3) a bomb to make it go by by. I have only one bomb left, but I can buy and hopefully eventually craft more.

The guards con yellow. The con range seems to be green, yellow, orange, red for SUPER STRANGER DANGER. The con levels might need some tweaking. I’ve won yellow combats before. This is not a winnable fight. Do note the automap in the upper corner. There’s also barks the party members do when noticing enemies (they’re optimistic this is tough but winnable HAHAHAHAHA) and there’s currently a bug where they’ll notice stuff you can’t actually see (but can detect on the minimap).

Why isn’t this winnable?

combat
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This is my rolled dwarf fighter (if the grid, from left to right and top to bottom, is numbered 1 to 8, he’s in position 2), Trowl Rogue (3), me (6), and the demon? mage who jumped into my party (7). We have 4 action pips. The fighter has 25 whole health, which is more than double my poor mage’s 11 despite the level difference (3 versus 7 or so).

Doesn’t matter. I should have moused over one of them. They all have like 42 health. They all hit REALLY hard. And they all have 8 armor, which blocks 8 points of physical damage (as I mentioned earlier). We have no capacity to win this fight right now. I tried, we don’t. By the time demon mage dagger friend gets his arc lightning off we’ll have at least one dead front row member. I might have whittled one of their’ armors down to 0 (assumingthe fighter isn’t dead, but the rogue will be at this point if this is the case).

The row of abilities above the action pips are the mage’s abilities. Far left is “burning hands”, which does minimal physical damage but adds a juicy DoT that does fire daamge. It only lasts a turn though. NExt is Arcane Bolt thingy, third is meditate. Forith is, uh. . . levitate. I can move someone to any other square. And last is “move”.

The two empty white crystals are how much mana you need to cast the speed. I, as you currently see, have 0/5 mana. There is an ability that starts you with 1 mana, I would not be surprised if there are others in the skill tree that modify that number. But I haven’t looked at all of it.

We basically can’t do much damage until 3 turns of the fighter using his armor sundering sword attack. At which point the arc lightning spell goes off and we have at least one person dead and this is all horribly depressing.

So back to Kylearan’s basement, I guess.

Oh, I think the fact that the party turns away from you when not active is pointless. But that’s how it works (this has been shown in videos before).

105

And Beta finished. I have not fully explored but I’ve done most things. It ended on a cliff hanger.

Let’s talk about saves. There’s no SASA. There’s save stones, and luck stones. The former allow you to save whenever you use them (saving also heals you fully). The latter allow that but also offer a chose. You can, uh, consume or drain or something the stone instead and get some experience but then you can’t save. In theory, this means you cna play risky, as they’ve talked about in some interviews. In practice. . . eh not really. For one, they’re weirder than save stones in that if you bind to them (to save), you cannot save again until you save somewhere else. For two, you then get the chance to bind/whatever again. So theoretically you can clear and area and then go back and get all the XP if you want. I’m honestly not sure I see the point in bothering with the mechanic at all. It’s possible the ability to save and then re-use/drain them later is a bug
and not intended. Even if it’s not. . . it’s still meh to me. I only drained one or two throughout the entirety of the playable demo and the xp gains didn’t blow me away.

106

Watched some footage of the beta earlier and it looked great. Really intrigued.

107

I did find a second puzzle weapon.

For funsies, I went back to the first and played with it and ?solved? the first riddle but then the game crashes! Maybe that’s the second riddle.

108

That’s a fantastic write-up, thanks! It seems very promising. Hopefully by the time it launches it’s in an even better balanced/polished state, because I like a lot of what you are telling us. I’m a bit leery of some of the design choices, of course, but overall well pleased.

109

I am not going to play anymore, regardless of whether they release more content (I’m not expecting them too; the game comes out in two months give or take, and the end of beta has a little teaser thingy that makes it feel final to me).

Kylearan’s tower is largely puzzles (a few traps), with a few fights in between to sort of change up the pacing. I liked it. There’s some “oh, a shortcut. . . why?” and also “ahhhh a short cut!” and the exploration is not fully linear (some levels sort of are).

