The bards tale barrels Pc#

The first nitpick comes from the amount of story time spent on minor subplots compared to the main plot. Now, as I said earlier, the story was one of the few nearly perfect parts of The Bard’s Tale IV for me, but I do have a few nitpicks I want to bring up. The story was creative and inventive, always ramping up the action level when needed and keeping the player interested as darker secrets and bigger problems follow you to every last locale. It is here, though, your story truly begins, as the paladins burn down the adventures guild, forcing you and your comrade into the seedy underbelly of Skara Brae and beginning your task to hunt down three people of interest, thus beginning your quest to save Skara Brae from the darkness it holds in itself. Our story begins in the city of Skara Brae, where a public execution starts us off as we take control of a young female bard called Melody, walking around the town with an associate until you reach the city’s adventurers guild. With such a deep story, rich with small details and fun easter eggs abound that lends to its overarching world, The Bard’s Tale IV stands on its own, with only a few key nitpicks that take away from the experience. As a warning, I did not complete The Bard’s Tale IV in its entirety due to some of these issues I will discuss further into the review. This RPG does many elements right, such as the core combat and in-depth story, but then falls on its face with constant crashes and level up issues. The Bard’s Tale IV is a turn-based, tactical RPG with dungeon crawler elements, developed and published by inXile Entertainment. Today’s RPG is one that falls in between these two lines, but to which side depends on the player.

The bards tale barrels Pc#

Rogue Spirit – PC (P)review - July 19, 2022Īs someone who has sampled and played a plethora of RPGs, I find experiences tend to vary from game to game, ranging from the bad and not good to excellent and worth exploring every little secret.Dual Universe – PC Review - November 23, 2022.TDM Game Awards 2022 – Voting is now open! - December 6, 2022.Sometimes the music just sounds right low-fi production, mixes with really traditional sounding melodies that are so accurate you can imagine bards playing it as you go about your adventure. Sometimes bards can be cool guys with sunglasses.īut there’s hope too. Avoiding tropes like the really clean sounding ballad would help the genre not become stale. They’re literally putting you into these worlds and, unfortunately, a lot of them look and feel the same. That goes triple for games, which leave very little to the imagination. With so many fantasy games, books and movies out there a lot of these stories are so similar they can become indistinguishable. They don’t all have to be lute-playing, flighty poets. They can be bearded war-dumming Vikings, they can be calculated assassins that lullaby their victims to sleep, they can be important diplomats for a warring nation. Bards important characters in the modern fantasy mythos dating all the way back to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. This is bad because it takes what could essentially be an important, meaningful moment for the story and devalues it into being generic.

So why’s this a big deal?įirst off, it’s jammed into so many games now as an arbitrary story beat you have to hit in the fantasy genre as if you’re not really playing a fantasy game if you’re not hearing the same-sounding song from the last fantasy game you played at least once.

After hearing this theme to Dragon Age: Inquisition, this rally cry of an upstart band of do-gooders became an endless boner joke to me as I changed the words of it to reflect my childish sense of humor.Īre these songs all intrinsically bad? No.