The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep Update #55 – Director’s Cut Announced

Back in December, we learned that the developers at inXile Entertainment were working on a major update and a free DLC for their dungeon crawler The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep. However, this new Kickstarter update lets us know that since then the update’s scope has grown and it will now be launching as a “Director’s Cut” of the game sometime around June 2019.

Here’s what you can expect from the Director’s Cut, along with a few paragraphs on the game’s Mac and Linux versions:

Production Notes

Hi all, Paul here. We hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season and is having a good 2019 so far. For us, it has been a very busy and momentous last few months. As we move into the new year, things are coming more into focus and we would like to provide some quick updates on the progression of The Bard’s Tale IV’s updated 2.0 version, as well as an update on the Mac & Linux versions of the game.

[…]

2.0 expands to become the Director’s Cut

We are still in development on the free DLC patch, which also includes a number of other player-requested features and items off of our own post-release support list. As the scope of the patch has expanded (and continues to), we decided that it warranted a more formal title than 2.0. When released, it will turn the game into “The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep – Director’s Cut”. We are introducing several new features, most notably the previously mentioned DLC and an engine update, a larger undertaking allowing us to further improve performance and optimization. Many of those features were discussed in our last update, and include:

• A new dungeon and story line featuring new enemy types
• New items (master-crafted gear and Dwarven Weapons)
• Inventory filtering
• Expanded balancing efforts across the entire game (combat, economy, abilities, etc.) based on player feedback and our own testing
• A new Song of Exploration allowing you to bypass puzzles if those aren’t your jam
• Additional character portraits
• A new intro animatic
• Expanded work on improving localization
• Updated game engine
• Improved performance and stability
• Improved level art
• Reworked main menu
• Numerous bug fixes

And much more! We are also currently working with Microsoft to improve and optimize our gamepad support. The Director’s Cut is scheduled to go live in June.

Mac and Linux Users:

We’ve seen your comments and hear you. The Mac and Linux builds are making great progress in co-development and parity to our main version with our development builds and current feature production pipeline. We have a full-time dedicated team for each platform (Mac & Linux), and those teams are working concurrently with our main features dev teams.

The issue we have as developers is that we are unable to finalize the Mac and Linux versions of the game and continue to simultaneously make such sweeping changes to it. We wanted to resolve the issues that affected the PC launch before we shipped Mac and Linux and this dovetailed directly into the work we began doing for the Director’s Cut, effectively becoming one continuous effort since September. This is why these versions need to go live the same day as the PC version of The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep – Director’s Cut.

We know it’s frustrating that you backed us early and have such a long delay but it just didn’t make sense to stop production in order to finalize these two versions and then circle back and update them months later. The Mac and Linux users will get the benefit of all the new features we are adding along with all the optimization, stability, and performance improvements so far, including our latest UE4 engine update, and that means tracking those development cycles to the current build.

For these reasons, we are releasing the Mac and Linux versions at the same time as The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep – Director’s Cut. We greatly appreciate everyone’s patience with The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep – Director’s Cut, and we believe all backers on all platforms will enjoy the new and polished features when the new version goes live.

Until Next Time,
Paul Marzagalli
Public Relations & Community Manager