Bard's Tale Construction Set: Summary and Rating

       

The Bard's Tale Construction Set

United States

Interplay (developer and publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, 1992 for Amiga

Date Started: 20 November 2017

Date Ended: 25 November 2017

Total Hours: 9

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 155/271 (57%)

   

It turns out that Star Light Festival, the sample scenario accompanying the Bard's Tale Construction Set, is both depressingly unoriginal and horribly imbalanced. It took me more than three hours of grinding in the wine cellar before I made Level 2. Leveling up is free, but with most of my money going to healing, I'm nowhere near having the 2,000 gold necessary to purchase more spells.

Even Level 2 characters can't survive for very long in the wine cellar, but I survived long enough to map most of Level 2, which--like Level 1--turns out to simply use the same map as the beginning dungeon of The Bard's Tale, right down to certain messages on the wall. My enthusiasm for continuing with the scenario took a major blow when I ran into this inscription:

       

This was not cool, Interplay.

      

You'll recall that the "IRKM DESMET DAEM" message in The Bard's Tale is one of the game's most enduring mysteries. No satisfactory anagram or cryptogam seems to work. Speculation is that the developers were just trolling players, but I'm not sure if we've ever had confirmation of that.

In any event, this game changes one letter in the final word, making it "IRKM DESMET DAGM," which just serves to aggravate the issue. Was the original flawed and now they're making a correction? Can we derive meaning from the new version? I note that it makes GAME and GAMES possible in a new anagram. If it was just nonsense in the first place, then why change it? What are they trying to tell us?!

     

Here's another one. This one had a purpose in the first game, but I suspect the developers left it here just because they were lazy.

      

Meanwhile, the Level 2 encounters weren't offering more experience than the Level 1 encounters. They were riskier because the exit was farther away, but not more rewarding. For comparison, I fired up The Bard's Tale. There, an average in-town encounter offered around 100 experience points. When I played it back in 2010, I was able to grind up to Level 7 in a couple of hours, never leaving sight of the temple. In this version, an in-town battle gives an average of maybe 10 experience points.

      

This is a real encounter on the third level of the dungeon.

     

Once you're strong enough to reach the wine cellar in The Bard's Tale, you're earning several hundred experience points per battle; here, you earn maybe 20-30 on average. 

In some ways, the slow pace of character development is of course balanced by reduced monster difficulty. But easier monsters can only take you so far as you get farther from the dungeon entrance. The bard can only play one song per level before he needs a drink. Spellcasters can only cast a few light or "trap zap" spells. It's frustrating to go deep into the dungeon, map only a dozen squares, and then have to retreat for the exit.

Equipment upgrades are also nerfed in this version. I don't know if it's a consequence of the construction set or this specific implementation, but I never seem to find "random" equipment drops post-combat. Instead, certain fixed encounters always produce the same thing. The pack of 4 goblins north of the guild always have crossbow bolts. The fixed encounter just before the Level 2 stairs always produces leather gloves. Random encounters produce gold only. By this time in The Bard's Tale, I had dozens of magic weapons, armor, wands, monster-summoning devices, and other items to help me with tough encounters. In this game, I rejoice when I find a "medium shield" because the store only sells small ones.

     

My hunter's equipment 8 hours after he started doesn't look much different than when he started.

      

Discouraged from the default scenario, I started looking into some of the other games made with the construction set. I should mention that I was either wrong in my last entry when I said it wasn't possible to make your own title screen, or a couple of developers found ways to do it that the game doesn't support. Either way, both games I investigated had their own title screens after the main Bard's Tale Construction Set title.

    

Major points for anyone who can find this location in Sweden.

     

The first was The Bard's Lore: The Warrior and the Dragon (1997) by Swedish developer John H. Wigforss, who followed it up with The Bard's Lore II: The Dark Tower (1998). There are definitely things to like about it. Wigforss took the time to code a bunch of original spells--far more than exist in the default scenario. The town map is efficient and doesn't screw around with a bunch of empty residences; most of the key services are on one street.

       

The"MO" at the end is the first part of the password "MONARCHY."

      

The first goal is to get the password to enter the castle, which is found at the bottoms of four statues in town commemorating fallen heroes. With the password, you can visit the king and get the main quest: rescue the kidnapped queen. First, you have to find the stolen key to get out of the city. The ensuing game takes place over one level of a pub cellar, two levels of a dragon temple, several small wilderness areas, and four final dungeon levels with a lot of secret doors, teleporters, and spinners.

        

I suspect this is the author's own image.

        

Unfortunately, a lot of the game is just juvenile. There are spells that summon Princess Leia, Kalle Anka (the Swedish version of Donald Duck), and Captain Kirk. The author thought it was funny for every chest in the first dungeon to produce nothing but "rat shit." In the town, you can find a door to a brothel that offers a very explicit picture of services rendered (it would not have been allowed in Xentar), and the ultimate reward for winning seems to be a topless picture of the queen.

      

Funny the first dozen times.

      

Ultimately, what deterred me from continuing was the same issue as in Star Light Festival. Although I brought my Level 3 Festival characters to the scenario, it would have taken hours more grinding before I could have survived the rat hordes in the first dungeon.

    

18 rats is a little excessive.

     

The second game I looked at was The Bard's Quest: Dungeons of the Unknown (1994) by Alex Ghadaksaz and "VisionSoft." (It's subtitled The Legend of Isil Thania in the documentation but Dungeons of the Unknown on the title screen.) I want to be careful about accusing anyone of plagiarism, but what I can say is that from all appearances, it certainly looks like Mr. Ghadaksaz simply copied the default Star Light Festival that shipped with the construction set, re-named it, and sold it as shareware. Since you don't have to purchase the Construction Set to play games created with it, it's entirely possible that no one purchasing the game realized that it was plagiarized.

