Not finishing this game, too many problems...[SPOILERS]

[kkitts]

I'm glad I only bought the standard version of this. Wasteland 2 was far better of a game than this. I've played and beaten Bard's Tales 1 - 3, so I know exactly what I expect from a Bard's Tale game.

This wasn't it.

This game reminded me more of newly-released Neverwinter Nights, being so buggy. That alone makes me want to stop playing - and I waited 3 patches before starting this game. It names all the BT historical references, but it doesn't feel even close to the originals.

1) You can't level your characters because there's no random encounters. More than half of my skill trees remained unused because there's nothing else left to kill. The world is static and empty as a result.

2) Once you've see the island merchants, there's nothing left to buy. Period. I had 20,000 gold left over, and nothing to buy, because there weren't any other merchants, and the existing merchants didn't refresh their inventories. Which brings me to...

3) Only 3 major lands to explore? Really? You see elves, but you can't go there? Even though you saved them? You can't BUY anything from them? When you look at the in-game world map, there's so much room, and fully half of the standing stones are on the one island. The vast majority of the continent cannot be explored, and thus 2/3 of the continental map is totally useless. I was really ready to go to the other parts of the continent and level my characters up to the maximum, but there was nowhere left to go.

4) Bugs, bugs, bugs. I got trapped on the sides of stairs, a merchant refused to activate after the bear god quest (forcing me to burn a skill point to get the dragon bile bomb recipe), enemies disappeared during combats, enemies became unselectable during combat even when I could kill them outright (only for them to hit me again on their turn, then inexplicably die), quest destination markers not appearing properly, magic mouth text disappearing halfway through the audible speech, the Review Board becoming useless 5% into the game, and on and on and on. It just ruins the game when things don't work right.

5) Invisible walls. There aren't enough curse words in all the languages of humanity to express how much I cannot stand invisible walls. This is a 3D exploring game, get rid of the invisible walls except for cliffs.

6) Indestructible barriers that could be burned with a dragon's bile bomb, but you don't get the option (especially at the end in Skara Brae). This is a variant of the invisible wall theory, and it needs to die immediately.

7) Some of the puzzles were too complicated (particularly the energy-line puzzles). Some of the complicated ones I got by pure luck, but one in particular had too many pieces and no description of how the pieces work. I had to go online and find a solution, and even then, there were no good pictures or descriptions - I had to copy as much of the pic as I could make out, and brute force the rest.

8) Character builds have no way to reset their skills. In the face of not having random encounters to level up your characters and also not being able to reset your skills, you face the possibility of having an untenable build for the final fight against Yanis (as I found out the hard way).

9) You get forced to enter the final game sequence without any warning about sidequests getting locked out, and since you have limited save game slots, you can't go back if you're saving regularly. Once you defeat Tarjan, you're stuck in the endgame, whether you like it or not, and it doesn't warn you. When you return, Old Skara Brae has blockades that will prevent you from going to Roscoe's, Harkyn's Castle, Mangar's Tower, all the other non-AG-camp merchants, etc.

10) At the end, the fight with Yanis was just unbalanced. You have two fights, back to back, and the first one will probably knock out one of your characters. You do NOT get to heal up between fights, and I didn't bring anyone with resurrection ability because I got forced into the endgame before I was ready. The second fight is Yanis herself, and the creatures she summons. If you don't kill them immediately (60 HP to start), they kill half of your party and gain over 300+ HP in doing so. Yanis has almost 800 HP, far beyond any other creature in the game. Considering your regular attacks only do 30 - 40 points of damage, and you MUST focus on the summoned creatures or die, this battle is unbalanced way too far in Yanis' favor. I tried this sequence twice, and thanks to the devs making it impossible to go back, I've given up on it and the ending.

11) FFS, Flesh Restore (FLRE, anyone?) was a Conjurer level 4 spell in the old days, if I remember correctly. ALL CONJURERS HAD IT. Why healing was stripped from the mage classes and made exclusively a paladin skill makes no sense in any sane world. And I won't even talk about the Heal All skill.

