The Bard's Tale: Final Rating

Our heroes discuss the relative merits of this CRPG

I know: three postings in one day. It's feast or famine with me. I'll try to develop better consistency in the future.

Earlier this week, I outlined a rubric for rating CPRGs in 10 categories. It's highly subjective, dependent upon my own preferences and peeves (but hey, it's my blog). Tonight, I'll apply the GIMLET for the first time to The Bard's Tale. Ratings for each category is out of 10.

1. Game world. The Bard's Tale's game world is not terribly imaginative. It is set in a somewhat generic high-fantasy city called Skara Brae which the evil wizard Mangar has taken over, unleashing scores of monsters into the streets. That's about all you're given. You learn nothing of the larger game world, nor how long Mangar has been a threat, nor where he came from to begin with, nor why your party suddenly appeared on the scene. Your actions do not effect any changes to the game world--not even completing the main quest. Even if you slay Mangar, monsters still roam the streets, and if you return to Mangar's tower you can slay him again! Perhaps the only unique thing about the game world is the implicit importance of bards in the society. Category Score: 2.

2. Character creation and development. For its time, the character creation system is reasonably advanced, allowing you to choose from a number of classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Hunters do very little damage but have a decent change of scoring a critical hit. Thieves are worthless fighters but necessary for trap-removal if you don't want to waste spell points. Spellcasters can cycle through four different classes, learning new spells each time. For all but the spellcasters, though, leveling up after a certain point doesn't seem to do anything but give you additional hit points. It's a little odd that you can only select male characters. There are no alignments, and there is no--absolutely no--character-based role playing. Category score: 3.

3. NPC Interaction. There are essentially no NPCs with whom to interact. In some squares, you stumble upon people and objects, but they mouth a few scripted lines at you and send you on your way. As with all games of this era, you have no dialog choices, no real opportunities for role-playing, and certainly nothing as advanced as romances. Category score: 1.

4. Encounters and Foes. As I noted when creating this evaluation model, I like random encounters and re-spawning, and this game is all about both. There are some scripted encounters, but they re-spawn the moment you leave the level and return. One memorable encounter has you fighting four groups of 99 barbarians each. If you have the right spells, you can survive it, it takes a good 10 minutes, and it nets you more experience than any other battle in the game. It's nice to be able to return to it now and then for a boost. The monsters are relatively well-distinguished, especially for a game of the era, each featuring different types of attacks, magic, and weaknesses. The manual doesn't really describe them for you, though, and of course there is no opportunity for role-playing in the encounters. Category score: 5.

5. Magic and combat. Combat in The Bard's Tale is identical to Wizardry, with the first three ranks having the ability to attack and the others able to use items and cast spells. The combat is very tactical, forcing you to choose your actions carefully to maximize your chances of survival and minimize your expenditure of resources. Since your six characters are all piled on to one screen, though, there is no way to role-play them individually in combat. Category score: 5.

6. Equipment. The game has a very large variety of equipment, from normal weapons and armor to special musical instruments (usable only by bards) that cast a variety of spells, rings, staffs, wands, lanterns, magic carpets, and so on. There is no description attached to any of these (no game will have item descriptions for years yet), but one unique aspect to The Bard's Tale is that you sort-of have to fiddle with your plundered objects to figure out what they do. My one gripe is that it's relatively easy to achieve the lowest possible armor class, after which finding new armor doesn't seem to do anything. Also, the damage you do in combat is overwhelmingly based on your level and not your weapon, so there's no particular reason to keep upgrading and comparing. Except for a few quest items, equipment is thoroughly randomized in the game world. Category score: 5.

Those horns do some serious damage.

7. Economy. Gold is very plentiful in this game, thank God, because you need a constant supply for healing. Healing is really all you need it for. After your first trip to the equipment shop at the beginning of the game, there is no need to ever visit again to buy anything. But because resurrecting characters, un-withering them, and turning them back to flesh from stone cost so much (and rise with levels), there is never a point that you're not grateful for a hoard of gold. Category score: 6.

