I’m fairly sure the team at inXile never actually sleep. Not only are they working on Torment: Tides of Numenera, and a Game of the Year Edition of Wasteland 2, but they’re prepping yet another crowd-funding drive to resurrect one of the studio’s classic franchises. A Kickstarter campaign will begin next month for The Bard’s Tale 4, a true sequel (that has nothing to do with the oddball comedy spinoff of 2005) to the dungeon-crawlers that helped make the company’s name back in the 80’s and 90’s. I spoke to inXile founder Brian Fargo about the studio’s next undertaking.
GameWatcher: Why did you decide to revisit The Bard’s Tale series for your next project?
Brian Fargo: One answer is that I love the dungeon crawl. I grew up playing Wizardry, Might & Magic, and then of course we did Bard’s Tale. I love the genre, and I’ll love it twenty years from now. I thought there was an opportunity to bring a more advanced form of that game into the 21st century. So that was part of it, it was also the most requested thing that I got from the fans – a true and proper sequel. You’ll remember we did the comedy version in 2005 which exists in a world unto itself, but people wanted a true sequel, and fortunately I was able to negotiate with EA for the full licence so that we could do that. I think those are the biggest things, but also there’s some serendipity that this year marks exactly thirty years since the first game was released. It’s also nice to try something different, not just move on to a new version of something we’ve just done. For all those reasons, really.
GameWatcher: You mentioned the 2005 Bard’s Tale there, which was very much a comedy game. Are you bringing anything from that interpretation across to this new project, or is that very much a spin-off that you’re not taking into account?
Brian Fargo: No, you really have to look at it as a separate spin-off that has nothing to do with it. It’s funny, there’s a group of people that really love that comedy version. In the beginning we did it, and the people more familiar with the old games said “hey guys, this wasn’t exactly what we were expecting”, but since it came out, and especially once we put it onto mobile, it’s sold a tonne of units and people love it. So there’s people who want a sequel to the comedy now! But no, you’ve got to look at that game as a product in its own right.
It came about for a number of reasons. One I was in a bit of a cheeky mood and wanted to make fun of role-playing games, I was busting through a lot of RPGs at the time, and they’d all send me into a tunnel to kill rats. I thought “I can’t believe they’re still doing this”, so I thought it’d be fun to have a protagonist who acted like he’d played too many of these games as well. And then it was couple with the fact that I didn’t have the rights to the copyright, so I had to do something a bit different. It was very difficult at that time to get a PC financing deal, so it had to be a console game. When you add all those things up, you end up with something very different. But this new game is very much a true sequel.
GameWatcher: You mentioned there that dungeon-crawling games can feel a bit over-familiar at times, in terms of story setup, combat, the enemies you face and so on. How will The Bard’s Tale 4 differ?
Brian Fargo: Well way back then we were bashing some rats ourselves, but at least that was before you saw it everywhere. With this new game, I think the important thing is to make the combat interesting. A rat isn’t going to be too smart, right? I know there’s the old trick of throwing trash mobs at the player from the start, but we need to try and make that more interesting. One of the things we’re doing is ‘dynamic phase-based combat’. The first game was phase-based, which meant you would have your party, issue all your instructions, and then they’d all go off at once. So the first guy would attack, then the second would defend and so on. Those actions would all play out, but if the playfield changed, maybe an enemy you were planning to hit died, you’d miss your attack. I think it was too passive in nature for today’s audience.
With this one, it’s still phase-based, but when you issue a command you’ll see the results straight away. It’s far more dynamic, and means you can react to changes on the battlefield. For me the combat has to be right, it has to really challenge you and engage your brain constantly. Some of those games… have you played many of those classic dungeon crawlers?
GameWatcher: I’ve played a couple of the old Might & Magic games, but mostly my experience with the genre is from recent revivals like the Grimrock series.
Brian Fargo: I don’t want to criticise any specific titles, but running backwards can’t be the primary tactic, you know? We want something a lot more interesting than that.
GameWatcher: It must be a different challenge from what you did with Wasteland 2, which used a very familiar turn-based combat engine with a top-down view. Here you’ve got to find a way to modernise elements of a genre people aren’t quite as used to these days, while still keeping the core fans happy.
Brian Fargo: It’s an interesting question, because I get that a lot; “how are you going to bring this up to date?” People forget, I only play modern games. I only play Shadow of Mordor, and Hearthstone, and BioShock. It’s not like I’ve just come out of a coma, and all the UI, modern things that people are doing, we’ll have that too. One of the things recently that happened was that I referenced Hearthstone. Look, we’re not doing a card game, but part of the cadence of that game’s combat system is that it’s phase-based. You’re playing a card, and playing a card, and they’re almost like character slots – some do random damage, or have random effects, so you don’t ever know exactly what’s going to happen, and your next card play is based upon what happened with the last one you played. That’s what I mean about the system being snappy and dynamic like that. Constantly changing. I think I confused some people with that statement, people thought we were doing a card game, but I meant it more in terms of cadence and pacing.
So my point is, I only play these modern games, and when we’re looking at getting things like the UI and combat systems across, we’re focusing on what’s out today. With Wasteland 2, as you mentioned, we decided we were going to do an isometric, turn-based game. For that we don’t deviate, because that’s a very specific experience. Did you get a look at the screenshot we sent out?
GameWatcher: Yes, I did. The lighting’s looking very pretty on the Unreal engine.
Brian Fargo: It’s going to be really fun to show off our graphics chops, because the guys are doing a really phenomenal job with it. Part of that’s the need for immersiveness, which is kind of a generic word these days, but when I’m creeping around that dungeon looking for clues, hearing monsters in the background, it’s going to be a great experience.
