A recent update on Inxile Entertainment's website regarding the remaster of The Bard's Tale has revealed that the project is being put on hold for the moment due to disagreements with Olde Skuul.
The announcement started by saying that they were revealing this information in the interest of transparency, and by giving some background into the development history of the Bard's Tale 4 Kickstarter campaign: "When the BT4 Kickstarter campaign started, we initially promised the emulated versions of the original BT trilogy - those were finished and delivered to backers many months ago. Shortly after the BT4 campaign began, Olde Skuul expressed interest in developing remastered and updated versions of the classic BT games. We were a bit reluctant, as we had concerns about Olde Skuul completing development, however, we agreed on the condition that inXile would provide payment on completion of the project. Because of this, our wording around the BT remasters was a bit more tentative:
"'Meanwhile, Rebecca will be working on the updated versions of the games and if that goes well we'll get you those as soon as she delivers them to us, also for free! As we're not working on these versions ourselves we cannot give an ETA or guarantee on their release, we'll all be waiting for Rebecca to deliver us an upgraded version worthy of the name!'"
"More recently, Becky has made appearances, such as on the Shane Plays podcast where she suggested Olde Skuul stopped working on the project because they haven't received payment. This implies that they've stopped working because we haven't paid them monies that are due, but as mentioned above, we agreed no monies would be due until completion."
Inxile then go on to say that progress got slower and slower and then eventually stopped, and development become harder to push, to the point where they "feel it's unlikely that Olde Skuul will finish development on the BT remasters."
They conclude by expressing their displeasure at the situation, and say that the Bard's Tale remasters have been removed from reward packages on Bard's Tale backer website, although "the emulated version we previously released as promised will remain available to everyone who backs The Bard's Tale IV."
Do you appreciate this level of transparency, and do you have an interest in what's happening behind the scenes?