Both original and DC are ultra settings... I can fiddle around with the ini settings but it hardly has an impact.

^^^^^^^ Consolitis strikes again!!

~just lost them a sale (and possibly many more..)

I can’t stand it when this happens...

Its like Microsoft has some ‘under the table’ enforcement that in order to release on their super low spec xbox one/xbox one S that the PC version of software cannot be any better.
(Forza 3 horizon is the best example of a studio hampering a platform to encourage console sales I have EVER seen)
Kingdom Come had a lot of stuff pulled from pc version (eg fog) that a command line can restore...

But these shots- its like ‘bump mapping’ is removed.
It could be time of day differences and weather pattern differences (eg the street scene with the nice water sheen might be after rain... and we can see the sun/‘time of day’ is clearly different- so I’d definately like a proper investigation done...

The shadows are pretty telling though..
The fact the game HAD a better version, and then had it yanked is silly.
I understand SOME users complain when they can’t run a game smoothly in ULTRA settings (...but game X runs in ULTRA SMOOTHLY so YOUR GAME SUX! (Type comments run crazy through game forums).

Ultra settings should be game independent.
We don’t want next years games running Ultra to look no better than Crysis (mid 2000’s) Ultra settings.
There was a reason Crysis was hard to run. Later version were ‘console-ised’ and went from jungle and mostly organic surfaces (hard to do), to buildings (made of triangles, easy to render)..
Ultra settings should be for ‘future hardware’.
Knowing that Bards Tale IV ran badly for many psyched me up for it (I have quad channel RAM/a professional grade SSD (little CPU overhead to use)/and a very optimised PC)- I have run every game that others complain about flawlessly. (Seriously never had ANY of the Kingdom Come issues that many were plagued with/ same with Forza 3 etc)
I was looking forward to a game that would utilise my hardware and look prettier on future PC builds (Just like Crysis/The Witcher and many others give).
The Witchers ‘uber sampling’ was once a thing of dreams, but now could be churned out by an ipad.
The original Deus Ex ran at one frame every seven seconds on my Matrox/Voodoo setup ‘back in the day’ (‘90’s), but a few years on would likely run silky smooth at the same ‘Ultra’ styled presets.

Ultra should be for future hardware and give the best- how many of these games get remastered over and over again for future hardware; and the latest iPads have more graphics grunt than an xbox one/(s), so its silly when devs don’t plan for future platform releases and gimp for a few whingers who think every game should run at ultra settings (no doubt in 4K with antialiasing) on their ‘compromised’ hardware. (Little Johhnys’ likely believe a samsung ssd is the best thing ever and/or buy based on ‘easily manipulated’ spec sheets)

I know I am ranting- but seriously- this just dampened my day- was the gaming release I have been waiting for ‘all year’, and it appears to have gone backwards from what I could have bought ‘last week’.

I hope this turns out to be a slight error and is easily remedied.
I truly do believe this is a ‘microsoft’ contract being honoured though- which is the bane of consoles!


Consoles used to ‘punch above their weight’ due to highly optimised software, generally delivering outstanding software with the second and third generation titles, once the developers learned all sorts of hardware tricks to squeeze out every last nuance of the hardware.. Microsofts’ new plan to rerelease hardware is the death of the industry. Sony had a genuine reason for a PS4 Pro, and had some strategies in place to ensure the PS4 was still the target platform, and don’t have massive financial gain to be made from gimping the PC hardware platform- like what was done after some microsoft developers got access to the original ‘scorpio’ (xbox x) hardware- within a week ‘game mode’ was announced: which has gone through a few iterations, generally proving non defeatable, and actually gimps games hardcore: running in fullscreen borderless etc... Microsoft has made Direct X 12 a joke; only using it to gimp PCs from delivering ‘better than console performance’; they use ONE FEATURE of DX12 which makes all the textures one large graphic, and then make the texture to be 1Gb bigger than the mainstream video cards offer.. (so Xbox with 8Gb of ram has 3Gb of ram for games working memory and a 5Gb texture set (at a time when majority PC graphics cards had 4Gb or less), the Xbox X has 12Gb of ram; the same 3Gb of game working ram with a 9Gb texture space (pc video cards generally topping out at 8Gb); this is intentional!!
Mikeysoft makes money on consoles for every title sold (not so on Windows), for every piece of hardware sold (not so on windows), and for annual network connection (not so on windows).
Microsoft is doubling down on consoles to make their biggest $$$ income; at the expense of pc gaming/PC usability.
Since their new strategy to move gamers from PC to Xbox, we have lost all notion of dual graphics card on PCs (a feature made easier to implement with Direct X12), and they have done some strange things with direct x input and a range of technologies that have been stable and untouched for over a decade; all to drive users to a console.

