Bard's Tale IV

Ripper said:

The player numbers for this one still look dismal, and are trending down. I don't know what can necessarily be concluded from these, but they are about 12% (at their peak) of what Pathfinder is getting, and about 2% of the D:OS2 numbers near launch. I suspect that's not good news for a moderately-sized production.

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Imho it' partially their own fault, and partially something unavoidable.

Their own fault:
-Released was rushed, tons of technical issues, bugs (mostly minor) and horrible imbalances
-They advertised the game in a sub-optimal way in terms of content and audience. I am pretty sure that the immense amount of puzzles is pissing lots of players off
-featuring the humor in the game was a bad idea. Not because the humor is so bad in the game, but because for lots of people this apparently moves the game closer to the previous Bards Tale action Adventure

Something which was somewhat unavoidable:
-They have a very "weird" hardcore player base, which is extremely against any modern game design. They dislike that you cannot create a full group of random characters right away, they think that grind is great, they are missing unlimited respawn and random encounters, dislike that you don't get HP on level ups, they dislike that you can save that freely and so on.

If you make a game catering towards this audience alone, then the game would probably not have any significant audience. However this audience has been quite vocal.
So no matter what they did, they either would have catered towards a tiny audience to begin with, or, and this is what they decided to do, go a bit more modern, and cause this group to write hateful reviews instead.

No other game I can think of had a problem in this clarity so far, as most of them had some kind of more modern members of the series.

Pillars for example is based on Baldurs Gate, and Baldurs Gate was already a very modern game to begin with. Actually Baldurs Gate is basically the game brought more modern game design into the public, like pre designed group members and so on.

Might and Magic on the other hand already had more modern games.
Wasteland 2 had Fallout to bridge the gap.

Wizardry 8 is also based on Wizardry 7, which was already somewhat of a progression compared to Wizardry 6. And Wizardry 6 is from 1990.

Ultima had Ultima 7,8,9 and Online. If they made a new non-online game it would probably be "easier" as well.

But creating a Bards Tale 4 is like creating, creating a Wizardry 5 after Wizardry 4 was released in '87, doing a Ultima 5 after Ultima 4 was released in '85, or creating a Might and Magic 2 after M&M 1 was released in '86.

Do you really want to go that far back just to say that you stay true to the roots? I don't think so.


So now they created an technically bad game with bad balancing, with rather unexpected features (massive amount of riddles), and they have some people in their hardcore audience who strongly dislike any new game design elements.
They get tons of shitty reviews, which again means that less people will buy it to begin with, and therefore it's rather clear that the userbase isn't really growing much and the number of active players is imploding.

And just for the record: I still like the game nevertheless. But it's obvious that it has significant flaws, which might or might not affect you.

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention and of which I was just was reminded, when I saw the third mail with my key arriving now, is how shitty their key distribution system is...

With all the projects I've supported over the years, I'll say that this and the Pathfinder key distribution methods leave a lot to be desired.

It is crowdox system they are using. I had one other kickstarter use that site instead of backerkit and it was just as messy. The problem is I can find an old email and query crowdox (or backerkit) but unilike backerkit you can't see your damn keys - if you miss or don't get the email there is no way to verify; check if it was sent or have them resend it. backerkit all the way (if you must use one of the two).

Kordanor said:

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention and of which I was just was reminded, when I saw the third mail with my key arriving now, is how shitty their key distribution system is…

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I'm not sure I totally agree that it is a technically bad game with bad balancing. I've had veritually no major technical issues. The biggest annoyance is during combat where actions are sometime slow to take place (this was much worse before the patch). The performance has been fine on my system (1070 with ssd) and i've had one crash in something like 35 or so hours (i'm slow).

