At least in the DOS version, I found one byte in the save file that represents the hunter's critical hit chance and another that represents (in theory) the rogue's thief skill chance. These values (which cap at 255) would be preserved when transferring across games.

There were 2 quirks I noticed:
1. In BT1 DOS, the value would cap at 255. In BT2 DOS, the value would overflow and become small; as a result, after level up, a Hunter's critical rate would eventually decrease drastically. (I note that this seems to happen generally some time in the teens.)
2. These values rise more slowly in BT3. Hence, it is best to level up your Hunter and Rogue in BT1 to around level 13 or so before transferring to BT3, as that will get you better critical/thief skill success rates in BT3.

Perhaps there's an 8-bit/16-bit version difference. I note that there are others, like in BT2, where 8-bit versions treat every attack that hits an enemy as an instant death attack (reliability based off damage dealt), while 16-bit versions track every enemy's health; there's also the fact that Mangar's Mallet (for example) is 200d4 in 8-bit versions, but 1d601+199 in 16-bit versions.

I would be interested in seeing the disassembly discussion. Do you know what versions were discussed, or where I could find the discussions?

Have a poke around here, should find what you need :) https://bardstale.brotherhood.de/talefiles/forum/viewforum.php?f=17&sid=1b73ebe8dbe80090c4d623227562af71

In bt1 8-bit, these values overflowed, and not at some crazy high progression point but by the late teens, so your hunter would go from being decent to terrible again.

Really, I found hunters were pretty useless in the 8-bit versions overall. Stoneblades (yes, I know about the DOS bug) in BT3 made them unnecessary before you really needed them, and they were buggy and unnecessary completely in BT1. In BT2 maybe they could have been good towards the end of the game but other bugs made them miss all the time anyway, and archmages could do all the necessary damage by then.

Regardless, I'm playing a hunter this time to get a little better mechanics coverage. I should probably be trying a rogue but I'm not motivated since I don't expect them to be especially useful.

Ok I reduced the size of the screenshot and I now can show you this esoteric glitch of mine

Any clue?

First thought would be a language code: ES for Espanol. Why it's there on the title screen I don't know, though.

And why the "the" is over the "bard´s tale" ?

Maybe 1366x768 is not enough for the advanced last gen engine? that was my first theory. The fonts collapses if the resolution is not high enough.

but about the "ES" I surrendered and I considered it bizarre.

Really. It does not break gameplay or affects he game inside but I am curious. I want to know What damn it is, considering I am alone with this thing.

Well the dumb part is that of course this is a spanish localized version. Gudadantza is from spain after all.
But I'm sure you got that far. Why it has to be part of the title screen, and busted at that.... no idea.

Sadly:

* This game doesn't seem to do languages as a setting. A separate download?
* The non-english downloads are not available to me in the GOG UI (??)

The only language in game is english. Not spanish localization at all.

Hi all,

Some info:
- We didn't use the AppleII GS version as the basis for the race stats (they were different on different platforms)
- The party attack loophole for allowing you to endless heal was deliberately removed
- The minimap behavior is intended, in dungeons and night time in Skara Brae. We're looking to add in some more user-facing information on this to make it a bit more obvious.
- The garbled main menu for Gudadantza... oops! Should be getting sorted out in the next patch.
- The latin chant isn't half-looping incorrectly - It should do the "do ni ah ee requim..." then displays the message "the is healed" while it does a final "do na.." chant.. Then back to the menu, with the whole process taking about 5 seconds. Currently just a homage to the original Amiga version... but we're discussing this timing because if the homage is annoying then it's... annoying :)
- Statues and several other fights are now deliberately once-only

We're not having any luck in reproducing the infinite songs during combat - we're getting the "has lost his voice" text when you try. Is there any more information you can share on that?

We have various fixes coming soon - it's a little harder to communicate this on GoG than on other platforms - but some of these will include some quality of life fixes for the ranged combat, arrow equipping, etc. There's definitely some more to ranged combat that we can probably do to make it a bit better in BT1, so we're looking in to that.

Cheers!

Hey all. A little background on the Krome remaster...

The remaster is based mostly on the maths generated by Burger Becky (who wrote Bards Tale III).
She originally started the remaster in C++ and had a functional version of BT1 running.