Forza 3 horizon was the first title where this was practiced heavily; the trifecta of forced windows updates/forced driver updates/and forced game updates meant the game would seldom fire up twice on the PC without having to be ‘reoptimised’ (a feature that took minutes to perform, would crash mild overclocks absolutely stable in EVERY OTHER nightmare system tool, and always choose setting that would make the game horrible); the final release forced the game to be online only (I bought it to replace ‘the crew’ as I wanted an offline racer), had gimped graphics setting in line with the best the xbox x could deliver, and was finally made multicore, but for nil effect. I say made multicore, but the game WAS multicore, its just that they put the ‘mission critical’ game framerate controlling processes on the same core as the AES256 encrypted texture ‘decoding’ (it was soo intentionally bottlenecked to perform very badly on the PC). The game took many minutes to load on a 1200mb per second enterprise m2 drive (the witcher 3 on ultra loads in around six seconds, every other game including BF1 (ultra) and Kingdom Come Deliverance (ultra) all load in around ten seconds; Forza 3 takes generally ten minutes to get from Windows into the game. Exacerbated by forced video driver updates that added six minutes to game load (machine doing literally nothing)- they even communicated to the community via the forums they had communicated these issues to the video card companies, but months later, with nothing resolved, the video card companies insisted they had never heard about it... users who hacked older drivers onto the machine (and returned the loading to perform vastly quicker) would be banned from the forums and the game. Anyone asking why they were banned would also be banned (I got banned for 200+ years for asking ‘why a user go banned’)

They even had framerate limiters in place (unofficial) at standard resolutions (run the game at any ‘non standard res and performance MAGICALLY improved massively).
Microsoft want PC gaming dead. Anyone saying otherwise can’t see their strategy. Its’ so ‘anti-consumer’ I wont let an XBOX in my house. (We have every OTHER gaming platform)
Win 10 is the joke they use to kill the pc platform off. There is a reason most developers are avoiding Direct X 12 in favour of Vulkan/OpenGL/ multiplatform technologies... many companies are designing their software for web interface dropping M$ windoze as a platform to support.
Heck even M$ make iOS their lead platform for Office etc...

I know this is a rant- but it is relevant as it is the state of the gaming industry.
Anyone supporting microsoft are basically ‘anti gaming’/‘anti consumer’. Its a hard statement to digest, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
I hope the devs have just targetted consoles as the primary release, being greater than 95% of the ‘future sales’ of this game, and will release a proper patch to fix this issue ASAP.
Or, that the screen shots given in the examples are just from users who changed settings and didn’t reboot to enforce them,.. or ‘time of day’ differences/weather patterns etc. Albeit the shadows are pretty revealing...

Damn... I hope that is some sort of bug with textures. The difference is quite jarring.


Edit

I found this from the official inXile forums: https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=20432

A developer answer for those who don't want click the link:

[i]Hey all, apologies for the delay in responding.

First and foremost our intentions with the Director’s Cut is only to make improvements. That includes fixes to stability, performance, tweaks to combat and balance, and new features and quality of life improvements—as well as the new content. We’re happy to see that we’ve already received more than a few comments and reviews that it’s a positive change for the game.

