First Impressions

[ArchV]

Brief Background
- I've played the original Bard's Tale 1 - 3 in the 80s on the Apple //c
- I've done game development (programming) for 16 yrs professionally.
- I bought the standard edition on Steam.

Hardware
- Played on my HP Omen 15 laptop, a Geforce 1060. I get 40-60 FPS on High. Its fine, we're not playing a freakin FPS here.
- I will play on my desktop later, with a Gefroce 1080 and a 34" ultrawide in 3440x1440. I'll get a chance to see how broken things might be in ultrawde as posts are saying.

First Impressions: Yeap, I've only played a bit maybe 2 or 3 hours tops (didn't check before starting this post).

Impressions about the game (not the technology or other technical issues):

- The soundtrack is freakin amazing. I might buy my wife a higher tier version just to the soundrack.
- Sound design and voiceovers seem very well done. There's plenty of ambience in the environemnts and things just sound great.

- A disappointment to me perosnally, was that I don't get to create all my characters up front like the old games. It does the whole "one character, and you'll get more later" thing. Minor detail, but I DID feel like I was missing something for awhile by only having my single created character running around, and most of the enemy groups were evaluating as "impossible". I questioned myself "Uhhh am I supposed to have more than just me right now? Did I miss something in the Adventurers guild to get more party members?" To add to my confusion one of the quests I got early on said "Gather a party to defeat blah blah blah"..... AM I MISSING SOMETHING? Turns out, no, I don't think so... but the whole party situation is a bit confusing at first since most info and trailers you see have a full party going at it.

- Loot.... Looks great, I have found bunch of things. Random things. Things that I don't know if I should sell or not. This is a minior annoyance as I don't want to sell something I'll regret later, so I just keep it all like a packrat. Just feels "messy" right now since I don't know how / where / when to use stuff I have found. Example: I have 6 or 7 Metal Scraps. That's fine, I can guess it's used in crafting... but how far off is that? Should I just sell it? Is it common enough to get more? Should I just carry it around?

- Quests and stuff seem pretty straight forward. At first I got a "linear" feeling to the start of the game, but I'm starting to realize that it's not quite linear. The initial quests kind of guide you in a linear manor, but it eventually opens up and gets a bit more freeform. I've seen lots of gates and places I can't open / access. That's cool... just means I'll going back that way some time in the future.

- Combat... I'm not sure I've had enough combat to really know. Having only a base character doing basic combat things doesn't really show the full view of combat. So that said, I don't think I'm qualified with enough play time to judge combat yet. But, so far so good, and confidient it will get better with more progression (and party members!!)

- The Story... I'm not a big story person, but this one was pretty good so far... I don't really feel "lost" on what the big picture is. There's plenty of dialog and info from the NPCs.

- The UI ... It's servicable. It's not the best, but at the same time it will get the job done. I bet in a year's time and my patches later, it could be improved. But face it, we're not here for the UI :) Just look past it and enjoy the world and the game.

- Historical Lore... There are some great references to the old games, but they definietly do not get in the way if you haven't played the originals. They just kind of *wink wink* moments if you have played the originals.

That's about it for now... I hope the packrat feeling I have right now clears itself up soon and get a clue or feeling about what to do with all this stuff I'm carrying around. But hey... that just shows there's a bunch of depth that I have yet to see :)

This game was an immediate buy for me. If you like turn-based party-based RPGs in first person, this is the game for you. Honestly how many games released in the last 10 years meet that list of qualifications? I feel like its a great little niche that has been lost to time for the most part... but Bard's Tale IV is definitely doing it right.

Thanks for listening. I'll probably do another review after many hours, but just wanted to post something for people that are on the fence.

[dbonzai]

Thank you for the excellent impressions, both good and bad, It is really helpful to the community.

[Harry]

good review, thanks