Drool wrote: ↑April 8th, 2018, 2:43 pmUm... okay. Sure. It's not changing its genre broadly speaking, but much of the core mechanics have been changed.
This seems to be sentiment shared with many folks here.
Let's look at the Final Fantasy series. Anyone played the 1st? It came out in 1987 with FFXV in 2016. This is a series that has spanned 30 years, and grew and changed over the course of 30 years. It's still an RPG with similar themes throughout the series, similar settings, for the most part, and many of the similar trappings, some from the beginning, others added later. But my how have the core mechanics changed. Not all at once, sometimes subtly, others less subtle. It was once a game where you started with 4 nameless characters and is now a game with 1 predefined character that you control. It was a combat system of attack/attack/cast/use to now real time hack and slash action. It had a robust magic system and now has something very different.
My point is, when a game series changes over time, you don't see the drastic results compared to the previous entry most of the time. It's usually subtle until at some point you realize, this isn't the same game series I was playing 30 years ago. It has some stuff in common with it, but overall it's something completely different.
BTIV is seeing 30 years of subtle changes slapped in all at once. Some of those changes I can see a direct connection from the originals, as in how combat went from the original to what it is now in BTIV. I can imagine the evolution happening over time, it's just more shocking when it's all at once. I don't agree with every change I'm seeing, and some may be straight up bad; like the lack of death and resurrection. Or why does the spell list appear so skimpy? I can understand trimming down the spell list if you have redundant spells or useless spells, or spells that simply would not work or be needed in this particular chapter of the series, but from what I'm seeing, the spell choices appear very limited.
That said, things have changed, but this sequel isn't that far off from the original trilogy. Final Fantasy had a very similar combat system to BT and now 30 years later it's full on real time action. Maybe we should be thankful that this franchise died for so long, if not perhaps today we'd be playing Bard's Tale XVI with a single protagonist in an open world with real time combat and online elements.
Even better, I think it's time for old franchises to stay dead. Certainly no more sequels. Even an unabashed reboot would be better than sequels too far removed from the originals.