The Bard's Tale

[Vansau]

So, about an hour and a half ago Doug and I stopped by the Acclaim booth at E3 and weaseled our way into an interview with inXile Entertainment, developers of The Bard's Tale. This game looks really cool.

Currently running off of the BG: DA engine, the demo showed that this upcoming dungeon-crawler looked a little rough around the edges with graphics, but the camera control was very smooth and efficient.

Sean Patton, a developer for inXile, was running the demo for us and was really excited about this game. One of the biggest pieces of news is that Acclaim signed Cary Elwes (Wesley in "The Princess Bride") to voice the lead character, who is only known as The Bard. The biggest feature about The Bard's Tale is its story and narration. The story follows The Bard around as he finds himself suckered by destiny to combat some sort of millenia-old evil and we get to listen to him bitch, complain, and insult anyone who will pay attention to him throughout the entire game. Sean stressed that his company didn't want to create just another RPG that had story elements everyone had already seen and could predict. Apparently a key scene in the game will involve The Bard watching some snot-nosed punk claim that he is "the Chosen One!" and then get slaughtered by the group of enemies that he is blustering to. Once they've finished making their kid-kebab, they then turn their attention to our luckless hero and he has to somehow get out of the situation.

Combat looks deceptively easy in this early run, but Sean stressed that it can be much more intricate and effective than all-out button mashing if players want it to be. He showed us a few parries and magic spells and told us that there were a lot more of these things in the full version of the game.

I feel obligated to stress how much fun this game looks. Not merely because we were given free T-shirts (college students are so not above bribery), but because this relatively early build of the game looks pretty darn impressive.

Currently, Acclaim is hoping to publish The Bard's Tale sometime in the third quarter of this year. When I get to a computer with a working CD ROM, I'll upload the screenshots on the Acclaim PR CD that was given out.

[ragnar]

I was never much into the old Bard's Tale games. I was much more into SSI:s gold box games. They ruled the day!