12) When I saw "Bard's Tale", the first thing I thought about was getting out graph paper again. I created maps of every dungeon in the first three games, and believe it or not, that was what I was hoping for. I was hoping for the old BT experience in a new engine. I was and still am extremely disappointed.

Overall, I got my money's worth out of the game, but it was a mediocre experience at best. It's not Bard's Tale, it's Neverwinter Nights with BT painted over it. Worse, it feels like playing D+D version 4 after a decade of playing the much better D+D version 3.5. It feels dumbed down to the point of plodding along. It disgusted me so bad that now I feel like replaying the original trilogy, just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

[matogl0396]

Originally posted by kkitts:

I'm glad I only bought the standard version of this. Wasteland 2 was far better of a game than this. I've played and beaten Bard's Tales 1 - 3, so I know exactly what I expect from a Bard's Tale game.

This wasn't it.

This game reminded me more of newly-released Neverwinter Nights, being so buggy. That alone makes me want to stop playing - and I waited 3 patches before starting this game. It names all the BT historical references, but it doesn't feel even close to the originals.

<snip>

[Spoilers ahead!]

You're right there are no random encounters, but there were more than enough fights to level up all my characters and in most cases complete their skill trees to my satisfaction (multiple capstones each). To be fair, I completed the majority of all sidequests in the game to get to that point.

While I agree with the truth of some of the other things you said (like not enough gold sinks by end-game, limited overland zones, and inexplicable puzzles requiring out-of-game research), they didn't bother me as much as they did you. I happen to have just completed the Bard's Tale 1 remaster as well, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, let's not pretend it was any better in those regards...

I did have some of the same problems with bugs, though. A few very inopportune crashes. One time after combat I got stuck on the wrong side of terrain boundaries (stuck in a garden and couldn't get back out onto the main path!). Although it wasn't game-breaking, probably the most annoying/persistent issue was slow down in combat where moves would be executed on a large delay.

Finally, I also agree 100% that there should be some kind of warning before you enter the final sequence of the game (when Skara Brae Below gets blocked off, and then you get stuck moving forward from Skara Brae in flames through to the final boss). That said, I didn't find Yadis to be all that difficult. Specifically, my Archmage was able to deal 400+ damage in a single turn with enough MP (2x Spectre Touch + 1x Mangar's Mallets). For strategy specifics, I did make a separate post which you can read here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/566090/discussions/0/1750106661709990475/

Seems a shame for you to quit on the final fight. If you really are stuck with a bad build and unable to return/grind, maybe you could just drop down to easy difficulty to wrap things up?

[kkitts]

Originally posted by matogl0396:

Originally posted by kkitts:

I'm glad I only bought the standard version of this. Wasteland 2 was far better of a game than this. I've played and beaten Bard's Tales 1 - 3, so I know exactly what I expect from a Bard's Tale game.

This wasn't it.

This game reminded me more of newly-released Neverwinter Nights, being so buggy. That alone makes me want to stop playing - and I waited 3 patches before starting this game. It names all the BT historical references, but it doesn't feel even close to the originals.

<snip>

[Spoilers ahead!]

You're right there are no random encounters, but there were more than enough fights to level up all my characters and in most cases complete their skill trees to my satisfaction (multiple capstones each). To be fair, I completed the majority of all sidequests in the game to get to that point.

While I agree with the truth of some of the other things you said (like not enough gold sinks by end-game, limited overland zones, and inexplicable puzzles requiring out-of-game research), they didn't bother me as much as they did you. I happen to have just completed the Bard's Tale 1 remaster as well, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, let's not pretend it was any better in those regards...

I did have some of the same problems with bugs, though. A few very inopportune crashes. One time after combat I got stuck on the wrong side of terrain boundaries (stuck in a garden and couldn't get back out onto the main path!). Although it wasn't game-breaking, probably the most annoying/persistent issue was slow down in combat where moves would be executed on a large delay.