However, there are some legitimate questions and concerns here, as well as some changes we should explain. The first of which is that we made some stylistic changes in the Director’s Cut to certain areas of the game to change the coloration, lighting, atmospheric effects, etc. to address some complaints from the original release and create a more consistent stylized look. Skara Brae above/below are prime examples of that, and we’ve made stylistic choices to the time of day, number of lights, coloring, etc. to create a new feel. Additional light sources and changes to global illumination can have pretty drastic impacts to the appearance of a scene, which don’t necessarily mean we’ve removed graphical options or fidelity, but may reduce their visual impact. For example adding more lights to brighten a scene may reduce how sharp the shadows and specular highlights appear.

Second, we moved from full dynamic shadows to a mix of baked level shadows and dynamic character shadows. This was primarily for performance reasons, because (as most who played the original release can attest to) framerate issues were a pretty widespread complaint we wanted to address. This is definitely a visual trade-off, although one we think leads to an overall improved experience, and in some cases more accurate shadows.

Outside of those changes (some like global illumination and colored lighting which can greatly impact the overall look of an area) the graphical options are overall unchanged, or even improved.[/i]

Now that's some proper bullshit story if I ever heard one.

Thanks for this, I won't be buying this till it reaches 4.99 in price.

To the DEVS: Please turn down the ambient light as it makes the characters/objs look flat, enable dynamic shadows and volumetric light, re-enable the high rez normal maps and allow them to be toggle-able, that would do well to help your game...

I love the game myself, so this is a critique to make it better, as it looks like a PS4 game, and we're on PC, we can tell the difference no matter how many people defend it. This is the same message as to the steam/official/gog page.

It's really damned shame inXile keeps messing up with this game. While the original release was poorly optimized and had its fair share of issues as far bugs go, I quite liked it. It looked good, but run poorly and crashed often, but after a while managed to get it running pretty well.

And now they seem to be messing up potential goodwill the free DC cut could have brought by gimping the graphics. It doesn't help that the devs seem to be pigheaded about it as well.

Oh well, I'll put the DC on hold and wait for it to be patched up because I can't believe the flat, almost shadowless look of the DC was what they were really aiming at. It just looks like someone forgot to turn on shadows for the release builds. Not to mention forgot to turn on a couple of shaders as well.

MS bought inXile, and MS might not like that the game can look better than Xbox version (imagine, Linux working better than Xbox - such a horror for MS). Not sure if it's the reason, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS is pushing such approach.

If it's not the reason, nothing should stop developers from providing an option for older look.

Apparently the missing shadows are a bug with high/ultra settings, which can be sort of fixed by using medium settings, where the shadows work even if they don't look the best.

Still rather sad they couldn't get fully dynamic shadows working decently in 2019. And that it was released with that obvious bug.

Not sure if you were intentionally leaving it out, but to be 100% fair you need to include the last paragraph of that post which says they admit there are issues including a bug with shadows:

But there are some issues. For example we’re attempting to track down the loss of dynamic shadows for characters and why they appear on our internal release builds but not the actual live product. We believe it should be fairly simple fix, but it is a legitimate bug. We’ll keep you updated as our work progresses to correct it.

Linux version seems to be up

Damn I had forgotten M$ aquired Inxhile...

(I think the game is a free game on xbox live games pass this month as well)


Yes Mikeysoft spent years shutting down many of the worlds best gaming studios (like Lionhead; initially aquired to sell XBOXs and hence led to the game Fable being massively cutdown to work on the consoles paultry 256Mb of RAM), and then, with the massive fail that the new XBOX lineup proved, realised that the only way to have games SHINE on XBOX X was to own the studios that made the games, and went about rapidly reaquiring gaming studios.

The. Problem was the XBOX X was never going to sell in strong numbers VS the Playustation ecosystem at the time (funny how for years M$ only metric for measuring XBOX sales success was made up of ‘XBOX Live ‘contact hours’’, a metric artificially boosted at every opprotunity- eg Windows store products are ‘xbox live contact hours’, so when Forza 3 horizon kept magically glitching, requiring a fresh download of 50Gb+ game (sometimes several times a week), the world ‘redownloding the game’ (on PC) was a part of ‘contact hours’.