8. Quests. The Bard's Tale has a main quest, but there is only one outcome--killing Mangar. There are no side quests or any opportunities for role-playing in quests. Category score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, Inputs. The graphics are quite good for the era--leaps ahead of Wizardry. Some of them are lightly animated. On the DOS port, there are no sound effects except for the bard songs, which suck a bit. Controls are by keyboard or mouse, and both work fine. Category score: 4.

10. Gameplay. In some ways, the gameplay is fairly linear--you must progress through the dungeons in a specific order. But having done so, you are free to backtrack to previous dungeons. Skara Brae itself is fully explorable at the outset; there just isn't much reason to explore. The difficulty is "pleasingly difficult," as I wrote in one point, because you can only save in the Adventurer's Inn and you have to carefully ration your spell points in dungeons. Towards the end, though, it becomes incredibly difficult, especially with the ability of certain monsters to turn your characters to stone, which you have no spell to redress. Every stoning requires a trip back out to a temple, if you're lucky to survive long enough. Monsters that drain your hard-earned levels also make you tear out your hair. There is absolutely no replayability; you'll get the same experience no matter what party you use or what decisions you make. Category score: 4.

The Bard's Tale's total score is: 38/100. On my master ranking list, that ties it with Wizardry I and suggests I liked it better than anything I've played so far except Ultima III. That feels about right.

The Bard's Tale: Won (at last)!

I'll be back to collect Shamino in a few weeks.

Well, my roller-coaster journey through The Bard's Tale is over. I know my postings on this game have been a bit schizophrenic, sometimes seeming as if I liked the game and sometimes as if I hated it. If so, then the posts are accurate, because that is exactly how I felt.

The game is challenging from the very beginning, thrusting you into a Skara Brae full of monsters in which the difference between survival and death depends primarily on luck. Run into some kobolds and you'll make it; stumble into a house with six barbarians, and your level 1 party is history. The game became more stable once I started dungeon-crawling, and for four out of five dungeons, my characters rarely died. But once I hit Mangar's tower, the vagaries of chance returned with a vengeance. Turning a corner and blundering into a party of six demons, four master wizards, and three red dragons is relatively commonplace, and if you can't run from the battle, there's essentially no way to survive it. Demons, dragons, magic users, and several other creatures are capable of launching deadly attacks that do more than 100 HP damage to all your party members, against which you have essentially no defense (the anti-magic bard song seemed, in my experience, to do nothing). If my characters were 10 levels higher, they wouldn't survive such an encounter, and I don't think there was any realistic way to get them 10 levels higher. It would have taken millions of experience points (most battles, even at the end, were giving me 5,000-7,000 each on average).

This is the bastard causing all the trouble.

So my winning was mostly luck. I made probably 20-25 forays onto Level 5 of Mangar's tower, dying each time, before I found the path that led me to Mangar himself. After that, I traced that path about 12 times before I finally got lucky and defeated Mangar. I would have recorded it, as I usually do for end games, but I never knew which time would be "the" time, and by the time I finally won, I had given up on recording.

  

Mangar is surrounded by two demon lords and three vampire lords. Vampire lords can stone you with a single touch and demon lords can belch fireballs. Mangar himself is no pushover, capable of some serious damage. Again, I just got lucky. The monsters decided to go after my summoned dragon, giving me enough time to kill a couple of them. The demon lords decided to cast spells instead of spewing fire. One lucky round is really all it took.

(Incidentally, the summon dragon spell is the most awesome spell in the game. The dragon almost always gets the first attack, and if you're lucky he'll breathe fire and wipe out an entire group of monsters.)

   

Winning gives you 300,000 experience points--like I really need those now, thanks--and returns you to the Adventurer's Guild, where I was happy to save and quit. I never finished mapping Level 5. As I allow myself to do once I've finished, I consulted a walkthrough and discovered I didn't really miss anything, although he found the final battle "disappointingly easy." Whatever. Apparently, I could then have gotten a cool magic item, but I don't see any reason to keep playing after I've won.

