The Bard’s Tale Trilogy – Thief of Fate Schedule, Remastering Comparison

When the first game of the remastered The Bard’s Tale Trilogy launched, we were told to expect Thief of Fate, the third and final part of the dungeon crawling series, by the end of the year. However, according to this Steam announcement, it will instead be going live sometime in early 2019. This added time should allow the developers to make the game better overall, improve its visuals, and squash some bugs.

At the same time, the announcement also informs us that the game will be going into beta on Steam shortly, which should allow you to get in on the action early and offer your feedback to the developers. And then, there’s also a number of sample animations that show off the game in its remastered glory, as well as this short comparison video:

Some additional details:

Hey everybody!

So we’ve been doing a lot of work on Thief of Fate – reading through the clue books and the manual; looking at the original map illustrations – and there is just so much that was layered into the lore, but wasn’t able to be displayed on screen because of the technical limitations of the time.

We want the Bard’s Tale Trilogy version of Thief of Fate to be the best that it can be. That means that we want The Palace to look like it’s underwater. To make Gelidia not only be a land of eternal winter, but look like it too. For Urmech’s Workshop to have mechanical walls (and occasionally, be filled with oil).

Because of all of this (and more – oh so much more!), Thief of Fate and the Legacy mode aren’t going to be ready until early 2019.

We want to make it very clear that this is nothing to do with money, nor inXile’s recent acquisition by Microsoft. This is simply that we (inXile and Krome) want to make the game be the best it can be – and we need more time to get it all in place.

One of the things that we’ve enjoyed since the game’s launch in August is the conversation with our fans. Now that we’re in the final stretch of development, we’re taking this delay as an opportunity to offer a peek behind the curtain. To that end, we plan on creating a Beta branch on Steam as well as a Thief of Fate Beta specific forum area. Before Christmas 2018, we’ll populate this Beta branch with a version of Thief of Fate that will be playable (but will have some bugs) – with some of the art (enemy cameos, dungeon art and such) not complete. We welcome peoples’ feedback and comments on the beta and we’ll keep you all informed on progress as we approach the full release.

As Steam is the development platform for the game, this beta will only be available for Steam users. GOG users will, of course, receive the finished product on the same day as Steam users.

We’ve included a taste of the work-in-progress art below, so you can see some of these things that we’re talking about and hopefully get a feel for what we’re trying to get in place and why we’re taking the extra time.

Cheers
Linds