Why do people still pay to be beta testers?
And why are people still surprised and angry that games need several patches before they are playable?

Speaking for myself, I backed the bt4/remaster, so I paid for it to exist rather than to test it.

I wouldn't be surprised about bugs in the compiled code. I'm surprised there are *so many* bugs in the re-creation of the game itself. It's like the game was re-created by someone who barely played the originals.

Can we get this back on topic about actual problems that exist or get fixed in the game?

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UI problems:

* The automap does not show that you have visited a stairway when you entered the level via the stairway.
* Simiilarly, the automap does not show that you have visited a square that you have been teleported to.
* The new equip/unequip combat action is kind of bad. Say I have a fighter with Mithril Arrows equipped, but now I see a group of dangerous foes at 40', so I want to switch to Ag's Arrows that I just got. I have to spend a turn unequipping the Mithril Arrows, and then another turn to equip the Ag's Arrows? I have 20 arrows and a bow. Using either group of arrows should take no more time than the other. For some other scenarios this might have marginal utility, but mostly it's a workaround to the incorrect inability to use items that are not currently equipped.

Missed opportunity:

(Faithful to original, but...)

* When you attempt to run away and fail, there is no feedback at all. This was always confusing in the original game. It feels like you must have pressed the wrong keystroke. Solution would of course just be a message about "your attempt to run away fails" or similar. Ideally 3 or 4 messages to randomly cycle among.

Some also reported, that rogues' critical hit stat always remains 0. Was that fixed?

Well, many of those "bugs" are actually you disagreeing with the interpretation in the remasters.
Maybe you should wait for the legacy mode for now ;)

And back on topic for the thread:

UI problems:

* The non-journal based version of Apport Arcane parses the numbers in an unfortunate manner. "1 1 1" is accepted, while "1 1 1 " is not accepted. Nor is " 1 1 1". "267 0 0" is taken as valid input though. "1 1 1" also fails? (That is 1<space<space>1<space>1). "6j 3 3" results in nothing happening with no feedback about whether the input was valid or not, but the spell does not seem to happen

I take it only in the video the bard talks while telling the tell? I haven’t had much of a chance to play the game. Maybe on the plane ride home I will get a chance. Lord knows 4-6 hours in the air sucks if all you can do is sleep. (Yeah I get in on 1:40 in the morning)

I don't believe there are any problems with the introduction.

That said, it's a little ambiguous. Is "The Bard's Tale" the story being related by a bard of your adventures after they complete? Or is it the Bard's Tale because you are sort of expected to have a bard in your party. Or both? Or neither?

It's up to you, but the opening segment is just setting the mood and the overall scenario. He doesn't continue to exist after that.

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Bugs:

* It is possible to get the following message fighting an event golem in Harkyn's 1 "<Your character> attacks the Golem and hits." Hits? .. for.. no damage? what? Not sure if this is special to this encounter. Also "<your character> slashes at a Golem and hits." Reproduced repeatedly on the Golem fights. Also reproroduced fighting the Jabberwock.
* Hot coals health drain is not working. Traversed hot coals hallway 10 times, no hp drain. Will try again later with different buffs. At the time i had just traveller's tune, lesser revelation, and magic compass.
* The hitpoint drain misbehaves differently on Harkyn's 2. In the .. drain area in the slotty corridors just east of the stairs reaching the level, there are dead-ends where the last two squares are hitpoint drain. Stepping on the first drain square does nothing. Stepping on the second drain square (the dead end) drains once. Turning around in place does nothing. Stepping back onto the first drain square does nothing. Very strange bug.
* Testing still more, it seems that the hit point drains are now *very* *very* slow drain effects that are not keyed to player movement, but instead a very slow timer, such that it's rare that it will engage when you are on the square at all. Given how confusing this with, and how experientially this directly conflicts with the signs like "hot coals" etc such that the player is likely to never see the effect, I think this is a design flaw.

