Update: We’ve been informed that The Mage’s Tale will also be coming to PSVR at a future, undisclosed date — but inXile have confirmed that this version is currently “in development.”
Original:The Mage’s Tale, an Oculus Rift with Touch exclusive from inXile Entertainment, was one of 2017’s very best VR games. Now, the developer is announcing that it will be making its debut on HTC Vive through Steam on March 27th — less than two weeks from now.
For a lot of VR gamers, this is the kind of game they’ve been clamoring for if they haven’t had a chance to play it yet. The Mage’s Tale has close to a dozen hours of content, an innovative spell-creation system, excellent puzzles, exciting combat, and one of the most visually pleasing VR worlds to explore yet. After release the development team continued to support it with updates, including free locomotion.
When it releases on March 27th for Vive it will also include the recently launched horde mode for endless replayability, optimized performance, faster load times, and full smooth locomotion. It’s basically the same game, but it’ll be accessible on Steam for Vive users instead of just on the Oculus Home Store.
The dungeon crawl RPG isn’t quite as popular nowadays as it used to be — at least, not in its most traditional form. Created as a way of adapting the likes of Dungeons & Dragons to a digital computer game interface mixed with the tenants of text adventures like Zork, the first dungeon crawlers were visually sparse and full of ambition, nothing like modern entries in the genre such as The Mage’s Tale in VR .
You’d view everything from the first-person perspective in a static window often with no animation while you selected options and commands for your party to perform as you explored the depths of the world’s darkest dungeons. By today’s standards it sounds archaic when you look at the likes of Skyrim VR, but at the time it was the most transportive experience available.
It All Started With A Bard
And in 1985 a little game named Tales of the Unknown: Volume I, more commonly referred to by its subtitle, The Bard’s Tale (pictured above,) became a best-seller and informed the design principles of an entire generation.
The team behind that game, Interplay, went on to be associated with the likes of the Baldur’s Gate, Wasteland, and Fallout franchises. Brian Fargo was a key industry figure on all of these projects taking up the mantle of everything from Writer to Executive Producer. Now his current company where he serves as CEO, inXile Entertainment, just recently launched Torment: Tides of Numenera as a spiritual successor to the acclaimed Planescape: Torment and are currently working on Wasteland 3 as well The Bard’s Tale IV, the first mainline entry in that franchise in almost 30 years.
Now they’ve also just recently released their very first VR game called The Mage’s Tale. It takes place in the same universe as The Bard’s Tale and has players assume the role of an up and coming wizard. You explore dungeons, solve puzzles, avoid traps, and fight back against countless enemies across 10 different dungeons and close to a dozen hours of content making it one of the largest and most elaborate VR titles to date. We really enjoyed it in our review.
The Mage’s Tale has been a long-time coning.
“From the very first time I tried VR I knew I wanted to make a dungeon crawler,” said Fargo during an interview with UploadVR. “I first tried that early Oculus Rift demo with the dinosaur in the hallway years ago. At that moment when I saw the dinosaur I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh! I have to do a dungeon crawl game in VR!’ because it just seemed like such a great opportunity to put you in the dungeon. You could look around and really feel like you were there.”
The transportive capability of VR is one of its most prominent strengths. When you’re playing an old-school dungeon crawl game like The Bard’s Tale, Might & Magic, Wizardry, or one of countless licensed Dungeons & Dragons games that came later on, it feels almost like you’re gazing through a window into another world. With VR headsets, you can tear down the wall, step through the window, and truly feel immersed in the environment instead.
“Unlike the old days when you’re just sitting at your desk, seeing a monitor, only concerned with what’s on the screen, now we have players that are looking around in the world itself, not just a screen,” explained Fargo. “Creatively it’s so different than what’s been done before.”
Learning to Dungeon Crawl Before You Can Walk
One of the biggest differences between the old games Fargo used to work on like the original Bard’s Tale titles and The Mage’s Tale is that traditionally you’d control an entire party of people and move them all together, in unison, through dungeons as one unit. That doesn’t really work well when you ask a player to physically move around in VR. You only have one set of arms and two eyes to look around so it didn’t seem appropriate to have players control an entire party that way.
