4/20/2023 0 Comments Only those who know the bards tale![]() If you remember what Skara Brae looked like, in the grid, it's exactly the same." A town has been built on top of Skara Brae. "In the first Bard's Tale there was a map of Skara Brae and you would expand it," Fargo says. That's a good opportunity for an early dose of nostalgia. The Bard's Tale 4 is unsurprisingly skipping that bit of the series' history and instead expanding on the lore surrounding the city of Skara Brae and the world of Caith, which was never fleshed out in the original trilogy. Image via the CRPG Book Project.ĭry wasn't a problem for The Bard's Tale 3, which involved an element of time travel and fighting enemies including Nazi soldiers and mutant bikers. A lot of the time these games can get pretty dry." "We want to push as much effort into the visual effects, the characters, the animation, the personality of the guys you're fighting against. That's why Bard's Tale 4 is being built in Unreal Engine 4, and what I've seen running in real time looks just as nice as the little slice of gameplay video inXile has released so far. "When you get into a dungeon crawl experience, you don't have this really dynamic, changing environment, the frenetic feel of combat going around, constantly moving your camera," Keenan says. But this is more like walking through a painting than the busier simulation of a world like Skyrim's or The Witcher 3's. Later, when we enter a proper dungeon beneath a castle, goblins patrol its stone hallways. There is animation, of course: Particles float in the air, plants sway slightly in the breeze. One thing The Bard's Tale 4 definitely has in common with other dungeon crawlers is the eerie stillness of its world. ![]() The Bard's Tale has long borrowed names from Scotland, but this time the team went to Skara Brae for inspiration (and photos). "Sometimes I've seen, like, Legend of Grimrock and those types of games, it still has that feel-everything is very squared off and angled," he said. VP of Development Chris Keenan chimes in that at the same time, it was important to them that The Bard's Tale 4 didn't look look it was on a grid. "They can play on hardcore mode and be able to orient themselves in a dungeon, and have a sense that maybe there's a secret room behind here, because I've mapped this out and I can tell there's a gap, and I feel like there might be something behind this wall," he says. ![]() Creative director David Rogers explains that in level design, everything is aligned to a grid, so fans can break out the graph paper and map their own dungeons if they wish. The Bard's Tale 4 isn't the first dungeon crawler to have above-ground 'dungeons,' of course-2014's Legend of Grimrock 2 starts on a picturesque beach-but it's amazing how different a dungeon crawler feels the second you're not snapped to a grid. His team at inXile, which he founded in 2002, is small-Fargo likes to talk about them being scrappy, and finding clever ways to punch above their weight with games like The Bard's Tale 4-though they're a bit bigger than the team of a half-dozen that made The Bard's Tale one of the most popular RPGs of the 1980s. It was one of the first games developed at Interplay, which he founded in the early 1980s and left in 2000 after a corporate buyout dramatically changed the company. "We're keeping the important parts of Bard's Tale, incorporating that into a package keeping modern sensibilities in mind," says Brian Fargo, who helped design The Bard's Tale with his friend Michael Cranford in 1984. The Bard's Tale 4 is the first dungeon crawler that's really grabbed my interest since I sat on my dad's lap playing the original Bard's Tale circa 1993. Partially because, damn, is it ever pretty, but mostly because inXile is walking a tricky tightrope of nostalgia and innovation. The Bard's Tale 4 is the first dungeon crawler that's really grabbed my interest since I sat on my dad's lap playing the original Bard's Tale circa 1993, getting lost in the endless streets and abandoned houses of Skara Brae. For the next hour, I'll get to see a game that feels at once delightfully old-fashioned and tantalizingly new. But a cool one-it's small and intimate, decked out with Christmas lights and artwork for Wasteland 2 and only the occasional baby doll hanging from the rafters. After the blinding glare of a bright southern California morning, the inXile office, a floor above a local surf shop, feels a bit like a dungeon itself. Developer inXile has invited me to its studio for an early look at The Bard's Tale 4, the first game in the series since 1991.
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