The Banner Saga 3 Interview

The Banner Saga’s original crowdfunding campaign went live more than six years ago, and now, The Banner Saga 3 is set to launch in less than a week, on July 26, 2018. Creating a satisfying ending for such a long-running series, all tangled in expectations and branching narratives, isn’t an easy task. And because of that, we have this GamesIndustry.biz interview with Stoic Studio’s Arnie Jorgensen and Zeb West, where they shed some light on how they plan to make their ending work, and what lessons they’ve learned from the Mass Effect 3 fiasco. Here’s something to get you started:

“Being on the inside of the studio, even though we weren’t directly working on the game, we were even more cognisant of what was going on and where maybe there were some missteps, and we really took that to heart in our own game,” Stoic co-founder Arnie Jorgensen tells GamesIndustry.biz.

“Here’s the point: if people play our game and they say: ‘Finally someone nailed it. They finished an epic and I feel like it was a satisfying ending for my playthrough. My personal playthrough’… it really feels satisfying for the player. We focused on that with the Banner Saga 3, really trying to make sure people feel that way and we hope we did it.”

Although not directly hit by the explosive rage of a fandom with a victim complex, bearing witness first-hand to the fallout informed their approach to the Banner Saga and it’s countless branching narratives.

“We’ve always known from the start of the Banner Saga 3, and even earlier, we have to stick the landing,” says Jorgensen. “If we don’t stick the landing, then we’re going to feel like it was all for naught, so we’ve taken it very very seriously.”

It’s something the studio takes very seriously indeed and, after seven months in development, they restarted the entire game from scratch.

“We started from the end to make sure we were sticking the landing then went back and wrote it from the front to the back, knowing exactly where the story was going to end,” Jorgensen continues. “So we knew where the story was gonna go, six years ago, but how you get there has changed… So on this one we took it very seriously, and we started with the endings.”