“Games that are primarily party-based just don’t lend themselves well to VR because you’re supposed to feel immersed,” said Fargo. “Keeping things like the UI in mind just changes things. We had to get rid of all of the stats and sheets of information that’d usually be on-screen to look at since that takes you out of the realm. The biggest thing we learned is the importance of putting presence at the front of the experience.”
Another major difference is that most of the older games were turn-based. In that system you’d see an enemy appear in front of you, you’d tell your fighter to hit it with his sword, a number on the screen shows how much damage you did, then the enemy attacks and hits one of your party members, followed by someone else’s turn, and so on. That doesn’t really work for a VR game. A developer can’t tell a player that, even though they have the ability to move around and do things, that they can’t attack or move because it isn’t their turn. That just isn’t how presence works.
“One of our earliest iterations of The Mage’s Tale was actually turn-based,” said David Rogers, Lead Designer at inXile Entertainment, during the same interview. “You’d have the goblin go, then you throw a fireball, then the goblin goes again, and so on. That never felt weird when looking at a monitor but it feels out of place in VR. The combination of first-person and VR made it not feel right and took you out of the experience.”
Going back to the concept of putting presence and agency first, that logic informed the entire game’s design process. When you play an old dungeon crawler and try to click and cast a fireball at a wall for no reason other than you feel like it, nothing happens. Combat isn’t going on so an attack can’t be used. But in VR when playing The Mage’s Tale you can totally throw fireballs and lightning bolts all around however many times you’d like. That sense of freedom is what makes it so effective.
Due to the game’s focus on that core concept — being a mage — some ideas had to be cut though, like detailed melee combat systems. In the game you don’t really pick up and use melee weapons, or any weapons at all for that matter, as you instead get to mix and create your own magical spells. You are a powerful mage in a fantasy world, after all.
“We wanted to nail the core objective of making a badass wizard,” explained Rogers. “And in doing so, we didn’t want to split development time between nailing the haptics and hitting the right areas of enemies and having them react. We thought about the experience we’re trying to make and we just asked each other, “Why would you use a sword if you can use ice javelins and lightning instead?” It came down to us not wanting to muddle the message. And our goal was never razor’s edge difficulty with you on the verge of death at all times, we just wanted to fulfill the dream of being a powerful wizard.
Building for the Future
Now that The Mage’s Tale has been out for a while inXile Entertainment is focused on making it even better. Some of the biggest gripes about the core game are that the loading times were way too long and there was no full, smooth locomotion option at all. Movement was restricted to either teleporting or incremental steps. An upcoming update is aiming to fix both of those areas.
On top of that, it’s been announced that inXile has closed funding with gumi Inc. for a total of $4.5, part of which is going towards the funding of a brand new VR game that will be a social, open-world RPG. We’re crossing our fingers for a VR version of Wasteland.
At this point in the life cycle of VR it makes sense that the people that helped popularize dungeon crawlers in the 80s would be trying to popularize them again for a new audience on a new platform. The best way to move forward sometimes is to look back and learn from the past.
inXile Entertainment, the developer behind the recent launch of fantasy role-playing game (RPG) The Mage’s Tale has just announced a combined investment of $4.5 million USD for equity and project investment from gumi VR Inc.
The studio is currently developing The Bard’s Tale IV and Wasteland 3 – neither of which are for virtual reality (VR). However inXile Entertainment will use the investment towards its next VR title, an unannounced open world survival RPG which the developer plans to bring to all platforms.
“Gumi shares my passion for creating deeper virtual reality games and I’m fortunate to have a partner to work with in this spectacular new medium. We’ve had incredible feedback from our first game, The Mage’s Tale, and we want to continue to build on our experience and reputation. I’ve always been fascinated by the social dynamics of the open world survival genre and experiencing that in virtual reality will create powerful and terrifying moments. We’ll also be bringing our storytelling and RPG experience to the table to help enrich the genre,” said Brian Fargo, CEO, inXile Entertainment in a statement.