Balance has also been ok - i'm playing on normal. Not totally easy but almost never too hard (one required fight so far has been brutal). If it was totally easy I could up the difficulty to hard. The only caveat is that I started clueless so my builds and play is far from optimal (this is normally true the first time I play a game - these days I do king bounty on impossible with no losses but when I started I played on normal and some fights were still hard (just an example but similar could be said about divinity games)). Anyway so I'm not sure if the balance complaint is too easy or too hard but i've found it fine. There are some rules on combat that still have me a bit confused - for example there appears to be a max number of skills during combat and if you use items with skills then you have fewer choices from your known skills (worse you don't get warned that selected skills are being dropped when you equip an item).
--
Mind you have lots of complaints (such as inability to annotate maps and lack of map markers AFTER you discover major places); but technically and balance I think it is as good or better than divinity original series games on release.

Kordanor said:

So now they created an technically bad game with bad balancing, with rather unexpected features (massive amount of riddles), and they have some people in their hardcore audience who strongly dislike any new game design elements.
They get tons of shitty reviews, which again means that less people will buy it to begin with, and therefore it's rather clear that the userbase isn't really growing much and the number of active players is imploding.

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you said:

Mind you have lots of complaints (such as inability to annotate maps and lack of map markers AFTER you discover major places); but technically and balance I think it is as good or better than divinity original series games on release.

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I strongly disagree there.
While you (and me) can play the game decently, albeit with extremely powerful machines (I am playing on a GTX 1070 on 1080p) I had to monitor my GPU temperature and experienced a few crashes during the first 20h until I capped the framerate to 45 fps. And it's not like the graphics would be so good that they'd make this necessary, in addition the temperature is ramping up to maximum when nothing happens, e.g. when you are in the inventory or you are in combat.
However, it works now (with the config edit). Tons of players in the forums complain about more serious issues and considering what I can observe here, I can understand that it's clearly badly done.
That said, the game still always starts on the incorrect monitor for me, with the incorrect language selected and I have to switch both every time I start the game.

But that was just the purely technical perspective.
Bugs in the game are actually much more present, a few, like the puzzle weapon bug, already have been fixed, I will only mention a couple which are still present and which occured to me:
-In Combat when you kill the last enemy with a fire tick, you do not get any xp
-Galfrois Wand, last boon is not correctly working, the additional damage is never applied
-Having the strife spear, learning wielding 2h in one hand, and taking an item in the offhand, you will receive a duped instance of your weapon which is still in the main hand
-There is a buff which gives you money after the battle is won, it has a cooldown of one fight. This cooldown is removed when you leave the zone. In addition the other debuff, only having half your oppunity goes away if the caster dies (you still get the money), so having your caster die early in the combat is of advantage.
-Happened a couple of times to be that the game got "stuck" in combat. Nothing happened for a few second, and then suddenly damage popped up. Looks like a bug in some internal calculation (endless loop) which is then broken by an failsave.
-There is a weapon locked behind some spikes. In order to kill them you need to summon monsters by using a totem (object in the room) if you use the object, and leave the room because the enemies appear to be too strong, you will not be able to pass the spikes anymore as the skeletons are gone and the totem doesnt reappear. Not sure yet if I actually need that in order to finish the game.

There might be other bugs I encountered but which I don't remember anymore.

There is a thread in the steam forums though with over 600 postings, which mainly contain bug reports.

Regarding the balancing:
Money Balancing is completely broken. You get too much money extremely fast, e.g. by the beforementioned item which gives you money after each fight (about 200 Gold in the beginning).
Later in the game, you are already rich at that point though, you can also just steal everything for free with your rogue anyways. However you still receive a great reward in a codewheel shrine of a few hundred gold, which is absolutely silly.

The Game becomes far too easy after about 1/3 of the game, when you approach the second chain (first mage "class skill"), and then especially after you pass this chain and unlock other "class skills". Some of them are massively overpowered.
There is also one puzzle weapon in particular which you receive rather early on which completely breaks the game.
At that point it's actually your choice on how you break the game, there are multiple options to chose from. I can go into more detail here, but that potentially spoils the game for you.

That said, craftable/usable items are pointless and pretty much useless. The talent system doesn't really work because of the 4 skill limitation. While 4 skills is fine for the combat itself, it makes the skill system extremely limited and lots of the talents useless. And it increases your chances to do mistakes you cannot correct because the developer didn't manage to implement a reskill feature (which then the beta testers were blamed for).

