The Bard’s Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled Available on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, Interview
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Just as promised earlier this month, you can now purchase the so-called “Remastered and Resnarkled” edition of inXile Entertainment’s humorous action-RPG The Bard’s Tale for your Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. The game is priced at $19.99 or your regional equivalent, offering 20-30 hours of hack ‘n’ slash gameplay enhanced by numerous interactions with bizarre NPCs and unique boss fights.
And as a bonus, you can now read this official Xbox Wire interview with inXile's founders. It goes over the studio's early days, tells the story of how The Bard’s Tale sort-of stumbled into being a comedy, mentions what it’s like working with high-profile voice actors, and more. An excerpt:
The Bard’s Tale ARPG isn’t like the other Bard’s Tale I-IV titles; how does it fit in to the world and story? Was there any influence from the other Bard’s Tale games?
Matt: We had to create an original story and world to avoid any blatant copyright infringement with the original trilogy (ed: the rights were at the time held by a different publisher), but the world we created was based on the same mythology that the original game world was based on. We just went back to the deep roots of the Scottish and Celtic Mythology that inspired not only The Bard’s Tale, but everything from Tolkien to Dungeons & Dragons. We will call it a parallel universe to the Bard’s Tale I-IV world. While the creatures and places might overlap a bit, the Bard does live in a world of his own.
Maxx: From my perspective, I was trying to create something brand new. We weren’t using the old titles as a reference point, we were only using the same locations, with the idea of Scottish lore as our guide. We did research and we looked at structures and we talked about the creatures, and that was kind of the genesis of everything that comprised the game.
When we were making the game, the attitude started to evolve. I designed this creature called the Bugbear…
Matt: A lot of people don’t know that when we first started writing the game it was not yet a comedy. Maxx sent me a piece of concept art that he had created really quickly of a Bugbear. Maxx is a great artist, but this concept art was not good. I immediately said, “That is not a Bugbear, that looks like a guy wearing a bugbear suit he got at a discount costume shop.” Somehow I could not get that image out of my head and sat down and wrote a quest line that really came right out of an episode of Scooby Doo. Old Man Vinters is wearing a Bugbear costume and is using it to scare the village population into paying him a ransom. By the time I was done writing it, we were now making a comedy.
Maxx: We had always planned on being irreverent, we were also planning to not just do the normally expected thing. We were going to twist things and put them on their ear. From an art standpoint, Matt’s response kind of got the ball rolling for me on a lot of different ideas about how to approach the game.
Do you think this title helped to define what inXile is today?
Brian: I do think this first The Bard’s Tale game for the studio helped define an approach that we take to game design. We try very hard to anticipate what the player is trying to accomplish in the game and what they’re thinking. The world is so much more alive and immersive when you’re able to do that successfully.
The Bard’s Tale ARPG was about the humor of our cynical hero (Cary Elwes) arguing with the narrator (Tony Jay). The humor worked because of the tropes it made fun of, and of the understanding of what the player was thinking at the moment. The game also reinforced how the little things are big things. It was the small moments, the song and dance numbers and the dialogue that people remember for years. We love putting effort into those small moments, or scenes that not everyone will see, because we know those are what make an impact. That’s something that continues to influence our development.