In addition to the investment, gumi Inc. CEO Hironao Kunimitsu also joins inXile Entertainment’s board.
“Brian is a legend in the games industry, and inXile Entertainment has a track record for creating ground-breaking PC and console games that feel AAA in scope and size using their creativity, ingenuity, and ambition. Over the past year, they’ve brought in very talented and experienced members as they shift their strategy from single player to multiplayer online games as a service, and we look forward to seeing how they approach the space,” said Kunimitsu. “Since breaking into VR, we believe they’ve already delivered the best VR RPG game to date with The Mage’s Tale. We’re honored to become a strategic investor and partner with inXile, and delighted for the opportunity to work together on the next VR title with such a masterfully skilled team.”
The Mage’s Tale launched last month for Oculus Rift and Touch, with VRFocusgiving it the full five stars, saying: “If you’ve been looking for a decent fantasy RPG then you can’t go too far wrong with this.”
For further inXile Entertainment updates, keep reading VRFocus.
The creators of The Mage’s Tale, inXile Entertainment, announced today that they’ve not only secured $4.5 million in funding from gumi Inc., but the investment is a combined total in the form of part equity in the company and part investment in the next VR game, which is based on an existing franchise. All we know about the game right now is that it’s an “open world survival RPG” VR game. This new game is not related to the new fully-funded Oculus game that’s in the works.
“We’ve had incredible feedback from our first [VR] game, The Mage’s Tale, and we want to continue to build on our experience and reputation. I’ve always been fascinated by the social dynamics of the open world survival genre and experiencing that in virtual reality will create powerful and terrifying moments. We’ll also be bringing our storytelling and RPG experience to the table to help enrich the genre,” said Brian Fargo, CEO, inXile Entertainment.
The Mage’s Tale has earned its reputation as one of the longest and most in-depth fully-featured VR games on the market so far. Since we know this new VR game is based on an existing franchise it could take place in that same universe again, but it would be even more exciting if it were a Wasteland VR game. The Wasteland series is one of inXile’s most popular and shares a lot of similarities to that of the Fallout franchise. Since we know this new game is open world with survival mechanics, it could certainly be the case.
Interestingly Fargo also mentions “social mechanics” and “powerful and terrifying moments” which reminds us of survival titles like ARK: Survival Evolved, H1Z1, and Rust — all of which certainly share thematic similarities to Wasteland. I’ve always been a proponent of those types of games getting more VR support. Fingers crossed that’s the IP they’re working on!
“Brian is a legend in the games industry, and inXile Entertainment has a track record for creating ground-breaking PC and console games that feel AAA in scope and size using their creativity, ingenuity, and ambition. Over the past year, they’ve brought in very talented and experienced members as they shift their strategy from single player to multiplayer online games as a service, and we look forward to seeing how they approach the space,” gumi Inc. CEO Hironao Kunimitsu, who is also now on the inXile Entertainment board. “Since breaking into VR, we believe they’ve already delivered the best VR RPG game to date with The Mage’s Tale. We’re honored to become a strategic investor and partner with inXile, and delighted for the opportunity to work together on the next VR title with such a masterfully skilled team.”
What do you think this new IP could be? Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!
Update: Added some clarifications at the beginning.
inXile Entertainment, the studio behind The Bard’s Tale franchise including VR dungeon crawlerThe Mage’s Tale (2017), today announced they’ve raised a combined investment of $4.5M intended for equity in the company and as funds to develop an unannounced open world survival RPG VR game.
Hironao Kunimitsu, image courtesy The Venture Reality Fund
Investment comes from Japanese firm gumi VR Inc., a subsidiary of video game publisher and developer gumi Inc. In addition to the investment, gumi Inc. CEO Hironao Kunimitsu also joins inXile Entertainment’s board.
gumi Inc. first expanded into VR and AR in early 2016 with the launch of Tokyo VR Startups (TVS), an incubation program focused on the Japanese VR market. The company later expanded their investment strategy to encompass US-based companies doing AR/VR with The Venture Reality Fund.
