The Bard's Tale III: Swan Song

He's going to make me play Bard's Tale III...forever. (Screenshot courtesy of YouTube user girldrinkdrunk1.)

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate

United States

Interplay (developer), Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released 1988 for Apple II and Commodore 64; 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga; 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 1 February 2011
Date Ended: 4 March 2012

Total Hours: 42 (not completed)
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Game #368: 240/368 (65%)

          

I'm departing from this game just as it admittedly started to get more tolerable. Thanks to ronaldsf's comment pointing me to the right patch, I finally had a version where I could type in spell names. This made a huge difference. I should mention that the patch brought some problems, though, including text appearing in the wrong locations.

The second dimension, Gelidia, was shaping up to be a little more interesting. Inside a ramshackle outpost, long-abandoned, I found a journal, written by someone named Alendar, that detailed the fall of the realm via some kind of invasion. The invasion apparently succeeded because their hero, Hawkslayer (my NPC from Arboria) was absent, and their god, Lanatir, was killed in the first wave of attacks. The journal mentions that Lanatir's sphere and wand (which I was sent here to find) are safe in his tomb behind a series of wards. Alendar died after using all his energies to cast a freezing spell over Gelidia to destroy the invading horde.

This isn't the first example of a expository journal entry in a CRPG, but I can't honestly remember where the first one did appear. They're a bit of a trope. The Elder Scrolls is famous for them, even when they barely make sense (e.g., a paper journal having survived 1000 years in a damp tomb). It adds a new dimension to The Bard's Tale III by actually instilling the land with a bit of lore.

Things got even better after that. The world's one dungeon, the Ice Keep, featured a series of warded doors with strange messages on them:

I wasn't sure what to do with them, so I mapped the keep, including an entire level that had not a single message or special encounter--I walked around it twice, just to be sure--before I realized the solution was in the journal:

The solution was to cast a series of spells against the warded doors. After some trial and error, I figured out that "bright light" referred to the "mage flame" spell; "loud thunder" resolved as "shock sphere" (that one took a long time); "whispered terror term" was "fear"; and "flaming guide" was "summon fire elemental." Finally, the note to "join the wall" was a hint to cast "spell bind" on it.

Unfortunately, by the time I was done with all the trial and error, my spell points were so low that I had to go outside and wait around for hours while they recharged. It literally took all day. I left the computer running while I went about my business, and when I returned about 6 hours later, the spell points were almost back to maximum. This is not a game that rewards experimentation.

With my spell point arsenal available again, I re-entered the tower, went through the opened portal, and explored four levels of a "black tower"--running away from almost every combat--before I finally encountered the dungeon's bad guys, a pack of wizards. They proved difficult enough that I had to blast away with my MAMA spell to defeat them, cast HEAL once, and turn a bunch of stoned characters back to flesh. By the time I made it out with a "black lens," my spell points were nearly exhausted again, and that's when I decided to call it a game. I honestly don't know if I'm missing something, but there doesn't seem to be any way to buy spell points, nor any faster way to recharge. The plot points in Gelidia were interesting, but only in comparison to what the game had offered so far, which was essentially nothing at all.

Like many games on my list, The Bard's Tale III might have been reasonably fun to play, map, and win when I was 15, didn't have any other responsibilities, and only bought one game every three or four months. It isn't addictive enough for modern gamers. Despite an interesting premise, the worlds are too empty, the gameplay too long, the mapping too unrewarding. I've quit a lot of games because of bad interfaces, or absurd difficulty, or inadequate documentation; this is one of the few that I've quit because I was just bored.

I admit to having some interest in the dimension where you travel to various cities on Earth, but that's the sixth world, so I wasn't willing to stick it out. Scorpia (whose review I reference below) barely makes any note of it, so I'm guessing it's not as interesting as it sounds.

Understanding that I can only rate the part of the game I played, let's see how it stacks up:

1. Game World. The premise of the series hasn't changed since the first game. In The Bard's Tale, you faced an evil wizard; in The Bard's Tale II, you faced a tougher evil wizard; in The Bard's Tale III, you face an evil god. In all three, these characters just sort-of exist; they're not explained in the context of any larger pantheon, and you don't really get anything about the history of the world or its people. In this game, you travel to different dimensions, but it's a little unclear why, how they're linked, or really how they're different from the dimension you start in (except for one case in which you visit Earth). The monsters and characters are just random names. The outdoor maps are extremely small--laughably so, given that they double back on themselves, and there isn't enough stuff in them to register any changes to your quest or progress. I was a little intrigued by some of the lore in the other dimensions, and I wanted to see what would happen with Hawkslayer, but it wasn't enough. If the game had rewarded my progress with the restoration of Roscoe's Energy Emporium, I might have stuck around a bit longer. Score: 4.
 

The only background info you get on this game.

 
2. Character Creation and Development. The creation process is no better or worse than the average CRPG of the era. You select a race, class, sex, and name. I give the game some credit for some interesting classes, and for featuring more classes, and with different strengths and weaknesses, than you have the ability to accommodate. The races and attributes are essentially the standard D&D set. My biggest problem, as I've discussed, is that leveling is unrewarding. You're expected to bring in characters from The Bard's Tale II who are already at around Level 30-40, and if you don't have them, there's a starter dungeon to get you there. At that point, you have all your abilities and spells and there's nowhere else to develop except to add a few more hit points and spell points to your pool. Like most CRPGs of the era, the encounters don't differ based on race or class, although apparently you do need a thief at some point in the game to sneak up and backstab a guy who's immune to spells and stays out of melee range.

