PetrusOctavianus: Judging by the very low activity in the Bard's Tale sub forum, I guess there is little market for CRPGs
that old.
spaceseeker19: I hope that no one would compare those games to The Bard's Tale, which is quite possibly the least of those games. It'd be like dismissing "Star Wars" because people weren't interested in Ralph Bakshi's "Wizards" movie. "They're both science fiction, and they both came out in 1977. No one's interested in them." The Bard's Tale was based on Wizardry and so had a lot of the primitive elements found in that game. There was no tactical element to character positioning (front, middle, back ranks), unlike all of the SSI games. And, as others have mentioned, in Phantasie III, you could have a party (at least early in the game, when character defenses did not prevent most critical hits) where every character was missing some limb (and you could also sever limbs and heads of opponents).
Yet we have remakes of The Bard's Tale and no remastered versions of any of the SSI games. If any games were screaming for remastered versions, it's the entire SSI catalog.
I disagree about there being no tactical element in Bard's Tale. Just like other "blobbers" such as Wizardry, Dragon Wars and Might&Magic 1-2, you had front and back rows. Also, just because the combat is abstract does not mean it's not tactical. The abstract combat of the turn based blobbers is not as tactical as the Gold Box games, but it's still better and more tactical than nearly all other CRPGs from the DOS era. The main problem with the Bard's Tale games is the insane random encounter frequency which is check in bleeping
real time!
I've been playing quite a bit of Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (the Gold Box make-your-own-adventure program) modules lately and personally I think the graphics and UI is good enough, but what is really lacking is the improved AI and the wealth of options you have in the Infinity Engine games.