Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale Series

[newtmonkey]

baba is you
I agree with you on the grid size, I think it was a technical limitation for those early games. It doesn't bother me, in fact it makes mapping those games a lot easier when you know evey level will be the same size! Actually, I'm impressed that M&M1+2 are able to make such a convincing world out of these grid maps that are all the same size.

Having said that, it was nice to play through Wiz 5, where all the dungeon levels are different sizes. That itself is sort of a metagame mapping challenge, since you have no idea how small or large a level is. Same with Wiz 6 and 7 of course, like you mentioned.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

criticism of Bard's Tale being obsessed with 22x22, as Grampy_Bone claims, is a bit misplaced.

The issue with Bard's Tale is the insistence on not only sticking to 22x22 but also using every square, whether it fills any kind of purpose or not.

This is the map of level 2 of Proving Grounds:

Dark green areas are not accessible. We see several distinct sections, connected somewhat logically by hallways. Rooms are containers, doors are barriers. It has a flow of progression to it. It does not arbitrarily fill space on the disk.

This is the Textile house in Phlan:

Maps in Gold Box games were hard coded to 16x16, and it does use every space. Yet it still has more purpose to it. There's a distinction between outdoors and indoors, with harder combats within buildings. The player knows where to start their search and where to end it, when to expect trouble and when to take a breather.

This is level 3 of the BT sewers what the actual fuck

We'll excuse for the moment that at no point does this come close to resembling a "sewer." The green part I highlighted is the only part that matters. None of the rest of the floor is meaningful. It's just a giant red herring. Gotta fill every square!

This is Catacombs 3.

We'll be a little nicer, this could kind of be some sort of tomb. But again most of the map is pointless. The bottom section is all filler, only the top section matters, and none of it is hard. It's just a tedious slog through a bunch of doors and traps, then some stupid darkness and antimagic corridors.


The dungeons in BT serve one purpose: places to find monsters and kill them. To be clear, there's nothing actually wrong with that, but "Masterful design of diabolical complexity" it ain't.

 

[baba is you]

It's just a tedious slog through a bunch of doors and traps, then some stupid darkness and antimagic corridors.

I see your point, and certainly this comparison makes the Bard's Tale dungeons a bit ambiguous.
But I don't think it's a bad dungeon at all. Yeah, I know, I'm being stubborn, but I don't think the mapping puzzles in Bard's Tale are bad.

I do agree that most of the combat is a one-sided slaughter. I think in the back of my mind I knew, but was in denial, that Bard's Tale suffers from the combat imbalance you mention after the mid-game point.

 

[octavius]

Is there a particular reason you chose the Apple II version, other than it's the original version?

Supposedly bug free, and also the msot hard core one in the beginning.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I swear i somehow bugged out on pc in wiz 1 into those unaccessable areas.

 

[octavius]

The game insists you must walk over every square to hit all those clues, but that's like saying you should wade through every inch of a river infested with piranhas. Um, no?

You haven't played Wizardry 7?


Comparing Pool of Radiance with BT this way is weird. BT is an abstract game, with abstract levels and abstract combat, while PoR is supposed to be more realistic, with non abstract combat.
it's different approaches and both work very well to me. Would be boring if all games tries to be "realistic".

As for Wiz1, you could always try MALOR into those areas. I think most of them are accessible that way, if you are willing to take the chance.

 

[octavius]

I'm now started on the level 3 or Mangar's Tower. Same menagerie as on lvl 2, so no Greater Demons yet. The Vampires are the greatest threat; whenever I meet any they are so hungry for blood that they push past the other monsters and I can rarely run from them. So my front line are kind of frozen at their current level, since it's hard to accumulate another 200,000 XP before being sucked down to 0 again.
Other nasties include Basilisks and Master Ninjas, who often hit with their Stoning and Critical Hit attacks. Annoyingly there's no spell to cure Stoning in the field.

Since character level seems to influence initiative, I decided to advance two of my guys only to Wizard 11 to get the Beyond Death spell, and then change to Conjuror and Magician and gain levels much quicker. It's enough that one character can get to lvl 13 and cast the one lvl 7 spell to summon a Greater Demon Demon Lord.

I'm also toying with the idea of revisiting that Soul Sucker in the Catacombs and Spell Bind him into my party, since they are quite a bit higher level than Vampires, I think, and would make a durable meat shield as well as breath on the first monster group.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Wait til you get to the last level. There is a nod to Cranford's first game. Look at Crpg Addict's review on Maze Master.

 

[octavius]

There's already a nod on the second floor, when you meet 3 Maze Masters.

 

[octavius]

I survived the fourth floor of Mangar's Tower without any party deaths. I guess I've been lucky not to encounter packs of Vampire Lords (it's possible they hunt alone, though, as I can't recall seeeing more than one of them at a time.
Not all hunt alone:

And they all act before my party, so my front line ends up dead. And of course the Demon chose not to use his breath weapon in this case. My front liners usually can't even hit most of the enemies at this level, so they are only there as meat shields. Since dead characters are only moved down in the roster at the end of combat, the spell casters need only worry about breath attacks in the first round.

This too was a fun battle:

I had to run from this one. Gimps can have up to 255 HP, I think, so this became an uphill struggle.

 

[octavius]

My party when they were about to retire:

They were levels
20
22
21
19
19
18

The Monk was useless, and was practically dead weight in the end game. I suspect he suffered from low Luck. I guess you need to max out Dex and Con, but also get the other stats as high as possible as well. On most level-ups he seemed to be getting useless IQ.

