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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Software Entertainment Games Linux

Devil Whiskey - The Bard's Tale Resurrected? 44

Posted by simoniker from the also-see-horrible-gin dept.
Tony Bybell writes "For the old school RPGamers, the 1980s Bard's Tale style of role playing is being unofficially resurrected as Bard's Legacy: Devil Whiskey. Check out the FAQ: a Linux port will be available immediately and they'll be releasing the code under an Open Source license after 50,000 copies of the full game have been sold." There's also a new downloadable demo available in both Windows and Linux flavors.
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Devil Whiskey - The Bard's Tale Resurrected? More

Devil Whiskey - The Bard's Tale Resurrected?

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  • This is great. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Future Man 3000 ( 706329 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @02:09PM (#6933808) Homepage
    Since the release of Final Fantasy VII and Diablo, the RPG genre has ramped up the glitz and glamour and ignored those of us that preferred a straightforward RPG experience.

    I enjoyed Bard's Tale and Wizardry, and hope that the simplistic style of the earlier Final Fantasies can be revisited at some point as well (although hopefully with deeper plot; Final Fantasy X was entirely over my head.)

  • Open Source license (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bios10h ( 323061 )
    and they'll be releasing the code under an Open Source license after 50,000 copies of the full game have been sold.

    ...that means never, right?
    • BTW, I don't mean to say this is or is going to be a bad game. I mean that 50k copies is quite a lot. Some mainstream game sold around this number of copies.

      • Re:Open Source license (Score:2, Interesting)

        by n0wak ( 631202 )
        I agree.

        While I do wish such endeavours the best of luck, selling 50,000 copies sounds like wishful thinking. So I wouldn't go setting my watch for an open source release.
        • I`m under the impression that many played the bards tale series on their Amigas. And that many, especially the graphics oriented types switched to Apple after Commodore bit the dust(many stayed on the Amiga of course). Maybe they should have ported DW to the mac, if they are looking to sell 50k units they need to port it to all the mayor platforms that Amiga owners currently use. Since it is based on SDL and opengl already it should be a straight recompile without to many hassles, correct me if I`m wrong
          • I`m under the impression that many played the bards tale series on their Amigas. And that many, especially the graphics oriented types switched to Apple after Commodore bit the dust(many stayed on the Amiga of course).

            The first in the series was released on the Apple II first, then ported to MS-DOS, Apple IIgs, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, and Amiga.

            I'm pretty sure I have all 3 Bard's Tale games somewhere at home for Dos/Windows, but I could be wrong (I certainly didn't have the original releas
            • Ah, but did you have the Bard's Tale Construction Set?

              It was wicked cool (at the time) to be able to create your own levels AND you didn't need an advanced degree in 3D modeling, etc.

              The thing that killed it was that you could only distribute your game to the three other people who bought the construction set...

              If they don't get to the point where they'll release the game as open source, I hope they will at least release either an editor or the API so that someone else could create an editor.

    • If the demo plays as good as it looks and the game isn't priced at something exhorbitant, I'll be buying a copy anyway.

      It's too bad they aren't doing something like releasing the engine now and releasing the game data under a license later if the given condition is met, as this could open the game to all sorts of fan-based addons if it catches on, but perhaps they'll eventually release everything whether or not they meet their 50,000 goal. It's retro, so even if it's five years from now it'll still be co

      • Re:Open Source license (Score:4, Informative)

        by Violet Null ( 452694 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @02:53PM (#6934509)
        According to the FAQ, the engine is the only thing they're planning on releasing. They're not planning on releasing the game data at all, currently. I quote:

        This is not to say that the content, such as the original artwork, audio, movies, maps, cut scenes, etc. will be available for free, but anyone who wants a copy of the source code will be able to get it.

        Still, very nice of them, even if it never actually happens. I'll probably buy a copy.
    • Perhaps.

      I think the better route (and I admit I haven't checked the site) would be to say after 50,000 copies sell or 18 months pass...or we go out of business...whichever comes first.
  • I remember playing Bard's Tale on my friends Amiga. Damn good times good times..

    definately will be checking this out.

  • wow (Score:2)

    by XO ( 250276 )
    the screenshots look great. I can't wait to get home from work and download this baby.

  • Devil Wiskey (Score:5, Informative)

    by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @02:37PM (#6934254)
    I checked this out last night. It's a good experience. The interface was entirely keyboard driven and brought a *ton* of memories back from Bard's Tale. The overworld graphics are just right for this kind of game; smoothly scrolling, high res, but still delivers that grid based feeling of navigating a town or dungeon. The monster and character art ranges from Ok to fantastic, but I'm happy to say it walks more on the "fantastic" side most of the time. (Go Socar Miles!)
    My only complaints would be the stat rolling for character creation and audio. I would consistently roll high stats for my gnome characters, stats > 15 for nearly everything, while some of my other characters refused to gain stats higher than 15 or 16 (like my dwarf who was awarded the name "wimpy" for this little characteristic. On the other hand my Gnome could easily get a full load of stats at 15 or above on everything, and I rarely saw anything below 10 for the little guy. He put all my other characters in their places, so that was quite odd.
    The audio was the second thing I noticed, while the music in the game is *beautiful* and fits the game and the mood quite nicely, some of the sound effects seem like they were taken right from a google search. They had very poor sampling rate and there was a noticeable level of white noise in the background when certain birds would chirp or crow in the distance.

    Other than that, I recommend this to anyone who misses their Amiga or C64 and wishes RPGS today could throwback to the simpler times. Very good stuff.