Divinity Original Sin 2 on the other hand didn't have any bugs which really impacted the gameplay for me, and it ran pretty well right at release. Also the balancing was rather good. And don't say that there werent any bugs, I had a couple ones, but they weren't as omni-present as in Bards Tale 4, where they are obvious in every single fight.

The balancing of DOS1 however was…well, not necessarily broken, but the game was just ridicolously easy, which you could consider as being broken.

And there has been the second patch with a huge list of fixes:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/566090/announcements/detail/3369147113804010409

Fun thing: Even the list is huge it hardly even touches the bugs and issues I mentioned and encountered besides of the performance issues.

Warning there is a game breaking BUG in isles when you have to go to the temple. Not sure of how to get past this bug in the gog version. They have said they had a fix but that was with patch 1 i think which I have. Also patch 2 (for gog) requires ANOTHER 26GB download. Crap. InXile is beginning to piss me off.

you said:

It is crowdox system they are using. I had one other kickstarter use that site instead of backerkit and it was just as messy. The problem is I can find an old email and query crowdox (or backerkit) but unilike backerkit you can't see your damn keys - if you miss or don't get the email there is no way to verify; check if it was sent or have them resend it. backerkit all the way (if you must use one of the two).

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That Crowdox web site is just ... kind of brutal.
I mean, I've tried 3 different browsers and none could properly show me my backer things.
I've had best results recently with Vivaldy, but also with an very old Opera browser.

Found a "Bard's Tale Day One Edition" (funny name !) in a store of a German electronics chain today. I bought it, because it's a physical item - all my backer rewards are digital.
And, maybe, this perhaps means less downloads ?
The Publisher is Deep Silver (daughter of Koch Media now).

Nice! Wondering when I'll receive my physical edition.

I think I would have preferred physical as well, but I can't remember anymore why I didn't take it. Perhaps nort available anymore, or perhaps too costly for my wallet, then ?

Anyway, for Pathfinder:Kingmaker I have preordered a physical version. I wonder when that arrives ... I filled in my adress only last week (I seem to have forgotten that).

Update : No, it's not less downloads ... As usually, the only thing that's on the game DVD is steam.

"Buy a game to help us distribute steam even further !" [Careful, Satire.]

Well, that was to be expected though.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Update : No, it's not less downloads … As usually, the only thing that's on the game DVD is steam.

"Buy a game to help us distribute steam even further !" [Careful, Satire.]

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Yep my favorite was when the game was fully re-downloaded despite what was on the disc. Anyway the last time I bought a Boxed Steam PC game was years ago.

I believe it was Empire Total War.

Yes, I had this, too. A full download despite the data on the disc.
I really find this gruesome now, from an archivist's perspective.
All we will have is steam. All games will be gone.

This is like having masses cars, but no motor gas (we say "Benzin" here in Germany, or "Treibstoff" as a general term).

This business model even has a name : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
Only that's the direct opposite here.
Distributing masses of vehicles, but in the end there'll be no gas.

Well in truth (at least for this game) is that there has been 26GB of changes since the dvd was produced....

you said:

Well in truth (at least for this game) is that there has been 26GB of changes since the dvd was produced….

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I don't think so...having played the beta it doesn't feel like a lot has changed since then, unfortunately.
Ofc it's possible that some stuff they added after the CD was pressed is actual game content which wasn't finished yet but added in before release.

It was a small joke; for the gog version each patch has required a 26GB download - most likely because xile is foobaring something.

Kordanor said:

I don't think so…having played the beta it doesn't feel like a lot has changed since then, unfortunately.
Ofc it's possible that some stuff they added after the CD was pressed is actual game content which wasn't finished yet but added in before release.

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Well, it's done now ... I had to download that awful lot almost the whole day ... But now it's done, at least.

The first few minutes into Skara Vrae : Oh, this is such a British game ! The Gaelic music ! I'm almost loving it !

The accent, the music ... everything ... The gore is almost like in Monty Python ...

It's a dreaded scenery, though. But, I do like this game now.

Well, from tomorrow to next Frodfay I'm on vacation in Berlin, so I'll have to stop that for a while ...