The Banner Saga and Sequel Interview

RPGamer has an interview with the Stoic developers about The Banner Saga and its upcoming sequel. Here’s a snippet:

JS: The first game ends with some closure, but it also left several plot threads open. What are the plans and time-tables for the future follow-up releases? Will the story pick up directly from where the first left off?

JW: The Banner Saga is the first part of a trilogy, and we are working hard every day to create the next part. The story arc of the entire saga is an epic tale that we are excited to tell in its entirety. When we started the project, we realized trying to make the entire story as one game was an unattainable goal for a small team like ours. Fortunately, the story line naturally divides into 3 books, so we decided to tackle each of the parts one at a time. The next part of the trilogy will pick up directly where the first left off, in the aftermath of the events of Boersgard. The player will encounter quite a variety of new characters and new classes in addition to many of the familiar faces of characters who survived the first part. Your actions in the first game will directly affect the situation in the second game, if your save files are preserved. Players should expect to learn more about the Dredge and their motivations, and the nature of the catastrophe which is threatening the world. Regarding a time table, it is too early to try to nail down a specific date. We should have our entire ‘white box’ version of the game done in late August, which means placeholder art for all scenes, placeholder dialog in all locations, and all of the major decision points implemented. This allows us to play through the entire game to get an idea of pacing. Austin Wintory will be in-house for several days next month for us to play through the whitebox as a group and brainstorm on tone and pacing.

AJ: The next game will pick up right where the first one left off. We’re going to be saving all the decisions the player made in the first one and tracking them through the story for The Banner Saga 2. The player must finish the first game though to enable us to do this for them! If the player hasn’t won the game, or never played The Banner Saga, then they will be handed the ‘default’ story that we set up for them to start with. That’s currently the plan, stay tuned to see how it evolves. I may be just be a simple artist, but I know enough to avoid giving dates on future releases!

…

JS: Based on feedback and reviews, what are some of the game features or mechanics you will look to tweak or update? From some of my own observations, and feedback I have read, will there be more of a penalty for running out of supplies and will there be changes to make the large army battles more robust?

JW: We have identified several aspects of the game that could be improved based on our own playthroughs, as well as player feedback. We have heard and agree with the feedback that combat can get a bit repetitive. We feel that this is largely due to a lack of variety in enemies, not enough different types of win conditions (most of the game is a simple kill-em-all win condition, aside from the several scripted story-driven battles), and not enough variety in battlefield configuration. We are working on ways to increase variety in all of those areas, and more. We also agree with feedback that there is not enough gameplay and story related motivation to save the peasants and clansmen of your caravan. We feel that the war mechanic is a bit opaque and confusing as well, as the effects of your strategic decisions in War are not well presented or explained, and we would like to improve on that. In a single statement: We are planning on giving the players more of what they love by creating loads of new content, driving the story forward with exciting developments, and carefully refining several points without changing the core gameplay mechanics.

AJ: Yeah, good question. No game is perfect, and though we tried really hard, there are things we simply didn’t have time to develop as much as we’d wanted to in the first game. We’ve got a white board list of things we want to improve upon in The Banner Saga 2 with such words as ‘War’, ‘Combat’, ‘Clansmen’, and ‘Supplies’. I won’t go into detail regarding any of these words, but people familiar with the game can make some good educated guesses at what we’re talking about.

I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the changes and improvements listed by Stoic there, given they line up with my complains about the original title.