“Gumi shares my passion for creating deeper virtual reality games and I’m fortunate to have a partner to work with in this spectacular new medium. We’ve had incredible feedback from our first game, The Mage’s Tale, and we want to continue to build on our experience and reputation. I’ve always been fascinated by the social dynamics of the open world survival genre and experiencing that in virtual reality will create powerful and terrifying moments. We’ll also be bringing our storytelling and RPG experience to the table to help enrich the genre,” said Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile Entertainment.
inXile is still playing it pretty close to the vest on their upcoming VR RPG, however they have said it will launch “on all platforms.”
image captured by Road to VR
“Since breaking into VR, we believe they’ve already delivered the best VR RPG game to date with The Mage’s Tale. We’re honored to become a strategic investor and partner with inXile, and delighted for the opportunity to work together on the next VR title with such a masterfully skilled team,” said Kunimitsu.
Following a successful Kickstarter to bring The Bard’s Tale IV to life, inXile has been busy developing several games including The Bard’s Tale IV, The Mage’s Tale and Wasteland 3. Before inXile, CEO Brian Fargo co-founded Interplay, known as the creator of the original Fallout series and as a publisher for the Baldur’s Gate and Descent series.
In The Mage’s Tale, you get to experience classic dungeon crawler staples like exploration, spell crafting, puzzles, and monster battles—and all of it in the immersive realm of VR using your own two hands with the help of Oculus Touch. In our review of The Mage’s Tale, we got a chance to step into a cohesive universe, that while a little rough around the edges, ultimately was a wonderful mix of charming throwback and modern, built-for-VR immersion.
While epic fantasy role-playing games (RPG) like The Elder Scolls V: Skyrim VRmight be coming to virtual reality (VR) headsets in the near future, at present fans of the genre don’t have a great deal to choose from. Luckily inXile Entertainment has stepped in with The Mage’s Tale, a magic fueled adventure for Oculus Rift and Touch that goes a long way to make you feel like you’re an all powerful wizard.
You play an apprentice who’s just begun learning about how to conjure spells when the wizard who’s training you gets kidnapped by an evil sorcerer. With a trusty – and sometimes annoying – goblin like sidekick who floats around telling you how to do things whilst making derogatory remarks about how you’re ill equipped to take on the task of rescuing your master, you begin the journey to becoming a fully fledged wizard.
You start your adventure at a magical base of operations. This hub allows you to warp to each level – and once completed head back if you need to – as well as create the potions you’ll need to fight your way through dungeons and complete the task at hand. The potion side of The Mage’s Tale is a big aspect of the experience allowing you to chop and change your loadout as you see fit, with a myriad of different options as you unlock more ingredients. To begin with you’re only supplied with a basic fireball spell but as things progress ice, lightning and other elements come into play, all of which are needed to solve puzzles and give you a wide array of offensive capabilities.
inXile Entertainment has decided to go for the tried and tested teleportation method of movement for this VR experience. It works as well as any other title, with a reasonable range of movement all controlled with the right stick plus rotational snap movement. The left stick allows for much shorter, incremental steps should you need to side step out the way of an incoming arrow or other attacks.
Learning how to use both is vital when engaged in combat, at points you can be dealing with multiple enemies and using just teleportation on its own can be somewhat cumbersome. If you’re using a three-sensor setup you can teleport behind someone and quickly turn around, but with two-sensors you need to snap yourself round which can leave you defenseless for a moment. When you’ve got the hang of it, the combat does become a lot more fluid even though it’s certainly not perfect.
Whilst talking about combat, selecting your spells is a much easier mechanic to deal with. Holding down the B or Y button on either controller brings up a selection of four and you just wave your hand over the one you want. This means that both left and right-handed players are catered for. One downside is the fact that there’s no duel wielding, you can’t have a lightning spell in one hand and a fireball in the other which is a shame. On the flip side the hand that doesn’t have a spell can make a shield, so its not completely redundant.
The Mage’s Tale is massive, while the studio states there’s ten hours plus of gameplay you’ll likely finish it quicker than that. But that does depended on how much of a completionist you are as there are loads of little collectables to find. The videogame is littered with puzzles and thankfully inXile has managed to create quite a variety so you’re not just looking for a key, or repeating the same old tasks.
