This can make end-game combat encounters feel predictable.Д¬ombat isnвЂ™t the only obstacle we face on our adventures. Progression and Combat are solid and enjoyable, but tactical variety is lacking and by end game, top tier gear is everywhere. Combat difficulty on normal difficulty feels inconsistent with some battles being faceroll easy, while others impassable for without changing difficulty or retooling the entire party. On easy difficulty it can become predictable. Progression is solid, satisfying, and fun to play around with. The BardвЂ™s Tale 4: The DirectorвЂ™s Cut lets us build and customize the entire party how we want. Meanwhile Melody the Bard adds an additional reactive to the front line defenders so enemy melee hits set the attacker on fire. They are my вЂњmental damageвЂќ dealers and can interrupt enemy channels early before they can wreak havoc on my party. The backline rogues have a passive that keeps the entire back row (practitioner, rogue, rogue) in stealth for the first turn allowing them to buff up. The fighters and rogues are built with melee reactives so anytime they take a hit damage is dealt to the attacker. Melody I have setup as a classic jack-of-all-trades bard with strong attack, defense, and support. For me, this party has a great balance of damage and defense.

My lineup consists of 2 Fighters, 2 Rogues, 1 Practitioner (mage), and Melody the Bard. My party is entirely composed of story characters that I picked up along my adventures, but then completely customized their skill set and gear. Parties also must be equipped to counter these tactics as enemies will bring them to the table as well. These can be leveraged by the party to demolish your foes. Key mechanics include, channeled skills, armor, and reactive skills among others. Those are a limited resource, but I still had several left unused when I finished and I had gone through and retooled each character to fit my play style. My characters were level 25 by the end and still had room for progression had I more time for side missions and the new dungeon Haernhold. Our characters can progress and level until we finish the story. There are some essential mechanics that need to be handled, but there are a lot of different ways we can build our parties to do so.ДЇortunately there is no hard level cap to worry about in BT4. However, as my characters grew those concerns evaporated and were completely gone around level 10.ДЇreedom to build characters and a party how I want to is very important to me and BT4 offers a great deal of flexibility. Early on I was concerned party building would devolve into gimmicks or tricky copy-pasta builds scraped from the internet. Stats are important in BT4, but equally so are character skill and party synergies. The core to any RPG is character progression and how well skill growth weaves into game play. There are some minor spoilers ahead so be warned. Read on and weвЂ™ll see if InXile put as much effort into the finish as they did the beginning. How well would these hold up over the entire game? I spent the past two weeks working my way through the story. Those systems felt good in the initial chapters, but a lot of games start strong and finish weak. Additionally, combat, enemies, puzzles, and many other aspects of the game were reworked and polished. We checked out the new changes and got a feel for the performance changes in our Initial Impressions piece a couple of weeks ago. The BardвЂ™s Tale 4 had a rocky start last year. ItвЂ™s a game that challenged me and a story that tugged at my heart. ItвЂ™s also a story of hope and triumph and perseverance. The BardвЂ™s Tale 4: The DirectorвЂ™s Cut is an epic tale of corruption and evil, suffering and loss, of lessons learned too late and and the bitter consequences.

The bards tale 4 hdr