Bard's Tale IV - Releasing September 18th

Silver Coin said:

How deep is the character progression?

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I really can't judge this at that point. I will look further into it but I also don't intend to spend dozens of hours on it before release.

Probably best to check out this video


Something I can add to that is that you only have a limited amount of slots you can set as "active" on your character.

You can respecc at any time, at least in the beginning. I am not yet sure how it works once you advance over the "chain" thing shown in the video as you need to get "reviewed" by the guild. And I don't know whether this requires going back to them if you reskill something.

Also it's important to take into consideration how the combat works. You only have a limited amount of action points per turn and these are shared among the whole team. So you use all 3 action points (I think they will increase later) on one character and have nothing left for others, which is an interesting decision concerning the active skills of your character you have to chose.

There are also lots of simple +1STR or +1CON things in the skill tree. This makes it a bit cumbersome. However +1STR actually equals +1DMG as far as I can tell. So it's actually a significant change (and not just a 1% value)

Each of the 4 classes has 4 skill trees afaik. From what I have seen one is attacks, one is for wearing armor and such, one is for "specials" like songs on bards or lockpicking for rogues and the last tree seems to be dedicated to crafting.

Kordanor said:

There are also lots of simple +1STR or +1CON things in the skill tree. This makes it a bit cumbersome. However +1STR actually equals +1DMG as far as I can tell. So it's actually a significant change (and not just a 1% value).

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So there aren't many active abilities in the skill trees?

Stingray said:

No way, I thought M&M X was too short.

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Not sure how you got through it that quickly. According to Steam, I spent 157 hours on one playthrough of the main game + expansion. I was pretty anal about trying to find every secret, but still...

I was anal about finding everything too (always am). I don't know how you could have spent that long on M&M X, but if you did, then I see why you might have thought it was too long. Because there certainly wasn't 157 hours of game there (I would have loved it if there had been…)

howlongtobeat.com shows the average "Completionist" playthrough as 70 hours:
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=12959

Did you play at the hardest difficulty level? I used whatever the default was.

Those stats from howlongtobeat.com are for the main game only. Not that I care how much time other people spent on the game. That's also a pretty small sample size.

Yes, I played on the harder (Warrior) difficulty. If memory serves me correctly, there are only 2 difficulty levels to choose from. My play time might be a little inflated from the game being paused during breaks, but it is from only one playthrough.

It's a good game imo, but I thought it was inferior to Wizardy 8 by quite a bit. I found the end game and most of the expansion very grindy.

Yeah definitely wasn't even in the league of Wiz8. But it was still the best blobber we've gotten since then, which now covers like 17 years.

Silver Coin said:

So there aren't many active abilities in the skill trees?

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Because you can only chose 3 active abilities for the combat it wouldn't make sense if you'd have tons of active abilities in the tree. It's not like there aren't any at all. To me it felt about right. But I will probably dig into that today and note down all of the abilities of the game so you can get your own picture of that.

JDR13 said:

Not sure how you got through it that quickly. According to Steam, I spent 157 hours on one playthrough of the main game + expansion. I was pretty anal about trying to find every secret, but still…

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I played 65h which included the UBI-soft point dlc thingy and the developer dungeon but not "The Falcon & The Unicorn DLC", but i doubt that this is another 100h.
I also did absolutely everything in the game on warrior. To me the length felt about right. The developer dungeon was garbage though (guess it wasn't really intended to be good) and the end of the game was too grindy.
Also I already felt like I was playing a group of gods in Might and Magic Legacy at the end as enemies were just dying left and right. I pretty much maxed out the characters and took advantage of balance weaknesses (double attacks, procs). Any additional content wouldn't have been more than a sight-seeing tour.
And as I record everything, the playthrough of MMX Legacy can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNU8jxMn6ejqc-ZGA94tXLNIn5osbRDzK

I'm amazed anyone could stomach 150+ hours in MMX.

I mean, it was pretty good for what it was - but most of it was samey combat over and over and over.

I believe I quit playing once my party started auto-winning (more or less) - and the content started being too grindy. I doubt I played it more than 30 hours or so.

Still, I would like more of this type of game - with a stronger emphasis on exploration and non-combat activities.

Darth Tagnan said:

I'm amazed anyone could stomach 150+ hours in MMX.

I mean, it was pretty good for what it was - but most of it was samey combat over and over and over.

I believe I quit playing once my party started auto-winning (more or less) - and the content started being too grindy. I doubt I played it more than 30 hours or so.

Still, I would like more of this type of game - with a stronger emphasis on exploration and non-combat activities.

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It's certainly not a game I plan on replaying.

And yeah, exploration was definitely not the game's strong point even compared to older games in the series.

I'd love to see another M&M game, but I'd want it to be more like M&M VI-VIII. Give us those large open areas the older titles had, and also give us more items, skills, spells, etc. M&M X seemed like it lacked variety overall.

