The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate
Developer(s) Interplay Productions
Publisher(s) Electronic Arts
Designer(s) Bill Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, Michael A. Stackpole
Platform(s) Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, DOS, NEC PC-9801
Release date(s) 1988 (C64 & Apple II), 1990, 1991
Genre(s) Role-playing video game
Mode(s) Single player

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate is a computer fantasy role-playing game created by Interplay Productions in 1988. It is the second sequel to The Bard's Tale. It was designed by "Burger" Bill Heineman (now known as Rebecca Heineman), Bruce Schlickbernd, and Michael A. Stackpole. The game was released for the Amiga, Apple II (64k), Commodore 64 and DOS.[1]

Story

The player characters receive a letter from a dying man who informs them that, during a celebration of your defeat of the evil wizard Mangar, his true master—the Mad God Tarjan—arrived and unleashed foul creatures which destroyed the town of Skara Brae (which has nothing to do with the real-world site of the same name). The box cover states it thus:

Skara Brae is in ruins. Roscoe's Energy Emporium stands vacant. The Equipment Shoppe went under so quickly Garth was crushed. Your Bard hasn't stopped whimpering since he realized all the taverns were closed.... Someone—or some thing—has sealed the city's fate with an evil so vast, so unspeakable, that a host of Paladins and an army of Archmages are out-matched. Hard times call for subtlety. Smaller is better. Sneakier is better. What the world needs now is a thief. The Thief of Fate.

The game begins in a refugee camp outside the ruined Skara Brae, which replaces the now-destroyed adventurer's guild from the previous games. Besides the city ruins, the wilderness features a temple for healing, a tavern, and a number of special locations from where the party will embark on missions to other worlds over the course of their quest.

Skara Brae was scaled down considerably. The ruins are 16x16 map tiles instead of the city's 30x30 layout from The Bard's Tale I, though its layout remains recognizable. In the ruins of the Review Board, an old man—the sole survivor—directs the party to first kill one Brilhasti ap Tarj, a servant of the mad god Tarjan, in the "Mad God" dungeon below Skara Brae, a startup quest for the characters to attain power which can be ignored if powerful characters were carried over from previous games. Next, the old man orders the party to retrieve artifacts from several other worlds and also teaches the group the chronomancer spells to be used at certain points in the wilderness to travel to these parallel dimensions and back:

With Tarjan defeated, it is revealed that the player party took the places of the deities Tarjan killed, becoming a set of new stars in the sky.

Gameplay

This dungeon crawl game featured several improvements over its predecessors:

According to Shay Addams, The Bard's Tale III is:

A much more enjoyable adventure than Bard's Tale I or II ... Missions involve a wider variety of puzzle types due to a new command that permits you to use objects and artifacts as you would in a text adventure such as Zork. Other improvements include auto-mapping, new character classes, magic spells and dungeon levels (84 of them!) that vary in size and shape. You also get to visit more exotic lands than in the previous installments, for each quest takes place in its own universe: a forest world, a frozen wasteland, and one that's linked via time warps to different times on earth, from ancient Rome to the Nazi's Berlin. The interface is smooth, [and] the first-person graphics [are] sharp and colorful. Characters from the previous games may be imported into this one, as well as characters from Ultima III and IV and the first three Wizardry scenarios.[1]

Reception

A review in Computer Gaming World described the game as an improvement over its predecessor, but "still too heavily oriented towards mega-combat."[2]

The game was reviewed in 1988 in Dragon #138 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 3 out of 5 stars.[3]

Production

Michael Cranford, the creator of the Bard's Tale series, was not involved in this sequel, as he had decided to leave Interplay to study philosophy and theology.[4]

The Bard's Tale III programmer Heineman has said that the original name of this game was to be Tales of the Unknown - Volume III: The Thief's Tale. Heineman also once sought to continue creating new Bard's Tale games, but was unsuccessful in obtaining the rights from Electronic Arts.[5]

Michael A. Stackpole created the storyline of The Bard's Tale III, and made maps for it. He has since become a successful author, and has penned many novels in the hugely popular Star Wars and BattleTech series.

Bruce Schlickbernd and Michael Stackpole also collaborated on Interplay's Wasteland, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, and Star Trek: Judgment Rites.

References

  1. 1 2 Addams, Shay, ed. (1989). "The Bard's Tale III: The Thief of Fate". Quest for Clues II. Shay Addams. pp. 98–105. ISBN 0-929373-01-4.
  2. Scorpia (June 1988). "Old Prophecies Never Lie... E.A.'s "Bard's Tale III", Thief of Fate". Computer Gaming World. pp. 20–21, 52.
  3. Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia; Lesser, Kirk (October 1988). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (138): 70–75.
  4. Cranford, Michael (1998). "The Bard's Tale Compendium". Interview transcript. Retrieved 2011-02-24.
  5. Heineman, Bill (2000). "The Bard's Tale Compendium". Chat transcript. Retrieved 2009-07-22.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, May 18, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.