New review posted:The Bard's Tale

[Daniel Weissenberger]

Mike Bracken plays The Bard's Tale, and is refreshed by what he finds:

"Critics (yours truly amongst them) have been complaining for years about how all Role-Playing Games (RPGs) tend to follow a set formula when it comes to narrative. Invariably, some young kid is the reluctant savior of the world—and he and his assortment of misfit friends will band together to save said world from some evil despot. If I had a dollar for every RPG that followed this basic narrative structure, I could buy myself a few nice things.

Breaking from this convention is InXile's The Bard's Tale. Astute RPG fans will note that there were several Bard's Tale games in early years of gaming—and this title is a direct descendant of those much-loved releases (in fact, Brian Fargo—the original creator of the series—is back to helm this one as well). Does this mean gamers can automatically assume this is yet another classic release? Almost…but not quite."

There's more review under the differently coloured word in this sentence.

[k8to]

For whatever it's worth, (and because the review mentions it) the difficulty of the original series was in two areas: getting started, and scribing.

Getting started was brutal. The monsters right outside the adventurer's guild were as likely as not to kill your entire party in the first fight. I really enjoyed the challenging prospect of rolling up character after character trying to get some up to the glorious level 2, then more easily 3, then finally managing to hit our stride around 4 or 5 or some such. Enough money began to come in that I could even afford ressurection to keep the cretins around for a while.

The reason this worked is because the manual told you most specifically to expect it, and recommended discarding a low level character rather than get too attached. It wouldn't fly today, but worked at it's time, and let up before you got too fed up with the whole thing. Sadly, the difficulty of combat rapidly became rather easy overall, so long as you paced reasonably.

The second reason difficulty was in scribing. That is, making maps and taking notes about the world. Maps were pretty necessary to find your way around, and taking notes and conciencious exploration was pretty much required to solve the riddles, eg "Name the endless byway."

So I suppose there were some tedious frustrations built into the original, depending upon your perspective, but they were very much designed in.

Of course, games were a lot smaller then, especially a turn based rpg with its very limited set of actions the player can take. Timing, for example, is almost a complete non-problem in that era.