Bard's Tale IV - Gameplay Video

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Spaceman
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The latest update for The Bard's Tale IV shows us some gameplay.

Greetings Exiles,

I'm excited to finally be able to show you our vision for how exploration and combat in Bard's Tale IV will be presented and played.



Combat is the core of a dungeon crawler and our goal has always been to make sure that it is tactical, deep and pays off visually. We also knew to stay with our roots with combat being party based and phased based, yet we've come up with a unique way to present this style of gameplay. You'll note that we still support six characters for the player to command along with two empty slots for summoned creatures.

Obviously, this is still in development and there are things we're not in love with yet. Namely, the characters on the HUD are still at a first pass. We will be updating their visual look and likely not have them bouncing around as they speak. And the visuals will only continue to improve as we layer on more VFX for world atmosphere, spells and combat effects, add additional post processing, upgrade the materials for the character models and greatly dial up the ambient life in scenes. Already you can see small touches in our use of planar reflections in the puddles of water, and what you can't see is our system for dynamically corrupting the forest based on the actions of the player. We want you to feel the effects you have on the world constantly.
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More information.
 
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Shouldn't they drop the exiles and switch to say… bards?

Edit: or am I missing the point? Thought it was related to Torment 2, but guess it is a ref to the dev name?
 
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Damn, looks great i shoulda backed this, now i must pay full price at release.
 
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Looks pretty great. A small nit, but it feels weird to me that the characters turn to face you to receive your "orders", and yet an axe comes out and hits the enemy while they are still facing you after you tell them to attack...
 
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Interesting, so it looks like you have a shared pool of action points and that one character can take more actions at the expense of other characters taking less. It also appears that many abilities have cooldowns, which I guess presents you from just spamming the same ability over and over with all your points.

Not necessarily a very realistic system, but it could make for some interesting tactical decisions.
 
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I'm so glad I backed this.

Note: Chien, I will hate it if they change it to an MMO;)
 
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That's looking really nice.

I like the combat animations and I know it's still early but I assume/hope we will be able to speed things up. Once I'm into double digit hours and have seen most things several times I am going to want things 2x-5x faster than that video.
 
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Apr 25, 2009
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Wow those graphics look amazing! Some really nice effects and visuals walking around. I hadn't had this on my radar at all but I am now. Looks like it would be a lot of fun to play.
 
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Looks great. Seems they are going a very different route than I expected. Art style is nice, combat looks involved and will probably be more impacting if I had to guess (less fights overall but more involved encounters including set pieces, etc.). I dig it. :)
 
Love it! Enemy character models and environments are outstanding. The party side of combat seems a little ugly with the look of the grid and characters who turn to face you...but what do i know, maybe playing the game it will all feel right.
 
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I'm impressed by the animations and voice acting. Those goblins sound just like Member Berries. :)

I do wish the battles were of a larger scale though. It looks like we'll only be facing about a half-dozen enemies max at any given time. Also, the walking speed outside of combat is waaay too slow.
 
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Hmm, that really didn't look bad. May end up getting this shortly after release rather than waiting a year or two for a sale.
 
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Having played BT3 in the late 80s on a C128 I can tell you for certain I will by this at launch for full price if necessary.
 
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I do wish the battles were of a larger scale though. It looks like we'll only be facing about a half-dozen enemies max at any given time.


That's true, how can we fight 4x 99 Berserkers!! :)
 
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Apr 25, 2009
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Totally glad I backed this and really looking forward to replaying the earlier 'Tales before diving into this one. Take your time and get it right, I'd rather wait for perfection myself.
 
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The combat certainly is colorful, with personalized elements almost like those in D:OS. It's good to see there's some tactical positioning available as well, although you can only do so much with a 3-4 character party.
 
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