Bard's Tale Sequel In Development?

Thanks to the forum regulars at Gaming Age for pointing out online reports that a company called inXile, headed by Interplay's ex-CEO Brian Fargo, has acquired the license to the classic RPG The Bard's Tale from Electronic Arts. No news on when the title is due, but this Bard's Tale page has further facts which seem to back up this hypothesis. Interestingly, Fargo was a designer on the original Bard's Tale, which was developed by Interplay back in 1987.

Here's A BT Clone Almost Done

[JohnDeHope3]

http://www.bardslegacy.com/main.html

The best.

[BoomerSooner]

Bard's Tale I-III, Ultima III-VII, Thief & Thief II.

My all time favorites.

Now where is that Thief III [thief3.com] Eidos!!!!

My joystick is going crazy

[Torgo's Pizza]

I don't know about the rest of you, but this has me very interested. This franchise has been aching to have another installment. The good news is that Fargo [mobygames.com] is involved, which is a great sign. The question remains if a game, whose last sequel came out in 1988, can be updated to the standards of 2003.

Re:My joystick is going crazy

[kenthorvath]

I think I'd be happy even if they didn't change a thing. A great game is a great game, no matter how antiquated the graphics/sound are. I'd PREFER it not to be in 3D. But, now that we have SVGA monitors, it would be nice to have some really cool hires artwork thrown in. A symphonic score would be neat too.

Re:My joystick is going crazy

[(trb001)]

I'm more worried about the standards of 2003 corrupting the last game from 1988. If they decide to put a lot of frills and killer graphics in, I think it will take away some from the simplicity of Bard's Tale.

The graphics of the first game were simple, but the animations and simple lighting (Adventurer's Guild fireplace?) made the ambiance great. That and it was the closest thing I had ever seen to true D&D.

I'm debating whether to say the hand mapping was a pain or not. Let me rephrase...the hand m

Tarjan!

[www.whitehouse.org]

I loved that game nearly as much as "real" D&D. Of course, there were those tedious moments (days), such as leveling up outside the NW tower, using my frost horn on the 4 groups of 99 mobs of Red Dragons or whatever they were, entering the tower and back out for repop. Mmmm. Good, clean fun. Doubt the remake will stand up to the memory... I'll probably buy it anyway.

Brought to you by the makers of

[Njoyda Sauce]

Fargo also brought us Wasteland, IMHO one of the best RPGs to ever hit production Fallout was a series inspired by the greatness of Wasteland, but that fell short of a true WL2.

3 Things I Want Remade

[javajames27]

3 Things I Want Remade:

• Bard's Tale (yay!)
• Mail Order Monsters from the C=64
• Starflight - there are way too many fantasy RPGs out there and not enough Sci-Fi ones

Re:3 Things I Want Remade

[Anonymous Coward]

Starflight was one of the most fantastic games I played at the time, with Starflight II being a worthy sequel. The problem nowadays is that nobody seems to remember how to create a two-dimensional game, which means that at best Starflight III would end up being more like what Elite IV is supposed to be like should that ever get made. That, or Diablo in space. Really, the Starflight franchise could be made into a decent multiplayer RPG where the universe and missions (to a point) are randomly generated an

Re:3 Things I Want Remade

[Torgo's Pizza]

Count me in on the Starflight remake. I met Joe Ybarra right after I left Ensemble Studios and he joined. I mentioned to him that I thought Starflight was one of my favorite games. I think he was a little taken aback by its mention and thanked me for remembering it.

Re:3 Things I Want Remade

[breon.halling]

Here's a Win32 version [www.soap.at] of "Mail-Order Monsters". I haven't tried it yet, though. Have fun!

Starflight 3

[Allanon01]

Starflight III [starflight3.net]

Bard's Tale,

[Evoluder]

99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers.

Re:Bard's Tale,

[c64cryptoboy]

99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers.

Yeah, but do you remember the coordinates in Harkyn's Castle where that happended? :-)

Re:Bard's Tale

[Squirrel Killer]

Yeah, but do you remember the coordinates in Harkyn's Castle where [99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers] happended?

No, but when I get home, I'll pull out my red Trapper folder that has all my hand drawn BT1&2 maps in it and let you know.

Re:Bard's Tale

[lanroth]

My friend (not me, honest) teleported up and down levels over and over again to kill the 396 berserkers and get the experience points. He spent weeks doing this until even his magic users had >9999 hit points!

Here's another one tho... did you ever say "burger" in the temple in the square in the town?
The priest said something like "That's the most offensive word utterable, DIE!".
You were faced with 396 nasty creatures, and if you killed them you were faced with 396 even more nasty creatures. I never managed to kill the second lot, all my characters got turned to stone :(

Re:Bard's Tale

[Gogo Dodo]

Ah, the memories...

For those who don't know, "burger" is in reference to Burger Bill Heineman, now over at Contraband Entertainment [contrabandent.com]. Everything he worked on had some type of burger reference.