Anyone at retail could see a handful of PS4s fluying off the shelf vs an xbox.
So microsoft did what money allows them to do- they reduced the hardware cost, and threw in all their first party and owned studios titles ‘for free’, using the method that had worked for nintendo for years (be the cheapest)..
All of a sudden uneducated consumers were easily manipulated into coming home with the inferior hardware due to the massive price delta between platforms.
But something went wrong-
Game devs were not optomising for XBOX X the way M$ hoped.
It made sense- the PS4 Pro version of a game would have massively higher sell rates so was naturally the platform to target in the higher specced parts (X vs Pro), and it wasn’t making the X shine the way it should...
so microsoft decided to reaquire studios, knowing they could target superior output on the X and show the other platforms (including PC) as inferior.

An xbox one (non X) loads Forza in a couple of minutes.
My x99 PC platform with cutting edge parts, configured in a highly optomised fashion, takes four times longer than a potatoe to load the game. And is literally missing game features. And has been hampered to be online only. (Etc etc etc)
And every second or third boot up it will reset itself, and have to reoptomise itself and then it is generally two restarts and closer to twenty minutes to get the game going (as a parent and infrequent gamer, the time lost to starting the software is usually more than half of my ‘gaming time’ lost)...

Microsoft likes making their software titles perform adequately on their platform, and inadequately on everything else.
And yes- the PC is seen as competing with the console, and they are determined to milk gamers away from it.
It is the only reason for ‘play anywhere’ to still exist.
I couldn’t buy forza 3 horizon for PC- I literally had to buy it for a platform I won’t even let into my house.
Boosts their figures - which in turn is used to convince developers to sign very shady agreements.

Non of microsofts actions are anything other than ‘pro shareholder’.
If you aren’t a m$ shareholder, then ye probably best to avoid them altogether.

I say this based on watching the company since the eighties and being platform agnostic.
I folded my tech business after win 10 lauch due to how anticonsumer and unethical the product is.
Like many techs I applauded the OS (win 10) right up until the day of release... (and then ‘forced updates’ etc and constant downtime, and PCs became the LEAST reliable productivity platform on the planet)

The world cannot afford to have microsoft operate in this way.
Bards’ Tale being gimped is small fries, but it is where it starts...

Vote with your wallets and educate anyone who will listen.

Sony/Nintendo are keeping gaming ‘GAMING’.
The Switch is a killer platform, and punches well above the weight that most spec sheet junkies think it can deliver.
I’d recommend the typical gaming household Nintendo and Sony (based on gaming preferences), and maybe the PC as a second or third platform.

Devs at Inxhile: is optomising your game to run on hardware less powerful than present iPads graphical and CPU hardware a good idea?
Probably not.
Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Microsoft closes studios all the time.
Their present interest in studios is simply to keep Xbox their major money earner.
At the cost to gamers everywhere....

Caveat Emptor

The installer is broken though.

Alrighty then.... (I did a massive search across a bunch of forums, review articles, developer comments, official page(s) etc)


My take away:

One shot the devs posted to show ‘improvements’ really confirmed my worst fears. It was in the foliage of tree’s both distant and close by.. obviously downscaled. Very noticably. Less bushyness, less size, less branches... (and in motion ‘who knows’?)
This one comparison shot irrelevant of accidental lighting slipups and design ideas for ‘uncalibrated’ monitors/screens etc is the one that had me understand that I would want to play the PRE-Directors Cut Bards Tale IV.

(GOG sell me the eariler one and we have a sale!,.. otherwise....)

This game will never be restored to what it was.

But- now people with entry level graphics cards can run Ultra at 60fps. (Or at least claim to as posters with 1660s state how fluid the game is now.. ‘massive improvement’ THEY SAY.)

Some people have hardware BETTER than an entry level card, and many people will play this game over the next few years (maybe even many more years down the track); given the performance delta between mid range and enthusiast cards presently, and new cards every year that push further and further - next years entry level cards will be running this game easily at Ultra, and next years phones might be able to do it at 30 frames per second...

