The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep Second Sight Update Live

Second Sight is the official title of the latest major update for inXile Entertainment’s dungeon crawler The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep. This newly released update fixes a great deal of bugs, adjusts the game’s balance, and most importantly, it introduces the highly anticipated Legacy Mode.

The Legacy Mode allows you to greatly customize your Barrows Deep experience and bring it closer to the dungeon crawlers of old by removing the auto map, enabling grid movement, and more. But on top of that, another optional Legacy Mode feature is the ability to save your game at will, which should come in handy for those who didn’t like the original limited save system.

You can also now watch the new “Reviews” trailer that recaps the game’s major features and quotes a number of favorable reviews:

The complete changelog is quite lengthy, so here’s just an excerpt:

Hello everyone!
Today, we are pleased to bring you the Second Sight Update, which brings a number of requested features (most notably an option for “save anywhere and anytime”) and a host of fixes. It also brings our previously mentioned Legacy Mode features, which we’re thrilled to finally deliver, especially to our long-time fans of the series! For details on this patch, please check out the notes below.
Work on the game continues. Certain major milestones, such as a revamped inventory system and controller support, are still on their way. That is in addition to continued improvements and optimization based on your feedback.
In addition to the above, we also continue to work on the Mac and Linux versions, as well as a few other nice things that we can´t talk about yet. Please let us know what you think of the update, and we look forward to talking with you again soon.
The team at inXile
What is Legacy Mode?
With the Second Sight update, we’ve added a whole suite of options to customize your play experience that we call Legacy Mode. You can play the game like a modern first person adventure or wind back the clock, turn off auto-mapping, activate grid based movement, and step your way through our dungeons and overworlds like you’re back in the 80’s.
Legacy Mode Features:
Grid Move (BETA): You can now play using grid-based movement! This feature has been a long time coming and we worked hard to get that classic game feel while still working with all our more modern elements and overworld design. You’ll have the option to grid move with full free look enabled at all times or play in a more classic mode in which your camera is rotated for you as you walk forward along the grid. There’s still polish on this feature left to do, but rather than holding back for longer we wanted those of you who are passionate about this feature to try it out and let us know what you think, and what you feel the most important improvements to the system would be. Let us know what you think on the forums!
Note: For those turning this feature on in an pre-patch 4 save game, you’ll notice many NPC’s aren’t looking directly at you in the world while moving on the grid. We adjusted NPC’s to better align with the movement grid, but to make that change propagate in existing games it’d require wiping out the NPC’s save data That would reset things such as their inventory, which we wanted to avoid at all costs.
Save Anywhere: This has been our most requested feature. You can now save the game (almost) anywhere in the game. Save through the pause menu, or use F5 and F9 to quick-save and quick-load. While save anywhere is active, you cannot consume luck-stones for bonus experience. A small price to pay.
Some areas have been blocked off from saving for technical reasons, and if that’s the case you’ll see a prompt appear letting you know that’s the case. Usually just moving somewhere else in the room or level will resolve that issue.
Auto-Resurrect: For an extra bit of difficulty, you can deactivate auto-resurrect. This will cause characters who fall in combat to only resurrect upon finding a luck stone. Food will also not revive characters while this is active.
Perma-Death: This mode is only for the bold. If your entire party is incapacitated, your save file is permanently deleted. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. This option cannot be changed once it’s been set and can only be set on new games.
Enemy Reactions: Deactivate enemy reactions to stop enemies from chattering and taunting.
Auto-Mapping: You can deactivate auto-mapping entirely, resulting in all your maps appearing black with no icons. Break out your graph paper.
Mini-Map: You can toggle how prominent your mini-map is on screen. You can set it to always show, only show while your adventurer’s HUD is up, or never show at all.
Show Waypoints: Toggle waypoints on or off, if you hate being told where to go.
Show Enemies On Map: Toggle weather or not enemies appear on your map and mini-map, for an extra challenge.
The A-Team is back: You can spend 8 mercenary tokens at Mercy the mercenary vendor to hire 6 adventurers who are fully geared for war and ready to rock.
Brian the Fist, the Fichti Paladin
El Cid, the Dwarven Fighter
Markus, the Elven Bard
Sir Grady, the Trow Rogue
Merlin, the Einarr Conjuror
Omar, the Elven Magician
Adventurer Re-Spec’ing: By spending a mercenary token at the Review Board, you can refund an adventurer’s skill points.
Legendary Difficulty: A 4th difficulty tier has been added, increasing enemy difficulty by 100% over normal mode.