CMOT70: The Bard's Tale IV- Director's Cut (XSX Game Pass)
Old School, grid and turn based, dungeon crawler. The graphics are actually really good and the music even better- lots of atmospheric Gaelic songs.
Combat is some of the best in genre, quite different to most turn-based systems in that each character does not get a turn and move to the next. Here it is an action point system for your entire team. You can just keep using the same character until they run out of abilities or swap characters to combine their abilities. Each character can only have four abilities readied at once. So, the combat is actually very tactical as a result of the above points. Most fights are easy to begin with, but the challenge definitely ramps up and requires you to balance your party and their abilities. The level system is also quite different- the skill trees are short, but you need to plan where to go on them carefully to make sure you you're building the abilities you like.
Exploration ends up being disappointing. There is plenty to explore off the path, but the time and effort often needed rarely ever pays off with anything useful. You will spend 15 minutes solving some obnoxious abstract puzzle and get 20 coins for your trouble or some weapon that was obsolete three days ago. I still had to explore fully, because I cannot help myself, but it was a waste of time on most occasions. Everything was hidden behind really repetitive puzzles that really get old.
Have I mentioned the puzzles? Well, they don't just hide secrets and bonus items. In this game they halt your path through the core story, again and again and again. They start off fun and interesting. Soon they became a drag. Then they become boring and tedious. By the end they become totally obnoxious and the game feels like one of those abstract puzzle games. I hate those games. It feels like there are more puzzles than combat. I wasn't expecting this type of gameplay, the type of puzzles I expect in these grid-based games are the old "find the switches on the wall to open the door types. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd prefer the old teleporter mazes and spinners to the puzzles in this game. They are so bad that they would have totally ruined the game, if it wasn't for one thing: I played the Directors Cut, someone must have told the devs that they really hate those puzzles, because they made them all optional! Just go to the menu and select the option to allow skipping of shit puzzles. So, you have three options- spend way too much time figuring the puzzles out, save some time (maybe) by looking up guides or do the sane thing and skip the worst of it.
Even with the ability to skip them, the puzzles still soured the experience for me to a large extent. Everything else was either great or decent. The game could have been a classic though. As it is my favorite modern grid crawler is still Might & Magic X by a long shot.
Bard's Tale IV was the first game I played to completion after joining GOG.com a few years back. As someone who grew up playing the original trilogy when they were released, finding GOG as a place to renew my decades long sabbatical from computer games with the ability to revisit the classics from my youth as well as new installments of those classics hooked me immediately.
I found Bard's Tale IV to feel like the originals while looking like something modern. I know many wouldn't still call this game's graphics completely modern even a few years ago, but when your all time favorite game was Ultima II, it's definitely light years ahead. The only complaint I had with the game was the puzzles being a bit excessive, I agree with your points on them. I didn't mind them as much as you apparently did, but there were definitely times when I was like, ok it's getting a little overboard on these. Otherwise I found it to be a highly entertaining game, especially given my history with the originals, and I'm a little sad Bard's Tale V hasn't followed. I guess someday it could, but in the meantime, I'd recommend the game to anyone who likes CRPGs and hasn't yet given it a try.
