The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut is now live!

[phimseto]

The Bard’s Tale IV: Director’s Cut is now available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux!

The Director’s Cut is loaded with new features, fixes, and content, making it the truly definitive edition of The Bard’s Tale IV. Along with an Unreal Engine update that has the game looking, playing, and sounding better than ever, The Bard’s Tale IV: Director’s Cut directly addresses feedback received from the game’s initial launch with thousands of fixes and tweaks included. Those who already own the PC game will receive the Director’s Cut content and improvements as a free update.

New features of The Bard’s Tale IV: Director’s Cut include:

The Royal Necropolis of Haernhold: Explore our most dangerous and challenging dungeon yet! Travel to the Royal Necropolis of Haernhold to help repair the terrible destruction that Tarjan wrought on one of Kinestia’s most holy sites. Explore the tombs of King Gaerwyn’s most trusted advisors. Solve new mind-bending puzzles and claim the most powerful weapons ever created as your own. New devilish boss encounters await you within King Gaerwyn’s royal tomb, as do a few friendly faces. Learn the fate of the dwarves and discover the true purpose of an old friend with a singular mantra and an uncanny ability to turn up literally everywhere.

A new 2-3 hour dungeon with numerous new boss fights, 4 tricky new puzzles, and tons of loot and gear to find. This is our game’s most challenging dungeon yet and you will have to be well-prepared to face the dangers within.

New Boss Enemies: Fight against the most difficult bosses ever seen in a Bard’s Tale game, built from the ground up to force you to change your strategies. Each of Gaerwyn’s advisors guards a precious treasure. Free them from Tarjan’s madness and claim the martial legacy of the dwarves as your own. But be wary, adventurer! There is something lurking in the darkness, waiting in the shadows to strike without warning…

Six new boss monsters to fight: Gaerwyn and four of his royal advisors guard the royal necropolis. Each boss has unique mechanics and abilities and will require new strategies and tactics. Additionally, there is a new creature who waits in ambush for you: when you least expect it, that is when the Redcap will appear and tear you apart with claws and poison. May the gods have mercy on you if you make it angry...

Dwarven Weapons:The greatest dwarven smiths have created the most powerful weapons at a terrible price. Though many are were interred alongside Gaerwyn and his advisors, others still lay in the deepest, darkest parts of Kinestia and Caith. Like elven weapons, dwarven weapons come with similar boons, but still retain the passive benefits of their weapon class. Unlike elven weapons, dwarven armaments do not require solving riddles to unlock their true potential. Anyone who is strong enough to rip that sword from your cold dead hands is probably more deserving to wield it than you…

Dwarven weapons are the ultimate gear for your adventuring party. They come equipped with their standard weapon passive and a Tier 2 boon, in addition to best-in-class stat blocks for their particular weapon class.

Several dwarven weapons can be found around Haernhold but keep an eye out for dwarven chests scattered throughout the most dangerous dungeons of Caith as well.

Master Crafted Gear: The blacksmiths of Caith have stepped up their game over the last year and have developed a full suite of arms and armor that stand head and shoulder above even the best Adamast armor or Mothren craftsmanship. If you manage to find master crafted gear in a store, it will not come cheaply, but it’s just about the best gear money can buy!

Inventory filtering: No more endless scrolling through inventory pages while trying to decide what to wear. Our new inventory filters help ensure that you can find everything you need with the push of a button. No more looking for caltrops or potions that you left at the bottom of your bags somewhere!

Filter buttons have been added to the bottom of the inventory screen, use them to find weapons, armor, trinket and crafting ingredients with ease!

Massive Balance pass: We haven’t just added weapons and armor, we have rebalanced every encounter for a smoother challenge curve with an eye for stepping up the challenge of the game towards the end. We looked at every system and tuned all of our numbers and encounters to better utilize the tactical depth of our systems.

Full economy pass: We looked at all of our items and balanced their cost, availability, and drop rate to make buying and selling more meaningful.

Player skills: We tweaked many skills to allow for more interesting tactical combinations and weeded out effects that were a shortcut to easy victories.

Enemy stats: We have rebalanced the game for a smoother early game difficulty curve and raised the challenge of our late game encounters.

Enemy party composition: We tweaked every enemy party in the game to ensure they provide a good challenge and interesting tactical decisions.

Skippable Puzzles: Struggler’s Lament is a brand-new Song of Exploration that allows players to bypass many of the plot critical doors in the game without the need to solve puzzles and riddles. However, this is still a Bard’s Tale game and Caith’s greatest secrets and treasures will still require some clever puzzle-solving skills.

After enabling Struggler’s Lament in the gameplay options menu, players may use this Song in front of doors, with a glowing green rune, to bypass their associated puzzles and keep the combat goodness rolling!

Additional character portraits: Due to an ale stain in an arcane by-law of the Adventurers Guild charter, male elves and female dwarves could temporarily not apply to be members of the Skara Brae chapter of the Adventurer’s Guild. It was a stupid rule, but the Review Board are sticklers for rules. Thankfully, that document went up in flames when the guild burned down, and the Adventurers Guild now welcomes everyone.

We have introduced several new character portraits for male elves and female dwarves! Find them in character creation or when you make a new mercenary.

A new intro cinematic: We overhauled the beginning of the game with an all new in-game cinematic!

Reworked main menu: We put all the numerous gameplay options for every type of player front and center when creating a new game. Pick and choose to customize your experience to your liking. We offer every modern convenience of the RPG genre if you want to save everywhere and move at angles that aren’t cardinal directions. But if you find yourself with a hankering for the good old days, the ability to strip it down to grid-based movement and graph paper maps is right at your fingertips. If you change your mind you can adjust these setting at any time in the options menu!

Expanded work on improving localization: Improved translations across all languages!

Updated game engine: We leveraged the latest and greatest features of Unreal Engine 4 to provide new features and dramatically improved performance.

Improved level art: We swept through every level and overhauled the lighting and texturing of our environments. Caith is now more beautiful than ever!

Improved performance and stability: We fixed thousands upon thousands of bugs in order to create a smooth and polished gameplay experience. Take a look at the thousands of issues we have fixed below. Pull up a chair, it’s going to take you a while…

Launch trailer: https://youtu.be/AXUs1xXkQOs