It’s a wonderful title to just walk around in, with the dungeons having a beautifully dark, dank, imposing feel to them. It’s not a horror by any means, actually most of the videogame is slightly camp and comedic in nature, even some of the enemies have a humorous aspect to them, evoking classic fantasy films of the 80’s like Dark Crystal.
One aspect that did curtail the enjoyment of The Mage’s Tale were the loading times. Now this is somewhat dictated by your PC’s spec, but any rig running VR needs to be fairly decent. Running a just above spec PC, most loading screens were timed at 2 – 3 minutes, fine to begin with when starting the videogame but this was consistent throughout. Get killed and it wasn’t straight back into the action, just a long pause while angelic celtic music played – beautiful the first few times, less so after a couple of loads. This also had an impact on gameplay, as nipping back to the hub to alter spells then became a chore, only doing so if really needed. This might not be the case for everyone but it will be for some.
Technical gripes aside The Mage’s Tale is a really good magical adventure that really puts you into the heart of the experience. The story provides hours worth of gameplay and the potion creation side adds even more fun, mixing and matching various items to see what they do. If you’ve been looking for a decent fantasy RPG then you can’t go too far wrong with this.
Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong decade. By the time I was old enough to really appreciate video games (born in 1990) I was diving headfirst into sprawling epic adventures from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior franchises on consoles and learning how to fight my way through the unrelenting difficulty of the original EverQuest. That adoration moved on to other series as time went on, but one game in particular that stood out to me in my youth was Wizardry 8, released in 2001 when I was just 11 years old.
The Wizardry games took place from a first-person perspective and had you advance an entire party of adventurers through dungeons and catacombs and dangerous fields as you embarked on quests for loot and glory. While the Wizardry games aren’t technically related to The Mage’s Tale, they were quite similar to The Bard’s Tale, one of the most popular games of its ilk from that time period of PC gaming. If I’d been born 10 or more years earlier I could have played many of these games as they’d been released instead of years later.
As a newly created VR-iteration of the classic dungeon crawling formula, The Mage’s Tale has a lot of expectation riding on its shoulders. Not only is the game being created by one of the original luminaries of the genre, Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment, but it actually takes place in the same universe as The Bard’s Tale too, right between the third and (upcoming) fourth installment.
Other than existing mostly in first-person as you move an entire party through dungeons, the most prominent feature of these sorts of games has always been the movement system. You press a key on the keyboard or press a button on the screen with your mouse, and your view moves one square in the specified direction. In this way the games are almost turn-based. Instead of holding a key or pressing forward on an analog stick to move smoothly you move one square at a time as if you’re taking individual steps. The Mage’s Tale uses a very similar concept.
Using the Oculus Touch controllers you move your character through the world by tilting the analog stick on the left Touch controller to traverse the environment one square at a time. Alternatively, you can point and click to teleport through the world as well, which is common in many modern VR games. I found myself using a combination of the two features in most cases.
Movement is a big part of the game as you’ll have to explore ten different dungeons that each take about an hour each (making the game last approximately 10+ hours depending on how thorough you are and how much time you spend backtracking or experimenting with spellcrafting.) In that exploring you’ll do some basic puzzle solving and a bit of trap avoiding, but combat is definitely the main focus of it all. Personally, I’d have liked a few more puzzles spaced out in it all to mix things up more consistently but overall the balance is better than most games like this.
Being a mage, combat is mostly of the ranged variety in The Mage’s Tale. Things start out simply enough as you master the art of flinging fireballs and shooting lightning bolts but it doesn’t take long for the intensity and complexity to go up a few notches. Most of the attacks in the game are handled by targeting an enemy with your head-tracked crosshair onscreen and then letting loose the spell using one of your hands. The lack of free fire such as in The Unpsoken is missed at first, but the wealth of options quickly overshadows that initial gameplay disappointment and once you start maneuvering around levels and dodging attacks you won’t be wishing for more complicated controls at all.
