Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites: The Bard's Tale IV Trailer
No, really
inXile Entertainment are seemingly transitioning to being a crowdfunding-only studio, freeing themselves of publishers by leaning on fans and admirers. They've picked a trick or two up from their years with publishers, though. Such as: never release a trailer alongside your big announcement; save it for a few days later to score a second surge of interest.
So here's the first "in engine" trailer for The Bard's Tale IV [official site], inXile's follow-up to Interplay's 1980s dungeon-crawling series, which is currently storming Kickstarter.
The trailer's pretty pretty, with some nice environment art and some interesting monster designs. Those are the nicest kobolds/goblins/generic low-level grunty monsters I've seen in a fair few games. It's rare to hear laughter in RPG trailers nowadays too.
This Bard's Tale is a sequel to the original games from the '80s, side-stepping inXile's one contribution to the series - a shoddy spoof in 2004. It'll be a dungeon-crawler, yeah, forming and levelling up a party, completing quests, and murdering monsters for the contents of their meatpockets.
inXile launched the Kickstarter on Tuesday seeking $1,250,000 (£810,000-ish), and with 36 days still to go are almost there ($934,451, as I write this). It's in the bag. They sought $900k for Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, but smashed these goals so thoroughly that I suppose the initial asking amount doesn't really matter any more. I'm impressed that they're breaking away from publishers to focus on the kind of games they want to make, it's just a shame they're holding back footage that could've easily been in the original Kickstarter pitch to give a more rounded impression of what they're making.
Anyway, here's that "in engine" trailer:
