inXile Entertainment today launched a new Kickstarter campaign looking to raise $1.25 million to make The Bard’s Tale IV happen, with plans to invest at least another $1.25 million from their own funds on top.
The Bard’s Tale IV will feature labyrinths and dungeons chock-full of dangerous traps, puzzles, and challenges, as well as the winding streets of the city of Skara Brae and its outlying environments. Exploration will take place in the first-person dungeon crawler style of the original trilogy.
The story of The Bard’s Tale IV will center on a new Skara Brae built upon the ruins of the old, returning familiar gameplay concepts such as No-Magic Zones and Magic Mouths.
Utilizing the Unreal 4 engine, The Bard’s Tale IV will also represent a graphical leap forward in the genre, immersing you in a highly detailed and lush world you’ll want to map to its farthest reaches. The Bard’s Tale IV enriches the setting from the original trilogy with Scottish culture, including a soundtrack inspired by Gaelic music.
inXile plans to use photogrammetry to create in-game 3D objects from photos of architecture, taken right in Scotland. With such detailed assets, The Bard’s Tale IV will have intricate interactions, allowing for detailed physical puzzles in the game world, or while inspecting your own items in your inventory to find hidden compartments, latches, and more.
The Bard’s Tale IV will update the classic gameplay of the originals, featuring a dynamic phase based combat system. Combat will utilize the complex decision making opportunities of traditional phase based combat, but with a constantly evolving enemy strategy and a pacing that keeps you on your toes.
Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile, said:
“It’s been an amazing last 30 years and I feel so fortunate to continue in the games business for this long. And it is only because of the incredible support our fans have given us that I’m still here today working on these great role playing games. After so many years, I couldn’t be more excited to revive the classic Bard’s Tale.”
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John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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