Bard's Tale IV - Patch 2 Available

I thought this game was supposed to be short. Not so on the first playthrough apparently, I've spent 30 hours and probably still have some distance to cover. Haven't sought help with any puzzles yet though, so some take some time to figure out.
 
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"In this patch, our team's main focus was continuing to improve optimization of the game across both the GPU and the CPU."

Seems like a no-brainer that should have been done before release. Is InXile strapped for cash and had to release the game early or did they just chance it?
 
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"In this patch, our team's main focus was continuing to improve optimization of the game across both the GPU and the CPU."

Seems like a no-brainer that should have been done before release. Is InXile strapped for cash and had to release the game early or did they just chance it?
This seems to be a problem with most crowdfunded RPGs on Unreal and Unity. A few of us talked about this problem on another thread it came down to a few probable reasons.
What a surprise another kickstarter game that loads faster on SSD's. It's a conspiracy I must must unravel. As most of the Unity Engine RPGs also had the same problem.

So this is either deliberate or people cant code correctly anymore.

Now excuse me while I make a sandwich while waiting for Tyranny to load a map.
Well I think the coders aren't that great but I also think they have to be better because they are moving a lot more data. Mind you that's no excuse for poor technical design but it takes more knowledge to understand the impact of larger data sets being moved between disk and memory and design a more efficient technique. This is an area for which I have years of experience but a lot of these kids these days have no clue about i/ops and how to lay things out to make it efficient.
Can't really blame the engines anymore, either. All the major ones, including Unreal and Unity, publish their source code now. If there's anything wrong with the loading of data, the code is right there to be inspected, modified or replaced by the devs.
One has to wonder if it has to do with hiring amateur contract workers who are cheaper?
I really suspect it's what I mentioned before - they have a certain range of skiils in these small studios, but not the hardcore bearded wisemen of old, who would feel confident ripping out the level-loading code and tuning it up.
 
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Can't really blame the engines anymore, either. All the major ones, including Unreal and Unity, publish their source code now. If there's anything wrong with the loading of data, the code is right there to be inspected, modified or replaced by the devs.

Does anyone actually do that ? I mean, inspect the code ? I often wonder whether anyone really does that.
I mean, it's a lot of work ...
 
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Does anyone actually do that ? I mean, inspect the code ? I often wonder whether anyone really does that.
I mean, it's a lot of work …

Yes, they do. The engine companies would much rather not publish their source code (competitors could steal a lot of their implementations) but they started doing it because of the demand. If you make a game and there's bugs that you just can't attribute to your part of the code, you're completely helpless if the engine is black-boxed, and you can't check to see what might be going on.

Also, there's definitely times when people want to make significant changes to the way the engine does things out of the box.

But, you're right that a lot of the smaller, more amateur devs probably wouldn't dig into it - they wouldn't know where to begin.
 
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This game is just Awful. A real shame.

Not even After 666 Patches can it be worth playing.

Not just NOT recommended - clearly for Garbage Bin.
 
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This game is just Awful. A real shame.

Not even After 666 Patches can it be worth playing.

Not just NOT recommended - clearly for Garbage Bin.

Well, that was constructive. I find the game really entertaining, and have had no performance issues whatsoever on a low end rig. I've seen some bugs, but nothing major. So I beg to differ.

It's certainly worth playing, and recommended for everyone who thinks they might enjoy a new take on the blobber genre.
 
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Does anyone actually do that ? I mean, inspect the code ? I often wonder whether anyone really does that.
I mean, it's a lot of work …

I did with MMX. I was frustrated with the inability to do every quest due to race/class limitations so I opened them up to everyone. I'm not a Unity programmer but it wasn't too hard.

Daniel.
 
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Well, that was constructive. I find the game really entertaining, and have had no performance issues whatsoever on a low end rig. I've seen some bugs, but nothing major. So I beg to differ.

It's certainly worth playing, and recommended for everyone who thinks they might enjoy a new take on the blobber genre.

It was a personal opinion. Maybe other people can enjoy staff like that.

It's not a good think that I can't enjoy a game when it's mediocre but I can't help it.

And my time for gaming is very limited, so I chose to play only if something is Really Good.
And with this and many games like this, it's not the case.

Of course, people less choosy or more abiding may feel different
 
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It was a personal opinion. Maybe other people can enjoy staff like that.

It's not a good think that I can't enjoy a game when it's mediocre but I can't help it.

And my time for gaming is very limited, so I chose to play only if something is Really Good.
And with this and many games like this, it's not the case.

Of course, people less choosy or more abiding may feel different

That's fine, opinions differ. I was just giving a counter point to yours since I actually find the game really good. And I believe the limited gaming time is a reality for many of us these days, between the work, the children and the wife the hours I get to game are to few and too far in between. ;)
 
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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.
Depends on a game and sometimes developer&publisher. But even that sometimes doesn't say much. Examples?