  • The Wheel? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11, 2003 @02:56PM (#6934554)
    But will it come with the copy-protection code wheel from Bard's Tale 3? It's just not the same unless I have to photocopy someone else's wheel to play the game.

  • I'm glad too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ErisCalmsme ( 212887 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @03:03PM (#6934643) Homepage Journal
    Pretty funny how this morning I had a dream about RPG's... actually I woke up wanting to be a dark elf in evercrack (which oddly enough I stopped playing on 9/11/01 when my DSL connection was lost in the rubble of the verizon building in downtown manhattan)... But anyway... I am downloading the demo now, in hopes that I can finally play an RPG that isnt "massively multiplayer online". I really just miss being able to save a game and continue it later... without the game changing while I'm gone...

  • Game Change? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kc78 ( 651501 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @04:24PM (#6935777) Homepage
    "I really just miss being able to save a game and continue it later... without the game changing while I'm gone... " When did you ever log into EQ and find the game had changed. That's the main reason I quit the game. Nothing you did had any impact on anything other than you having more gear. Oh you could awake the sleeper, but that was it. That didn't even have any real impact on the world other than some different beasts in his lair and one quick slaughter of the world. Hmmmm, you'd have thought something that big would have made some significant game changes.

  • Hardware requirements (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NetDanzr ( 619387 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @04:45PM (#6936092)
    I played the demo for two days and I liked very much what I saw. There were some minor balancing issues (the demo is much easier than the Bard's Tale games), but I guess that's because it's only a demo.

    What I really don't understand is why a game that tries to be a sequel to Bard's Tale (a game that ran on my 386-33) requires a Pentium III and 256MB of RAM?

    • Re:Hardware requirements (Score:5, Informative)

      by ThrasherTT ( 87841 ) <thrasherNO@SPAMdeathmatch.net> on Thursday September 11, 2003 @04:58PM (#6936229) Homepage Journal
      Take a look at the difference in graphics between the two. You may remember the original BT's as having good graphics (and they were, at the time), but memory can do funny things. That's probably a big reason for the increased memory requirements. Not to mention that it requires a modern OS and windowing system to run within.

      As for processor requirements, it does use OpenGL for the graphics engine... I'm fairly certain that the engine could be optimized to use less CPU, and it probably doesn't even peg a P3, but who doesn't have P3-or-better processing power nowadays?

      Feel free to try it on a lesser system and let the team know that the requirements are high!

      Disclaimer: I am part of the Devil Whiskey team, but these comments are personal and should not be construed as official Shifting Suns comments.
      • Actually, I'm still playing the original BG games, so I know very well how the graphics look like ;). Still, I'm one of the weird people who'd gladly sacrifice graphics for low hardware requirements and faster loading times. I must admit I was impressed with the graphics, especially the progression of time (the changing shadows on trees outside was a nice touch), but being able to put it on a floppy or two and take it to my home computer would make me much happier. (And for your information: as far as I
        • the game is playable at 233MHz/64MB RAM, with some difficulty

          Thanks for the info! I suspected this would be the case, I'll let the guys know. Could I get you to tell me which graphics card/chipset you are using, and what game setting you were using to play?
          • I'm sorry, but it's not me who played it at such low settings. I got this information from a friend of mine in a discussion [the-underdogs.org] about the demo. (I'm sure you get lots of feedback on the game, and the link I posted offers precious little in the terms of technicalities and is more about gameplay issues, but be aware if you check it out that these guys are not fanboys of the new game, and they don't expect the development team to read it, so it may be a little less biased than the feedback you receive.)
      • I think it`s bigger problem that they have hardcoded the keyboard, I`m on a dvorak keyboard and having to look down and watch the qwerty equivalent is really annoying. Is people in Europe having this problem? It`s my understanding that `z` and `w` is located in diffenent places in for example Germany (where old school rpg is still big) and France, it seems a little shortsighted to limit your market in this way.
        • I have a Danish keyboard. Fortunately none of the A..Z-keys are placed different (in some other European countries some of these keys are switched), but a lot of other characters (like -_+?,;.:) has been moved around. Some to make room for the three extra letters in the Danish alphabet; aeoa. Some other just to annoy us Danes, I guess :)

          And I agree. Instructions to hit the "/?"-key was useless, since these two characters are placed on two different keys. Fortunately I am used to work on English keyboard-la
  • Does it have a mapping feature? Going through the first two Bard's Tales (III had a mapper) I went through so much graph paper drawing maps. For the most part, drawing them out by hand was fun, but in dungeons that went too crazy with magical darkness / spinners / teleporters making an accurate map was as hard as killing the monsters.
    • Yeah, looks like it does, if this screenshot is any indication: http://www.devilwhiskey.com/screens/screen8.jpg Looks like a mapper to me.
  • Where's the OS X port!
  • Am I the only one seeing problems creating characters? I saw they posted that people reported bugs, but they didn't announce what bugs they were. People here seem to be able to play ok. Oddly, I can't get past the save character after selecting a character class. Selecting a race works, then rolling my character works, but then it prompts me to either save the character or cancel. I can only cancel. Hitting return to save doesn't seem to do anything, and cancel just lets me reroll again. Yes, I'm on w
    • Am I the only one seeing problems creating characters? I saw they posted that people reported bugs, but they didn't announce what bugs they were. People here seem to be able to play ok. Oddly, I can't get past the save character after selecting a character class. Selecting a race works, then rolling my character works, but then it prompts me to either save the character or cancel. I can only cancel. Hitting return to save doesn't seem to do anything, and cancel just lets me reroll again. Yes, I'm on windows

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