This is a sign of a broken character-development system.

I'm going to give an extra point for something that I didn't actually experience in the game: the option to change fighters to the "geomancer" class, which doesn't come up until the fourth dimension. Doing so allows you to keep using the same weapons and armor, but you lose all your special attacks and, for bards, bard songs. The spells in this class seem almost worth the effort, including the ability to "trap zap" an entire dungeon level, an alert for anti-magic zones, and lots of mass-damage spells. I suspect I would have transferred my paladin or bard. Score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. This hasn't changed since the previous two games. There are no true "NPCs," just occasional encounters with people in their respective squares, to whom you can say, at best, yes or no. There are a few wandering NPCs, like Hawkslayer, who join your party, but with no lore or dialogue attached to them. Score: 2.

Someone clue me in as to what he was all about.

4. Encounters and Foes. This game's downfall is its banal, featureless encounters with a slew of unmemorable monster portraits. Thank the gods for mass damage spells. In the unpatched version, at least, there are far, far too many encounters, although you can run away from a lot of them. There are inventory puzzles in the various dimensions that add a little depth to the game, but for most of it, I was cringing with every turn or step, hoping I could just finish mapping this #*&$(ing corridor already! I usually regard random encounters, opportunities for grinding, and re-spawning as good things, but this game taught me the value of moderation.

Two hobgoblins. You have to admire their spunk.

I wish the developers had learned a lesson from the Might & Magic series, in which every third or fourth square featured some kind of message or context-sensitive encounter, or Pool of Radiance, where at least four or five times per map, you got some kind of role-playing option. I mean, what kind of a world is this in which packs of 98 monsters are just roaming the countryside together? Where do they even live? How do they feed themselves? Score: 3.

5. Magic and Combat. A character who has progressed through all mage classes, including archmage, has access to 80 spells. Between these, the various combat options--including rogue sneaking/backstabbing--and the various items you can find and use, combat ought to be very tactical, and there were times at the beginning when it was. Spell points were so precious and death so imminent that I carefully studied the spell book and tried to identify the best spell for each foe. It was a joy and relief when I defeated Brilhasti. After that, when I got 20 levels all at once, the game suddenly became far too easy, and every combat was a bore, except for the boss-level fights. These left my spellcasters so drained that I had to stand around in the sunshine for hours (real hours, not game hours) to get them back again. Score: 4.

 

6. Equipment. I have to give it points for variety, but this is one of those games that doesn't tell you jack about the stuff you find. You can guess that adamantium plate is better than mithril plate based on your armor class, but there's nothing to tell you whether Kael's Axe does more damage than the Dayblade (except, I guess, to meticulously record and average your damage scores). Part of this is supposed to be fun, I guess; most of the items you find have some sort of magic property attached to them, and through trial and error you can figure out what they do. With the right items, any character can cast mage spells. In practice, I find that there's far too much stuff to keep straight and much of it was under-powered. After a certain level, damage was so overwhelmingly based on character attributes, I don't think it would have mattered if they'd all had daggers. Again, I wish the creators had looked to Might & Magic, which had the same variety of equipment but allowed you to pay people to tell you stuff about it. This game doesn't even offer a shop. Score: 5.

My chronomancer and the only two harmonic gems that I found in the entire game.

7. Economy. You collect millions of gold pieces and have nothing to spend it on beyond spells (which you buy up quite quickly) and healing. The lack of Roscoe's Energy Emporium and Garth's equipment shop did not improve this game. Would it have killed the developers to let me buy harmonic gems? In the beginning stages, coin is precious because of healing, but pretty soon you have spells that will resurrect all your characters and cure them of all conditions in one casting. Score: 3.

8. Quests. The main quest is the standard slay-the-evil-wizard type, but the sub-quests associated with each world are, if not quite "fun," at least interesting. The game would be a lot better if you were allowed to visit the seven worlds in any order, instead of marching through them in lockstep. There are no side-quests and, as far as I can tell, no opportunities for role-playing in the main quest. Score: 3.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. Most of the problems I experienced here are probably platform problems, but that's what I have to judge. The graphics are adequate enough, but the sound is horrible and I kept it turned off. The automap seems like a nice feature, but it was broken, frequently not mapping squares I'd stepped on, and it resets every level.

Most egregious is the repetitive melodies in the bard songs, which loop every 20 seconds and drive you crazy, but leaving the sound on is the only way to tell that they're still playing. The navigation and combat controls were fine, but the method of selecting spells is so awful that I can't believe no one stopped the game from being released like this. Imagine having to scroll through 80 spells, not listed in alphabetical order, every time you want to cast something. Although the patch fixed this problem, I have to grade it on the original, and I'm taking away all its interface points for that horrible design choice. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. Linear, repetitive, non-replayable, too difficult at the beginning and too easy after that, and far, far too long. There is really nothing that I liked in this category. I can't give it a 0--the only 0 I've given was for Braminar, which featured literally no gameplay--but I really can't see offering anything more than a score of 1 here.

