Now that The Bard's Tale has been on store shelves for a couple of months, several members of the inXile team discuss the development of the game in
RPGVault's latest four-page "wrap report". A snippet from Brian Fargo's comments on decision making:
The best decision we made during development was our commitment to the personality and humor of the game design. We received a lot of feedback in the beginning that we were crazy for taking on humor. Until people finally saw the game up and running and could see the way we were using the humor, nobody outside our company seemed to think it was a good idea. If we had not been so convinced we were going in the right direction, it would have been easy to let popular opinion lead us to making yet another generic medieval action RPG.
The hard part was getting people to understand that our idea of humor did not mean characters sitting around telling jokes. Our vision was to lambaste the genre and make fun of all of the tired cliches game designers have been using since the original Bard's Tale shipped back in the '80s. The response to the game has been amazing, and we feel somewhat vindicated now that people are playing the game and finding it to be as entertaining as we do. I knew we were going to be okay when I watched testers who had already played the game from start to finish a dozen times still laughing and singing while they played the game.
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