The game was funded via crowdfunding several years ago, with the promise to create a real sequel to the Original Bards Tale 1 to 3, staying as close to the original as possible while implementing modern technology, and the advantages it offers.

The Backers of the game are now claiming that they went to far off that path, and Inxile is basically completely ignoring all their comments, not even acknowledging that there is a problem, and only reacting to those people who praise their game.

Some things that are not in the game that were trademarks of the original:

1. A multitude of races and classes. The new game lacks a lot of the races and classes of the old trilogy.

2. There are no random encounters. Anyone that remembers the classic Bards Tale, remembers that one vital part was to grind through Dungeons for XP, gold and Loot. That part is gone, completely.

3. The Leveling system is now completely meaningless. All you get when you level is 1 Skill point that you can use for a skill that is basically 'You can now wear X'. You also dont get any HP on levelups. Everyone that knows the originals will see how this is a problem.

4. The combat system. While it is clear that you can not use the classic text based combat system in a modern game, they went a completely different route. Combat is now strategic on a 4x4 tile, and every combat takes several minutes, compared to the seconds it took to resolve combat in the original.

5. Skills and crafting. Was never a part of Bards Tale, and even though it could have been a valuable and interesting addition, the way they implemented it was very poor. For example: You can only have three skills usable at any given time, and it is placed in an mmo style taskbar.

6. Spells. One trademark of Bards Tale was its huge amount of spells. Currently they maybe implemented a Fifth of that, and compared to the spells of the original trilogy, they are utterly boring.

7. You can not create your Group of adventurerers from Scratch. Instead you start with being given a premade character and have to progress through several hours of gameplay before you are given the option to create your own band of adventurers. Replay Value: Zero.

8. They retconned the lore. Several events of the classic Bards Tale are completely ignored or changed in hindsight. Skara Brae is now a coastal city all of a sudden. NPC that were officially dead are now back all of a sudden (Lagoth Zanta, Roscoe, to name just too), and the Big ass Villain of part 3, Tarjan, a god that killed all other gods and nearly destroyed all of creation, now simply is a powerhungry but misunderstood mage.

9. Skara Brae is now in Scotland, or something resembling scotland?

10. And this is one of the major gripes people have:
Anyone remember the 2004 reimplementation of Bards Tale? Yes, that atrocity of a game that basically had a Bard run through Dungeons in Diablo Style, using immature potty humour? That very same kind of humour is now part of Bards Tale, and the Backers hate it.While Bards Tale never was a super serious game, it still had at times a very dark background, and this new game is littered with immature jokes and stuff like that all over the place.

11. Gridbased movement, and mapping:
The game was promised to be a tilebased gridbased turnbased dungeoncrawler. While it does have an option to turn gridbased movement on, it is currently not working and from what can be seen was clearly just slapped on the freeform movement. Everyone that played the original Bards Tale knows that one major part of dungeon crawling was to create your own map. This, with the currently implemented form of movement, is quite literally impossible.