I'm going to do a quick posting with a final ranking for The Bard's Tale. After that, I have to regress to Wizardry II and Wizardry III (I ordered The Ultimate Wizardry Archives after my first attempts to play them didn't work) before moving on to Phantasie.

One final thing: most of the messages scrawled on the dungeon walls turned out to be clues to one thing or another. Even the message "Thor is the greatest son of Odin, "found in the first dungeon, turned out to be helpful in the fifth when answering that question gives you a little Thor figurine you can use to summon him. But one message I never did figure out, also from the first dungeon: IRKM DESMET DAEM. It doesn't seem to be an an anagram ("mirk Ed Mets made?") and it doesn't give enough letters to be a solvable cryptogram. Googling the phrase just turns up references to The Bard's Tale. Any ideas?

The Bard's Tale: AAAAAAAARGH!!!

Bard's Tale, have you no sense of decency?! No sense of pacing?! This is not how you craft a good CRPG. You don't make it moderately difficult ("pleasingly difficult," I said a few posts ago; oh, how you must have cackled at that) for 90% of the game and suddenly introduce battles with 12 demon lords on the last level! You do not include a host of creatures--oh, those %*#$*& vampires--who can level-drain you with a single touch. Do you know how long it takes to gain levels in your game?

You do not--above all, you do not--allow creatures to stone you with one touch and not include a freaking stone-to-flesh spell! And if you do--you utter, irredeemable pricks--you do not make such battles inescapable so that the last 50 hours of playing your game boil down to entering the dungeon, climbing up five levels, getting stoned, and having to make your way out of the dungeon to heal the stoned character at a temple. Yeah, nice gameplay. Bastards.

But if you must do all of these things, must you also--hey, I'm talking to you, you heartless time-sucker--must you also make it so that healing a stoned character costs 15,000 gold pieces? Mere moves from the end of the game, must you make me return constantly to low-level dungeon-crawling to build up my finances and experience points? Is there no end to your cycle of futility?

AAAAARRGH!

Bard's Tale: Pleasingly Difficult

The night before last, shortly after encountering the above-pictured beast, I found out what happens when your entire party dies in The Bard's Tale. It isn't so bad and yet at the same time it sucks incredibly. Instead of losing your entire party to the dungeon depths, as in Wizardry, your entire party returns to the Guild of Adventurers, dead but with all of the items, gold, and experience they've accumulated. Doesn't sound too shabby.

The problem is, it costs a lot to resurrect a dead character, especially a high-level dead character. Resurrecting six dead characters cost way more than I had at this point. I had to create a dummy character just to exit the Guild. I was able to resurrect one character immediately, but to get the other five, I had to build up my savings. It took a good three hours before they were all happy and healthy again.

It sounds horrible, especially to modern gamers, but I actually really, really like this aspect of The Bard's Tale. Death isn't a game-killer the way it is in Wizardry, but boy does it have consequences. Since you can only save in the Guild of Adventurers, every dungeon foray is a risk, creating a palpable tension as you wander your way through the passages. And every once in a while, you stumble into an encounter like this one (there were actually two more on this same level, with a dragon and a high-powered wizard) that makes your stomach drop and an expletive escape your lips.

Modern games make it far too easy. In something like Baldur's Gate, you would save every five or ten minutes. If you stumble on to a soul sucker, you might treat the first battle against him like a test run. If your characters die--or, heck, even just lose more hit points than you want to spare--no problem. Just reload and run the encounter again with the experience at your back. Even that was too tough for the creators of Neverwinter Nights, though. In that game, you could just use your Stone of Recall to take a time-out, get healed up, and return to battle fresh. What a bunch of wusses we've become.

Because of the frequent save points, modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging. In The Bard's Tale, Wizardry, and other games of the era I'm playing, there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it's the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty. You must constantly strategize. How much gold do I need to get from this encounter to make the "trap zap" spell worthwhile? What should I set as my bottom hit point threshold before I return to the surface? Do I want to expend 15 spell points on this group of wights, or take the risk that they'll turn me into a crippling old man with one touch? I've only got 15 squares left to map on this level, but my characters only have 1/2 their hit points. Should I press on or go back?