Final Rating: 33. This puts it 3 points lower than II and 4 points lower than I, keeping with my belief that the series got worse as it progressed. The developments the story and dimensions was offset by repetitiveness and boredom.

If it's killing you not knowing how it ended, here's the last of a nine-part YouTube series by user girldrinkdrunk1:
 

Like me, she played the DOS version. The video is an hour, with no sound (it's not a "let's play"), and it's mostly repetitive combat. Her characters, oddly, seem to be lower levels than mine; she must have used a walkthrough and avoided most of the mapping and level-grinding. But she has two archmages, which probably helped a bit with the spell point issue. The final battle with Tarjan starts at 45:45, and it clearly shows way overpowered characters fighting way overpowered monsters; her strategy (which is no doubt the correct strategy) is to use alternate mass damage and mass heal spells and slowly wear down the monsters before her spell points and harmonic gems run out. Meanwhile, she's having her thief hide in shadows and slowly sneak up on Tarjan; the titular thief does his one job at 51:44 and kills the mad god, but she's still got to contend with 25 rock demons one-by-one (they're immune to the mass-damage spells) before she wins the battle at 54:23. Her party ascends into heaven, is congratulated by some benevolent god, and is rewarded with godhood for themselves.

White text on an aqua background. Nice design choice.

 

The color choices make this section miserable to read, but it's a fairly good ending. If I'd played all the way through, I would have felt suitably rewarded. I'll reprint it here (punctuation errors and all) so you don't have to strain your eyes:

"Welcome, brave heroes. You have succeeded in destroying the threat to all reality. As you know, to do this, you slipped the bonds of time, and traveled forbidden routes through that which has forever been. You pressed your struggle forward despite danger and death, and you accomplished that which the gods themselves were unable to do."

His praise washes over you like a warm ocean wave, and you feel your strength infuse your body.

"In doing what you have done, you have proved yourself worthy of nothing less than the ultimate reward." He closes his eyes and raises his hands. "The death of the gods tore reality asunder, but you bound it up again. The gods of old are dead, therefore I accept you as my new children. You shall be gods yourselves."

His eyes open again and you look upon infinity. At once you see Skara Brae restored to its former beauty. You see beyond it and the Six Cities of the Plains. You see the whole world and each of its cultures, and you realize all of it is now your domain.

"And so it came to pass that the new stars burned in the night sky. The least of these, the Companion star, was named Hawkslayer after a hero of legend. The other seven, together known as the Company of Heroes, are each named for one of the New Gods. Each night they can be seen is betokened a good night, and adventurers know these gods smile especially upon them..." --excerpt from The Gospel of the New Gods (Chap. I, Verses 5-9).

Oddly, though, the game then sends these new "gods" back to the refugee camp in the unrestored Skara Brae.
 
Turning to Scorpia's June 1988 Computer Gaming World review, I'm surprised to see that some platforms allowed you to import characters from Ultima III, Ultima IV, or Wizardry. It's a cute feature, but how do we explain these worlds existing in the same universe? Moreover, what does importing your Ultima IV character actually do, since the classes, levels, magic systems, and hit point scales are all different?

Scorpia's assessment is fairly similar to mine, though she ranks it "better" than the previous two games, if still "too heavily oriented towards mega-combat" (p. 52). She notes how boring the dungeons are, and how pointless the spinners and dark zones are, especially given the automap function (p. 21). She says that Tarjan himself is quite easy. I was gratified to read her final assessment on the magic:

These spells make your party incredibly powerful. Except when facing opponents that are highly spell-resistant or have huge amounts of hit points, your characters can often blow away herds of monsters in a single round, with just a couple of spells. The power balance is thus very much weighted in the party's favor, making the majority of encounters fairly routine and not very exciting (p. 52).

So there you have it: a game that's eminently winnable, but would take poor time management skills to actually win. Like The Dukes of Hazzard, Lloyd Alexander novels, and the musical stylings of Duran Duran, this game is better experienced in memory than in actuality.

The Bard's Tale III: The Age of Aggression is Just About Done

The guy was dead literally four seconds later.

I can't believe how many comments I got on my last Bard's Tale III posting. I really starved you for those five weeks, didn't I? The last week has been rough, work-wise, so while I struggled to find time to play the game, I read your comments and tried to figure out what to do. Most of you wanted me to get on with it, but some of you offered cogent arguments for staying. I was particularly intrigued by bobturkey's comment that there's a World War II-themed world, and I appreciated Stephen Tanner's reminder that Sir Robin's Song eliminates a lot of the random combats. Then Killahead came along with a link to a thread on The Adventurer's Guild that not only explains the programming behind the random combats, but also offers a patch to reduce them and fix some other errors, like enemies not using their special attacks (or, in some cases, attacking at all).

I'm pretty sure he's referring to stuff that happens in a different world. These bartenders get around.

I downloaded the patch (created by a user named "drifting") and I can't say I noticed a huge difference, although I wasn't keeping track of the various monsters' special attacks in the first place. It sounds like most of the high-random-combat squares were in the starter dungeon.

Uh-huh.

