RPGWatch Feature - Not a Review of The Bard's Tale IV

You guys talk about games journalists like it's a real career, like being a carpenter or nurse, ex. "I don't think his Hiring Manager would approve of such a shabby work ethic."

I still find it hard to believe anyone gets paid a middle-class salary (or gets paid at all) to do this kind of work. Most of them probably have real jobs where they're putting in 40+ hours to stay alive.

screeg said:

You guys talk about games journalists like it's a real career, like being a carpenter or nurse, ex. "I don't think his Hiring Manager would approve of such a shabby work ethic."

I still find it hard to believe anyone gets paid a middle-class salary (or gets paid at all) to do this kind of work. Most of them probably have real jobs where they're putting in 40+ hours to stay alive.

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It really depends on where you are looking at. When I think about "game journalists", I obviously think about the high-tier outlets like PCGamer, Kotaku, Polygon, etc. There are plenty of people there making at least 60k yearly. There are dozens of well-paid journalists in the game industry. Maybe even hundreds? However, not thousands. Maybe not even hundreds in the plural.

Most of these "sites" that you can find on the web are very lame and they are made by kids who do not even get paid most of the time. So you have to understand that there are like three tiers. The top journos who actually are journalists hired by big media outlets, the middle guys (people that maybe create videos and monetize them or own a site) and the low tier which is composed by occasional freelancers (like me) who have other jobs and a bunch of 13-year-old kids.

I like the combat system - it's a nice twist.

The class/skill setup is decent at best for me since a great deal of it is stuff I'd never want to use, leaving very narrow build paths.

Gear and such is pretty simplistic and blah - can't comment much when there isn't much to discuss.

I enjoy the game as a whole - for the most part, but it often feels tedious, especially when it comes to the puzzle overload.

I'm not huge on puzzles but they're nice to have to spice things up. I think one problem I have with the game is you get to those sections of faerie puzzles that seem to occur WAY to often and they're slow and annoying to do, and there's usually 10 of them in a row. And once I hit that, I just want to get out of the game asap.

The repetition is a problem with puzzles in general. I don't want to spend 2 hours solving 10 puzzles in a row. It's like the opposite of hack and slash to the point of being a pure puzzle game at times. The puzzles are usually easy to figure out even for a dummy like me but they still take a while to do, making them tedious.

I haven't played it in weeks and probably would've already finished it if it wasn't for the faerie puzzles and overdose of consecutive puzzles in general. Mostly the faerie puzzles. Cute once. Increasingly annoying with ever other occurrence.

I also really enjoyed the combat, but it seemed I spent far more time on resolving puzzles and such. I much prefer that the majority of my time in a game such as this one be spent on exploration and combat, some of these puzzles took quite some time to resolve, at least for me.

Are there any Bard's Tale Trilogy reviews coming down the pipe? That's met with a lot of good will.

Remember my 2006 editorial on delving the past to make a good game - the Pirates latest remake was my example.

It sounds like BT4 wasn't enough of a BT to make it work. Its like the reasons superhero tv shows and movies kept failing - the writers always thought they were above the material and didn't give enough respect to the source.

Oh yeah - there was a Bard's Tale sequel already - and it wasn't called Dragon Wars.

/me goes back to his BT Construction Kit.

BT4 not being enough of a BT might have turned off backers; but in my view BT4 wasn't a very good game period. I could have been great with better management and talent (implementation details); but what they actually released was imho a bunch of decent ideas but lousy game.

Lucky Day said:

It sounds like BT4 wasn't enough of a BT to make it work.

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Well. good review... however I liked the game and I finished it.

Don't understand what all the hate on the fairy puzzles is about because at least they resolved themselves logically. The connect the dot fire puzzles were just total serendipity. They were logical in the beginning but near the end in order to make them more complex, the logic was totaling lacking. Same with the gear box puzzles. The logic used to resolve those puzzles was not consistent. And the constellation puzzles while logical was just far to tedious. They shoulda took a page from a typical adventure game and post the constellation map next to your puzzle area.