Having three mages is absolutely optimal, and the Bard can hold his own in one of the front slots as well as the Paladin. If I were to replay, I'd try a Rogue instead of the Monk, just for fun.

I'm surprised I enjoyed this replay so much. One month ago I was convinced that replaying Wizardry 1 would be a much more enjoyable experience, but then it turned out to be the other way around.

Clearly Fleeing from all wandering monsters, and thus not reaching very high character levels, made things much more interesting, but OTOH I struggled more when I played the DOS version some ten years ago, when I thought Fleeing was an unnerdly thing to do, and my party must have been many levels higher. This time I made it through Mangar's Tower without any party deaths.
Either the DOS version is harder in the end game (I seem to recall Greater Demons being much more prevalent), or I have just gained many blobberer levels since then.

I will play the C64 versions of BT2 and 3 (using the fixed disk images provided by drifting), since that's the versions they were made for initially. I just hope the emulation will be as hassle free as it was with Applewine (very quick to load and run even with authentic machine speed, and only two crashes during the whole game).

 

[octavius]

Tried the C64 version of The Destiny Knighr and it's un.................bear................................ab...........................ly...........................slooooooooooooooooooooooow.
It takes seconds just entering and exiting buildings.
I thought maybe I had not set up the emulator right, but checking some videos on YouTube I see the same wading in syrup.

I have no patience for this, so I'll play the Apple II version instead, since it's much faster.

 

[octavius]

Started playing the Apple version of BT2, and the beginner dungeon is a bit easier than Skara Brae was for lvl 1 characters. My guys reached lvl 2 with only one character death so far, which happened in the starting city where the monster are somewhat tougher than in the dungeon. Gold is more prevalent than in BT1, so I could afford to raise a lvl 1 character.

Looks like the Apple version is superior if you want to play the whole trilogy with the same party (I don't recommend transferring from 1 to 2, though), with no or minimal bugs, and with no waiting for things to load.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The glorious Amiga version will always be the best!

 

[bandersnatch]

The glorious Amiga version will always be the best!

Couldn't agree more. I wonder what happened to all the excellent Amiga artists of my youth?

 

[octavius]

Not if you want a bug free game. The Amiga version of BT3 is crippled, and I want to transfer my party from BT2. And I think the Hunter is bugged in BT2.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

This post was really deserving to be in this thread:

Awesome AMIGA BT PICS

yea I dont understand why Brayden the 11 year old zoomer isnt excited to play Bard's Tale 1 on my amiga 500

I wish I could again capture the feeling when I as a teen played BT1 on my brand new Amiga and saw those glorious monster portraits and the fantastic monk chanting in the temples...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

That made me ponder the intro to BT 2 on all the different computers. Here are a few on youtube:






Appleiigs & amiga fucked up?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Some vids need trimming. You telling me DOS, Amiga, appleIIgs all have fucked intros? This is becoming a pattern like phantasie and some ssi games.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Not if you want a bug free game. The Amiga version of BT3 is crippled, and I want to transfer my party from BT2. And I think the Hunter is bugged in BT2.

Much like Wizardry, TBT Trilogy's ports are all damaged in one way or another. So your game will be fucked up no matter what you do.

 

[octavius]

Not if you want a bug free game. The Amiga version of BT3 is crippled, and I want to transfer my party from BT2. And I think the Hunter is bugged in BT2.

Much like Wizardry, TBT Trilogy's ports are all damaged in one way or another. So your game will be fucked up no matter what you do.

The Apple versions of BT1 are considered bug free. The only bug free version of BT2 seems to be the Apple IIgs version, while the C64 and Apple ][ have UOPs that fixes the traps bugs. Both BT1 and 2 have the Hunter critical hit bug on the Amiga, I think (definitely in BT1, since that I remember clearly).
The DOS and Amiga version of BT3 are crippled and not worth playing, but DOS has an UOP, so that is now the superior version, with the possible exception of the Remaster. The Amiga version doesn't have the same production values as BT1 and 2 had, anyway. IIRC there was a bug with the harmonic gems in the C64 version. Not sure about the Apple ][ version, but at least there's no lag when using an emulator.

As for Wizardry 1, I guess the DOS version in the end is the superior version.
The Apple ][ version is bug free, I think, but I'd rather take decreasing stats than monsters casting spells in the surprise round.

(Lately I've been trying to find the optimal versions of the classic blobbers, as well as the best way of playing them)

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Critical hit bug?

 

[octavius]

Overflow bug which resets the % chance every 16th level.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Oh yuck!

 

[Denim Destroyer]

Finished my first ever play through of Tales of the Unknown via the Bards Tale Trilogy. I did not know much of the game outside a few running gags (x99 Berzerkers) so clearly I had no idea of what was awaiting me. Early on I appreciated how brutal the game was but quickly became disappointed when the difficulty dove off a cliff into a sea of tedium. Combat encounters changed from "oh crap!" to "oh boy another one." After the beginning I managed to breeze through the game until Magnar's Tower which catered more to my sensibilities. Sadly this is not enough to salvage the game. If 90% of a game is mediocre then there is no way the remaining 10% can make up for it. There is much more that can be said about the game but other Codexers have articulated their opinions much better than I can.


Addendum:

Final Battle

Making Magnar vulnerable to backstabs was a horrible idea. I killed him on the second turn with the only real threat being the demons and vampire lords who stoned half my party, I was rather thankful for the Thor Figurines.