For everyone with a setup better than ‘basic’ not having any scope to ‘turn up the effects’ (or at least have what the game has been giving for yonks, until now) is silly.
Ultra settings at 60 fps isn’t an entitlement for everyone with a PC. The devs catering to the lowest common denominator is fine, but to REMOVE what was great and worked, just as hardware catches up with their vision, seems very backwards.

I like the improvements. (Non graphical)
But I am starting to think that most of their quoted ‘number of changes’ is to do with prebaking lighting and removing fidelity.
There is more than one graphical setting. Listening nearly exclusively to whinging ‘little johnnys’ (my apology to non whinging Johnnys/ big Johnnys) and churning a game out for the ‘negative nells’, at the expense of the happy customers who knew that a turn based Strategy RPG game can run at 30 fps, and tune visuals to suit... is silly.
Kids demanding all titles run at ultra and high res and high refresh rate (no doubt with high levels of antialiasing), was a bad bet.


I suppose I have a few days to see what patches come out.. (the present price/offer is good enough to buy into, even for fence sitters perhaps), but I am truly sad I was a ‘day late’ buying the non directors cut (which was my plan, but I missed it).

Many alternating between the version state how fluid and consistant the old game was and how jumpy the new release is. Conclusion by quite a few gamers being that the old game plays better/looks better and by far the ‘better product’.

Like many I thought the Directors Cut was going to be like Sirsofts Wizardry 8. A game worth running even with low frame rates (back in the day) as it was turn based in combat. Wizardry 8 might not be the most graphically fancy game today; but I imagine anyone working on the game, if they had taken design ideals to make the graphics simpler, would realise that ‘for the rest of time’ everyone missed out.

Bards Tales IV time of underperforming was a long time ago. The graphical options allowed a range of computers to dial in what they might attempt, and left scope to return to the game for future playthroughs when acquiring new hardware (something many of us did with the original Crysis, every time we upgraded hardware (and Neverwinter Nights/Morrowind/Oblivion/Witcher 2 etc)).

September has a lot of great RPG rereleases (Ni No Kuni/Dragon Quest IX/Zeldas Awakening all on Switch!!)
Pretty confident Bards Tale will ALWAYS remain a shadow of its’ former self.

Devs? GOG? (Sell me the old version?)

My apols, it was an NVIDIA 1060 performing in ultrawide. (2560x1080=>’Full High Definition’/1920x1080)
Achieving locked 60fps all settings Ultra.
New version runs fine on a calculator given its a turn based combat game (framerate doesn’t help nail headshots)
XBOX users will no doubt be happy they can claim running games that ‘barely worked’ on PC.
ITs kinda why Mickeysoft aquires studios really. I bet the PS4 version runs the same as the XBONE (not giving the 20% higher framerate at 20% higher resolution that most multiplatform games typically show),.
And the XBOX X will be the target for ‘better consoles’, with issues on the PS4 Pro attempting to run at 4K.

It’s worth the investment on M$ part just for bragging rights.
Good for them!! (Sarcasm heavy here)

As for PCs that can eat an XBOX X for breakfast (yes CHIPS for breakfast); will likely have all sorts of issues enforced on them via forced windows and driver updates. Microsoft has done it before and will do it again.

Devs are wondering why the game in the wild has issues different to their machines? Probably a different build of windows; the ones ‘in the wild’ that gamers are using will no doubt be patched to work again a week or two after the console release of the game. And just as the workaround happens, a Direct X input adjustment will break controller input for PC control pads.
These were common tactics for six months plus with Microsofts’ Forza Horizon 3.
It happened so frequently and without fail that it was obviously more than an ‘accident’; rather a ‘happy coincidence’ that had many gamers on the official forums (where PC workarounds to given issues would be removed instantly but never a comment from a dev to be seen) swearing they’d buy an XBOX as it ‘just works’.

Microsoft targets any game that the PC version is potentially better that their console.
If they own the studio?
Gamers lose out!!
inXile; I hope we can have a ‘better’ PC version and that your issues with the present PC build running under direct X can be made to work as intended/where possible ‘as it used to be’.

Perhaps double down on your linux and mac versions so at least some users can be happy, ay?