Still, I enjoyed the game a lot in spite of its frustrations and would love to see another just like it (albeit, cleaned up). There is room in the RPG world for another game like this.

NOte, if they turned Talos Principle into an RPG I would be so there . . . just sayin

I liked it too. It was satisfying to solve the puzzles and also to find unique combat styles that you yourself came up with. It seems like everyone would have different unique to them ways to dismantle the enemy encounters. I enjoyed it but Kingmaker released and well, BT4 is on the back burner for now. But I'll return as the 30 hours I played were pretty fun.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I'm sure we have been trained to dislike puzzles.

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Or have we been trained to like puzzles in the 80s and 90s?

The worse part for me was that ridiculous code wheel, to be honest. I eventually just skipped trying to mess with those shrines, ignoring them completely and just working on the puzzle versions. The combat and exploration though, is where this game really shined, and there just wasn't enough of those elements for me.

Man I love stuff like the code wheel, lol. I made mine pretty nice, as best I could with a small nail. That adds an element of excitement to the game for me. Call me a nerd if you will, it's true.

Had I a physical wheel, I'm sure I would have enjoyed those shrines as much as the others. I don't, though, nor do I have a printer, so I just had to leave those alone for my sanity's sake. When I do replay this, I will somehow lay my hands on a physical code wheel before doing so!

Carnifex said:

Had I a physical wheel, I'm sure I would have enjoyed those shrines as much as the others. I don't, though, nor do I have a printer, so I just had to leave those alone for my sanity's sake. When I do replay this, I will somehow lay my hands on a physical code wheel before doing so!

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I just used an application that someone pointed out in the Steam forums. Just required a bit of alt-tabbing; not too annoying.

Honestly, a lot of the shrines' rewards were total shit, so I don't think you've missed much. In fact, that'd be true of a lot of the chests as well. There were many occasions of spending some time working out how to get to a chest, only to find it had 88 coins or something equally crap.

That's great to hear, perhaps when I replay the game I'll just skip those things entirely.

I wasn't planning on playing this game yet, but seeing so many puzzles gave me that itch and now have a higher priority.

well, not every game is for everyone.

If you enjoy solving many puzzles, and quite a few of them are rather complex, you should really like this game.

Wisdom said:

…a lot of these professional reviewers literally play less than 30 min, or watch a demo, then jump on a bandwagon and pepper it with a mixture of announcement hype, stating development promises as if they are fact, and blowing silly things out of proportion (both positive and negative).

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Wow ! You must have a tremendous expertise with pro reviewers that have lost their job, right ? Can you please give at least some examples of so called " professional reviewers" and point to some articles they wrote ? I long to see who they are as I guess they must be the majority, referring to your definitive statement.

Wisdom said:

Its funny how in current society we give participation stickers to everyone, we can't 'shame' anyone for inadequacy or inaction, and yet… yet we nail people to the wall when we feel they've disappointed us.

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The hospital that makes fun of charity ! (in reference to your previous bold statement about pro reviewers… )

The bell ones were the only ones that really confused myself. Oh yea there was one gear puzzle that was a pia.

Carnifex said:

If you enjoy solving many puzzles, and quite a few of them are rather complex, you should really like this game.

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CRD said:

I wasn't planning on playing this game yet, but seeing so many puzzles gave me that itch and now have a higher priority.

well, not every game is for everyone.

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Well, it's not that many puzzles, but everyone's taste is different now.

I don't know whether it is a bug or not I've encountered, so I was putting that game "on hold", but I plan to progress further in the future - silently I'm waiting for more patches, hoping there'll be more.


But apart from that, I find it highly irritating in how far "gaming" has evolved. Not only do action games dominate everyong - in the earlier 90s, puzzle games were more or less dominaing everything - but also that people - as it appears to me - actively frown upon puzzles in general.

If a game has puzzles in it, it won't be bought.
If it has action in it, it will be bought.

I fear that this is the result of the "gaming industry" training us. By delivering no puzzle games anymore - and of course by hyping anything "action" so much.