The Banner Saga Release Date Announced, Launch Trailer

To celebrate their first content complete build, the folks at Stoic have sent out a post-funding Kickstarter update which includes a release date for the title and a trailer to send the message home in style. In short, the game is coming out on January 14, and in long, well, I’ll leave you to the video and the devs themselves:

From the update:

I’d love to give you an update on everything going on at this point. We finally feel comfortable with giving a release date for one very big reason: we are essentially content complete. This means the game is playable from front to back, the combats are in place, the characters are all hooked up and every conversation throughout the game is ready to go. In essence: we’re almost done with the game. This is a huge milestone because we’ve been working nearly every waking hour since Factions released to get to this point.

We’ve partnered with a new marketing and distribution team called Versus Evil who have taken a lot of work off our plate and help us put together new promotions so that we didn’t take away from production time. They’ve done an amazing job on the new website (http://stoicstudio.com/) and will be helping to make sure we get seen by as many people as possible at launch.

What’s left to do? We’ll be spending an appropriate amount of time on playtesting, polish and balance. We’ve been getting help from a QA house to help us find and write bugs because the game has become both long and complex at this point. What we originally envisioned as a 6 hour game is probably closer to 15+ hours on the first playthrough, and all the branching variables and additional systems are time-consuming to test. We’ll also be playing through the game a lot to get combat balance in as good a state as we can. Lastly, you may have heard this before, but polish is the difference between a good game and a great game in our minds. Personal touches, transitions and making sure that everything is finely polished is really important to us. For example, we’ve added procedural snow, random events in travel, items in combat, an interactive world map, every godstone in the game and tons of new characters and classes.

This week we also had Austin Wintory in the office to walk through the game and hook up each piece of music for the game. He’s gone back to his studio with a list of things he wants to add, and we’ve got an insanely high-quality, huge score now in place for this game. He’s been swamped lately with this work but is still raring to go on a music update for you coming up.