Finally, I also agree 100% that there should be some kind of warning before you enter the final sequence of the game (when Skara Brae Below gets blocked off, and then you get stuck moving forward from Skara Brae in flames through to the final boss). That said, I didn't find Yadis to be all that difficult. Specifically, my Archmage was able to deal 400+ damage in a single turn with enough MP (2x Spectre Touch + 1x Mangar's Mallets). For strategy specifics, I did make a separate post which you can read here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/566090/discussions/0/1750106661709990475/

Seems a shame for you to quit on the final fight. If you really are stuck with a bad build and unable to return/grind, maybe you could just drop down to easy difficulty to wrap things up?

No thanks. I played the originals back on my Commodore 64, and they were much more fun. This game reminded me of when I had put 60 hours into Neverwinter Nights, only to find a game-breaking bug, and the patch forced me to start over. I never did. You don't ship crap like that, and I won't go through all this again just because things weren't programmed in a rational manner. There have been plenty of games that do things properly by now to learn from. Play balancing should happen long before a game ships, period.

And on leveling up your skill tree to max - unless there's fully half a game I missed, there's no way to do that. I went through every side quest except for whatever I might have missed in Mangar's tower beyond the first quest and the Spectre Snare, and Harkyn's Castle. That's all, I did *everything* else, and there were at least 15 skill points missing in all of my character's trees (more like 25 - 30 in most cases, over all the categories). So I don't see how you could have maxed them out. Not that it matters now, though.

In any event, I'm done with this game. I know MS has bought InXile out, so I'll be downloading a demo long before I pay for any sequel to this game (and then only months after release so I can read reviews from players well into the game). I worry now about how Wasteland 3 will turn out, because Wasteland 2 was awesome, and this was a sorry mess. This was a huge disappointment.

[Lord Azlan]

Agreed it's not Bards Tale but there is a definite feel of Bards Tale to it.

I would go as far as saying BT IV is something new and has many things going for it but it's also a paradox in that many aspects of the game feel amateurish and just sloppy.

The inventory system and related merchants has been diabolical from the very beginning and I can't understand why something wasn't fixed. A reset of merchants seems easy to do and would even make sense in the world since I assume your merry band is not the only people doing business with merchants.

I also had a problem with the lack of random encounters to build up your characters but it seems if implemented - combat would become easier than it already is. I reached level 20 on some characters and not quite finished the game. I am beginning to appreciate the planning required to have a defined role for each member of your party so there is no need to take on every skills available. It's a shame the Defence skill tree for your team are mostly limited to wearing different types of armour. I would like to have seen more innovation here. The Inventory and Skill screens are very poor. Very slow and unresponsive.

Agreed about the invisible walls but come to accept that as part of the genre. The game is not Skyrim in that sense. However, when my party can't move about 1 mm to drop into another path and has to divert around for another hour or so makes me think the maps are much smaller than expected. Some areas are cleverly exploited to maximise or even limit your party's movement. I hate that stuff.

Agreed about the puzzles. I like that some of the puzzle areas are not required to finish the game but there are clear puzzle obstacles that would tear my hair out in their obtuseness. I would even say that without many of the puzzle areas the game would be much shorter. Without online help and guides I think I would have been very, very frustrated with this game.

I like that exploring might reward you with a giant rat god. I hate that so many things are unexplained. Game mechanics things that should be explained.

Saying all this - looking forward to BT V if they include more Bards Tale and less Legends of Grimrock.

[matogl0396]

Originally posted by kkitts:

No thanks. I played the originals back on my Commodore 64, and they were much more fun. This game reminded me of when I had put 60 hours into Neverwinter Nights, only to find a game-breaking bug, and the patch forced me to start over. I never did. You don't ship crap like that, and I won't go through all this again just because things weren't programmed in a rational manner. There have been plenty of games that do things properly by now to learn from. Play balancing should happen long before a game ships, period.

