Experience the events that led to The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep and The Mage's Tale! The Bard's Tale Trilogy is a remastering of the classic 1980's series, one of the godfathers of the RPG genre. Create an adventuring party in the first volume and play it across all three, creating a heroic story...
Experience the events that led to The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep and The Mage's Tale! The Bard's Tale Trilogy is a remastering of the classic 1980's series, one of the godfathers of the RPG genre. Create an adventuring party in the first volume and play it across all three, creating a heroic story all your own!
The Bard's Tale Trilogy contains remastered versions of all three classic games: The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown, The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight, and The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate! Rescue a city trapped by a wizard, reforge the legendary Destiny Wand, and travel across time and space to confront a Mad God! Enjoy a uniform playing experience across all three titles without the need for emulation or compatibility concerns. For the first time, play as male or female across all three games! Also includes other quality of life changes such as automapping for all three games, spell access, and updated equipment/inventory management. Go old school with Legacy Mode, a suite of features which will allow veteran players to experience the games similarly to how they first played them, and will be released free of charge for owners when complete.
The Bard's Tale Trilogy is a chance for old fans to be young once again and for a new generation of roleplaying and dungeon crawler fans to discover why these games matter so much all these years later. Pick up the game and start your epic adventure today!
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When this first came out on the Commodore64, this was my favorite game. I never went back to revisit it due to the originals poor graphics, and the pain in the balls to map every square on graph paper. This new upgrade fixes all the old problems while keeping the charm and storytelling of the original.
Based on first game in the trilogy:
Positive: The remastering is good. Cheerful, cartoony graphics, excellent automap and ingenious minimap (you can toggle on or off), in-game manual, customisation options.
Negative: Engine mimics original game, even when not in legacy mode, so you mostly only have one option - step forward, and you can go from one random encounter straight to another before you even move. Of course, you can't see the enemies coming, it's that old school.
You also can't camp or rest or regain health or magic by praying at altars or whatever in the dungeons (as far as I've ever got), so you have to keep running (or rather fighting you way) back to the start, about four times every game world day.
It's also boring that I got to level 8 or 9 and all my non-mages were no better equipped than they were at the start. The mages get plenty of new spells, so the game feels really unbalanced between magic and the rest.
Worst of all is the primitive level-up system which means you will often get a really bad dice roll, like a tank fighter getting plus one - yes, one - HP out of a possible 15. Try playing a level 50 paladin with 60 HP or so HPs - if you accept the dice rolls, you could do. So you inevitably end up scumming the level-ups - save and reload for every character in your party, every level, until you get at least a reasonable dice roll.
The game always felt like a hard slog and I never lasted long with it, even in the 1980s. Now I can only play it for half an hour at a time, with the thought in the back of my mind, I wish there were some mods for it.