Description
Hidden in the shadows, an evil has waited patiently. Until now. Who will face the darkness if not you? A heroic adventure featuring 40+ hours of gameplay, 350 speaking parts, a Legacy Mode for returning fans, and over 100 pieces of incredible music!
Customize How You Play
Define the way you play, using sliders on numerous options such as saving (including “save anywhere”), the mini-map, waypoint markers and many more. Whether you seek a hardcore challenge, a lighter experience, or something in-between, the choice is yours.
Create the Hero You Want To Be
Play as Bard, Fighter, Practitioner, and Rogue, each featuring 60-70 skills and collectively unlocking 21 unique classes. Build an array of characters to make every playthrough a unique experience.
Craft your Party, Your Way
Start your party with a single character, recruiting or creating new heroes to bolster your ranks. Build a party that suits your play style!
An Adventure Around Every Corner
Explore towns full of quest givers, fight your way through dark and deadly dungeons, and navigate beautiful rolling hills, dense forests, and icy wastes.
Outsmart Evil
Battle your enemies in dynamic, intuitive turn-based tactical combat,that rewards clever thinking. Use superior strategies, thoughtful positioning, and deadly combos to bring down your foes!
Unlock the Secrets of the Past
Unravel challenging mysteries. If your enemies don’t get you, the devious riddles and dangerous traps just might.
The Blade’s Tale
The sense of discovery and mystery doesn’t stop with the environment. Gain ancient Elven weapons containing secrets which you’ll need to uncover by carefully examining them.
Some two centuries after the now-legendary events from the original trilogy, one Bishop Henred of the Church of the Swordfather (a church militant and now the predominant religion in the land of Caith in which the games are set) has moved the faith to a more extreme and radically xenophobic outlook. Magic-users and non-humans such as dwarves, elves, and the goblinoid trow are now persecuted even though some still live among humans.
The game begins with the execution on the gallows of six people for being magic users, adventureres, or non-humans in the town of Skara Brae as witnessed by the initial player character, Melody the bard. She meets another bard, Rabbie, who escorts her to the Adventurer’s Guild which, however, is stormed by paladins shortly afterwards. The player has the option to build another character at this point and continue with that character instead of Melody.
As the Adventurer’s Guild is overrun, Rabbie leads the player through an escape tunnel to Skara Brae Below, the ruins of the old Skara Brae (destroyed just before the events of Bard’s Tale III) that exist in a giant cave below the new town of the same name. There, the persecuted non-humans and adventurers have set up refugee camps around the old Adventurer’s Guild building while paladins scour the subterranean ruins.
The initial mission is to check up on friends and allies up in Skara Brae and elsewhere. Over the course of these missions it is found that an unknown agency is committing crimes and blaming them on the non-humans in an apparent attempt to discredit them and sow civil unrest. As it turns out, the religions of other people and realms have similarly developed, and then been subverted by, malevolent militant sub-cults (much like the Church of the Swordfather, which is portrayed as an originally benevolent religion that underwent a dramatic shift towards malevolence only recently).
Over the course of these quests, the party size gradually grows to six members. (It grows from two character slots to six; some characters have to join the party at least temporarily to achieve certain short term goals, typically adding a character slot in the process, and can be exchanged for other characters after the specific quest revolving around their character is resolved. It is thus possible to create a party entirely made up of custom characters.)
It is gradually uncovered that a primordial evil, Yadis, seeks to end the dominance of men in the world. To this end Yadis, in alliance with the resurrected Mangar, Lagoth Zanta, and Tarjan, wants to open a rift that happens to lie under Skara Brae, incidentally explaining why the town always seemed to draw the attention of evil wizards.
Ultimately, Skara Brae is put to the torch and the population enslaved to dig through to the rift. Bishop Henred is revealed to be under Yadis’s influence, and is eventually slain on the doorstep of the cathedral as the player party races to the dig site in the sewers below the cathedral to stop Yadis.
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