UI problems:

* When encountering the crystal sword, the message is simply "There is a crystal sword here". There is no communication to the party that an item has been acquired. In the original game this was not a problem because the sequence was something like: "There is a crystal sword here" -> "<character name> got a crystal sword". In this game, there is no messaging when the party collects an item as a whole, so this sequence becomes very confusing.
* Same as previous, "There are piles of robes here" conveys no information about the party acquiring the robes.
* As mentioned by others, getting a single "robes" from the encounter seems incorrect. The game just described "Piles of robes" and you now have one robe? I haven't tested how the baron's legions react to wearing one "Robes" yet, but even if it works it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would one of your many party members having robes on confuse them? Also it's a little awkward that you fight 6 guards (to presumably get 6 robes) when you can now have 7 party members.
* When the party has a "full inventory" of 40 items, you are prevented from swapping equipment. This is kind of goofy because after you swap the equipment you will not have 40 items, but I suppose the game either just checks for full inventory before considering an unequip, or applies the unequip first.
* Something is wrong with the spell list in the Wizard Spells. Prime Summoning is sorting among the level 2 spells for wizards instead of level 4 where it belongs.

* Robes Update: Having now reached the berserkers encounter, wearing the robes on any single party member appears to have no effect at all. After going to Garth's and buying 6 more Robes, The encounter operates as expected. Thus we can confirm that: a single Robes drop is an incorrect change from the original game.

You guys should have hired jsjrodman.

I could point out that this is technically true of the rather buggy DOS version of Bard's Tale 3 (provided you replace Mangar with Tarjan); it may be possible to complete that version of the game, but it really isn't that fun. So, this statement really isn't saying as much as you think; things like not have the Mage/Conjurer staves not working would certainly make the game less fun for me. (With that said, I would certainly hope that BT1R v1.0 wasn't as buggy as BT3 DOS.)

By the way, I thought of another use for intra-party combat in old versions: It is useful when solo leveling non-spellcasting characters, and the alternative is further hampered by the game not finishing the round when all enemies are dead. The strategy (in classic versions is this):
1. Form a party with the character you want to level and a decent spellcaster.
2. Teleport to the spot you want to use for leveling. In the meantime, casting spells like MYSH can be useful, and you could add a summon if you want (since summons don't take a share of the XP). (Bard songs won't be useful here (unless you're leveling up a bard this way) because they end on the singer's death.)
3. Enter intra-party combat, then intentionally kill the spellcaster so that they don't take a share of the experience.
4. Fight battles with the one survivor, who will get *all* the XP from the fights.
5. When you are done, deathwarp to get out. (Intentionally kill your last character, triggering a game over and a return to the guild; in BT2 or BT3 you'll need to drop any summons you have, and in BT3, if you drop summons after killing your last character, you'll need to enter combat (intra-party combat works here) and try to fight to get the game over.)

Incidentally, a menu option, accessible any time (but not too easily) that causes an instant game over, might be useful, particularly if a player gets lost or stuck somewhere. (Chronomancer dead and no way to revive them, for example.) Making this accessible during a combat round would be a good idea (maybe the party monk has gone insane, has killed the rest of the enemies, but is unable to kill themself, leading to a softlock unless an option of this sort can be used.)

Or more practically, when stuck in a dungeon (teleported into an inaccessible region, then ran out of spellpoints or caster died), you can use this approach to kill your party members to die to get out.

If some of the geme elements (stasis room) get fixed, this will be more relevant.

Yeah, this would be better and more discoverable, especially if the (forthcoming?) documentation mentions why you might want to do it.

Maybe not your point, but I would like to comment that kromeuploads is right. I haven't seen any reports of bugs that prevent players from playing the game.

Likely there were any number of crash bugs during development in a compiled language, at least one like C++; it's a pain you have to go through and I haven't seen any in this release.

That said I'm still underwhelmed. They had a friends & family beta which it seems included a number of people I know who know the game well, but it's plausible they just didn't have the kind of interest in error that I do. I'm glad most people don't, honestly.

Yes, the option would need to be discoverable (and always available, except maybe on the "Sorry, bud!" screen), but would need to not be too easy to pick by accident. In particular, this is one case where a confirmation prompt would be a good idea.