And on leveling up your skill tree to max - unless there's fully half a game I missed, there's no way to do that. I went through every side quest except for whatever I might have missed in Mangar's tower beyond the first quest and the Spectre Snare, and Harkyn's Castle. That's all, I did *everything* else, and there were at least 15 skill points missing in all of my character's trees (more like 25 - 30 in most cases, over all the categories). So I don't see how you could have maxed them out. Not that it matters now, though.

In any event, I'm done with this game. I know MS has bought InXile out, so I'll be downloading a demo long before I pay for any sequel to this game (and then only months after release so I can read reviews from players well into the game). I worry now about how Wasteland 3 will turn out, because Wasteland 2 was awesome, and this was a sorry mess. This was a huge disappointment.

I mean, what level did your party members end up being by the end of the game? I've seen multiple posts floating around this forum that indicate a max level of 25 ~ 30. For me, my characters were lvl 25 ~ 26, and I think they could have gotten up around 28 if I had completed the couple of outstanding quests/dungeons I know I missed (Harkyn's Castle, Dwarven Ruins, maybe a few others?).

To be clear, I didn't say I maxed out ALL skills from ALL trees, I just said I "maxed out my characters *to my satisfaction*", which ended up being 3 ~ 4 capstones per character. That felt right to me as they each had a unique build and distinct party role. I wouldn't want or expect every character to max out every single ability, as this wouldn't be very interesting character development (no impact to your choices). So just clearing that up in case we weren't quite on the same page re: skill trees. Again, check my post for some of my character details: https://steamcommunity.com/app/566090/discussions/0/1750106661709990475/

Also, I do have a bit of a pet peeve with people that play games for a long time but then still give them bad reviews. I don't get it, if you hated the game so much then why did you play for, what, at least 50+ hours, all the way until the final boss? Honestly, it seems to me that you liked the game just fine, then got super angry when you couldn't beat it, and are now kind of rage quitting on the forums. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just honestly don't think it's fair to condemn the game when you obviously got a ton of time/value out of it. $35 / 50 hrs played (minimum I bet) is less than $1/hr of entertainment. I just think you're being too harsh...

Cheers.

[kkitts]

Originally posted by matogl0396:

Originally posted by kkitts:

No thanks. I played the originals back on my Commodore 64, and they were much more fun. This game reminded me of when I had put 60 hours into Neverwinter Nights, only to find a game-breaking bug, and the patch forced me to start over. I never did. You don't ship crap like that, and I won't go through all this again just because things weren't programmed in a rational manner. There have been plenty of games that do things properly by now to learn from. Play balancing should happen long before a game ships, period.

And on leveling up your skill tree to max - unless there's fully half a game I missed, there's no way to do that. I went through every side quest except for whatever I might have missed in Mangar's tower beyond the first quest and the Spectre Snare, and Harkyn's Castle. That's all, I did *everything* else, and there were at least 15 skill points missing in all of my character's trees (more like 25 - 30 in most cases, over all the categories). So I don't see how you could have maxed them out. Not that it matters now, though.

In any event, I'm done with this game. I know MS has bought InXile out, so I'll be downloading a demo long before I pay for any sequel to this game (and then only months after release so I can read reviews from players well into the game). I worry now about how Wasteland 3 will turn out, because Wasteland 2 was awesome, and this was a sorry mess. This was a huge disappointment.

I mean, what level did your party members end up being by the end of the game? I've seen multiple posts floating around this forum that indicate a max level of 25 ~ 30. For me, my characters were lvl 25 ~ 26, and I think they could have gotten up around 28 if I had completed the couple of outstanding quests/dungeons I know I missed (Harkyn's Castle, Dwarven Ruins, maybe a few others?).