Puzzles I’ve seen:

  1. Altars where you sacrifice an item. They have some form of “riddle” that hints what the item should be. Several of these I cam en owhere close to solving, but didn’t necessarily try overmuch.

  2. The little Gear puzzles. As expcted, these got a little more interesting as I got into the game. Generally, you need to make a specific gear (with a sort of spiral pattern on it) turn to open something. But tehre’s also ones where you need to stop red gears from turning. And both combined. And like I said I found a gear puzzle missing 3 gears and never saw anything about those.

  3. Arranging stone pillars to do stuff. If you ever get stuck, there will be a symbol somewhere that you can play the “song of repair” on and reset the room.

All in all I enjoyed the puzzles except for the entrance room to Kylearan’s tower, which was TOTALLY my own stupidity (so, yeah, it turns out there’s a “special item” inventory page and it’s even OFFSET VISUALLY from the other pages - the little red circle on the far right in the above Inventory screenshot - don’t ask me why I never clicked it).

I left 4-5 fights, at least, undone. Only one seemed doable too (a couple of reds, the afformentioned 3 fighter dudes, a yellow with two caster humans and some goblin looking guys and this was the doable one, and I think an urnge con one). I saw many mysteries I simply couldn’t do anything with as I likely didn’t have the abilities to bypass/whatever them yet. That’s in addition to like 3-4 of those pedastals I didn’t do, a couple of things in the tower, and the two puzzle weapons which both crash when I try to “solve” them.

I took a passive +1 ac bonus on my fighter. He also has a “stance” that lasts until the end od combat that gives +2 ac. He was getting 2 ac from some gear. At 3 ac, when I used the stance, he went to six. Bug? Not sure. In fact, let me go enter that. . . Oh wait maybe not. Deflect might double armor. I’m not sure.

Uh, what else. Respeccing is entirely free. You just click a button and hi! here are all your skill points.

110

There have been a couple of updates since I stopped but I’m done.

There’s a stink over on the offical forums about the beta, about how this isn’t Bard’s Tale, blah blah blah. It’s a small yet vocal group. The only thing I’ll say to their complaints is (1) they’re right that this is claiming to a game in the series and (2) it sort of nonsensical from a lore standpoint. Where it is to be understood that BT had minimal amounts of lore and this sort of takes names from it and that’s it. Mostly what they are saying I don’t care about.

My only concerns are two fold. One, the skill trees are shallow. A game like BT 1 has a decent amount of superfluous spells, so not seeing anywhere near that many doesn’t bother me. Not having massively deep trees doesn’t bother me. But this looks like it might come off a little light mechanically for my tastes right now.

Two, I do not like the stat system and the way it ties so strongly to gear. Some of the people complaining are calling it dumbed down. I think it was more an attempt to do something different (while casting off dead wood; BT features like 4 stats that are basically entirely irrelevant and the rest of them aren’t exactly massively important given all the leveling you wind up doing and the way gear there works), I just don’t think it’s very good mechanically right now. Bolstering the skill tree (where some nodes are just “+1 of a stat” would help. IMO, a little health gain on level up might go a long way as well.

Having said all of this, I am still looking forward to it. I will play any RPG that isn’t Dungeon Master or a bland jrpg rehash. And I’ll even look forward to most of them. Some of the reservations I have can be addressed through balance tweaks. Others are what they are. I did read that there are more classes coming. I had sort of forgotten about that. Looking forward to a monk (the secret MVP of the classic series. Well, I mean sort of tied with spell casters but there you go).

Lastly, if anyone was unaware there was originally a plan to remaster BT 1-3. This went to hell because the company working on it was not performing to inXile’s taste. They shelved the remasters but later another company stepped in and is doing a proper remaster. It’s not going to be a fully 2550x1440 (e.g.) resolution game but the graphics are much better and one hopes for UI improvements and the like.

111

That’s very exciting news, all on its own.

I’m trying to stay away from much in the way of B4 news, but I’ve heard the rumblings. I’m hoping it all works out anyway because, at the end of the day, no one makes games of this sort anymore and I really want a good dungeon crawl.