I resolved to finish at least Arboria. I opened up my mapping file and was surprised that I'd already mapped much of it. I don't remember getting as far as I did, but then again, it was over a year ago. I do vaguely remember hitting a lot of places that I could not get past because I lacked some crucial item, and a foe (Tslotha, it turns out) who kept coming back to life. The key was doing everything in the right order. I had to collect an acorn from the outside area and the "water of life" from the palace beneath the lake.

It took me forever to figure out I needed to use a wineskin to "collect" the water.

Planting and watering the acorn allowed me to get through a portal in Valarian's Tower, where I found a weapon called the Nightspear. The Nightspear was needed to trap Tslotha's soul so he wouldn't come back to life.

See if you can figure out which part of this message nearly made me rage-quit.

Returning Tslotha's head to the king allowed me access to the Sacred Grove...

 

 
...where Tslotha's heart and the water of life, placed in the cavity of the dead Valarian's chest, allowed...I don't know...somehow allowed me access to a part of the dungeon where I--at last--collected Valarian's Bow.

 

Returning it to the guild master in Skara Brae, I was awarded 600,000 experience points and given a new quest to retrieve Lanatir--or at least his gear--from the realm of Gelidia.

"Actually, it would probably be easier if you just killed him and took his stuff."

After finishing the level, I reloaded a backup and played parts of it again so I could make the following video, which illustrates some key aspects of gameplay. The pauses are me consulting my maps, but for the most part, it's quick because I'm able to teleport to most of the places I need to go.

Some highlights from the video:

• 00:00: Start off in a tavern. Note how the animation makes it look like the bartender is repeatedly spitting into the patron's glass. It takes Essyltt a while to order a drink because I forgot to give her any money. Earlier in the game, the bard needed to keep drinking to replenish her songs, but somewhere along the way, she found something called the Bardsword which makes that unnecessary. So I basically just wasted a minute for nothing.
• 01:16: My characters are nearly at max health, but I figure I'll heal them anyway. A few seconds later, I lose patience with pointing and clicking, and throughout the rest of the video I'm using the keyboard.
• 01:58: Note the unfortunate gesture the king is making with his staff.
• 02:31: An easy combat begins. I could run, but I want to illustrate some combat things.
• 02:43: Notice the difference in attack damage between my monk and my bard! The bard is fairly worthless except for "Sir Robin's Song."
• 03:35: Boy, that tower sure looks high.
• 04:27: Another combat. Mabon the Mad pulls out all the stops and casts Mangar's Mallet (while shouting, "Run home and cry to MAMA!"), which does 200-800 points of damage on every foe but costs 80 spell points. It's one of a few fairly overpowered spells. I've been complaining that spell points take so long to recharge, but perhaps that's deliberate. Perhaps the creators wanted your pool of spells to last through basically one world, with a little recharging or harmonic gems in emergencies. My guess is it would definitely be worth having a third spellcaster, especially since Escorducarla, as a chronomancer, doesn't have nearly as good mass effect spells.
• 05:32: The game forces me to pick up some armor that I don't want, so I have to immediately go and drop it.
• 05:54: In preparation for entering the tower, Mabon the Mad casts the "Batch Spell," which simultaneously casts light, compass, protection, wizard eye, and levitation. One of the better inventions of the game.
• 06:35: I teleport to the place on my map that I want to go.
• 07:00: For some reason, planting an acorn in a dungeon floor accomplishes something.
• 07:40: I "trap zap" a trap ahead of me, but frankly I get the message so often that it's a waste of time to keep doing it.
• 08:01: Watch the compass. I run into a spinner. It takes me a few seconds to figure out where I'm going.
• 08:18: Every first-person tile-based game of the era features "zones of darkness." These serve no purpose but to making mapping a pain in the neck and waste spell points.
• 08:31: Forgot to have Sir Robin's Tune going. This allows me to "(R)un" from unwanted encounters with near-100% success. I haven't been having much trouble so far, but just in case...
• 09:13: I find my objective.
• 09:40: Yes, I'm looking at my map and counting squares. Moments later, I exit. Time to hang out in the sun and recharge my spell points!

At some point, leveling became meaningless. I stopped by the Wizard's Guild every once in a while and got a level or two, but all I'm getting at this point are more hit points and spell points on top of an already-staggering total. When games get to this point, it's time for them to be over. Usually it happens late in the game. When I was playing Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal and started thinking, "Ho hum. I guess I'll take another improved whirlwind attack," it was fortunately close to the last battle. In this case, it's relatively close to the beginning of the game. I know it seems like I've been playing for a long time, but all I've really done is complete the optional starter dungeon and the first of seven worlds.

When you have to start mentally putting commas in the experience point figure, your characters are perhaps a bit over-leveled.

Although each of the four dungeons featured only one or two key locations (the rest was just mindless mapping), the levels at least had the virtue of being small, and thankfully the developers didn't restrict the use of APAR (teleport) at key locations like most games do.

I confess that when I started this posting, I had intended to include a GIMLET in it, but it ended up being longer than I anticipated. I hated the game a little less during this play session--mostly because I took the time to re-read and note the spells, which make combat a lot faster--but probably not enough to keep this up through six more worlds. I'll explore Gelidia a bit as I gather the screenshots for my GIMLET, but I really think the next posting will be the last.

The Bard's Tale III: Don't Make Me Do This. Please.

"We drink to our youth, to days come and gone..."

