Category: inXile Entertainment

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Watch 40 Minutes of The Mage’s Tale Gameplay with Oculus Touch

Watch 40 Minutes of The Mage’s Tale Gameplay with Oculus Touch

The 2017 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) is now officially over. This year there was a ton of news and lots of great looking games for all manner of VR systems from the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift to the Gear VR and PlayStation VR (PSVR). One of the highlights of the week was undoubtedly The Mage’s Tale from inXile Entertainment, lauded developers of Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wasteland 2, and The Bard’s Tale IV.

During GDC week, we invited the team behind of The Mage’s Tale to our offices to let us do an exclusive Facebook livestream of the game in action. If you missed out on the action last week, you can watch it right now down below!

The 40-minute long gameplay video starts all the way back at the tutorial section of the game and runs through the first level of the first dungeon. The team is promising an approximately 10-hour long adventure complete with dozens of enemies to fight, spells to cast, and rooms to plunder. The action and gameplay is reminiscent of the classic old-school RPGs of yesteryear, albeit with a modern aesthetic and built-for-VR polish.

During my time with the game one of the elements that stood out the most is just how satisfying it is to throw a fireball in VR. It’s a sensation that’ been captured before — perhaps best by The Unspoken — but never has it been extrapolated to a massive, sprawling, first-person RPG adventure such as this.

What’s more is that it doesn’t just stop there as you’re able to carefully and creatively concoct spells of your own by mixing ingredients and effects together in a massive cauldron. Shooting rainbow-colored lightning bolts shouldn’t be this much fun.

The Mage’s Tale is currently slated for a summer 2017 release first on Oculus Rift with Touch and then other platforms later. You can read more about the game in our extended hands-on preview and original title announcement.

Will you be playing The Mage’s Tale when it releases later this year? Let us know in the comments below!

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Preview: The Mage’s Tale – A Magical Adventure for Sorcery Fans

If films like Harry Potter, and videogames such as Dark Souls are anything to go by, the general public love fantasy entertainment filled with wizards, goblins, potions and fire breathing dragons. Which is exactly the theme inXile Entertainment has chosen for its first virtual reality (VR) experience The Mage’s Tale.  

An action role-playing game (RPG), The Mage’s Tale is a classic story of a sorcerer’s apprentice who’s learning to master the mystical arts. This is cut short however, when your master gets kidnapped, so you must go on a quest to save him and learn on the fly.

The Mages Tale screenshot 4

inXile Entertainment is using its previous RPG experience to create a fully fleshed out experience for Oculus Touch users, rather than just a short tech demo. Set to feature massive sprawling dungeons, the teasing demo the studio is currently showcasing does a very good job of highlighting the teams understanding of VR.

As with most VR titles at the moment The Mage’s Tale utilises teleportation as its main movement mechanic, giving players reasonable freedom to wander wherever they like. This works well enough, with certain areas providing a hopscotch style fixed point areas to navigate. Additionally though, there’s further movement features with incrimental sidestepping available to strafe out the way of incoming projectiles, and 45-degree rotation to ensure players don’t need to spin round and lose tracking.

As a wizard The Mage’s Tale is all about throwing projectiles, from fire balls and arcs of lightning to crazy bouncing triple shot, rainbow balls of death. You can haphazardly throw them if you think you’re a good shot, but it’s much easier to use the gaze-based lock-on system to inflict damage.

The Mages Tale screenshot 2

To make the spells you’ll need to brew up some potions and its here that inXile Entertainment has added a wealth of options, enabling an almost unlimited amount of combinations to be created. Why have a simple fireball when you could make one that ricochets of multiple objects, multiplies itself, and so much more. You’ll just need to keep an eye out on your travels for useful items.

If you haven’t guessed already from looking at the screenshots, The Mage’s Tale isn’t an ugly title. Some VR videogames don’t always look as good as developers initially make out, with sharpness being a consistent issue. There’s no such issue here, with the studio having created impressively detailed environments that are atmospheric and just beg to be explored.

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.

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Watch: Six Minutes of ‘Mage’s Tale’ Gameplay Shows Real Promise

Mage’s Tale is a VR Action RPG set in the world of classic fantasy RPG The Bard’s Tale. It is being shown at GDC 2017 for the first time on Oculus Rift and Touch and here’s six minutes of gameplay footage to whet your appetite for the title.