However she was unable to complete the project and we came and took over.
The game was rewritten in Unity from scratch, using the first remaster as reference.
We also cross referenced a lot with the Amiga, C64 and PC versions through emulators.
On top of that we cross references with a lot of information on BTO, and Bards Tale Wiki and various other online sources.

Some data tables (especially the BT2 and BT3 items) were ripped from the Amiga version via the emulator debugger.

After all that, we then homogenized the 3 games to make a consistent experience for players as they go from 1 -> 2 -> 3, so things like the S+6 slots has just become 7 slots throughout, and Archery and some BT2 spells, like Quick Fix have been enabled across all platforms.
And on top of that, we just added some QOL changes to make the game more accessible to new players, while trying not to corrupt any of the spirit (or difficulty) of the originals.

My personal history is just from playing Bards Tale 1 a lot as a teenager on my Amiga. I played BT2 & BT3 but I don't think I got very deep into them.

I backed Bards Tale IV kickstarter and when I saw the remaster stall, I messaged InXile that I would have loved to do the remaster, and to my joy, they were interested.....

My personal vision for the project is to keep the spirit of the 1980s games but accessible to an impatient 2018 audience, and to preserve as much of a nostalgia kick as possible in the process.

If you want the authentic 1985 experience, you really do need to play the original games on emulator (or hardware) with the original sound and pixel art and a lot of graph paper.

That said, we want this version to be the definitive version, so we're doing the legacy mode with lots of options that turn back on things like the original XP grind, the S+6 slot combat, and disabled automap/save anywhere.

Even after ALL that... every platform of the game had subtle differences - the casino only worked on BT2 C64, the ATeam differs in every platform, the character stats have subtle differences between platforms...

Then check the c64 or Apple II. They're consistent. This is weird. There are many exploits in the game, and you remove just this one?
Meanwhile you sacrifice making the interface even more confusing and reduce accuracy. I'd say wrong choice.
But even if you want to make this choice, you didn't do the work to clean up the user experience. I played this on the amiga, and it didn't do that. Maybe some kind of PAL/NTSC bug?
I know this in detail, we used the amiga bard's tale game to produce this sound in high school on dorm and would blast it out into the hallway on a periodic basis.

Maybe your emulator or copy of the game had a bug. There were multiple releases on the Amiga.

It should be noted also that the IIgs lacked this bug. I'm not sure why you'd intentionally chose to keep a platform bug.

While we're discussing it, I'm pretty shocked that you didn't add a Quality of Life feature to skip the 5 seconds. Escape, space, should get out of it. This is a major break in character with the original game and for what? I can't tell you how many times I had to refight a major battle in order to reget an item I accidentally dropped.

This one certainly falls under design choice but it seems your choices are very murky. Roll a level 1 bard. Start a combat. It would be far easier to reproduce if you hadn't removed party combat!
Use a song every round. You'll be permitted to keep using your one song over and over.

After this combat, you will not be able to use more songs.

At least, that's what happened to me repeatedly. Maybe there's another factor.

This was a major error, as the Amiga version had the most problems of the ports. Unfortunate.

Yeah, I think this is a bit of a balance mistake. Healing was precious in Bards' Tale 1, but it's clear you weren't going for that. And yet many of the missteps I'm outlining reduce the difficulty quite drastically. For example, doubling the armor bonus of the bard's songs means I'm not ever getting hit at all at level 9 in the catacombs. I don't even have proper gear from the catacombs nor the lower sewers.

Sure in Bards' Tale you out-armor your foes sooner or later, for better or worse, but here it's shifted forward quite prominently, and that's without the leveling rate changes.

I accept that may be your intention, but you can't just say the out-of-line behavior doesn't miss that intention. Or with Grid Cartographer. This is incorrect. The Apple II version (the original) had working casinos. They were kept in the c64 as well, but not the Amiga, DOS, IIgs, etc versions. The character stats are different on Amiga and DOS which get many many things wrong.

(Note: I haven't yet tried the remaster, so some things, like the cost of Restoration and the behavior of spell casting items, might be different.)