Holy... I last played Bard's Tale III more than a year ago?! I've been working on 1988 games since last January?! If I had realized this a week ago, I probably wouldn't have restarted my blog. I'd have given up in despair. I realize that the odds of me ever catching up in time with current CRPGs is extremely small, but it's absolutely impossible if I take more than a year to cover a year's worth of games.

I already didn't want to play The Bard's Tale III again, but now I don't want to play even more. You can go read my postings on the game from--Jesus Christ--last February if you want (the last one is comically titled "brief break"), but to summarize my dislikes:

• Characters come into the game far too high, possessing all of the available spells. There is really no room to develop throughout 90% of the game.

• The game involves endless combat, with random encounters appearing even as you stand in a square and turn. With the number of monsters, the distances, and no "quick combat" option, combat takes forever. By the time it's over, you've forgotten what you were doing before you went in, so you take a couple of turns to orient yourself, and you're back in combat again. Even with liberal use of the "Run Away" command, you find yourself in six times as many combats, each lasting four times as long, as Wizardry or Might & Magic.

This is a game where you find yourself saying, "Oh, for #*&$'s sake" quite frequently.

• You're forced to pick up useless equipment and then discard it.

• Spell points regenerate only outdoors, at a rate so slow that it literally takes an hour in real time. There is no "energy emporium" where you can pay to get spell points regenerated, as in previous games, and the "harmonic gems" that regenerate all of them are precious and rare. (At least, in this DOS version; some commenters reported they were more frequent in other versions.)

• To cast a spell, you have to select it from a very long list of four-letter codes, which are not alphabetized, instead of being able to just type it in yourself.

I know I saw it in here somewhere...

 

• Enemy magic users have a habit of summoning creatures every round, needlessly prolonging combat until you can get close enough to kill them.

Oh, yes, please let's keep this going indefinitely.

• Multiple monsters use the same portraits and it's very hard to keep straight those that do no damage from those that do horrific damage.

• The dungeons are full of annoying things like spinners, squares of darkness, and magic-draining zones that add nothing to the gameplay and just make things hard for no reason. There is otherwise hardly anything in the dungeons, so you end up spending a lot of time plodding along and mapping for nothing.

• You can't tell if a bard song is playing unless you have the volume on, in which case the same 10-second melody loops over and over and over.

• The game just sucks.

But last year, when I was saying this, you were all like, "Noooo, CRPG Addict! It gets so much better after you start traveling to other worlds! We promise! Bard's Tale III is a classic!" so I declined to just do a GIMLET and delete the stupid thing from my hard drive. Why did I let that happen? You don't tell me what a good game is; I tell you. Did you invent the GIMLET? No, I didn't think so.

Fine. I'll give the game one world to prove that it's not just one big suck-fest, and then it's on to BattleTech.

I remember that after the "brief break" posting on February 6, 2011, I spent a lot of time level-grinding by just randomly spinning in place in some dungeon, fighting random encounters, while I...well, it would take too long to explain, but suffice to say I had a week's worth of work where I had to wait for my computer to process batches of hundreds of thousands of data records, and I couldn't do anything intensive on it while it was processing. DOSBox, fortunately, doesn't take up a lot of the CPU's attention. Most of my characters rose about 10 levels during that week. Either because of that or the 20 levels that the character's rose after the first dungeon (see my rant about that here), I'm not finding most of the combats terribly difficult, just long and annoying.

For reasons I don't quite remember, my characters are in a realm called Arboria, trying to collect a magic bow and arrows from someone named Valarian. I ran into a character name Hawkslayer, who is now at the head of my party, and some total spaz of a king wants me to kill someone named Tslotha.

Or maybe "Tslotha's Head" is some kind of artifact. Whatever. The developers aren't so good with the punctuation, either.

From some hermit, I bought a spell that will make me grow gills and explore the bottom of a nearby lake where there's some kind of palace.

Hey! You look just like every other old man in the game!

And there was a tree with acorns on it nearby:

And...yeah. I've got nothing else to tell you. I'm not sure how all of these things fit together. Right now, I'm in the midst of mapping a place called Valarian's Tower. There are at least two other dungeons in the area of I don't know how many levels, and the thought of mapping them all fills me with such revulsion that I honestly think I may get drunk before playing any more of this game. You have to map, though, because the game depends so much on special encounters in non-obvious squares that to miss a single square might screw up the entire game. (To be fair, this is true of every first-person, tile-based game of the era; it just somehow annoys me more here.)

This is a perfect description of the CRPG Addict's living room.

The basic problem with The Bard's Tale series is this: by the end of the first game, your characters were already developed as much as they were going to develop. Oh, sure, there's a "chronomancer" class in this game that has a different set of spells, but they don't add much of anything to the game and you can max out your spell levels in about half an hour of gameplay. So after spending a relatively short and non-torturous game getting from level 1 to 15 or 20, you get to spend two more games of twice the duration getting from level 20 to...I don't know...probably 100 or so, but you don't really gain anything from these level increases except more hit points and spell points. This is why most other series (Ultima, Might & Magic, Wizardry) have you start over at Level 1 or, at most, allow you to continue your level progression through two games. If The Bard's Tale III had me start over at level 1, with level 1 foes, I wouldn't have complained for a second. As it is, with characters so over-powered, the game has no choice but to throw hordes of over-powered monsters at me.