Wizardry 7 had a feature like this, with the rather foreboding name "Terminate Game". It did have a couple issues; one being the lack of a confirmation prompt (so if you click it by accident, bye bye!", and two, it was only accessible after entering commands during combat; in one of the situations in Bard's Tale where it would be most useful (the insane monk who can't kill themself), you don't even get the "Use these commands?" prompt.

(By the way, another feature I thought of that would be nice: The ability to set a character's pronouns independent of sex. It would be nice if I could make a character use they/them pronouns: "Jamie is hit for 76 damage, killing them!". After all, there is a mechanism that allows "it" pronouns to appear (for many monster types), as well as "he/him" and "she/her" pronouns, and Tarjan in Bard's Tale 3 even has Tarjan's own pronoun!)

Avoid the DOS version of Bard's Tale 3, then; there are *so* many errors in that version.

Awkwardness:

* You've imported the high-octane Bard's Tale 2 power-level spell Force Focus, but the Mangar's Mind Blade is still the lower-powered Bard's Tale 1 version. It feels weird. It's not broken for now, because Mind Blade has such utility, is acquired earlier, and foes have small hitpoint totals. When you bring in the Bard's Tale 2 content though, it seems like you'll have to make Mind Blade crazy overpowered for BT1 content, or make it sadly underpowered for BT2 content, or go the confusing route of different Mind Blade powers.

Bugs:
* Something is wrong with the combat system. I know you've redesigned it, a level 16 party is not supposed to miss Mangar Guards 30 times in a row. They're a little evasive sure. I could see missing them entirely for a round. They don't cast buffs that make it harder to hit them or anything.
* When casting a spell in combat, the spell is not cast if the enemies are defeated first. In The Bard's Tale 1, the spells always were cast anyway, which makes sense since this is a decide-actions-before-the-round-starts system. This change is not merely a convenience feature. You can cast a spell to cure an affliction and not notice that it is not cured. You could have another combat start immediately after finishing the first, and have your healing spell cancelled potentially leading to a party wipe.

UI problems:

* When given the riddle "What tavern lies off of xxx street?" You are prevented from consulting the in-game map. When playing the original game, I had mapped the entire town and that's where the information was. In this game, the game is handling the mapping. How would you expect anyone to answer this without reviewing the town map?

According to an earlier post by the devs, this was intentional and not a bug.

Incidentally, this change can interfere with that strategy for solo leveling a non-spellcaster. One alternative to starting intra-party combat would be to have the mage cast Death Strike on themselves during the first fight with the Wights. Unfortunately, with this change the strategy becomes overly turn order dependent; if the non-spellcaster's breath attack goes off before the spellcaster's DEST, the spellcaster's DEST will not go off at all, and the spellcaster will end up taking a share of the experience meant for the non-spellcaster.

Personally, I think that being able to be attacked immedialely after an encounter is obnoxious, especially if you can't run from it, and I would change the game so that that can't happen. (I believe that, in Bard's Tale 3, you can only get attacked when you move or perform actions; that would mitigate this problem significantly.) It's actually one of the issues that modern JRPGs that use visible enemies that move in real time have; sometimes you don't get to recover or get your bearings before the next fight (and one reasong why I prefer the way classic JRPGs handled things, where enemies weren't visible on the map, but you could only get attacked when you take a step).

One thing worth noting, and probably why it doesn't seem to be broken:
BT1 Fire Horn (40-160 damage) > BT2 FOFO (25-100)
Also, BT2 FOFO has only 10' range, and BT2 MIBL > BT2 FOFO (BT2 MIBL has better range and targeting, the same damage, and is actually cheaper).

Also, if the spell is at the same class and level as it is in BT2, you could realistically get the spell first, especially if you have one character rush toward Wizard (learn only level 3 Conjurer and Magician spells, then change to Wizard, skipping Sorcerer). It sounds like you are assuming a more tyipcal class progression, but keep in mind that that's not the only option, considering how easily it is to level up a new spellcaster later on (get low AC and a Dragonwand (or the REDE or FOFO spell) and blast those Wights).