As one of six new titles announced at GDC for Oculus platforms, Mage’s Tale is built from the ground up for Oculus Touch. The Action RPG is developed by inXile Entertainment, set in the world of The Bard’s Tale, a classic RPG series. Delving through dungeons, solving puzzles and mastering the arcane arts sounds like a good time; the game promises to deliver 10 hours of gameplay through hand-crafted dungeons littered with secrets. A crafting system that lets you design hundreds of variations of four base spells, all of which are cast with a physical hand motion. While a release date hasn’t been set, inXile plan to launch on Touch first, but will bring the game to other platforms in the future. The game is shaping up well too, as you can see from this 6 minutes of gameplay footage.

Road to VR‘s Ben Lang also spoke to inXile’s David Rogers this week at GDC to find out more about the design ethos behind the game.

The post Watch: Six Minutes of ‘Mage’s Tale’ Gameplay Shows Real Promise appeared first on Road to VR.

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inXile Entertainment Unveils First Details of The Mage’s Tale for Oculus Touch

inXile Entertainment the developer behind role-playing games (RPGs) like Wasteland 2 and upcoming title The Bard’s Tale IV, has announced The Mage’s Tale, an action RPG for Oculus Touch.

Set in a fantasy world of mythical creatures and magic, 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 eleven 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.

The Mages Tale screenshot 1

To succeed players will have to learn and master all manner of magical elements, from fire balls and javelins of ice, to lightning arcs and swirling vortexes. It’s not just about learning but also crafting, with powerful spell reagents to find and build even more exotic spells. Hidden within the walls of the dungeons are further secrets to be found, ancient lore to uncover and more.

“When I was a kid our dungeons consisted of playing Dungeons and Dragons on graph paper. From there I graduated to playing classic computer games in black and white like Wizardry, which inspired me to create a full colour dungeon crawl with Bard’s Tale. The window for the players kept getting bigger, the graphics more advanced, and now with The Mage’s Tale, we are inside the dungeon,” said Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile Entertainment.

Scheduled to launch later this year, checkout the other screenshots below. For further updates on The Mage’s Tale, keep reading VRFocus.

The Mages Tale screenshot 3 The Mages Tale screenshot 4 The Mages Tale screenshot 5

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The Mage’s Tale is a Breathtaking New Oculus Touch Dungeon Crawler RPG from inXile Entertainment

The Mage’s Tale is a Breathtaking New Oculus Touch Dungeon Crawler RPG from inXile Entertainment

The world of roleplaying games (RPGs) is dominated by a few select developers near the top of the pile. Studios like Bioware, Bethesda, and Square Enix obviously come to mind as historical pioneers and juggernauts of massive, sprawling, roleplaying adventure titles, but all of those studios have embraced the modern era of RPG development.

inXile Entertainment on the other hand, along with Obsidian Entertainment and Larian Studios, are keeping old-school RPGs alive.

Less than a week ahead of the release of Torment: Tides of Numenera,  the much-awaited Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to the legendary Planescape: Torment, inXile have announced a brand new game, this time designed specifically for virtual reality (VR). Even more specifically, designed just for the Oculus Rift with Touch.

Simply titled The Mage’s Tale, it’s an immersive, first-person dungeon crawler RPG that takes place in the same universe as The Bard’s Tale. Stylistically, it brings back Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, and Elder Scrolls 1 & 2 vibes. We can only hope for something with that same level of quality and creativity. At least visually, we can clearly tell that it’s aiming to keep that breathtaking and beautiful style intact.

“When I was a kid our dungeons consisted of playing Dungeons and Dragons on graph paper. From there I graduated to playing classic computer games in black and white like Wizardry, which inspired me to create a full color dungeon crawl with Bard’s Tale. The window for the players kept getting bigger, the graphics more advanced, and now with The Mage’s Tale, we are inside the dungeon,” said Brian Fargo, dungeon crawler expert and CEO of inXile Entertainment in a prepared statement.

In The Mage’s Tale, players become conjurors in a quest to rescue your master from the evil Gaufroi. There are 11 dungeons ranging from tombs to sewers, scattered with dangerous enemies and tricky puzzles. You’ll be equipped with fireball spells, ice javelins, and more, all cast using the Oculus Touch motion controllers.

We don’t have an exact release date or price yet, but The Mage’s Tale is expected to launch this year in 2017 for the Oculus Rift with Touch. UploadVR will be going hands-on with the game at GDC next week.

What has you most interested in this new game? Let us know in the comments below!

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