I know I'm going to get a lot of comments urging me to just drop it if I hate it that much, so I'm more interested in hearing from people who see some value in this game. For god's sake, what do you like about it?

Bard's Tale III: Brief Break

Switching to the chronomancer class.

Yikes! I take two days off and I have something like 50 postings to reply to. I'll work on that a bit this afternoon.

I am going to keep going with The Bard's Tale III, based partly on your comments that it improves, and partly because my win/give-up ratio hasn't been looking so good lately. But unfortunately, I'm spending the week in Kansas City and I forgot to copy the save game from my old laptop to my new one (which I have with me) before I left. So to the extent that I get any playing time this week, my next post will be on BattleTech. I'll resume with BT3 next weekend.

In the meantime, anyone know who this guy is? Was he in The Bard's Tale II? I encountered him when I stepped into Arboria, the first alternate dimension.


 
Later edit: The "brief break" ultimately stretched on so long that I forgot what I was even doing in the game. I've kicked Bard's Tale III lower on the 1988 list and I'll basically start over with it after I get through 8 or 10 other games.

Much later edit: It was over a year before I got back to it. Here is the next posting.

Bard's Tale III: More Complaints, Mostly

A harmonic gem at last!

The last two days have been full of complete bull$%&*.

Yesterday I timed it. With the bard song "The Rhyme of Duotime" playing, spell points regenerate at a rate of two every 30 seconds. My characters had around 160 spell points then, so if they came out of a dungeon needing to regenerate 140 of them, that took 35 minutes. But there are other complications because "The Rhyme of Duotime" only lasts about three minutes, meaning I'd have to keep resetting it, which defeats the purpose of doing other things while I wait. That means that a real regeneration took closer to 55 minutes providing I remembered to reset the song once. However, this also doesn't take into account that spell points only regenerate during the daylight, and day and night both last about 10 minutes. This effectively doubles the amount of time it takes to recharge spells unless I stand outside the refugee camp and remember to enter and exit every once in a while (you always return to morning when you leave the camp).

The upside is that I had to wait at least 35 minutes, but practically more like 70 minutes, in between trips to the dungeon. It's hard to believe I'm not missing something, but I don't think I am. I've only found one "harmonic gem," which does indeed regenerate all spell points for a single character, but I kind of feel like I need to save that for emergencies.

I'm just putting this here because I thought this guy looked weird.

What makes this particularly unforgivable is the multiple dungeon squares that sap your magic points. There's nothing like waiting an hour to recharge your spell points only to head into the dungeon and watch half of them drain away.

While I'm complaining, here's a few other things:

• Spellcaster leveling makes no sense. Once you've achieved the seventh spell rank (character Level 13) in your first class, there's no reason not to switch to the next class. Switching starts you back at 0 experience points, but with no detriment to your health or spell points. Leveling comes extraordinarily quickly at this point. It took my characters about 3 hours of playing to get to Level 13 in their first spell classes, then only about an hour to get to Level 13 in their second classes and less than that to get to Level 13 in their third. During the time that the two spellcasters went through 13 levels the third time around, all my other characters rose maybe 1.

• I don't like the way the characters find items at the end of combat. The game forces you to take whatever you find, but with no way to sell the items, 90% of the time, you immediately go into the character's inventory and discard it. A better game would ask what items you wanted to keep.

• The only way to tell if a bard song is still playing is to have the volume on, but the bard songs--the only sound the game, as far as I can tell--just loop over and over and over again every 10 seconds or so. While the sound quality isn't bad, you can't listen to it for long.

• I don't mind random encounters in dungeons, but what annoys me is that enemies can attack when your only move is to turn. This makes mapping very frustrating. There are certain squares where it seems like every move produces an encounter. You finish fighting and then take a couple of turns to remind you where you are, and suddenly you're in battle again.

• The game doesn't seem to register a lot of my key-presses. I'll hit "8" twice to go north and map the walls assuming I've gone north twice. Then I find out it only registered one of them.

In between times in which I was standing around waiting for spell points to recharge, I finished exploring the dungeon and ultimately killed Brilhasti, the Mad God's servant. To do this, I had to first solve two more riddles on Levels 4 and 5. Both stumped me for a few minutes, although there were other clues on the levels as to the answers (select the text to see the answers):

• "I am nothing, I make nothing, but my opposite creates me even as it destroys me" (SHADOW).
• "I have no lips, yet my kiss is deadly. I am not a razor, but those I caress need never shave again. Your best friend, I will kill you" (SWORD).

Answering them got me a message to the effect that maybe I am strong enough to defeat Brilhasti and a clear path to the stairs. Reader Eric nailed it: it's more fun if you imagine these messages were scrawled in blood by a spy as he tried to escape. That leaves the question of why he magicked up a mouth with a riddle, though.

Both levels featured plenty of spinners, anti-magic zones, silent zones, spell-point-draining squares, and invisible walls--things that seemed like novelties in the first Bard's Tale but are just tiresome now.

Level 5 was also full of clues as to "three wards" that would "try my soul" on Level 6. Well, I don't know what they were talking about. Level 6 had spinners and dark zones and such, but it was easy enough just to plow through it and make my way to Brilhasti's lair...

