I have mixed feelings about the “always equip the best weapon.” It assumes that the “best” weapon I have is the best for every situation.
Hit the (black I think, could be white) button and you can swap out the weapons to your satisfaction.
On XBOX, the “Back” button usually skips cut-scenes (like on LucasArts’ “Gladius”). Although even in Gladius that fact wasn’t advertised and I discovered it on a forum.
I just started playing: are there no healing potions in this game? Is the only healing from that woman you summon? No healing potions in the thick of battle is going to suck.
I have mixed feelings about the “always equip the best weapon.” It assumes that the “best” weapon I have is the best for every situation.
Take Dark Alliance II for instance. While runing around collecting lesser swords and arrows to sell later is somewhat annoying, I like trying to choose the best weapon for the upcoming fight. Undead ahead? My flaming mace! Hill Giants ahead? My two-handed axe of coldstrike (hoping a swing will freeze the enemy for a quick kill).
Having to make some strategic choices when it comes to equipment can make the millionth battle against familar foes still seem fresh.
Also, weight limitations forces players to make choices. If it’s completely streamlined, then it’s just running around and killing, which will eventually get old. Again, from DAII, I’d like to equip that uber heavy platemail +20, but then I can only carry 10 potions b/c of the weight limit, so I am forced to make a choice, and again, choices make the last stages of a game still seem fresh.[/quote]
You will eventually get summoned creatures who will be able to heal you as well but there are no healing potions… really if you think about it adderstones are sort of surrogate healing potions.
There is a lot of confusion about how the “equip the best weapon” system works. If the game had a normal weapon system then yes of course equipping the best weapon would rob you of strategic choices, however in Bard’s Tale you have multiple weapon lines that all have linear upgrade paths.
For example the dirk upgrade path is something like this:
Normal Dirk
Normal Dirk + extra damage
Normal Dirk + extra damage + poison damage
Normal Dirk + extra damage + poison damage + Lifestealing
This is a little bit of a simplification but you can see how succesive weapons are clearly better than the previous ones.
We achieve strategic choice by giving you multiple lines like this that all have different uses… i.e. flails are unblockable but slow, sword and dirk is fast, bows inflict fire damage, etc…
The different weapon lines are: sword + shield, sword + dirk, 2 handed weapons (there are actually 3 weapon slots dedicated to them with two of the weapons being special ones), flail + shield and bow.
Hope that clears things up a bit for you!
I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s starting to get a bit old for me as well.
In a sequel, I would like to see the core “moment to moment” gameplay dastically improved. Not the big things like the quests, or the dialogue trees.
The feel of combat needs to get better. You get “stuck” in animations and combos and can’t interrupt them with other moves (like blocking). This is sort of par for the course for games using this engine, but it only grows more annoying over time. Especially as we have examples like Prince of Persia - can you imagine this game with combat like that? But even without going that far, the game could be drastically improved by simply paying more attention to the lengh of animations, timing of swings/shots, recovery times, interrupting moves to block, and so on. I know it’s an RPG and all, but it’s an arcade fighting engine in essense and it needs to feel better.
The locations and enemies get to be mind-numbingly repetitive. Going up three floors of a tower that are almost exactly the same, fighting very much the same enemies, then fighting your way back down again… it smacks of “we need to make our game a lot longer so let’s pad it up” and it’s never any fun.
More attention paid to character animation. Example: you have the prisoner guy’s arms tied up behind him. But as he turns in place, his arms magically “pop” untied and then “pop” back behind his back when he’s done turning, because it’s just playing some canned turning villager animation that is used all over the rest of the game.
Get a little more cheeky with the sex humor. It’s obvious it’s intended to be in there, but it’s barely hinted at. I don’t expect or want Leisure Suit Larry here, but the very start of the game and the “quest for coin and cleavage” tagline for the game promise a bit more of a ribald tale than we get.
