The Banner Saga 3 Interview

During this year’s GDC, Stoic Studio’s co-founder Arnie Jorgensen chatted with PCGamesN about the upcoming third entry in Stoic’s narrative RPG series The Banner Saga. He mostly talked about the combat side of things and how you should expect to be dealing with more wave-based encounters, tougher enemies, and a bigger focus on character synergies. However, some story bits, like the increased prominence of the mysterious Darkness, also got a mention. An excerpt:

As a mysterious cosmological phenomenon that has been part of The Banner Saga since the first game, The Darkness is a major part of the plot in this third and final chapter, as you might expect. One of your caravans is literally travelling through it, and so the characters escorting it will be regularly attacked by soldiers that The Darkness has warped and mutated.

“Everything you are going to be fighting is going to be nasty and weird,” Arnie Jorgensen, co-founder of Stoic, says. These enemies are based on foes you have fought before, but their purple, ragged skin indicates that The Darkness has turned them into something much more fierce. “They have new passive abilities since they’ve been warped,” he adds. “They have heightened statistics.”

A fight in Darkness-covered lands is characterised by more than fearsome foes, though. “It’s a race against time because The Darkness is encroaching,” Jorgensen explains. “In combat there is actually now a turn counter, where literally in each fight you are racing against the clock as well. If the turn counter reaches zero, another wave attacks you.”

This means that the enemies present on The Banner Saga 3’s chess-like battle grid at the start of combat are not the only enemies you have to worry about. As the Darkness counter runs down, new creatures will deploy onto the battlefield, which offers an additional challenge to deal with – especially in situations where you have been unable to clear the grid of all pre-existing enemies.

“If you clear the wave before the counter reaches zero you can flee,” Jorgensen reveals. “If you really love combat, you can fight longer and try to get an item from one of the minibosses in the next wave.” Battle is a risk/reward situation in most RPGs, but Stoic’s new ideas for The Banner Saga 3 appear to be toying with this dynamic in even more thrilling ways.

While the series has always promoted character synergies, The Banner Saga 3 is pushing that even further by taking The Horn away. This news will likely alarm fans, as the magical device has been key to being successful in combat for two games now, allowing you to grant extra willpower to characters after a kill. Replacing it is a system that lets characters themselves buff others with extra willpower, meaning positioning on the field is of paramount importance. For example, a character with the ability to sing of your heroic deeds will inspire units in close proximity to them.

Additionally, Jorgensen talked about the studio’s plans for the future of the Banner Saga IP. A bit on that:

While the fantasy saga is set to conclude with the release of the third title this summer, Jorgensen said there are plans for more Banner Saga – “this is a world of untold tales and pockets. When [Stoic] made the game map they just went to town on it and gave every location a name and there’s lore text there, whole areas of the map where you’re like ‘what happens down here?’ and ‘what do these people do during catastrophic events?’”

The games won’t have the same scope as the Banner Saga trilogy, but “it’ll be more like smaller bite size pieces of content for players to get more often than we’ve been giving in the past.”

Jorgensen also confirmed that the studio were still considering developing The Banner Saga: Factions. “After we have finished Banner Saga 3 we’ll be putting a team on continuing content for [Factions], we’re going to be peeling off the other team to work on something new and that remains to be seen.”