My most successful run at Brilhasti out of about 30. He soon killed me.

...where I promptly had my ass handed to me. Bad. I didn't even come close. He was surrounded by four "dark guards" who cast pillars of fire at me, did 80-100 points of damage in melee attacks, and basically just slaughtered me even when my spellcasters were casting REST (full party health restore) every round. I reloaded about 30 times before I finally was able to kill the dark guards through DEST (destruction) spells. But then I had to "advance" across 60 feet to Brilhasti, and he wasted me with RIME (serious frost damage) spells along the way. When I finally reached him, two of my characters were dead, and then he started summoning greater demons. I didn't stand a chance.

Discouraged, I returned to the surface--which was no picnic, by the way, walking back up four levels (the APAR teleport spell failed)--healed, and started to level grind. For an entire day, I killed easy, medium, and hard monsters throughout the Mad God's dungeon. My spellcasters finished mastering conjurer, magician, and sorcerer spells. But my regular characters only advanced a couple of levels throughout the entire day. Still, with my new spells and strength, I returned to Brilhasti's lair a second time.

It ended mostly well.

This time, I only had to reload about 15 times before I finally defeated Brilhasti and his guards, although I lost two characters in the combat. Yay! And my victory was accompanied by an automatic teleport out of the dungeon. Thank you! But this is where the final BS appeared.

Returning to the review board, I found that killing Brilhasti gave me enough experience points to advance from Level 16 to LEVEL 36! Moreover, my two spellcasters, who I hadn't even changed to wizard, let alone archmage, suddenly had all the conjurer, magician, sorcerer, wizard, and archmage spells. What the hell?! I spend an entire day level grinding only to have the game hand me 20 levels and two full classes' worth of spells for a single combat? Could it maybe have balanced that a little better? Was the entire purpose of the first dungeon to get my characters to the level they would have been if they had finished The Bard's Tale II? This is bad, bad, bad game design. Aside from the new chronomancer class, my spellcasters have nowhere to go. My thief has 99 in all the thief abilities. Playing with way overpowered characters is no fun even if the monsters are hard; there's nowhere for my characters to develop.

The next quest.

So the "last of the guild elders"--the guy in the review board--wants me to go to some realm accessible through some trees and to bring back a bow and arrows from another adventurer named Valarian. To do this, I have to take one of my archmages and make him or her a chronomancer, leaving me with only one archmage unless I take the time to develop another. I'm going to bed now to sleep on whether I want to even keep playing this dumb game. I'll leave it running overnight, though, so maybe my 350 spell points will be recharged by the time I wake up in the morning.

Sorry to sound so negative, but at least I know one thing now: my reviews of The Bard's Tale II were not simply because I was in a "bad mood." I was in quite a good mood two days ago, and I was eagerly anticipating this game. It's the game, not me. This series sucks. Why is it considered a classic?

Bard's Tale III: Just What I Needed

Enjoying the sunshine between battles.

Some of you may have noticed that I've been a bit manic lately. In January, I had 29 postings--a monthly record for me--and I covered 11 games. Truth be told, I've probably been devoting too much time to playing CRPGs this month--to the detriment of my real work. Thus, The Bard's Tale III came along just in time.

Let me explain. Spell points are vital to the survival of your characters. In fact, if the rest of the dungeons go like the first one did, I'm going to regret not just creating an all-spellcaster party. You need them for healing, buffing spells, exploration spells, and defensive spells, and all of the necessary exploration spells (magic compass, greater revelation, levitation, mystic shield) take up about 1/3 of your spell points right there. So when you go exploring and you start to run out of magic, it's time to get out of Dodge.

The first two games had a shop called Roscoe's Energy Emporium where you could pay to get your spell points recharged. But in III, Roscoe's was destroyed by the Mad God. Thus, the only way to recharge your mana (that I can tell) is to hang around outside. This only works in the daytime, too, so if it happens to be night when you emerge from the dungeon, you have to wait.

A full recharge takes about 20-30 minutes in real time, even with the bard song called "The Rhyme of Duotime" playing in the background. This time only gets longer as my levels (and, thus, max spell points) increase. Consequently, I'm getting a lot of work done on my "to do" list when I'm supposed to be playing the game. Explore the dungeon. Write a few pages for a report. Finish mapping Level 1. Check in on my online classes. Map half of Level 2. Design a database form. This really is just the kind of game I need. In fact, it gives me an idea: all computer games ought to come with built-in timers. When you create your character, you tell the game how long it should allow you to play and how long a break you should take in between playing sessions. Want to override those settings? Fine, but you'll have to restart from the beginning.

Based on comments I got from yesterday's posting, there are things called "harmonic gems" that recharge your spell points, but I haven't found them yet.

Tarjan's dungeon, Level 3

I managed to map four levels of Tarjan's dungeon since my last posting It's slow-going. The game throws encounters at you on every other square, it seems, and you never "clear" a level, so it's relentless. With "Sir Robin's Tune" playing, I can avoid most of the fights if I want to, but obviously the point of the dungeon is to increase my experience. My characters are Level 13/14 and my spellcasters have rolled over into their second classes. I had to find a word on Level 2 ("CHAOS") to allow access to Level 3, and on Level 3 there was a riddle ("The tint of melancholy paves the way" and "A splash of noble's blood colors the exit"; answer: BLUE) to pass to Level 4.

