Very excited about InXile's newest Bard's Tale offering though. Insta-buy, unless the initial impressions are truly awful, as I hope will not be the case....
Wow, looks like I spoke too soon -- or without being in fuller possession of the facts (...not the first time that's happened !). Was really excited about the new Bard's Tale, Barrow's Deep, until I dug a little deeper (ha) to see how it has evolved.
And it looks like an absolute trainwreck.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/566090/discussions/0/1744469130468368645/https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=19047"Barrow's Deep" appears to be much more in keeping with the dopey, jokey, unwanted stepchild Bard's Tale from the mid-2000s, rather than the true dungeon-crawlers from the '80s. Why InXile chose to go in this direction is utterly beyond me.
Just look at the character creation video on the Steam mainpage. You create a Bard, and he has all these Guitar Hero animations, rockin' out on his lute with magic sparks flying all about like some lame 80s glam-rock band.
WTF???
And in the footage of gameplay -- the encounter with "Arthur" with the dagger in his eye. Hahaha. This is supposed to be... funny, I suppose?
Again, wtf?
The tone is completely off. There were definite flashes of humor and fun in the original Bard's Tale trilogy, but it was never the sort of heavy-handed juvenile nonsense that apparently became a trademark of the 2000s reboot (a game I admittedly never played because it looked bloody awful and seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the original trilogy...) -- and which has apparently returned in spades with Barrow's Deep.
Barrow's Deep also eliminates most of the races for your character builds (no Half-Orcs or Gnomes or Half-Elves or Hobbits anymore!) while introducing a new one -- "Trow" -- that seems utterly gratuitous and a half-baked replacement for the classic choices. Also, there are now a whopping 4 character classes -- Bard, "Fighter", "Practitioner", and Rogue. Yup. Gone are Hunters, Monks, Paladins. Gone are the 4 magic classes, Magician, Conjurer, Sorcerer, Wizard -- replaced by the catch-all "Practitioner" (and what an inspired stroke that is! Practitioner! Reminds me of a General Practitioner! I.e. something with no lore/magical associations whatsoever!). Jesus.
Some of this could be forgivable if the gameplay itself looked good. But it does not look good. The presentation has a "Pow! Kablammo!" pyrotechnics that, again, just feels completely tonally off to me.
And apparently random encounters -- which in so many ways was the core of the original Bard's Tale experience -- have been eliminated. No more blundering into a house where "the mystic denizens of this place assault you! You face 4 Kobolds!" That's pretty much *the game*. How could they tear the heart out of the classic experience like this?
OK -- rant off. Just had to vent some major disappointment. On the plus side -- totally unexpected too -- the remastered Trilogy does look really sharp. Will have to pick it up later this evening. Looks like it's going to be the only way to really get that Bard's Tale feeling back.....
