There’s just under two weeks left for The Bard’s Tale IV to lighten our coin purses some more, having already achieved it’s Kickstarter campaign goal of $1.25 million. A new stretch goal for RPG veteran Chris Avellone now dangles.
Should the heroic PC RPG community manage to throw enough into the inXile coffers then Avellone will join Brian Fargo and his team. He’s already helped out on Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Those are two of inXile’s past Kickstarters that achieved success, although backers and RPG fans are still waiting for the release of Torment: Tides of Numenera, whereas Wasteland 2 is due a special re-release this summer including significant upgrades to the core game.
”If you’re not familiar with Chris, he and I go back together to the mid-90s when he worked on the legendary cRPGs Planescape: Torment (as Lead Designer) and Fallout 2. Afterwards he co-founded Obsidian Entertainment and was the Creative Director,” wrote Brian Fargo.
Most recently Chris Avellone had been working on RPG Pillars of Eternity at his former co-founded studio. He has since departed from the developer and is presumably off adventuring in caves and long forgotten tombs with an assortment of colourful companions.
Should he join The Bard’s Tale IV then he’ll be given responsibility over the Cairn of Horrors.
”I owe my career to seeing Bard’s Tale II on a Commodore 64 at a friend’s house. When I saw the streets of Skara Brae up and running (gasp - in simulated 3D! And in color!), I suddenly realized I didn’t have to be the game master all the time in order to get my RPG fix, there was finally someone out there who had done the formidable job of creating a digital dungeon master for RPG aficionados with the same amount of lazy players as I had,” says Avellone.
”So I have Brian Fargo to thank three times - first for the game itself (and all the Interplay RPGs I played to follow, including Bard’s Tale I, Bard’s Tale III, and Wasteland), second, for hiring me at Interplay, and third, for asking me to be a part of Bard’s Tale IV - with your support, I hope we can make it happen!”
Fargo also teases we’ll get representations of our characters in the inventory screen if we hit $1.9 million, instead of a paper doll cop-out. At an earlier $17 million they’ll enlist Colin McComb, a designer of Planescape: Torment and current Creative Lead of Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Check out The Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter for more. There are 11 days left and pledges currently sit at over $1.364 million from around 30,700 backers.
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