I dont get it, seems like Im the only one, who disliked what we saw here.
The intro with hanging was absolutely anticlimactic, it was like wtf Im just watched. Characters looks horrible, especially that elf female, like really? What an acid addict is that? And that ugly barbarian guy?!
Why are people praying to some preacher at place of gallows with fresh corpses still hanging there? And just few steps further some guy advertise soup! Like no one cares whats going on further than few steps around them. Corridors and restricted places everywhere.

Stupid blue griddle is still there - why?! Why not animated characters in battle, what's with that looking back, when issuing commands. Combat it self looked boring, enemies yawn while waiting for their turn, making it all even more silly. Opponents still don't retreat, as always lone archer fights overpowered group of 4. Dungeon was solve puzzle/fight/solve puzzle /fight - and I bet it will be like that for the whole game.

Story - I can predict it already after the intro and first dialogues:
Evil guy spreads his dark doctrines through his fanatics to overcome the world, the group of adventurers are sent out to gather artifacts and rise in strength, must find some magic crystals, which makes bad guy invincible, destroy them, ascend to dark tower and fight main antagonist in last battle. How many times we been there, done that to go all over again?

I mean, I understand nostalgia for old school games, but cmon, did none really wants any improvements, just old same again and again?

Zogar Sag said:

And that ugly barbarian guy?!

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Did you just insult the dwarf? Bad idea!

I like everything I've seen except the skill trees. They look very tiny, and hearing that many of the abilities are passives that boost stats makes it appear even more shallow.

I agree to that, but am also hoping that we actually only saw an excerpt of the tree.

(Edit: Although, it does not have to be as complex as the skill tree in games like Path of Exile. Afterall, being a party based game, much the the complexity could come from the configuration of all party members.)

Silver Coin said:

I like everything I've seen except the skill trees. They look very tiny, and hearing that many of the abilities are passives that boost stats makes it appear even more shallow.

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Not necessarily true at all. If Active skills are limited to a certain number at one time, passives are a good thing. This was also the case in Starcrawlers.

Drithius said:

Not necessarily true at all. If Active skills are limited to a certain number at one time, passives are a good thing. This was also the case in Starcrawlers.

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The question is, what kind of skill tree do people actually expect in a crawler.

Imho the system bards tale is offering is already pretty detailed and I can't think of any other crawler with a more detailed system. I have not played Starcrawlers and Vaporum though.

There is some crawerler I've been trying to play for a while that has a decent skill tree - i keep reaching a point where i can't move forward - hum what was the name of that crawler - oh yea - one sec - looking - looking - looking - oh yea this one:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/409450/The_Fall_of_the_Dungeon_Guardians__Enhanced_Edition/
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But it is a bit of a different game as the story is pretty thin - more of a dungeon crawl looking for a way out.

Silver Coin said:

I like everything I've seen except the skill trees. They look very tiny, and hearing that many of the abilities are passives that boost stats makes it appear even more shallow.

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How many times are you going to repeat that?

you said:

There is some crawerler I've been trying to play for a while that has a decent skill tree - i keep reaching a point where i can't move forward - hum what was the name of that crawler - oh yea - one sec - looking - looking - looking - oh yea this one:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/409450/The_Fall_of_the_Dungeon_Guardians__Enhanced_Edition/
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But it is a bit of a different game as the story is pretty thin - more of a dungeon crawl looking for a way out.

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The Fall of the Dungeon guardians more or less has "fake freedom" though. As merging the different trees makes almost no sense. You basically put 90% in your main tree and then have maybe 4-5 Slots for points which actually make sense in other trees. For example it makes no sense as a Ranger to put anything into tanking skills which is a whole tree. And it makes no sense as necromancer something into a skill which improves an ability which you can only use as wizard.

While it's not the worst system in the world, this is what I'd call fake freedom, and I am pretty sure that it's quite easy to do better (and I think Bard's Tale is already past that)

I wasn't recommending their skill system - merely presenting it for folks who insist that bards tale iv skill system was too simple. There are a lot of things I don't like abou tthe game but it is generally well received....

Kordanor said:

The Fall of the Dungeon guardians more or less has "fake freedom" though. As merging the different trees makes almost no sense. You basically put 90% in your main tree and then have maybe 4-5 Slots for points which actually make sense in other trees. For example it makes no sense as a Ranger to put anything into tanking skills which is a whole tree. And it makes no sense as necromancer something into a skill which improves an ability which you can only use as wizard.

While it's not the worst system in the world, this is what I'd call fake freedom, and I am pretty sure that it's quite easy to do better (and I think Bard's Tale is already past that)

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Fall of the Dungeon Guardians was a pretty good game, I believe I played it maybe right before the holidays in 2015. One of the few times I jumped on a game right after it was released because two mates really raved about it, and they were both right, well worth playing.