Here are my notes from the last day's sessions:

• In a departure from the first two games, monsters do not attack while you wait, only when you actually turn or move. This makes my strategy above possible.

• The game has introduced a new way to cast spells, and it's so annoying that I don't know what the developers were intending. Instead of typing in the four-letter code for the spell, you now have to choose the spell from a list. A long list, especially as your spellcasters achieve multiple classes.

They could have at least put them in alphabetical order.

• There are a lot of ways to get NPC assistants in the game. I've found half a dozen figurines that will summon them, sometimes wandering monsters offer to join me, and there are several spells that conjure them. What I've noticed is that these monsters are nigh indestructible. A figurine gave me a "Molten Man" with an AC of -12 and 146 hit points. I've had him for two levels and he hasn't come close to dying.

I think in real life I'd be suspicious of this offer.

• The ability to save in the dungeons, while beneficial on the surface, potentially removes a lot of the challenge inherent in the first game. There, you felt a real tension as you explored the dungeons, taking care not to stray too far too fast, watching your hit points and spell points. While I have been forcing myself to take slain characters for resurrection rather than reloading the game, I decided that when my entire party is wiped out, I'll allow myself to reload rather than trying to create dummy characters and resurrect them all from the adventurer's guild.

• Along these lines, one level of the dungeon had a couple of doors that said, "Those who enter this door will never leave through it." Entering takes you to a dark level with no exit in which you take constant damage while moving. Lesson learned: heed the warnings on doors.

Honestly, if you saw this in real life, you wouldn't open the door, right?

• I don't know if the creators were afraid of copyright infringement suits or something, but none of the monsters from I or II appear in this game. This game features a slate of creatures found in no other game. So far, I've counted about 15 different monster portraits, with each portrait standing for at least half a dozen monsters. For instance, the goofy looking thing below is shown as a "Hookfang," but the same portrait serves for "Blackclaws" and "Greenclaws" as well. Since these creatures are all unique to The Bard's Tale III, I suppose a dedicated player would keep track of their names, toughness, and special abilities to help better plan combat tactics. Alas, I have lacked such motivation.

I need to work on better insults.

• In another departure from previous games, not all of the dungeon levels are the same size. The first level was only 13x13, for instance, while the second was 22x22.

• There is precious little in the levels, aside from random encounters, traps, dark squares, spinners, and other such dangers. The first two levels of the dungeon, for all of their twists and turns, served only one purpose: to tell me that the word CHAOS, when spoken to the Mad God's priests, would allow me access to the deeper levels. This whole "message-scrawled-on-the-wall" thing is a staple of early CRPGs, found in Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Might & Magic, among others. But it does break the immersion a bit, doesn't it? I mean, why would the bad guys go and write their code words on the walls?

Was this written by some helpful fifth columnist in Tarjan's horde?

• The game theoretically introduces an automap feature. I say "theoretically" because it doesn't really work. I think it's supposed to black out places you haven't been, but calling up the automap seems to either 1) show me the entire map of the level regardless of whether I've been there; 2) show a map with random parts--including places I've been--blacked out. I haven't abandoned my Excel maps.

This is what the automap showed me before I had even gone anywhere.

• The rogue's attack abilities are a nice touch. I'm not sure if they're new to this game since I didn't have a rogue in the first Bard's Tale. Essentially, the rogue can take one combat round to hide in shadows. If successful, he can attempt a sneak attack against a foe on the next round. The sneak attack has a decent chance of being a critical hit (instant death). He can also do this from the fifth rank--a rank from which you can normally not attack. Also related to the rogue, the game follows Wizardry's tradition of having the rogue first identify the trap and then attempt to disarm it by typing in the trap's name. This can get annoying during repeat failures, when I have to type "poison blades" six or seven times. Inevitably, I screw it up ("pison blades") and set it off.

The thief makes a back stab.

I'm actually a little disturbed by how quickly I'm leveling up. I guess I had the erroneous impression that III restarted all characters at Level 1 for a reason, but the game seems bent on ensuring that I'll have Level 20 characters and arch-mages (spellcasters with all spell levels in all spellcasting classes) before the end of the first dungeon.

In this posting, I probably haven't been able to successfully conceal my disappointment. I don't know why, but I was really looking forward to this game. Somehow I thought it would be a lot different than II, but it's not. The lack of scripted encounters, the needlessly large dungeons, the constant combat, and the insanely rapid leveling have conspired to create a game that is fundamentally boring. The first Bard's Tale wasn't a whole lot different in gameplay, but it was somehow different in quality. It was more compact, for one thing. There were more NPCs and scripted encounters in dungeons, and the maps had a little more thematic sense to them. Compare the largely random map above to this one from the first game, for instance:


 
See how you can discern a pattern in this map? There was a consistent theme on this level with undead, and the walls led you inextricably to the location of the level's main encounter. Not so in the maps so far in The Bard's Tale III.

But the forced waiting has been a real benefit to me during a couple of days when I had to get some real work done, so in that sense, it's been just want I needed. And perhaps I'm being a bit premature--I understand that after this starter dungeon, I get to explore other worlds and stuff. That must be cool, right?