       

This took some guts.

     

Now, I haven't even finished Star Light Festival, let alone The Bard's Quest, so I can't say for sure that they remain identical throughout. What I can say is that the quest given in The Bard's Quest documentation is the same, including the fact that the party is in town to visit the "Star Light Festival." The name of the city is the same. The city map is the same, including all fixed encounters. The first two dungeon levels are the same, including all fixed encounters and messages. The documentation for The Bard's Quest is simply copied from a section of the Construction Set manual. Finally, the directories for both games have all the same file names and sizes.

The documentation for The Bard's Quest promises hint books and copies of two sequels in exchange for the shareware fee. These are given as The Bard's Quest II: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and The Bard's Quest III: Dungeons of Darkness. I haven't been able to find evidence that they were actually produced.

[Ed: Eight months after I posted this, I heard from one of the developers who worked on The Bard's Quest. He claims that while he and his colleagues--who were all aged 12-14 at the time--started with a "Starlight Festival" nucleus but created a full, original game from it. He also says that the two sequels were produced and sold, and that the trio made $12,000 - $14,000 in profit selling nearly 2,000 copies. As for my experience, I'll quote directly: "The one you claim as 'plagiarized' is different from the one that was sold and that was probably due to a mixup when someone downloaded the game from an Internet FTP site that the Tour de Force BBS sysop had uploaded it to, and then unzipped it and decided to upload it to CompuServe but rezipped a new archive instead of the original one from Tour de Force. I can only assume that maybe they were comparing it to the BTCS sample game and zipped the sample game, probably by mistake." I don't fully understand all of this, but I can't imagine that a real plagiarizer would take the time to write about a 27-year-old game to defend his friends' honor, so I accept his account. I asked for permission to post his entire e-mail but never received a response; If I do, I'll put it on my blog somehow.]

Back to the default scenario. Having decided it wasn't worth my time to do the grinding necessary to finish, I hex-edited my characters to higher levels and attributes so I could zip through the first dungeon and identify the fork where the game diverges from The Bard's Tale. Most of the messages on the sewer levels were the same, but when I got to the location where in the first game, I learned the Mad God's name, in Festival, I got a message that said "ROY G BIV." Later, in a place where the original sewers went down to a fourth level, here there was only a message in which a gerbil ran through the room saying "The Runt" had sent him. Even the lower levels of the sewers offered combats no more difficult than the town.

"THE RUNT" ended up being the answer necessary to enter the Obsidian Tower in the northwest corner of the town map. ("Who sent you?") The tower had different foes, including "Bramashavers" and "ytiruces," which is "security" backwards, but they weren't really much harder than the enemies i the sewers, and the number of experience points per combat still hovered below 50. I was looking at more than 80 combats to get to the next character level. The game seem determined to give them to me. Combat in the tower is a lot more frequent than the sewers--literally every step, almost every time I turned, and even if I stood still for more than a few seconds. Clearly, the developers learned nothing from the "grindfest" reputation of their previous games. I soon threw in the towel, but not before I verified that the Obsidian Tower, at least, seemed to use a map not found in the original game.

      

Do you think they were going for "Burmashaver"?

    

Ultimately, because of its limitations with encounters, treasure, and equipment, I suspect it would be impossible to replicate any of the original Bard's Tale games using the construction set. Even if you could get close, you certainly wouldn't improve upon them except perhaps a little in graphics and sound. Thus, even with an excellent plot and better-paced character development, the most a Construction Set game would earn on my GIMLET is the original Bard's Tale score of 37. (Today, that seems a smidgen high. It was the first game I rated with the GIMLET and I tended to be generous early on.) I just ran through my experience of Star Light Festival so far and got a 29, highest in "economy" (5) and "graphics and sound" (5), although the sound effects slow things down so much that most players probably play with it off. It earns the lowest scores in NPCs (1), game world (2), quests (2), and gameplay (2). It's simply too long and grindy and doesn't reward the player with a real plot.

I'm going to wave off the encouragement some of you have made to develop my own adventure. If I'm going to take the time to do that, it will be with a kit I really enjoy, like Stuart Smith's (1984) or the upcoming Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures (1993). 

    

But in an era in which Smith's Adventure Construction Set was seven years old and no one knew FRUA was coming up, The Bard's Tale Construction Set clearly filled a hole. In the July 1992 Dragon, the reviewers gave it 5/5 stars and called it the "finest fantasy role-playing game construction set we've used." In the February 1992 Computer Gaming World, Scorpia was a little more tempered. She covers both its strengths and weaknesses (I mostly echoed her in my last entry), concluding that while it's "definitely rough around the edges and somewhat lacking in polish, it is still a good dungeon editor."

       

The problem is, I don't see myself as "the ultimate gamemaster."

     

I was curious how Amiga magazines rated their version, particularly since turn-based gameplay never seems to interest them. The best review (A-) comes in the July 1993 Amiga World, which praises the ease of the editor but predictably (and, to be fair, accurately) calls tile-based movement and "combats up the wazoo" relics of yesteryear. The April 1993 Amiga Format and the March 1993 Amiga Power both said essentially the same things while offering much lower scores: the kit is good for what it does, but The Bard's Tale is no longer an impressive game.

Of course, you know where I stand. I don't think that games get worse just because time passes. I don't think that an engine can no longer be fun just because new ways of designing engines have come along, any more than I think that Casablanca sucks in comparison to Avatar. My problem is that The Bard's Tale was never a good game in the first place. It was always too grindy, too limited in encounter mechanics, and too boring in plot. A kit based on a mediocre game was never going to produce anything but more mediocre games, which is probably why so few Construction Kit games have been completed and cataloged. The same will not be true of the Gold Box engine, but it will unfortunately be some time before we get there.