Exhilarating. Fortunately, I have a lot of games like this left to play.

I finished mapping and exploring the Mad God's catacombs last night, finding in the process his eye (which is equippable, but I don't know what it does). An inscription on a wall told me to "seek the Mad One's stoney self in Harkyn's domain," while another one more cryptically told me, "to the flower fly the mad one die once lost an eye!" In any event, this suggests that the third dungeon is one of the towers in the corners of the Skara Brae map. Since there are three of them, I'm guessing I'm about 2/5 done with the game.

Made a really dumb mistake last night. Because I don't have a rogue, I have to cast "trap zap" on every chest after battle, which depletes the spell points of my conjurer fairly quickly. Last night, my conjurer and magician reached their seventh spell level, so I decided to dual them to other classes to start gaining additional spells. The intelligent thing to do would have been to dual my magician to a conjurer so he could have "trap zap" too, and my conjurer to a sorcerer. Instead, I dualed my magician to a sorcerer and my conjurer to a magician. I know this sounds complicated, but trust me, I'm an idiot.

Bard's Tale: Intense Dungeon Crawling

I had hoped that I would be able to announced that I had won The Bard's Tale this weekend, but I'm not even close. I finally just finished mapping the first dungeon of four levels; at least, I hope it's only four. I nearly didn't find the fourth level because getting down to it involved (d)escending through a pit in the floor with a levitation spell in effect. The pit was barely visible, though.

As you can imagine, the monsters get tougher the lower the level. I'm finding that spellcasters are my worst enemy. I routinely run into parties in which there are 12 or more spellcasters in three or more groups, making it nearly impossible to clear them out before they get a couple of fireballs in. Most monsters are standard D&D fare; I haven't encountered any truly unique ones yet.

Fortunately, I've yet to have my entire party wiped out. I don't even know what happens if that occurs. I've lost individual characters several times, though, and it's getting expensive to raise them.

Some miscellaneous things about the game:

• There are several party-effect spells that I've found useful to have running when I start my dungeon crawling. These include MALE (levitate), YMCA (mystical armor), MACO (compass), and GRRE (a light spell that also reveals secret doors). The screen shot below shows my party in a dungeon with several buffing spells active (lined up in the center of the screen).

• These spells take up a lot of spell points, and spell points do not regenerate in the dungeons. I've gotten in the habit of standing outside Roscoe's Energy Emporium, casting these buffing spells, then going inside and paying to get my spell points recharged before heading into the dungeons.
• There are four spellcaster classes in the game--conjurer, magician, sorcerer, and wizard. You cannot select the latter two when you start, but you can change a conjurer or magician to those classes (or each other) once they reach Level 3. There are seven spell levels per class. I'm on the cusp of getting Level 7 spells for my conjurer and magician, at which point I'll switch them over to the other classes. Theoretically, I guess, one character can cycle through all spellcasting classes and get all the spells, but this must take an incredibly long time.
• Only after about 10 hours of playing did I figure out that the "T" key pauses the game. If you don't pause during mapping and such, the clock keeps running and your spells run out faster. It would have been handy to know that earlier.
• The "P" key starts combat with your own party, giving you a chance to have your characters assail each other. I can't imagine why I would want to do this.
• When you first encounter creatures, you can try to run from combat. If you succeed--which you seem to do about 75% of the time--you stay in the same square, and as far as I can tell there's no penalty. I have frankly been running from a lot of combats if they look difficult.
• Instead of armor and weapons +1, +2, and so on, better armor and weapons seems to be distinguished by the metal used to craft them. During this dungeon crawl, I found some mithrail swords and armor that seem to be one step up from the regular weapons and armor I had. I also found a "bardsword" that only my bard can equip; I'm not sure what it does.
  

The main purpose of dungeon crawling so far, it seems, is to pick up hints and clues written on the walls. I don't understand most of them yet. These are some of the ones picked up in the first dungeon:

• "Pass the light at night!"
• "Golems are made of stone."
• "IRKM DESMET DAEM"
• "Heed not what is beyond understanding."
• "Thor is the greatest son of Odin."
• "The hand of time writes but cannot erase."
• "Seek the snare from behind the scenes."