Some games that you should have played immediately as there were no bugs that would completely ruin your game, only a bad lack could trigger something:
Dishonored (both games, Arkane&Bethesda)
Skyrim's expansion named Dragonborn (Bethesda)
AC: Origins (Ubisoft)
TW3 (CDpr)
All sorts of proper console ports (Trails of Cold Steel games for example)

Some games that were released with critical bugs, note developer is the same as above:
Prey (Arkane&Bethesda, autosaves deleted items from inventory on release)
Skyrim vanilla (Bethesda, and even afrer decades it's still a broken mess)
AC: Unity (Ubisoft, it was more broken than Skyrim and still is)
TW1 (CDpr, then again it used the horrible NWN's Aurora engine)
All sorts of horrible console ports (no k+m or not remappable, 30 FPS, no blur disable)

Anyway… There is no guarantee a mess will be playable after a year. IMO instead of waiting just check steam forums. Sure, there are always whiners who have problems on nonstandard setups (SLI), but if a game is generally in pisspoor state, you'll notice pages and pages of bugs being reported.
I'm interested in how they will be able to unFK this one with patches.
IMO nohow.
They wanted to make a dungen crawler with tons of puzzles and they did it. Why did they use Unity for that, dunno, maybe it was the best possible option out there. Unity however doesn't care about PC and still uses some outdated code from Cyrix era.

The game isn't a visual beauty nor can be. Does it matter in the end?
 
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It was a personal opinion. Maybe other people can enjoy staff like that.

It's not a good think that I can't enjoy a game when it's mediocre but I can't help it.

And my time for gaming is very limited, so I chose to play only if something is Really Good.
And with this and many games like this, it's not the case.

Of course, people less choosy or more abiding may feel different

Nothing wrong with having an opinion, positive or negative.

However, just posting “this game is garbage” isn’t really helpful to anyone. Unless you’re just venting to make yourself feel better.

As someone who hasn’t played the game yet I’d find reasons as to why it’s “garbage” or “great” helpful.
 
Nothing wrong with having an opinion, positive or negative.

However, just posting “this game is garbage” isn’t really helpful to anyone. Unless you’re just venting to make yourself feel better.

As someone who hasn’t played the game yet I’d find reasons as to why it’s “garbage” or “great” helpful.

Alright. My personal pros:
-Fun puzzles and many of them
-Enjoyable combat
-Decent skill selection where two characters of the some class can still play different
-Good story
-No scaling
-Nice loot system
-I like the tension the save system brings
-Nice athmosphere
My cons:
- Combat gets too easy halfway through the game
-The banter between companions is so-so
- 4 skills are still too few, I would have preferred at least 6-7 and longer cooldowns.
- No real choices in dialogues, or other C&C

- I haven't had performance issues nor seen many bugs, but it's obvious it's far from optimized considering how many people who've had a different experience.
 
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Alright. My personal pros:
-Fun puzzles and many of them
-Enjoyable combat
-Decent skill selection where two characters of the some class can still play different
-Good story
-No scaling
-Nice loot system
-I like the tension the save system brings
-Nice athmosphere
My cons:
- Combat gets too easy halfway through the game
-The banter between companions is so-so
- 4 skills are still too few, I would have preferred at least 6-7 and longer cooldowns.
- No real choices in dialogues, or other C&C

- I haven't had performance issues nor seen many bugs, but it's obvious it's far from optimized considering how many people who've had a different experience.

I'd agree, except I like the banter between party members. You often get some history and it's longer than banter in Kingmaker which is only 2 sentences long usually. And I disagree that 4 skills is too few, I think it makes for more careful selection that further adds to how you want to play, but that's just me. Agreed on the rest, though. Well said.
 
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Alright. My personal pros:
-Fun puzzles and many of them
-Enjoyable combat
-Decent skill selection where two characters of the some class can still play different
-Good story
-No scaling
-Nice loot system
-I like the tension the save system brings
-Nice athmosphere
My cons:
- Combat gets too easy halfway through the game
-The banter between companions is so-so
- 4 skills are still too few, I would have preferred at least 6-7 and longer cooldowns.
- No real choices in dialogues, or other C&C.

You've listed twice as many pros as cons yet you consider the game "really Awful clearly for Garbage Bin"? How does that add up?
 
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You've listed twice as many pros as cons yet you consider the game "really Awful clearly for Garbage Bin"? How does that add up?
@sakichop;, perhaps you should read the earlier posts (and who wrote what) a little more carefully… ;)

Hint: I called it closer to great, and you said you wanted reasons for why it was garbage or great...
 
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Btw there is a game stopping bug in isle of whatever. I posted this in general whatever thread but thought I would mention it here for those are still playing. Hum. Also patch 2 on gog is ANOTHER 26GB which is of course rather annoying.
 
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I failed the latest patch when having 27.5GB left on my ssd and I have galaxy set to download the files themselves to another hdd.
Might just uninstall the game at this point and come back after I am done with DOS2 and Kingmaker which would hopefully free up enough space.
 
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