112

Well, a good dungeonc rawl can be many different things. I enjoyed the exploration in the demo. But it’s very much not a dungeon crawler in the classically 80s sense. Which. here’s the thing, we already knew from the kickstarter campaign. So I think some of the rumblings are misplaced.

Some of them are matters of taste. Theres no random monsters in this (and this bothers some people, but we pretty much knew this going in I think). Games that go down this road sometimes end up sort almost puzzle like in that you start trying to slice off bits of areas to get upgrades/experience/etc while you figure out where to progress next or to make progressing in whereever you need to go easier. I donj’t mind that, but it’s obviously not to everyone’s taste.

I think people who expected random encounters, and grid based movement, and over 100 spells! should have paid attention during the kick starter. I think complaints about those things not being present are misplaced.

113

This surprises me. From the little bit I’ve seen, it seemed like the grid and attack areas, action points (whatever they are called), Magic point manipulation etc look pretty interesting.

I’m curious if you think those aspects simply aren’t important in the early going (I.e. that stuff is easily ignored) or if those things aren’t that interesting to you. Or maybe combat is just too easy in the demo?

114

Oh, they are important but you really need to get to 3-4 characters before they start to shine IMO. Also get a few levels on casters because the SP simply won’t matter until you get abilities that can take advantage. And as I mentioned, there is a point where you have 3 characters (3 regulars and a “guest”) where you only get 3 action points that’s a little bit odd.

The problem right now is twofold, one easily fixed.

  1. There’s only ever a very limited amount you can do at a given time, because you have a limited number of active skill slots on each person. Oh, sure, you can decide to act with the warrior multiple times and skip the mage here (and do the reverse there), but that’s not as awesome as it sounds because it’s 3 abilities per at most (in the demo; I don’t know if items later in the game allow you to equip more abilities; it seems possible but I am not sure going to 4 or 5 solves the problem).

There are 13 active abilities on the mage Spell craft tree, and 3 of them are tied to getting Archmage. Two of them are summons. Levitate is a utlilty spell. That leaves 6 active damaging abilities (wait, 7, the first point you spend in Spellcraft gives two actives). But it’s not like you can say “I want 3 damaging abilities and then some utility” because of the limited slots. Yes, this is just one tree. But Meditation has 1 active and all passives. Bladecasting has two actives (both requiring daggers).

There probably need to be more active ability slots. It’s too limiting currently. Basically my mage can take meditate (super useful since it generates a spell point and I have it buffed so that it also gives me temporary armor), a “use while twiddling my thumbs ability OR levitate”, and “something I can spend spell points on that is kind of spectacular”. That’s 3 choices. And because of how targeting works some appealing looking spells become less so since I don’t want a mage up front (I have no idea if this makes them safer mind).

Again, this is fixable. Being more generous with ability slots, or perhaps simply progressing in the game, could alleviate this. But I cannot say whether we can expect more slots or not as is.

  1. I can be at any one of the Grand (conjurer, sorceror, magician, and summoner not sure why they didn’t call it wizard) within 7 spellpoints. So I could have one right now, although that seems foolish since it would mean no meditate. Also you can get to one in 5 (magician and conjurer). The conjurer line gives you levitate and a buff. That’s it. There’s two generic stat point boosting nodes along the way to the keystone. This is what I mean when I say shallow.

Again, I don’t need 100 spells. But there really aren’t a tom of options here. If you sit in the back a significant number of your active abilities are useless (they will only hit the front enemy in your column, if there is one, or won’t be able to target anyone at all). Even if you sit in the front half of them will be useless half the time because they only target a line in front of you. There are 4 “target anywhere” spells (one of which is a target all control spell, one of which is a target all spell from archmage). Everything else hits in a line in front of you except Dragonfire. which hits in front of you and the three blocks perpendicular behind the first (a T as it were). If you’re in the back that means it just hits 3 blocks in the front row (unless you are on one or the other end, in which case it hits two).