One inscription was helpful, though. A magic mouth appeared and told me that "a man called Tarjan, thought to many to be insane, had through wizardly powers proclaimed himself a god in Skara Brae a hundred years ago. His image is locked in stone until made whole again..." I'm guessing Tarjan is the name of the "mad god" whose priests keep asking me for his name. I suspect this leads to the second dungeon.

I'll leave you tonight with my map of Level 4 of the wine cellars/sewers. With luck, I'll win the game this week.

The Bard's Tale: Not Quite As Fun as I Thought

Dungeon-crawling in The Bard's Tale

My praise for The Bard's Tale over the last couple of posts may have been a bit too effusive. I was taken in by the graphics and character classes and other trappings of the game, but now that I'm a few hours into it, the gameplay is very repetitive and frankly not distinguishable from Wizardry.

Since I last posted, I finally advanced my conjurer high enough to obtain a healing spell, but it wasn't the breakthrough I had hoped for. Healing takes so many spell points, and spell points regenerate so slowly, that really the only way to survive in the game is to pay for frequent healing at the temples. This isn't that crippling because gold is plentiful and there's very little else to spend it on, but it makes dungeon-delving problematic. You can't risk going too deep lest you find yourself unable to make it out.

Things I've done and discovered since last night:

• You can't start the dungeons too early. The first dungeon to explore is the wine cellar (I'm blocked from the others for now). When you go from street to dungeon, you go from facing one party of monsters at a time to sometimes four or five parties at a time. It's a huge leap. After dying a couple of times, I decided I'd better stay in Skara Brae a little while longer and build up my characters.

One wonders what brought such a diverse group together

• There's not much in Skara Brae. Most of it is marked on the map that comes with the game. The bulk of the city is composed of interchangeable houses which, when you kick in the door, sometimes offer up monsters. From a role-playing standpoint, it somehow seems wrong barging into houses and slaughtering the denizens, many of whom are innocuous-sounding creatures like hobbits and dwarves.

One of many interchangeable streets in Skara Brae

• One thing I did find: a temple of the "Mad God." Instead of healing me, the clerics ask for the name of the Mad God. There must be some adventure here later.
• Tougher critters come out when night falls.
• The Bard's Tale tried to catch me pirating. At one point when I leveled up, the Review Board asked me a question that I was only able to answer by looking at the game map.

1980s DRM

• Since there seems to be an equal chance of encountering monsters every time you enter a house, there's no reason to march all over the city looking for battles. I set myself up near a temple and just went back and forth between two houses across the street from each other, killing monsters for hours. As you can imagine, it was a bit boring, so I watched an episode of Lost while I was doing it. Last night's episode was pretty good, incidentally.

"Death itself." From a zombie. Get it?

Once my characters were up to Level 7, I entered and mapped out the first level of the wine cellar. Not much here: one trap, one spinner (a square that when you land on it points you in a random direction, confusing your mapping), stairs down, and two doors marked "fine wines" and "rare wines" but which, as far as I could tell, had nothing but monsters in them. A lot of the squares aren't used, and I'm wondering if there isn't some other way of finding secret doors other than running headfirst into them the way you do in Wizardry. I didn't find any secret doors on Level 1, in any event.

I do still like mapping.

I'll keep plugging away. In the meantime, I'm mulling over a comment that Gooberslot made on my first posting. He or she called me on only playing PC/DOS CRPGs, noting that not only am I missing games, in some cases I'm "missing out on playing the best version." Downloading Apple II, Atari, and C-64 emulators would mean going back to pick up Space, Space II, the Dunjonquest games, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Return of Heracles, Questron, and SunDog: Frozen Legacy, and Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive.

Should I do it? Or should I stick to my original plan and cover DOS/PC CRPGs only? Any fond memories of any of these games?

