I have to admin it looks very good and I am thinking of buying it. Can anyone compare it to Wizardry 6/7 and tell me differences? I don't know much about BT and from videos I have seen, I did not learn much.

What is the difference in combat?
How does communication with NPCs work?
How about items/equipment?
Environment? - so far I have seen that starter city only

It's actually a lot like Wizardry gameplay-wise. More like Wizardry 1-5, though, than 6+.

There isn't too much communication with NPCs, you can get some hints and explore town, but after that it's a pure dungeon crawler.

Equipment system is almost D&D. I felt the Wizardry games had a larger variety in items, but I haven't gotten so far yet.

Combat: Same general type, but not as many options. In particular, generally the best strategy is to blast enemies with spells, since there can be a lot in one battle (for instance, there's a spot in the second dungeon where you have to fight 66 Skeletons at once, and that is relatively tame compaired to some of the other big encounters). From what I hear, the remaster added a mechanic from later games in the series, where enemies will appear at specific distances from the party, attacks have limited range, and if there are no enemies in melee, you can have your party advance.

NPCs: Don't really exist as an entity in this game. In town, there are some services, like a shop, temples, the Review Board (needed to level up and learn new spell levels), and a place to regain spell points. Aside from that, the only interaction with NPCs that could be said to occur is in scripted events that show an animated picture of a character, display text, and occasionally do things like give you an item, give you yes/no prompts, or trigger an encounter.

Items/equipment: Pretty simple. You have weapons (which you can attack with once you equip them), armor (improves (that is, lowers) AC when equipped, making you harder to hit), musical instruments (which a Bard can equip to play music, there's also the famous Fire Horn that allows a Bard to act like a dragon), and other accessories.

Environment: Only the starter city and 5 dungeons; if you try to leave the town, you reach a gate that you can't past with a message about an eternal winter (IIRC). Later games in the series have more varied environments; 2 has a wilderness and multiple towns, while 3 has alternate dimensions you can eventually teleport to. (3 also has a wilderness; however, there's only one ruined town, and some services are not found (in particular, there are no shops in BT3).)

I am enjoying myself, but I also owned and played the original, alot. The Original was perhaps the first game of it's kind. I could be wrong, as I was only in the 5th grade at the time, but I felt at the the time that it was a huge step forward, and sort of put the concept of a D&D type RPG on the map as far as video games went. I mean, we had played zork prior, which was all text, but along came bard's tale which was just huge.

I can recall being a kid, holed up in my laundry room with a few good friends, one of us at the keyboard, the other serving as cartogropher with a pencil and piece of graph paper, the desk littered with maps, etc.. as we did our level best to beat this really hard game. We eventually broke down and sprung for the guide, which I read from cover to cover, but once we finally managed to get ourselves into Mangar's tower, I remember being overwhelmed with how punishing it was. When we finally beat the game, it was by the skin of our teeth...

Anyways, my two cents... They have done a fantastic job on this remaster. It always was a good game. It isn't going to compare to modern rpg games that much, but I was up to 1am playing it the other night, which has to say something for it.

Not quite, Wizardry 1-3 came beforehand and The Bard's Tale is clearly inspired by them (so much that you could actually important your Wizardry characters into the game in some versions!).

On a sidenote, I never played this game before, but I still like it so far, though I was a bit disappointed that the town consisted mostly of empty houses. If you are expecting something like Realms of Arkania where every second house has some NPC talking to you, then you'll probably be disappointed.

Still as a pure dungeon crawler, it is quite enjoyable. Basically Wizardry 3.5.

The remaster seems really good because I usually can't play old games anymore because the controls are so horrible and unintuitive that selling just a single item takes me a minute, but in this remaster everything feels smooth and there are even tooltips when hovering over various things. I never had to wonder how to do something because it's so intuitive.

My only criticism is that you can't switch characters when you're in the spell selection (switching to another spellcaster to check his list) and that you can't undo a battle command for a single character (need to input a command for ALL characters first and then cancel and redo all).

One thing I forgot that distinguishes the game from games like Wizardry:

You can get what the game calls "special party members". Sometimes, in a dungeon, a monster will ask to join your party, and if you let it, you get a new party member. Also, you can get special party members by casting certain spells; some Conjurer and Wizard spells summon monster, while Sorcerers get spells to summon illusions, including one of a fire-breathing dragon that can roast your enemies (very powerful in BT1, not so good in BT2 and 3, but at least the spell was lowered a couple levels to compensate).

Unlike the summons found in Wizardry 5-8, when you summon a creature in a Bard's Tale game, the summon will stick around; in (original) BT1, the summon lasts until killed (or disbelieved) and can't be saved, while in BT2 and BT3 they can be saved to the roster and will stick around even if killed (but not if disbelieved).

Of course, enemies can use summons; there's one particularly annoying monster in BT2 that can summon more copies of itself, leading to battles that are often unreasonably long.

It sort of fits with the theme of everwinter. The town is mostly abandoned, infested with monsters, and locked in a state of forever winter cutting it off from outside help and escape. Those who would stand against it... gather at the adventurers guild I guess. Heck, in days past, been known to have a few hundred adventurers packed into that little tavern that does not even serve ale.