After 27 years, an official fourth entry in the legendary The Bard's Tale adventure series will be returning to PC.
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Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment - who recently successfully Kickstarted and released Wasteland 2, another blast from the past - confirmed the sequel via Twitter the other day. Fargo was involved in creation of maps for the original titles and even directed the third entry.
The series of D&D inspired adventure games began in 1985 with the release of the original The Bard's Tale, an epic "3D" dungeon crawler that was well ahead of its time. There were two sequels made, 1986's The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight and The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate in 1988.
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A top-down comedy-RPG was released back in 2004, with the voice of Cary Elwes, but it was met with poor reviews. Nor was it connected to any of the previous titles, having skirted through a legal loophole to use the name.
As with the recent Wasteland 2, Fargo will be seeking crowd-funding support. And while this may be #collusion, I cannot wait to help this project along. The Bard's Tale was one of my first encounters with a digital adventure game, and my two brothers and I would play it all the time on our (at the time amazing) computer, keeping the prized floppy disks - the actual floppy ones - locked in a drawer in the original box art. So as to not damage them.
Fargo is prepping the game for a PC release, but does not discount the possibility of a console version at some point in the future. We are surprised that he was not fed more Game Developer's Bingo and asked 'will there be Oculus support?'
Though, now that I mention it...
You can play The Destiny Knight and Thief Of Fate via the MS DOS Game's Archive.