To be clear, I didn't say I maxed out ALL skills from ALL trees, I just said I "maxed out my characters *to my satisfaction*", which ended up being 3 ~ 4 capstones per character. That felt right to me as they each had a unique build and distinct party role. I wouldn't want or expect every character to max out every single ability, as this wouldn't be very interesting character development (no impact to your choices). So just clearing that up in case we weren't quite on the same page re: skill trees. Again, check my post for some of my character details: https://steamcommunity.com/app/566090/discussions/0/1750106661709990475/

Also, I do have a bit of a pet peeve with people that play games for a long time but then still give them bad reviews. I don't get it, if you hated the game so much then why did you play for, what, at least 50+ hours, all the way until the final boss? Honestly, it seems to me that you liked the game just fine, then got super angry when you couldn't beat it, and are now kind of rage quitting on the forums. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just honestly don't think it's fair to condemn the game when you obviously got a ton of time/value out of it. $35 / 50 hrs played (minimum I bet) is less than $1/hr of entertainment. I just think you're being too harsh...

Cheers.

I'm being honest (not harsh) because this series deserved better than it got. My characters were all level 27 and one 26, three of them with cleric skills, and it still wasn't enough. Not even close. I would have had cleric skills on all of them if I had found three more of those relics, as healing was not put into this game, despite being in all three games of the original trilogy (in the 4th level Conjurer and 7th level Magician spells, no less). I didn't even have most of the capstone skills - only my Sage came close, and was still missing Master Sorcerer and Archmage. The fighters lagged sorely behind on capstones, because I learned early on that maximizing damage output was the only way to win this game. Lackluster items and overpowered enemy parties forced me to go more for strength skills than constitution skills through most of the game (and I didn't have all the constitution trees finished before I got railroaded into the endgame). I was constantly looking, and not finding, ways to level up my party. When I got railroaded into the endgame, and all of Skara Brae was walled off, I double-checked the forums to see if it was a joke...and it wasn't. At that point, it was actually a relief, because I was not happy with what had went before. I figured I'd give it a shot (actually, two), and if that didn't work, I was done. As you could tell from my original post, I'd just about had it with the game, and was trying to be optimistic, when the endgame was forced on me. Having played Final Fantasy Tactics in years past, I remember that there was a level-up dungeon near the end of the game, in case you wanted to max out every class and get all of them. I was hoping beyond hope that Harkyn's Castle would be that dungeon, and there would be a ton of encounters so that I could level up my party to a useful level. I was extremely disappointed by not even getting a warning that I would be passing up my chance. I remember the days of 4 groups of 99 Berserkers each in Harkyn's Castle and Mangar's Mind Blading them all to death, and I was hoping that I'd get the chance to do something similar in the new system. No such luck, and I should have known better.

And I'm not rage-quitting, either. I was angry throughout most of the game, due to precisely the issues I listed, most of which occured throughout the game. I was hoping for Bard's Tale, not Neverwinter Nights or D+D v4.0. I hoped it would get better, and it progressively got worse and more buggy as I went along. I mean, silly things like the lack of ability to save anywhere is just completely annoying in this day and age (and I didn't even list that in my original post, because I was so disgusted with the game by that point). The difficulty in clicking on crystals doing the constellations was beyond annoying (the pointer would click on crystals you didn't point at). It isn't one big thing, it's a ton of little bad things that kept piling up and ruining the game. The endgame funnel was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm a huge fan of the Bard's Tale series, and the original engine itself (Wasteland, Dragon Wars, Deathlord, etc). I was hoping for a re-vamp of the old engine, but with similar gameplay. I got this muck instead. I remember rolling up Hobbits, Elves, Gnomes, etc, and in this game, you can't even go to any of the other realms to see the other races. I only got six of the 8 candles for the one trap-laden tower, so I never found out if there was a way to all the other realms from BT3 - I was thinking at the time that I'd be able to visit ALL of them and the game would be absolutely huge, and again, I was disappointed. I never managed to get the Strifespear, or the Destiny Wand (thanks, endgame funnel), or any other major artifact from the originals except the Spectre Snare, which was completely underpowered in comparison to the original.

