Comments on: Thoughts: The Bard’s Tale IV

By: E Kramer

E Kramer — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 06:13:05 +0000

Wow. Great review. I bought the game before reading yours and more on a,i like dungeon crawlers and my brother played the original( he gamed i chased girls)so lets get nostalgic. It is unfortunately as you say,begins terrible gets bit better but sags after getting halfway. Couldn’t finish it myself. Am with other reader,mass effect andromeda was petfect but started the remastered 1-3 again in wait of FF16.

By: ilitarist

ilitarist — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 09:18:14 +0000

I took me 3 tries to complete M&MXL without getting into game-breaking bug that stopped my progress. Even then I didn’t get to expansion. But I really, really liked the game and gameplay and it’s one of those times when I feel rare strong dissonance between what I think about the game and what most those who played it think (the bigger dissonance only happened with Mass Effect Andromeda which is the best Mass Effect game for all I care). Yes, technical quality is not what you’d expect from a big publisher, and your party is canonically clairvoyant because there’s no way they couldn’t have survived all those bullshit ambush encounters otherwise – I mean really, that elemental forge story dungeon has end-game enemies you can just stroll into.

Anyway I don’t like InExile at all. I’ve played half an hour of Wasteland 2 and hated it – even enhanced edition had extremely cheap feel about it and the humor was terrible (Red Boots DLC in main menu and toaster repair skill/favourite cigarettes in character menu did not amuse me) plus the game had happily allowed me to create a professional sniper who didn’t have enough AP to shoot sniper rifle. Numenera didn’t feel as cheap but it was too verbose for its own good and overall style didn’t feel right, it got better by the time I’ve arrived in Bloom but there it forgot about the whole gameplay thing and I’ve easily cracked every problem without spending mana.

This review is the most favorable thing I’ve seen concerning BT4. And I still don’t feel it’s worth the try, especially with your description of challengeless endgame.

I am strangely more excited about sincere ridiculousness and number-inflation of Labyrinth of Refrain or something like that. I trust those Japanese games to have an end-game challenge.

By: Cauldar

Cauldar — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 21:48:19 +0000

I loved the original Bard’s Tale on my old Apple IIc. In the sea of D&D cliches it was nice to have a game that used song in combat. Of course, I use the term music liberally as it was an Apple IIc after all. I share your frustration with Kickstarter-backed products. There’s a reason I don’t read fan fiction. I’ve watched a few people as they played this game I am regretfully going to take a hard pass. I already have plenty of games in my life that ended mid-game when they became a grind.