Imagine playing easy-peasy Skyrim and you'd actually have to memorize and enter the shouts… I am telling you, once you had all the spells in the game safely stowed in your brain, you actually began to feel like a real wizard! Expecto Patronum! Take that, Harry Potter! It required the player to think and to get involved. This meant you had to memorize the actual spell codes, such as D-E-S-T for the Death Strike. #SOURCE VODE THE BARDS TALE CODE#Unlike in modern games where you simply select a spell without any actual intellectual input from the player, in The Bard's Tale you had to enter a four-letter code combination to cast a spell. In addition to these songs, The Bard’s Tale also had an intriguing magic system that actually involved the player directly. A small icon appeared next to the image of the person or the affected enemy as an indicator of the respective effect. Most of the songs represented what we call buffs today, such as the one song that would reduce the armor class, and so forth. And playing any song would actually play a little tune in the game. What made the game stand out in our memory was the actual bard class in the game-the bard’s songs were essential to solving some of the puzzles in the game. There was no moving around, no graphics-just an exchange text blows. The individual combat events as characters and monsters took stabs at each other were displayed as a log-style scrolling text in a window on the screen. The Bard’s Tale still had its combat still fought out in a text form, via a list of the monsters versus a list of your party members. The innovation that Pool of Radiance added, though, was the combat screen. So in many ways, it probably served as an inspiration for the SSI Gold Box games, considering that the games play similarly. One of the interesting and often overlooked things about The Bard’s Tale is that its character system was actually pretty similar to that of D&D. One of the listeners sitting next to him would imagine the adventurous scenes portrayed in his odes, appearing and disappearing in graphics bubbles above his head. Naturally, the lyrics of the song appeared as text only on the screen but this was pretty impressive stuff in 1987 on the C64! The bard would stop playing to take a sip from his mug once in a while.
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