To a newbie, BT4 might be a good game for the money. But to a Bard's Tale fan, who has seen all that went before, this is a poor game in comparison to the originals. It's nowhere near the originals, despite the care that went into name-dropping everything from the original games. The harshness in my tone comes from the fact that InXile did such a wonderful job with Wasteland 2 (please don't mess up Wasteland 3), and yet shipped this mess, which was so far off the mark that it doesn't look or play anything like the originals. They honored Wasteland, but they defiled Bard's Tale, in my opinion. So, I'm done with this game, and I'll be checking out a demo before I put out a penny for BT5, if they decide to make it at all. I would rather have had a new game in the old engine in 1920x1080 resolution than this buggy mess.

[Failmore]

this game is actually super easy, the hardest part is the puzzles but none you need to look up. I beat it with maybe 1 crash and never getting stuck and this way before the 3rd patch. Combat is super easy especially once you understand it. Clerics are probably not even necessary, i had 1 but never really used it.

[matogl0396]

Originally posted by kkitts:

I'm being honest (not harsh) because this series deserved better than it got. My characters were all level 27 and one 26, three of them with cleric skills, and it still wasn't enough. Not even close. I would have had cleric skills on all of them if I had found three more of those relics, as healing was not put into this game, despite being in all three games of the original trilogy (in the 4th level Conjurer and 7th level Magician spells, no less). I didn't even have most of the capstone skills - only my Sage came close, and was still missing Master Sorcerer and Archmage. The fighters lagged sorely behind on capstones, because I learned early on that maximizing damage output was the only way to win this game. Lackluster items and overpowered enemy parties forced me to go more for strength skills than constitution skills through most of the game (and I didn't have all the constitution trees finished before I got railroaded into the endgame).

I agree with Lord Failmore that the game was overall not too difficult. It seems like you sort of got hit by a perfect storm though. Perhaps made some choices with skill points that didn't work out so well? Since you said you didn't get many capstones, but you definitely had the levels for it, I'm guessing maybe you invested in dead-end branches (like attribute boosts)? We all know there is no respec, but you could have rolled brand new toons, except you got stuck in the end-game sequence. So everything possible just went all wrong, and that's unfortunate.

Like I said before, I do entirely agree with you there should have been fair warning before that sequence begins. I remember playing JRPGs back in the day that implemented this kind of mechanic.

Originally posted by kkitts:

I mean, silly things like the lack of ability to save anywhere is just completely annoying in this day and age (and I didn't even list that in my original post, because I was so disgusted with the game by that point).

To each their own, but this REALLY did not bother me. Seems like it has been made into waaayyyyy too big of a deal. In fact, I think it was one of the things that gave the game a bit of old-school charm. Again, I've played so many games over the years with save point systems. There were plenty of them placed throughout BT4. I tried to be mindful/careful with them and it didn't lead to very much if any loss of progress.

Originally posted by kkitts:

I never managed to get the Strifespear, or the Destiny Wand (thanks, endgame funnel), or any other major artifact from the originals except the Spectre Snare, which was completely underpowered in comparison to the original.

Just wanted to add that one of my favorite things about the game was the huge amount of unique quested equipment, so I definitely understand that not completing a lot of those would lead to less enjoyment of the game overall.

[kkitts]

The problem with save points is that there are a limited number of them. I'm from the old school - save often, or you will eventually lose your progress. With limited saves, you end up overwriting your progress eventually, and are unable to go back as far as you need to, in order to avoid crappy things like the endgame funnel. The save-anywhere system that most PC games have allows you to save in individual save files as much as you like (I had over 800 save games in my Fallout 4 folder by the time I finished my first playthrough). Checkpoint and limited-save systems are just a cheap programming tactic that ends up screwing the player (and it got me this time). I can understand if you want to multi-platform a game, but FFS, make the PC version to current PC standards and have a fully-fledged PC version.