In general there needs to be a greater variety of environments and creatures - this goes back to the whole thing about not making the game feel padded by forcing us to spend a long time just whacking the same thing over and over.
Lots of little polish issues: some sound levels are off, you lose yourself whenever you walk under one of the big trees (a simple transparency bubble would solve that), the lip synching gets pretty rough at times, a lot of the animations have very stiff (or non-existant) transitions…
I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s starting to get a bit old for me as well.
In a sequel, I would like to see the core “moment to moment” gameplay dastically improved. Not the big things like the quests, or the dialogue trees.
The feel of combat needs to get better. You get “stuck” in animations and combos and can’t interrupt them with other moves (like blocking). This is sort of par for the course for games using this engine, but it only grows more annoying over time. Especially as we have examples like Prince of Persia - can you imagine this game with combat like that? But even without going that far, the game could be drastically improved by simply paying more attention to the lengh of animations, timing of swings/shots, recovery times, interrupting moves to block, and so on. I know it’s an RPG and all, but it’s an arcade fighting engine in essense and it needs to feel better.
The locations and enemies get to be mind-numbingly repetitive. Going up three floors of a tower that are almost exactly the same, fighting very much the same enemies, then fighting your way back down again… it smacks of “we need to make our game a lot longer so let’s pad it up” and it’s never any fun.
More attention paid to character animation. Example: you have the prisoner guy’s arms tied up behind him. But as he turns in place, his arms magically “pop” untied and then “pop” back behind his back when he’s done turning, because it’s just playing some canned turning villager animation that is used all over the rest of the game.
Get a little more cheeky with the sex humor. It’s obvious it’s intended to be in there, but it’s barely hinted at. I don’t expect or want Leisure Suit Larry here, but the very start of the game and the “quest for coin and cleavage” tagline for the game promise a bit more of a ribald tale than we get.
In general there needs to be a greater variety of environments and creatures - this goes back to the whole thing about not making the game feel padded by forcing us to spend a long time just whacking the same thing over and over.
Lots of little polish issues: some sound levels are off, you lose yourself whenever you walk under one of the big trees (a simple transparency bubble would solve that), the lip synching gets pretty rough at times, a lot of the animations have very stiff (or non-existant) transitions…[/quote]
Yeah these are all certainly areas we hope to improve in. Thanks for the comments.
Just because I see developers say that a lot (and mean it!), I thought I would throw this out there:
It’s not enough just to do a lot better the next time around. Because ALL other games are getting “a lot better” while you’re making yours. If your next game comes out in two years and is twice as good, hey great, but everyone else’s games are twice as good as well and, competitively, you’re right back where you started.
It’s a problem I commonly see with new companies trying to break into the hardware business. They tell us about how their product will be “20% better than that thing which is all the rage now!” Which would be fine, except that the company making that All the Rage Now Thing will introduce a new product just before you that’s 80% better, leaving you in the dust.
You can’t aim at the competition, you have to aim at where the competition is going to be.
And I don’t mean this specificly for inXile, but for all game developers.
I’d also like to seem some type of co-op play mode in a sequel as well. 2-4 players is always a good time and makes it a must for partys.
[quote=“Jason_Cross”]
Just because I see developers say that a lot (and mean it!), I thought I would throw this out there:
It’s not enough just to do a lot better the next time around. Because ALL other games are getting “a lot better” while you’re making yours. If your next game comes out in two years and is twice as good, hey great, but everyone else’s games are twice as good as well and, competitively, you’re right back where you started.
It’s a problem I commonly see with new companies trying to break into the hardware business. They tell us about how their product will be “20% better than that thing which is all the rage now!” Which would be fine, except that the company making that All the Rage Now Thing will introduce a new product just before you that’s 80% better, leaving you in the dust.
You can’t aim at the competition, you have to aim at where the competition is going to be.