Game 11: The Bard's Tale (1985)

"Your most important goal is to complete the quest built into the game. In The Bard's Tale, the city of Skara Brae is threatened by an evil mage called Mangar. You must find Manger and 'persuade' him to release the once-harmonious city from his evil control." -- Bard's Tale manual

As I said in my last posting, I'm beginning to feel that CRPGs are hitting that "good enough" stage where they are authentically enjoyable and not just historical curios. The graphics, sound, and game play are notably improved in over most of the previous games on this list, and especially the game of which it is a direct descendant: Wizardry.

As in Wizardry, you control a party of six characters representing different classes and races (oddly enough, you cannot specify sexes; all characters, at least judging by their portraits, are male). These characters exist on a list in the lower part of your screen while the upper part is devoted to a first-person view of the game world. Your characters can buy and equip a variety of weapons, armor, and miscellaneous items, some of which must be identified if you find them after a battle. In battle, just as in Wizardry, you specify an action for each character, and then your characters and the enemies go at it all at once. You may face multiple groups of enemies of varying numbers. Only your first three characters can attack. You cast spells by typing in their names, although in the case of The Bard's Tale it's a four-letter code instead of the entire spell name.

So far it sounds so close to Wizardry that I'm surprised the developers weren't sued for copyright violation. But in subtle details, The Bard's Tale is better, and (at least so far) more fun. To name a few:

• The graphics are much better. Character and monster portraits are animated, as are scenes inside various buildings.
• There is an awesome variety of races and classes. Here for the first time are half-orcs, paladins, hunters, monks, and four different mage classes--two of which you have to transition to after you've gained some experience. Hunters do critical hits at higher levels, and monks (as in D&D) are skilled in unarmed and unarmored combat.
• Bards appear for the first time in a CRPG (unless you count the "lark" in Ultima III). And the class isn't just a name: bards can sing helpful bard songs in battles and use certain musical magic items. "The Seeker's Ballard," for instance, produces light in dungeons and makes foes easier to hit; "Falkentyne's Fury" increases the damage you do in combat. In between songs--I love this--bards have to have a glass of wine or ale to refresh their windpipes.
• The town is Skara Brae. At first, I thought the Skara Brae of Ultima IV must be paying homage to The Bard's Tale, but then I discovered that Skara Brae is the name of a neolithic archaeological site in Orkney.
• A variety of locations to visit. There are several taverns, temples, and shops, and a spell-recharging place. A place called "the review board" advances you in levels, but you have to find it (it's not on the game map).

• You can summon or join NPCs to your party. More on this in a second.
• Cute little touches: a street is blocked by a statue of a samurai. Attack it, and it becomes a samurai for real. Kill him, and you can pass. Just beyond him is a tavern where, if you buy a bottle of wine, the bartender lets you into a dungeon.

All of that said, the game is pretty hard, mostly because you start off with no healing spells. I thought maybe I'd get some after my mages advanced to second level, but I didn't. This means that almost all the gold you collect from battle has to go to temples for healing and resurrection.

My party consists of

• Palamdedes, a human paladin (I almost always lead my parties with a paladin)
• Blaargh, a half-orc hunter
• Grimgnaw, a dwarven monk
• Taliesin, a half-elf bard
• Grey Star, an elven magician
• Lailoken, a gnomish conjurer

A rogue seemed unnecessary because conjurers get a spell called "trap zap" at the first level (I wish I'd had that in Wizardry).

I've spent most of the first few hours mapping Skara Brae, fighting various battles, and all-too-often raising and healing my characters at temples. I have most of them up to Level 2. I'm hoping I get the healing spells at Level 3, at which point I'll start exploring the first dungeon.

Despite the Stone Elemental's help, three of my characters died in this combat.

One thing has made combat exceedingly easier in these opening stages. At the top of your party list is a slot for a summoned creature. While exploring the key commands, I discovered that if you hit the "Z" key, a stone elemental automatically appears in that slot. I have no idea why. It seems too easily-discoverable to be a cheat. Either way, I'm getting a lot of use out of him.

The Ultimate Wizardry Archives arrived while I was away and, as promised, I'm going to go back and try Wizardry II and Wizardry III when I'm done with this game, but it's going to be hard to regress to those games after The Bard's Tale.