Re:Bard's Tale,

[Quill_28]

Oh yes, I also remember:

Fire Horn and HEAL

Correction

[NetDanzr]

The lead designer of Bard's Tale was Michael Cranford, not Brian Fargo. Fargo was credited only with level design. While still important, as a level designer, he didn't have to work on game rules, spells, the story, etc. In fact, he never designed games on his own, even though he helped with the design of Bard's Tale I and II and Wasteland, after which he became a game producer. I'd love to see him as a producer of the game again, while leaving the design to a seasoned designer.

On a side note, Bard's Tale was so great because of the whole team; something that will be difficult to reproduce. In addition, to the genius of Michael Cranford, the team also included Lawrence Holland who later moved on to create Totally Games (X-Wing games, Star Trek: Bridge Commander), Joe Ybarra, the veteran game producer, and Bing Gordon (currently the CEO of Electronic Arts).

Interestingly, my memory is failing.

[The Almighty Dave]

Interestingly, Fargo was a designer on the original Bard's Tale, which was developed by Interplay back in 1987.

I remember Bard's Tale from high school. I finished in 1986. I think it was released about 1985.

Re:Interestingly, my memory is failing.

[Quill_28]

You are correct 1987 is too late, I played BT on a c64 in jr high. 1985 sounds more accurate.

Wow!!

[Kirijitsu]

I think I've just been MIBLed!! Seriously, I've lost a large percentage of my life to the Bard's Tale series and would love to see what technology advances could do for it. Caution is the key though. A nearly-pure text game would not survive in today's market, but changing the game engine too much risks eliminating the essence of a Bard's Tale adventure and becoming just another run-o'-the-mill RPG. Best of luck to the developers.

The Sequel

[Quill_28]

Alright I will go ahead and say what I would like to see, in this and future rpg's.

Time.

Time becomes important, meaning that the "evil wizard" is actually gaining power as the game progresses. Maybe in the beginning of the game, you have a few missions.
Choose one and your guys can handle it, but while your characters get stronger so does the enenmy on the other missions.
This would make it less linear and increase re-playability.
Are any games already doing this type of thing?

I'll stop here.

Re:The Sequel

[UPi]

I think the answer is "realism vs fun".

While I agree that it's not "realistic" to be able to level up as long as you like, it's still "fun" to be able walk around, explore the world, do any side quest you like, etc. without having to worry about being able to win the final boss fight.

Chrono Cross got this right: you could only advance levels by completing certain quests (during which you got to beat up bosses). Just spending time in killing random monsters didn't help (or not that much, anyway).

Re:The Sequel

[crawling_chaos]

This is do-able in the Neverwinter Nights Engine. I think that there are a few user created modules that do something like this, but it is mostly keyed to the power of the player character rather than time. It wouldn't be hard to modify it though, so that a global variable tracked how quickly the player made it to the bad guy's sanctum, and adjusted the difficulty accordingly.

Re:The Sequel

[Quill_28]

I (briefly) looked into NWN to see what could be done, it seemed it wouldn't do well under this scenerio. Perhaps I should try again.

Re:The Sequel

[crawling_chaos]

NWN does lack an internal "clock" but it isn't very hard to hook the rest event to increment a module global that represents time. You could also increment the counter based on the number of side quests completed.

All you need then is to create several versions of the Supreme Evil Overlord and his minions, and spawn in the correct set when the sanctum is reached. It's a fair amount of work, but it is possible.

If you wanted to do it based on actual time spent playing the game, I suppose you could keep track

high hopes for cross platform?

[cosmcactus]

I loved the original Bard's Tale, though I doubt a new one would be written to run on my Linux machine. At least I'll have Magicosm [magicosm.net].

I remember playing Bards Tale I

[Tarindel]

I had a party of 6 characters, one of them being a monk named "Green Booger". Hey, I was like 10 at the time. Give me a break. It was funny.

Anyway, there was this tower in the upper left hand corner of the map -- I can't remember what it was called, but it had one of those dragon statues (or was it some kind of guardian?) guarding it. The tower was pretty high level for my characters, so my forays were usually pretty short and limited, and my characters were wiped out fast and often. Usually Green Booger was the last standing due to his incredible AC. In case you don't remember, monks in that game lost an AC every level (with lower being better -- silly old school AD&D conventions!).

Well, one day I entered the tower and actually made it through a couple of battles. Upon trying to find my way back to the entrance, I stumbled upon some kind of trap which caused a few members of my party to go insane. My party mutinied. Of course, Green Booger was one the insane ones. After a few minutes of infighting, everyone was dead except Green Booger.

"Finally!", I thought. Now I could load my saved game and try again. But no such luck -- Green Booger-the-now-raving-lunatic turned his evil fists upon himself. Unfortunately, his AC was so low, he couldn't hit himself.

I watched for at least ten minutes as messages like "Green Booger punches at Green Booger but misses!". "Green Booger tries to strike Green Booger but misses!". Finally, after the amusement from the whole situation wore off and realizing this was an infinite loop, I rebooted.

I think it was the first time I realized that sometimes things happened in games that not even the game designers anticipated. It was, for all intents and purposes, my very first experience with design-level game flaws.

hmm

[MattW]

BT was my first RPG ever. It is amazing how, 16 years after publication, it still has a 'brand name'. I have to say, even if I saw "Bard's Tale 2004" in stores next year, I'd have a hard time not buying it just based on the original. I still remember picking up my copy for the C64 from a computer expo.