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Thirty days of PC games takes a look at the thirty PC games that either paved the way for better PC games, were revolutionary or simply fun to play. Each day, for thirty days, a different PC game (or series) will be featured.
The Bard’s Tale: Tales of the Unknown – Volume I (1985), The Bard’s Tale II: the Destiny Knight (1986) and The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate (1988) was three dungeon crawler games based loosely on the Dungeons and Dragons table top games. Interplay Productions used 3D graphics to bring these three tales to life. The game is simple enough, where players can create six characters from the following classes: warrior, mage, bard, hunter, paladin, monk and sorcerer. Players could even import characters made from Ultima III or Wizardy to play in Bard’s Tale, which was unheard of at the time. These days we can import saved games and characters as seen in Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
Players had to create maps in order in order to keep track and this was commonly done on graph paper, giving it a more of a D&D feel. All actions were written out instead of seeing the action first hand.
The Bard’s Tale II won an Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Game in 1986 and showcased improvements from the first installment. A new class was introduced, the archmage, puzzles in the game were clearly harder and even real time puzzles were brought into play. Banks were used to store money and casinos available to play Blackjack. Players could even import a character from the first Bard’s Tale as well as from Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Bard’s Tale III included 84 different dungeon levels that took the player to different lands for each quest and even brought players to ancient Rome via a time warp. Characters from the first two Bard’s Tale games could be imported as well from Ultima IV. Auto-mapping was introduced to the series as well as two new classes: geomancer and chronomancer.
Since their release, there have been several novels created and in 2004, UnXile and Vivendi released The Bard ‘s Tale for Xbox and Playstation 2.
The Bard’s Tale series is regarded as a fun, challenging classic dungeon crawler game that gave the inspiration to several games that came after.
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