GameWatcher: The exploration is real-time, right? And then you’ll jump into the the combat system when you run into an enemy.
Brian Fargo: Exactly, so you’ll be moving around that dungeon in real-time, full-screen mode. When combat starts we’ll probably pull the camera back a bit, show a bit more of the combat area. Your characters will be represented somehow, we’re still working on whether they’ll be full models or represented by portraits, that’s a budgetary consideration, but one way or the other we’ll show you the scene and throw you into the phase-based combat. One of the beauties of what we’re doing is that the Unreal Engine can do some powerful, beautiful things, but often when you get to the project your bandwith is taken up too much by multiplayer, AI, all that stuff. You don’t get to do all the awesome things you can do in the demo. Because exploration in our game is essentially just walking around, without having to worry about forty things running around, we get to really show off. Same in combat, because it’s turn-based, you have a lot more bandwith to show off the beauty that you’ve seen in that shot.
GameWatcher: It’s interesting, one of the games I played recently was Might & Magic X, a similar kind of modernised dungeon-crawler that kept the grid movement for overland exploration. I found it horribly off-putting, because when what you’re seeing isn’t abstracted, when it’s all being shown off in this neat, shiny graphics engine, sliding around the world in only four directions feels incredibly awkward.
Brian Fargo: That’s an interesting point. There’s raging debates on the forums about whether exploration should be freeform or gird-based. There are some positive aspects to the grid system; things are very specific, it’s easy to remember where you were, you can use grid paper in that old-school style to record your location, we can do all these neat things with perspective like spin you around, drop the floor out from beneath you. But yes, it feels a little unnatural in today’s modern day games that I’m locked in. You see a world like the one in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you want to look at that world, you don’t want to be locked in. So we chose a kind of compromise. You can move on a grid if you want, but we allow you to pop off from the grid. However, when combat starts we pop you back on, but of course at that point it’s a battle so it doesn’t matter. That’s our compromise for getting the best of both worlds.
GameWatcher: What kind of balance are you looking for between questing and dialogue in The Bard’s Tale 4? Does dialogue play a big role in the game?
Brian Fargo: Well it won’t have nearly the text load of something like Wasteland 2, won’t have a fraction as much dialogue as that. But we’ve done a lot of research on Scottish folklore for the quests, and we’ve had a blast with that. I just got back from Scotland a week ago. The original Bard’s Tale was set in Skara Brae, in the Orkney Islands, and they have this really rich, odd folklore up there that’s fascinating. The quests just write themselves, and the situations are so bizarre.. it’s better than anything you could make up. We want to have all that, so you have the Shrouders stealing babies, all the stuff they believed in back then. We can’t help ourselves with quest design, we’ll have some branching pay-offs for quests, like “what if they don’t do that?” The game is less quest-driven than other games like Wasteland 2, but we’re doing our damnedest to make sure the quests are interesting, and not full of the usual fantasy tropes.
I should mention that the other pillar the game rests on is the puzzles and riddles. One of the games I was inspired by recently was The Room, on iOS. It’s really brilliant. You start out with just a chest, which doesn’t sound that interesting, but it’s fascinating how rewarding it is to physically manipulate objects in the world. So you walk around, look at the chest and see a latch on the front. Boom, you open the chest, and there’s another chest inside of that. Manipulating objects in the world like that makes it feel incredibly real. We have a team of developers for Bard’s Tale 4 who do nothing but design the puzzles throughout the world. Back when the first game came out, you’d make a really tricky puzzle, and if the player got stuck – that was it. They were dead in the water. That’s not something people want now, so instead we’ll reward players for figuring these puzzles out. You solve a really complicated puzzle, and you’ll get a really cool item. If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to. This kind of physicality stretches to all your inventory items too.
I like to give the example of sword that you’ve been using for hours, then you take a lot at it, and there’s a switch on the pommel. Ah ha! You click it, and your sword lights up, it’s a magic blade. So the exploration is both at a macro level in your environment, right down to the micro level with your equipment.
GameWatcher: As for the storyline; the first three games have a definite arc, does the new game follow on from that, or is it set in a completely new time period?
Brian Fargo: It does follow up, it’s some hundred years in the future, but it’s going to bring in all the fiction from the past. It’ll answer some questions. In the first game Mangar enveloped the city of Skara Brae in ice, and then another wizard came, then another. Why are all these dudes interested in Skara Brae? There’s a reason, and the player doesn’t know what those reasons are yet. All those old characters are dead, we won’t pull any cheap tricks to bring them back and make you fight them again, but they live on through their cults, and there’s still a reason why all these powerful people focused on this place.
GameWatcher: Do you feel more comfortable raising funds through Kickstarter now, having had a lot of success with it in the past?
Brian Fargo: I’m never comfortable (laughs). I think that everything you do has risk, so I’m cautiously optimistic. We always learn a lot, with every campaign we do. There was definitely a greater learning curve from Wasteland 2 to Torment than there is from Torment to Bard’s Tale 4. One of the things I did in the first campaign we ran, which worked out great, was I started talking to my audience way before we were ready to start. Discussed stretch goals and tiers, worked out was really valuable to them. So they really helped me hone in on what made sense. The thing I learned was that you need things that are interesting to people outside the core audience. Preaching to the converted every other day doesn’t gain you much, in the sense that they’re on board already. So we have to think of things that might catch the eye of a new audience, and of press people like yourself. New classes and things are all well and good, but you need to come up with things that will keep the interest up over the course of the campaign. That’s easier said than done.
Many thanks to Brian for speaking to me. Not long now until we get a clearer picture of just what backers can expect from The Bard’s Tale 4’s Kickstarter campaign – inXile is prepping to launch their funding drive on June 2.
