Wish You Were Here: 15 CRPGs That Never Made It

Felipe Pepe, who is currently working on a free book on CRPGs with contributions from names like Chris Avellone, Tim Cain and Ian Frazier, has published a blog post on 15 cancelled CRPGs, which includes mentions of titles like Meantime, Ultima VIII: The Lost Vale, the “Van Buren” version of Fallout 3, Baldur’s Gate III: The Black Hound, and Chaos Chronicles, among others. Here’s a snippet on some of the possible The Bard’s Tale IVs we might have gotten:

The Bard’s Tale IV

This one had many, many incarnations. 1989’s Dragon Wars was originally intended to be Bard’s Tale IV, but due to license issues with EA, Interplay couldn’t use the name anymore, and had to switch the name to Dragon Wars only a couple of months before release.

In 1992, the German magazine PowerPlay featured a preview of EA’s Bard’s Tale IV. According to project manager Rick Lucas, the game was already two years into production and it was huge the biggest RPG ever. So big that they were considering to release it in two parts. Dungeon-crawling would still be in first-person mode, but the rest of the world would be explored through a 2D bird’s view camera.

Yet, for all this excitement, the game mysteriously vanished, and was never spoken of again.

But it doesn’t stop there, various other attempts at a sequel were made. Former Interplay programmer Rebecca (Burger) Heineman revealed in an interview that she tried to pitch a Bard’s Tale IV project to EA and never got greenlight. Anther case was Devil Whiskey, a 2003 blobber that began as a Bard’s Tale IV project, changed names to Bard’s Legacy: Devil Whiskey after a while and competently dropped the (Bard) part in the end. A year afterwards, Brian Fargo managed to acquire the name back and release The Bard’s Tale (2004), a parody action-RPG of which the less we speak of, the better.