There’s not that much tactical flexibility present there. Obviously, abilities that target people not in front of you are extraordinary since they save you having to shuffle charcters around (fun fact, there’s a toggle for whether your party order should reset after combat). This one is not so easily fixed, as I doubt they’re going to add a ton of abilities or radically change what stuff targets. But who knows? There’s a few months until release and it may be they’ve held some stuff back. It’s just that there’s nothing in the skill trees that indicates that at this time. And it feels like I am going to spend large potions of the game with certain characters doing the same sequence over and over.

Combat in the demo is all over the place and the consider system needs tuning. Some fights tax you. Others are easy. Others impossible. This is all fine by itself but it’s not always possible to tell what is what or come close (yellow is the biggest culprit; I breezed through some yellow fights and others were straight impossible and I left them undone). I don’t know if having a bard might have altered that (certainly possible). Managing actions and spell points is important. But the grid is engaging at times while annoying at others.

I stuck with levitate on my main because it was useful for me to drag people into other’s big attacks where necessary (at the time the guest mage with me had Warstrike, which hits anyone in a line in front of you and arcs and does good damage; so he would gather SP for two turns and then I dropped someone into his line if there wasn’t anyone there and then let him unload).

115

I sure hope that you will post this excellent feedback where the devs will see it.

116

I’ve posted most of it. I’ll probably do the rest. But now I kinda want to experiment with a different mage build and see what happens. Although I didn’t leave myself a lot of places to do that. I’m staying away from the big thread where some people are expressing unhappiness (some reasonably, some not so reasonably), but there are other avenues and I have leveraged them (repeatedly).

I will reiterate I’ve quite enjoyed the exploration and puzzles, even though they are of the lighter variety (for the most part).

117

Thanks for the reply. Based on playing Enchanted Arms I think they limited themselves by keeping each side to two rows. In that game, it was three rows on each side, and…4 columns I think. But there were all sorts of cool abilities that had shapes like Y (3 boxes) or + (5 boxes). Movement on the grid was important and fun.

The lack of skill flexibility sounds like a concern. Like you said, limited number of skills doesn’t sound like a huge deal (since most end up worthless later) but the equip aspect seems like a problem.

118

I didn’t play enchanted arms but I have been thinking the 2x4 grid might have been a mistake. And right now there are no skills I have seen that:

  1. Target a 2x2 grid or larger grid (excepting “target all” spells of course).
  2. Target e.g. a row. I bet there are some and I hven’t seen them, but they aren’t on the mage.
  3. Allow you to e.g. target anyone on the back grow only (regarldess of where you are).

So I guess I was expecting to see more of that sort of thing and I don’t see really any of it in Rogue, Warrior, or Mage. A lot of warrior abilities target “nearest enemy” but there seems to be some unfathomable limitation there (I suspect it’s the immediate 2x3 grid in front of you only but not sure).

I’m surrpised I haven’t seen more targeting variety. There are skills that move you or the enemy. Levitate is one, obviously. There’s some sort of “passing slash” where you attack and then move. A nice rogue skill hits hard and allows you to move to the back row (or not move at all if you choose).

But yeah if you want to make the grid a big deal I expect it to be a bigger deal than I’ve seen so far. And I don’t see evidence of it changing a lot yet (there’s more than just the Monk coming IIRC and I don’t recall the Bard tree).

119

Yeah, Enchanted Arms had at least one skill off the top of my head that targeted an entire row and it was three rows away from the character, so you had to be in the front to hit the back row or vice-versa. The other thing in that game was that successive hits on the same enemy triggered a damage multiplier during that round, so each consecutive hit went from 1 to 1.2 to 1.4x damage or something like that. So you would move units around to try and tag an enemy then hit with a huge attack at the end of the chain.

Still my favorite combat system ever.

120

Enchanted Arms sounds interesting. I was wondering why I’d never heard of it but then I looked it up and it’s a console game. I guess they never ported it to PC.

121

No, I wish they had. It was also unfairly savaged in reviews because of a flamboyantly gay character. It’s not the sort of game you play for a great story. There’s also basically no exploration (with side passages that tend to have loot ala Octopath Traveler). It had plenty of flaws, but if you like the sound of turn-based combat with a puzzle-like feel (like figuring out how to chain combos together by moving people around and using different shape attacks with getting smacked hard in return) then it’s worth digging it up.