Bard's Tale IV suffers from some big flaws:

1: Technical issues. It's been shipped with uncompressed files and lots of technical bugs leading to extremely long load times between levels (ironically worse on some systems with high end GPUs), freezes, stutters, and crashes. These can probably be fixed with patches but right now they seriously impact on the experience.

2: "Marmite" design decisions. You'll either love or hate their choice to implement save point locations rather than free saves. Probably swayed by how often your game crashes or your entire inventory vanishes, prompting a reload. Their decision to make skill acquisition permanent on first click with no undo option really penalises an accidental click when you only meant to mouse over the available skill picks. Their decision to shrink the available skill set you can use in combat down to four picks, when in previous games you had dozens makes it hard to have variety in how you approach challenges without meeting the enemy, reloading (back however many minutes and fights) then tweaking mastery slots before you replay.

3: Poor graphics. Not everywhere, but in many places that count. The character avatars are execrable. They can't even be bothered to get the hair colour right on the first mandatory character you play. All elves will look female even if you pick a male one. All dwarves and trow will look male. The overhead text above NPCs wanders about drunkenly as the character models move slightly, inducing a ripple effect as multiple lines of text sway at different times. You break open barrels and boxes in the most unrealistic way imaginable. Such a pity when contrasted against the areas where the graphics are done so much better.

4: Miscellaneous bugs. Games always have these and BT4 is no exception. Some fights ending with zero xp awarded particularly rankles in a game with no random battles so every xp lost can never be reclaimed.

If you haven't bought into this already from being a backer, I'd recommend holding off a month or more and watching the patch logs. A lot of this stuff could be improved significantly if they allocate some experienced talent to fix up the amateurish mistakes. It's clearly a game that shipped before it was ready for the public. inXile have a track record of this with games like Wasteland 2 but this is the worst yet. Hopefully they can turn it around and fix them fast. It took a while to get a Director's Cut of Wasteland 2 but they got there in the end. Lets hope BT4 gets a similar level of post-launch effort. It's such a shame that a premature release has done so much damage to the credibility of the game.

EDIT:
On the positive side, if you can tweak the graphics to get rid of the shockingly blurry textures (in my case a combination of turning motion blur off, switching to the other AA, turning shadows down to high and everything else on ultra) and persevere past the relatively dull opening areas until you reach Kylearan's Tower, you really get to see what the game wants to be. The environment is much more beautiful and there's a fiendish combination of traps, puzzles, secrets and fights. This is definitely a diamond in the rough and with a while lot of polishing could yet shine brightly.

Now it's had some polishing and i've got past the early stages, I'm happy to switch my advice to "would recommend". There's a good game here, even if it's buried in a poor start.

Bard's Tale IV suffers from some big flaws: 1: Technical issues. It's been shipped with uncompressed files and lots of technical bugs leading to extremely long load times between levels (ironically worse on some systems with high end GPUs), freezes, stutters, and crashes. These can probably be fixed with patches but right now they seriously impact on the experience. 2: "Marmite" design decisions. You'll either love or hate their choice to implement save point locations rather than free saves. Probably swayed by how often your game crashes or your entire inventory vanishes, prompting a reload. Their decision to make skill acquisition permanent on first click with no undo option really penalises an accidental click when you only meant to mouse over the available skill picks. Their decision to shrink the available skill set you can use in combat down to four picks, when in previous games you had dozens makes it hard to have variety in how you approach challenges without meeting the enemy, reloading (back however many minutes and fights) then tweaking mastery slots before you replay. 3: Poor graphics. Not everywhere, but in many places that count. The character avatars are execrable. They can't even be bothered to get the hair colour right on the first mandatory character you play. All elves will look female even if you pick a male one. All dwarves and trow will look male. The overhead text above NPCs wanders about drunkenly as the character models move slightly, inducing a ripple effect as multiple lines of text sway at different times. You break open barrels and boxes in the most unrealistic way imaginable. Such a pity when contrasted against the areas where the graphics are done so much better. 4: Miscellaneous bugs. Games always have these and BT4 is no exception. Some fights ending with zero xp awarded particularly rankles in a game with no random battles so every xp lost can never be reclaimed. If you haven't bought into this already from being a backer, I'd recommend holding off a month or more and watching the patch logs. A lot of this stuff could be improved significantly if they allocate some experienced talent to fix up the amateurish mistakes. It's clearly a game that shipped before it was ready for the public. inXile have a track record of this with games like Wasteland 2 but this is the worst yet. Hopefully they can turn it around and fix them fast. It took a while to get a Director's Cut of Wasteland 2 but they got there in the end. Lets hope BT4 gets a similar level of post-launch effort. It's such a shame that a premature release has done so much damage to the credibility of the game. EDIT: On the positive side, if you can tweak the graphics to get rid of the shockingly blurry textures (in my case a combination of turning motion blur off, switching to the other AA, turning shadows down to high and everything else on ultra) and persevere past the relatively dull opening areas until you reach Kylearan's Tower, you really get to see what the game wants to be. The environment is much more beautiful and there's a fiendish combination of traps, puzzles, secrets and fights. This is definitely a diamond in the rough and with a while lot of polishing could yet shine brightly. Now it's had some polishing and i've got past the early stages, I'm happy to switch my advice to "would recommend". There's a good game here, even if it's buried in a poor start.