I disagree with this change. That loophole may look scary from a game designer's perspective, but it isn't actually as gamebreaking as it may sound. Specifically:
* The trick is only useful in the early game. Once you get Restoration, the trick is too slow to be worthwhile; you might as well just cast a cheap Restoration spell to heal your party back to full instantly for only 12 SP (BT3 changed it to 25; more on that later).
* The early game is where players need the most help. Being able to heal your party for free (at the cost of real-time) can easily make the game less frustrating in the early stages.
* Even with intra-party combat removed, one can still endless heal; just get your front line's AC low enough so that enemies can't hit you (not hard to do, provided you're not in the later part of the game where you have Restoration anyway).
* Save anywhere adds another infinite heal exploit; just save, use the Pureblade or Staff of Lor, check to see if you still have it, and reload if it broke. (This can also be done with the Harp of Healing, but is far more tedious because it only casts WOHL, which is way too weak to be useful at that point in the game.) (This exploit doesn't apply to BT2 and BT3, because items now have charges instead of a chance to break mechanic. Also, the Pureblade lost its healing ability for some reason; a shame especially since that was the only way Flesh Anew would come into play in BT1, and it won't see use in BT2 as a result.)

To clarify the context of the remaster..

It's worth noting that instant-save-anywhere dramatically reduces the difficulty of the early game, making this less needed. Also the cost of temple-healing is halved and similaly Rosoe's cost is reduced as well. Also the large number of items you find around town means you get a lot more money early on. I'm not sure if you get more gold from fighting too, but I think so.

So it's not really much of a struggle.

I think it does make up to around sewers 4 much less attrition-y to be able to use this trick, but I never did when playing the original and I don't when replaying them now, because of the time investment you mention. This I agree with. This is easy to do still, so the removal just make things more confusing with almost no gameplay benefit. Also I think this "exploit" will be more obvious to new players than the party combat trick.

Of course with the Kilnfest song incorrectly not stacking, the tediousness of both are increased. In the remaster, all items have charges, so there's no "chance of breaking".

One possible issue with this: BT2 QUFI and BT1 WOHL do not mix. QUFI heals 8 HP, while WOHL heals only 2-8 (average 5 HP), yet is more expensive and isn't learned until later. If BT2 QUFI is available, WOHL needs to be boosted in order for the spells to be balanced.

Incidentally, original BT1 and BT2 have a similar issue; Flesh Anew is obsolete as soon as it's available. Why should I spend 12 SP to restore some HP to the party when I can instead spend 12 SP to restore *all* HP to the party? BT3 fixed this by making REST cost 25 SP (still very useful at that cost), and made FLAN a 6th level spell (so it appears before REST) and reduced its cost to 9 SP.

By the way, there are a couple BT3 spells that would be *really* nice to have in earlier games:
* Stone to Flesh (Magician 7): In original BT1, there's no way to cure petrification mid-dungeon; having somebody get petrified would basically mean having to end the expedition right there and go back to a temple. Having this spell available would solve the issue.
* Preclusion (Sorcerer 7): I would likely not find a use for it in BT1, but it would be *really* nice in BT2. In BT2, fights with Herbs (or enemies that summon them) are extremely frustrating, because they appear at a distance (so you can't kill them quickly), and they can cast the Summon Herb spell (so, once you killed some, others would just summon more). This spell, while expensive, would be appreciated as a way to stop the fight from taking forever. (In BT3, Herbs no longer have access to that spell, so fights where they are summoned can now be resolved in a reasonable amount of time.)

You are in a maze of twisty Bard's Tale versions, all different.

Which, of course, means you can now use those fights to endless heal. See what's going on here?

The way I play the game these days, by the time I reach level 4 of the sewers, I already have Apport Arcane and the key to enter Mangar's Tower, so that particular dungeon isn't attrition-y by the time I get there.

(My strategy is actually to take El Cid's Fire Horn, go to the Catacombs, and use it against that group of 33 Skeletons. Can be done at the start of the game (remember to use Trap Zap on the trap in the way!), and gives a lot of money quickly, not to mention some nice equipment for the start of the game. Once I have decent equipment and levels, I have no trouble in the Catacombs and therefore have no reason to go into the Wine Celler until much later.)

It also breaks one of the death snares in BT2. Even if you can't save during the snare (at least that's how the DOS version worked, and I would guess the 2gs version is like this), there's one snare where you have to choose a door based off hints within the snare, and where a wrong choice results in party death. If you save right before, you can just try any door and reload if you made the wrong choice, making it unnecessary to solve the puzzle the intended way.

Good to know that my Fire Horn won't randomly break when I most need it.

(This actually results in an interesting tactical change; in classic BT1, I like to carry extra copies of important breath weapon items just in case; in the remaster, I won't need to carry a backup until the old one is running low on charges.)