The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut - Deluxe Edition

As a backer of this in the hopes of a worthy sequel to the outstanding Bard's Tale trilogy I am hugely disapointed. Poor story telling, low quality and boring puzzles that frequently make little sense coupled with an unstable engine and poor graphics. A lot of the design decisions were obviously rushed through without a clear idea of the what the final game would be. If you want a real time game go with the excellent Legends of Grimrock, if you want a turn based game go with the good (but not great) Might and Magic X. You could also purchase The Bard's Tale Trilogy which has been remastered and is excellent and well worth playing. Just avoid this one.

While I have some heard good things about the PC release of the Director's Cut, the current Mac version should be avoided until significant fixes have been implemented. Even though the Mac version was released months after the original PC version (which itself was massively delayed and plagued by technical difficulties), the product is definitly in no way finished or polished. Attempting to run it on an iMac with 4,2 GHz i7 / 32 Gb RAM / Radeon Pro 580 8Gb (incidentally the top of the line model in 2017 - the year this game was originally scheduled to be released) results in a jerky and blurry display, that will occasionally freeze for a few seconds when just turning around. The problem is exacerbated by a large number of NPCs, but even the first glance of a fairly unspectacular city view will bring it to a crawl. This performance remains unchanged, even after switching the graphics from a recommended setting of "High" to "Low" and turning off all effects, such as reflections, motion blur, anti-aliasing, etc. It is very distracting and removes all pleasure from exploring Scara Brae. In the state this game is in and especially if you are running similar or worse hardware, I would highly recommend waiting until the publisher gets around to finishing the product instead of purchasing this obvious work-in-progress.

I've been a long time fan of the series and was really trying to give this game a shot to prove all the reviews wrong. Unfortunately, the reviews are correct. The game is still riddled with bugs, most of which are somewhat forgiveable. The one issue that broke the game for me is the horrible lack of balance in combat... not just class/skill balance but enemy balance is broken too. It's almost as if the devs didn't actually play test the game. I was looking forward to difficult battles,etc like the old games, not having non-tanks instantly one-shotted the moment a fight starts every time...even after farming the max XP available to insure I wasn't just under level. This is one game I can't force myself to see through to the end sadly.

First off: despite all its flaws, I gave the originally released Standard Edition a positive review. because I was intrigued by the gameplay, art style, and music. Sadly, you can't edit GoG reviews. 🤷‍♂️ Problem is that as soon as I left Skara Brae, perfomance (which was never good to start with) became so bad, I had to stop playing (5 fps, not kidding). So, when I realized that I had received the improved Director's Cut version for free, I figured now might be the time to give it another shot. Tweaks and improvements were made, so now it should run better, right? Turns out that was further from the truth than I could've ever imagined. You see, these "optimizations" are so poor, the game still runs like crap. But to make things worse, while the graphics had been kinda pretty, yet overall mediocre at best even in the standard release, inXile have ruined them completely now. The DC version looks like a game from 2001 (and I'm not exaggerating!)! Half-Life 2 for example has far superior facial and character animations, prettier textures, yet >10x as many fps while playing. Seriously, performance is still atrocious, but now the whole game also looks terrible even when you take a screenshot. It's plain ugly, and I feel absolutely zero inclined to continue playing. How is that supposed to be an improvement!? I am aware that my laptop is below the minimum specs (i5 8250U, Geforce MX150), but for comparison: Even at its low 1366x768 resolution, BT4 degenerates to a slideshow (5-20 fps on low/medium settings). On the other hand, I can run Witcher 3 at 45 fps (medium(high settings), Star Wars Fallen Order at 35-40 fps (medium/high settings), and even a PvP-game like Fortnite at 50-60 fps (medium/high settings). I'm using both Jedi FO and Fortnite as reference here, because they're built on the same engine as BT4 (Unreal Engine 4). So the graphics engine is no excuse, on the contrary. What a shame. Never again will I touch this "game", thank you very much, inXile. 💩