Bard's Tale IV - Patch 2 Available

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Patch 2 is now available for The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep.

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Patch 2

29 September - paul_inxile
Hello everyone!

The second patch for The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep is live, and it is a big one. Once again, thank you for all the feedback you provided. We really appreciate it.

In this patch, our team's main focus was continuing to improve optimization of the game across both the GPU and the CPU. We have made some great gains in this area across all quality settings and we will continue to improve it in the upcoming next patch.

We also continued our improvements to loading times. Additional notable fixes in this patch include a resolution to a problem some people experienced during launch where non-ASCII characters in Windows usernames would cause a game crash, UI support for widescreen and non 16-9 aspect ratios, large localization updates across all languages, clean-up pass to the mini-map (including adding save totems to it), lots of ability clean-up and description work, and various balance tweaks.

Moving forward, we are already working on the third patch that will have additional optimization and load time fixes. We expect this to be out in approximately 10 days when this work has been completed.

Beyond that, we will be focusing on additional optimization, fixes, and Legacy Mode. Unfortunately, Legacy Mode will not be part of the third patch as we originally suggested, as this feature is a larger project, and we did not want that feature to reduce the cadence of our updates in the meantime..

For details on this patch, please check out the notes below.

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More information.
 
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So again, never play games until they have been out at least 6 months. Personally it's usually more like a year for me.
 
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Yeah just look at Spellforce 3; at launch it was fucked so hard, but played it and finished it 2 weeks ago, after 38 patches. It was great :lol:
 
I think this game is quite playable without patches or just the first patches. While some people have found more serious bugs i haven't run into anything serious yet. Anyway i suspect they will drop support pretty soon as it sounds like sales are quite poor.
 
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you said:
I think this game is quite playable without patches or just the first patches. While some people have found more serious bugs i haven't run into anything serious yet. Anyway i suspect they will drop support pretty soon as it sounds like sales are quite poor.
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That would be a shame, it's really a good game. Underrated already.
 
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I wonder when developers will stop shooting themselves in the foot like this, especially considering the impotence today of early reviews and sales in a flooded market.

The opening menu screens of this game were buggy, and it wouldn't even let me create the race/class combination I wanted. There really aren't that many combinations available in this game, and stuff like that is just sloppy. It seems to me you're going to kill yourself in today's market like that. If you're going to be buggy, you better have a truly special game, like Kingmaker appears to be, for pepole to put up with it.
 
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I also find it shame. InXile appear in many ways to make poor decisions when it comes to making a marketable game. Dropping companions from Torment was a terrible decision when it was promised in the kickstarter. I enjoyed the game even if it wasn't PS:T, but angry kickstarter backers buried the game in negative reviews out of the gates. In this game (which I haven't yet started) being unable to get the backers on board with their innovations and technical issues appear once again to have buried the game at the outset with negative reviews. If you make your player base happy they will help market your game for you, if you piss them off it will really hurt your sales.
 
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I think one of the things that really annoys the customers is poor performance, particularly people on lower-end machines who feel that they "ought" to be able to play it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, it's a lesson I would take on board. If you're working at the indie level, don't try to get too fancy - keep the hardware demands down.
 
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Especially considering your core fan base is likely a bunch of old guys on cappy laptops.
 
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Glad I switched over to Pathfinder, I'll come back to this one maybe next year. Great game I'm sure, and I've totally enjoyed the ten hours of it that I've played to date, but it is crystal clear beyond refute that this title was released far too early.
 
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Ok, changes I have seen so far, ignoring the patch notes:
Map Legend is now updated, wasn't a big issue in the first place though.
Animals are now stuck in their animations.
Some textures are "moving" when moving closer. Not that the texture is being loaded in more detail, but it's more like it is stretched.

The combat seems to flow a bit faster now, and the performance overall is slightly better I'd say.
 
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To me, the BT IV patch situation is totally different from the Pathfinder situation. That game isn't broken, it mostly needs some balancing. The flaws people are unhappy about come more from the PnP rules than a buggy game. It is sad that games get pushed out and then need so much work to be fun.
 
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I had plenty of fun in the 25 or so hours I played of it. No bugs on my end that I noticed. I just shelved it at the moment for Kingmaker.
 
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forgottenlor said:
38 patches? That's incredible. I wonder what the record is.
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If you include fan patches it's hard to go past Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has had (with no exaggeration) around 100+ versions of an unofficial patch.
 
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And then there is MMOs. I remember Neocron and that we guessed on how many "emergency patches" every patch brings with it. ^^
 
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TheRealFluent said:
I had plenty of fun in the 25 or so hours I played of it. No bugs on my end that I noticed. I just shelved it at the moment for Kingmaker.
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But… but it was serious game for serious gamers and now you shelve it for some Kingmaker!
Ok, no offence, everybody knows how new shiny is always more tempting over things you already have.;)
 
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Aside from some annoyances, I saw a lot of things I'm going to like once I start into this for real. Not afraid of no bugs. But I backed a grid-based blobber sequel and so I'm going to wait for BT4 to be just that. Shame about their priorities, kinda.
 
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Zogar Sag said:
But… but it was serious game for serious gamers and now you shelve it for some Kingmaker!
Ok, no offence, everybody knows how new shiny is always more tempting over things you already have.;)
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Kingmaker is also a serious game for serious RPG gamers. ;) To be fair I've been waiting for Kingmaker for a long time and really wanted to play a new isometric CRPG.
 
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Well and earlier today I switched back to Bard's Tale, but only until the next Pathfinder patch hits that's supposed to fix some of the kick starter backer rewards.
 
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