The Banner Saga Kickstarter Project Update #10, $689,000 and Counting

With only 6 more hours to go for their The Banner Saga Kickstarter fundraising campaign, the folks at Stoic have issued yet another update on the project, in the form of a brief Q&A that should hopefully clarify some controversial points about their stretch goals. Here’s on console porting and additional content:

Won’t porting to consoles dumb down the game, compromise the UI or take more time away from working on the game?

We started the game with the intention of porting to as many places as possible, which we say in the video and on the front page. Something that we could have messaged better is that we won’t be porting anything until after chapter 1 is complete sometime at the end of the year. We’re not doing simultaneous development, so we won’t have anything to port until we have a finished first release. We do apologize about not making this more clear.

As for dumbing down the game or making the UI worse, we don’t think that’s true. The game as we pitched it is going to be the same on PC, Mac, Linux, iPad and consoles, the same as we originally envisioned it (at this point, better). The UI will be developed to work on our first release – PC and Mac – and then have to be converted for other platforms in the porting process.

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Can you talk more about the additional content?

There are two main things we want to expand with additional content: one is the variety of events that happen during travel. We’ve mentioned in a few places how this will be reminiscent of King of Dragon Pass. For example, a group of warriors in your caravan may approach you and demand more food than the farmers. Depending on your response you may upset the warriors or the farmers, cause one or the other leave or turn into an unexpected fight. Or you might diffuse the situation and move on. Additionally, we want these events to have some repercussions. You might tell the warriors to back down and think the thing is settled, only to discover that two days later they steal supplies and run off while you’re sleeping. We’d like to add a much larger variety of these events and give them more variables.

The other thing is the finale. We’re putting an equal amount of effort into the game as a whole but we’d love to put more effort into the finale to 1) make it a longer event and 2) try to account for more variables. We were excited about the ending we were planning to do, and this will let us make a better one. You’ve already hit this goal, and we’re psyched about the ability to work on this!