NB There was a game released much after this original trilogy called 'The Bard's Tale'. It is rated T, and isn't in any way related to the original trilogy.
The original trilogy had the following titles:
Bard's Tale 1 - Tales of the Unknown
Bard's Tale 2 - Destiny Knight
Bard's Tale 3 - Thief of Fate
Anyone else used to play this 'dungeon crawler' series of games originally out in the 80's? It was good fun, and it has in more recent times been remastered so it can now be played on modern computers through the Steam system. There is a trick to saving the game, as shown in the following posts from the Bards Tale 1 threads on the steam launcher site:
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So it looks like the problem is really very simple. When you run BT1 for the first time, it extracts a bunch of required emulator files (config, images etc) to a folder in appdata. It *also* creates a 0 byte flag file called iibt1.
Then, every time you launch BT1, it looks for that flag file, and if it doesn't find it, it re-extracts all the required files to your appdata folder, overwriting anything with the same name that's already there.
One small problem -
It's not looking in appdata for iibt1, it's looking in BT2004's root directory lol.
Simple fix, move (or create) iibt1 (no extension, 0 byte file) in steamapps\common\The Bards Tale
From that point on, BT1 no longer overwrites the image files, and saves work fine. IF you delete the appdata folder, you'll probably also need to delete the iibt file to get it to recreate next time.
From inXile's perspective, all they should need to do to fix this going forward is have BT2004 look in the correct place for iibt1. Should be trivial.
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Assuming you are using Windows 10 -
Paste this into your windows search bar and hit return:
%localappdata%\inXile entertainment\The Bard's Tale
A folder should open, in which you should see a file named 'iibt1'. Right click on it, and select 'copy'.
In your steam application, locate 'The Bard's Tale' in your library, right click on it and select properties. Select the 'Local Files' tab in the window that opens, and then 'Browse Local Files...'.
In the folder that opens, right click on an empty space, and select 'paste'. This should copy the iibt1 file to this folder.
Job done. Let us know if it works for you!
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Tip - The existing bard from the premade A-Team party has a wonderful instrument that really helps the starting battles in the game, when your party is likely to get wiped out. I pull him out, add in 5 character (3 monks, 1 magician and 1 conjurer) until his instrument is used up and disappears on you, and replace him with a second conjurer.