And I don’t mean this specificly for inXile, but for all game developers.[/quote]
We are most certainly shooting at least as high as the competition for the next one (can’t say more than that) but yes this is certainly a problem. Of course another problem that we have is that we are a small company… compared to most others a very very small company. It’ll be interesting to see if we can compete in the log run.
This is the #1 feature that we’d like to include in the next game.
I also recently beat the game and then reloaded an older save and with the assistance of a gamefaq guide picked up all the secondary quests I missed. Anyway, I rather enjoyed the game, including the songs (who knew Tallarico could be funny?) but I don’t expect to ever replay it again and by the end I was just running past monsters to get to the next chest or exit. Most of the nitpicking and complaints I had about the game were mentioned already. But I have a few little ones.
First: Don’t make unlocking the bonus stuff insanely tedious and boring (you have to donate money hundreds of times in a row). Why not make the bonuses unlock by rare drops from each monster type or something similar, so you at least reward players for actually playing the game instead of doing some obscure nonsense?
Second: Don’t make the extra stuff lame. Except for the bonus art (which is nice except that it is a slideshow so you can’t look at a particular picture for as long as you want and/or zoom in ala Soul Caliber) the extras are all content that you would have already experienced in-game (i.e. the intro movie, the songs etc.) Why not record a designer commentary for the game? It is essentially free except for disc space (as opposed to a video interview which would need to be professionally produced). You could play the commentary tracks under the bonus art slideshows or something. Or designer diary type stuff, etc. Or statistics about how many adderstones you used, orcs you killed, pets you summoned etc. All of these sorts of bonuses are basically free from your perspective.
Third: Why was there a jump button in the game? I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining that you didn’t include any jumping puzzles, but what was the point of it then? It didn’t really have any use in combat since it only barely made you move faster than normal.
Fourth: I’ll second the suggestion that other gametypes be included. Why not follow the bandwagon and include rhythym mini-games for the bard since he is supposed to be a musician anyway? Or some sneak quests, or a gambling or drinking game of some sort since he spends so much time in pubs? (e.g. you have to play poker to earn an item using in-game cash, you have to win a drinking contest by button mashing or whatever for a quest, you have to win a music contest or charm someone etc.)
Fifth: Your biggest problem was the lack of variety in enemy AI which led to the fighting being somewhat dull. Why not have teleporting enemies, or enemies with more distinctive moves that require more strategy to fight than just mash the parry button? Go play Zelda or Devil May Cry etc and steal from them. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t internally consistent or within the same mythology base. Also, I don’t know from the history of the license if this can’t be done for some reason, but why not let the Bard have spells to enchant the monsters he is fighting? Isn’t that what the D&D bards did - as opposed to summoning magical creatures?
Basically, the bottomline is to go out and play other games and steal the best parts of them.
PS - I assume you guys know about the missing texture bugs during the custscenes with the princess in the tower, the sound bugs, and the candle bug (blue glow) on the main menu. (I played the Xbox version for reference).
Just to balance it out a bit, here are some things that I really liked about TBT:
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The voice acting and writing. Definitely the best part of the game (which is sort of a shame).
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The shopkeep patter. Very cool and much more fun than the usual generic shopkeep.
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The dog. Dogs seem to be getting more respect in games lately and I applaud it. I especially enjoyed the little touch where he digs up treasure randomly.
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Using the Konami code as the basis for the cheats.
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Bouncing ball for songs. It was a nice touch.
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The barks for your summons. And the advice they give in the end.
Basically, the game has a lot of nice little quirks and touches but a somewhat unsatisfying nougaty center.
Once again thanks for the comments!
I realize this seems like an odd thread necro but apparently this game has been rereleased on PS4 as Bard’s Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled and, for the first time ever I think, I’m jealous of PS4 owners. I love this game, I put it in my top 100. It’s got great humor and it’s fun to play and you could opt out of the final boss fight and just head to the bar. Maybe more platforms will get it soon, fingers crossed anyway.