Dragon Wars

The player starts the game with a party of four characters, who can be either the default characters or ones created by the player. Alternatively, the player may import characters from The Bard's Tale trilogy into Dragon Wars. During the game, the seven character slots can be filled with any combination of the starting characters, recruited characters, and summoned creatures.

The story from the back of the original box states:

The designers of the Bard's Tale series, Wasteland, and Battle Chess pooled their talents to create the ultimate role-playing fantasy. They knew it had to be a first-rate story with sophisticated graphics. The result was Dragon Wars.

During the initial design process for Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, one of the designers came up with a list of enhancements and improvements for the game. With the possibility that Interplay would soon be parting ways with Electronic Arts, it was decided to save these for a future game and stick closer to the original engine, though the auto-mapping feature did make it into Bard's Tale III.

These design improvements came in this next game, Dragon Wars. In essence, the game was a fusion of Bard's Tale and design philosophy pioneered in Wasteland.

Dragon Wars was reviewed in 1989 in Dragon #152 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 5 out of 5 stars. Scorpia gave the game a positive review in Computer Gaming World in 1989, noting improvements over the Bard's Tale series, saying that "tighter design, attention to detail, balanced combat, and a carefully constructed plotline all combine to produce a CRPG well worth playing". In 1993 she wrote that the game was "a good choice when you want something a bit more than a standard slicer/dicer".

According to Heineman, the game sold well but two things were against it: the game being a blobber RPG and not being able to use The Bard's Tale name. The game eventually broke even.