As you explore the game’s various dungeons you’ll come across different effects that can be used to augment and create brand new spells. For example, would you like to shoot a giant purple fireball that seeks out enemies once it leaves your hand? Go for it. Or how about a big sparkling pink ice spike that you can control in the air by waving your hand like a magical conductor? You can do that too. It’s not exactly a limitless system, but it feels pretty close.
The biggest issue here is that when trying to select items for mixing into the spellbound cauldron the controls can be a little finicky. As great as the Oculus Touch controllers are we haven’t quite reached the point from a tech perspective where minute selections and manipulation are really possible so I found myself fumbling with ingredients from time to time. Some of the UI elements felt unfinished or ugly as well, such as the large letters on potion bottles that clearly label things but stick out a bit like a sore thumb. You can see an example in the screenshot above.
As you explore dungeons you’ll find plenty of enemies to fight, traps to avoid, and treasure to loot, but along the way you’ll also level up your character as well. In most cases this results in being able to choose how you upgrade your wizard and progress your abilities. By the end of the game I found myself truly feeling powerful and like I had learned a great deal in terms of not only my in-game powers but also in terms of how I handled myself in combat.
One of the most satisfying areas of the game is in how it handles boss battles. Most VR games of this type have only been able to pack a couple of hours of content with maybe one or two big boss battles near the end but in the case of The Mage’s Tale each of the 10 dungeons has a satisfying climax that requires you to memorize attack patterns and deftly navigate the environment to dodge attacks and setup your own responses. It’s nothing short of exhilarating.
Final Score: 8/10 – Great
The Mage’s Tale is one of the best examples of how to take a tried-and-true existing gaming genre and adapt it for the new VR medium. While it retains plenty of design decisions that make it clear where its roots lie, The Mage’s Tale iterates on principles that truly move the first-person dungeon crawler RPG subgenre forward in big ways. This is easily one of the longest and most involved adventures to grace the VR market thus far and is a must-play for RPG fans.
Stepping into The Mage’s Tale, a first-person dungeon crawler RPG that puts you in the enchanted boots of an apprentice mage, is a bit like jumping into your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick. With elemental magic at the ready, you get to experience classic dungeon crawler stuff like exploration, spell crafting, puzzles, and battle against a number of monster types—and all of it in the immersive realm of VR. While at times a little rough around the edges, The Mage’s Tale is a charming throwback that vaults you head-first into a dank and mysterious universe of inXile’s other series, The Bard’s Tale.
Developer: inXile Entertainment Available On: Oculus Rift (Touch required) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: June 20, 2017
Gameplay
The evil wizard Gaufroi has kidnapped your master, Mage Alguin. As his apprentice, it’s your job to get him back by finding his powerful fellow mages, a quest that takes you through ten dungeons where you’re confronted with various puzzles, traps, and monsters—where there’s always a chest that needs looting at the end.
Walking into a puzzle room usually elicits a hint from your Alguin’s familiar, a magical goblin whose name I can’t remember. For the purposes of this review, he shall henceforth be known as ‘smarmy turd’ (ST for short).
image captured by Road to VR
ST is a constant thorn in your side, and tends to tutorialize puzzles and generally point out the obvious. He does however make the dank dungeons placed before you a little less lonely, so I guess he’s got that going for him. When not tutorialized by ST, puzzles are explained by a changing cast of ever-present talking wall monsters, who offer riddles to help you along the way. Puzzles tend to be fairly simple, but because The Mage’s Tale offers so many varied types, you’ll always be on your toes figuring out the next one (if ST hasn’t spoiled it already, that is). You’ll find yourself fetching missing parts to puzzles, looking through magical orbs to locate important runes, cranking machines, freezing water in pipes so you can light a torch that’s being dowsed; the variations are so rich, that even the smarmiest of turds can’t ruin it for you.
When you’re not cranking weird machines and blowing out walls to reach hidden chests though, you’re probably blasting away at the world’s many monsters. Enemy types tend to be mostly ranged, like archers and mages, so they usually keep their distance allowing you to block with your arcane shield or plink away with your magical abilities. There are however a number of melee fighters to watch out for later in the game including shielded goblins and hammer-wielding giants. Enemies don’t have health bars, so you usually end up blasting away with whatever appears to work best on each enemy type.
image courtesy inXile Entertainment
To my utter dismay, dual-wielding is not a thing in The Mage’s Tale. Oh well.
A big personal attraction for me to the game is spell crafting. I would have loved to find ancient books filled with spells, but unfortunately crafting is done entirely through trial and error, as your cauldron will unhappily vomit out bad combinations, forcing you to start over again until you find something that works. Because there are more than 2 dozen ingredients and over a 100 combinations, you’ll spend plenty of time mixing and matching until you get that perfect lighting spell that has both impressive range, rips health from your enemies when they die and tosses out confetti on the monster’s dead body.
image courtesy inXile Entertainment
Chests usually offer some sort of magical ingredient you can use in crafting, be it base elemental spells like lighting/fire/wind/ice, or a modifier like poison, extra recharge, or triple shot. My absolute favorite part of opening chests isn’t receiving points for upgrades, or new magical reagents, but tossing them into the awaiting mouth of my teleporting frog-buddy, whose name was mentioned once and forgotten forever.
Without revealing too much, the story line isn’t anything you wouldn’t find ripped from a Dungeon Master’s Guide, so don’t expect any great innovations in story telling here. But then again, that’s exactly you’re in for with The Mage’s Tale, a faithful classic that lets you fire lighting at wise-cracking goblins.
For those of you mashing ctrl+f and searching the article for ‘gameplay length’, you’ll see I finished in a little over 7.5 hours, a slight tick under the advertised 10+. I’m far from a completionist, so I don’t mind leaving the game’s many collectibles behind in the dark dungeons where they belong, so you may well spend 10+ hours collecting everything, not to mention trying your hand at mixing together ingredients to get better spells.
Combat can feel a little repetitive at times. This is dampened somewhat once you get a good number of reagents to add to your base spells and start to naturally rotate through different attacks instead of just picking the strongest one. Just like classic games of yore, combat can be a process of trial and error, so expect to get smashed a few times by a giant before you know his weak spot. To get a good idea of what combat looks like in The Mage’s Tale, check out the video below. And no, you can’t get a sword or any other melee weapon.
Immersion & Comfort
Relying on classic dungeon level design and an appropriate mix of irreverent campiness (a goblin told me to “kiss his ass”), it’s easy to like The Mage’s Tale, especially as it follows some well-established practices in RPGs that date back to the pencil and paper era of Dungeons and Dragons. Bringing those places to life, and in a grand way, is ultimately one of the coolest things about The Mage’s Tale. It’s truly a breathtaking adventure into the known unknown.
Despite this, one thing that I can’t quite get around is the game’s character animations. An otherwise good-looking game with a varied palette, awesome magical effects, and impressive architecture, The Mage’s Tale is blighted by its clunky and wooden characters, that when confronted in VR look just terrible. A competent swath of Scottish and English voice actors do their best to bring the characters to life, but I can’t shake the feeling that every NPC is actually chewing on a magically invisible potato.
Another gripe is the game’s ‘force grab’. Striving to make your life easier by giving you a telekinetic powers and saving you from constantly bending over and letting you get to items just out of reach, actually activating the force grab it is somewhat of a pain. Instead of using the omnipresent gaze-based cursor to highlight objects, you actually select the item by pointing your finger at it, which is extremely fiddly. It doesn’t sound difficult to grasp at first, but I can’t count the number of times I waved my hands to no effect at a nearby bottle or mushroom. Also, force grab seems to take precedent over natural object interaction, and trying to lift open a chest or grab one of the many collectible monster cages without critically highlighting it first, usually means your hand will pass right through it without the slightest bit of recognition of intent. Because force grab is usually used during downtime from battles, its more of a constant annoyance than a game-breaking feature.
wall monster riddles, image captured by Road to VR
During battle however, the game’s UI is remarkably intuitive, giving you access to either a spell menu with 4 selectable elemental spells, or an arcane shield that lets you reflect incoming arrows and enemy magic. You can access these on the fly, and mix and match your attacks/defense to the best effect. Popping the menu open and quickly shooting out a flurry of different spells is just so gratifying.
To the dismay of some players, locomotion is teleportation only, and is done by one of two ways; you can select the teleport spot and potentially move farther (and quicker) using your right thumbstick, or use your left thumbstick for a shorter blink teleportation. Even in close, quick combat, I felt ultimately very comfortable using either method. A snap-turn (aka ‘VR comfort mode’) exists so people using a two-sensor setup can adjust themselves for optimal hand controller tracking. As someone who owns a two-sensor stock Rift/Touch setup, I would highly recommend getting a third for better coverage, because it seems I was constantly facing the wrong direction at crucial moments.
Comfort-wise, I was very happy with The Mage’s Tale, but once battles really popped off and multiple enemies force you to go mobile, you really start to buck up against the limits of the locomotion style. Snap-turning and teleporting at high-speed can start to feel like a bit of a slide show, and while it’s ultimately comfortable, it certainly dampens the immersion. I hate to think how much I missed in the dark corners of the game by spamming the far-teleport button.
inXile developer Brian Fargo says in a recent tweet that The Mage’s Tale will be available on other VR platforms in 12 months.
Role-playing game (RPG) specialist inXile Entertainment (Wasteland 2, The Bard’s Tale IV) has announced the release date for its first virtual reality (VR) title for Oculus Rift and Touch, The Mage’s Tale.
The magical fantasy adventure will be released on 20th June 2017, exclusively for the head-mounted display. Starting today, the studio will be offering a pre-order discount for players, knocking 10 percent off the standard $39.99 USD price.
The Mage’s Tale casts players as a wizards apprentice. Their master Mage Alguin has been kidnapped by the evil wizard, Gaufroi, and to save him they need to complete a series of dungeons. From the sewers of Skara Brae to the living tombs of evil Charm, there are puzzles, traps and all manner monsters that aim to put an end to the quest.
Offering the ability to craft hundreds of spells, inXile Entertainment states the title should offer 10+ hours of gameplay, with a musical score produced and composed by Ged Grimes of Simple Minds. It features some of the top Gaelic singers in the world such as the Elidh Mackenzie, Fiona Mackenzie, Kathleen MacInnes, and Peigi Barker (voice of Merida in the film Brave).
“Our goal was to use the old school tried and true methods of game design and integrate that with everything that Virtual Reality offers. We wanted to get away from the VR “experience” and create the kind of meaty and full-scale game that gamers appreciate,” said Brian Fargo, dungeon crawler expert and CEO of inXile Entertainment in a statement.
VRFocuspreviewed the title during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017 earlier this year, saying: “At this stage inXile Entertainment has a pretty solid experience on its hands. The basic ground work is there for a rich, exciting fantasy adventure, that mixes up wizard battles with an insane amount of crafting options for those interested in testing out their alchemy skills. For Oculus Touch owners, The Mage’s Tale is certainly one to keep on the radar.”
VRFocus will continue its coverage of The Mage’s Tale, reporting back with the latest announcements for the title.
Back in February inXile Entertainment announced its first foray into virtual reality (VR) development with The Mage’s Tale for Oculus Touch. At the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, VRFocuscaught up with the studio’s Lead Designer David Rogers to find out more.
inXile Entertainment is the developer behind role-playing games (RPGs) like Wasteland 2 and upcoming title The Bard’s Tale IV, and its bringing that expertise to VR.
Rogers details the story behind The Mage’s Tale and its various gameplay mechanics which VRFocuspreviewed at the conference, saying: “At this stage inXile Entertainment has a pretty solid experience on its hands. The basic ground work is there for a rich, exciting fantasy adventure, that mixes up wizard battles with an insane amount of crafting options for those interested in testing out their alchemy skills.”
Checkout the interview below, and for further updates from inXile Entertainment on The Mage’s Tale, keep reading VRFocus.
