The Banner Saga Interview

Wired is offering an interesting six-page (you’ve read it right) interview with Stoic’s creative director Alex Thomas on the upcoming Kickstarter-funded viking-themed indie turn-based RPG The Banner Saga. Here’s an excerpt:

Wecks: What do you mean when you say (a deep strategic tactical game?) What kind of game play are we talking about? I see some kind of turn-based combat in the Kickstarter video, and it looks like you are choosing dialogue. Tell me something about the game experience you are aiming for?

Thomas: Combat’s one of those things we’re really looking forward to talking about more very soon as we get ready to release our free multi-player standalone. As much as I love old turn-based strategy games, I recognize looking at them critically that for the most part there’s a heavy emphasis on just comparing and shifting around stats. You can grind until your stats are better to make forward progress, and that’s not exactly a compelling tactical system. On the flip side is something like chess, a game with no numbers at all and strategy in its purest form. I’m not saying we’re going to be the next chess. We’re shooting for a balance by focusing on the importance of building a team whose abilities play off each other and where you need finesse to beat your opponent, not just bludgeoning your way through a fight. I know this all sounds like rhetoric until we start getting into the meat of the combat design. Although we can’t talk about the exact mechanics quite yet, we think it’s an idea that hasn’t really been seen much in strategy games.

Wecks: When I was a kid, one of my very favorite books was the Choose Your Own Adventure book Prisoner of the Ant People by R. A. Montgomery. I loved that book and read it again and again, because I had influence. I got to make decisions about what happened to the characters in the book! Then a few years ago the first Mass Effect came out maybe you’ve heard of it? and suddenly I felt that same sense of wonder all over again. I got to help tell the story, and what I did mattered for the game. It felt like a choose your own adventure movie! When you say (strong story) I hope this is what you are talking about. Do I have influence in the narrative of the game? Am I on the right track?

Thomas: From the start of the design we intended to make each of our three main systems (combat, travel and conversation) influence the others in exactly the way you’re talking about here. To summarize briefly; the story involves you and your people trying to escape what seems to be the literal end of the world which is sweeping slowly across the land. The travel scenes from the video are actual game-play which are akin to a cross between King of Dragon Pass and Oregon Trail. You’re not responsible just for a single character or a party, but for an entire society of people, and that opens up a lot of options people haven’t played with much in role-playing games.

As you travel events will happen your clansmen get in disputes, supplies run low and a wide variety of other unexpected issues come up that you have to deal with. Making decisions during travel can affect the difficulty or frequency of combat, and in turn barely surviving a fight doesn’t return you to full health afterward. You know you’ll be in trouble if you get in another fight soon, but making camp to rest will chew up time. Time is a key element to the game, and events can change based on when you encounter them. Through these smaller events you’re forming the story of your caravan, and through primarily dialogue you unravel the mystery of what’s happening to the world and what you can do to change things. One of our key goals has been to let bad things happen and to allow the player to deal with mistakes and keep them. Being a smaller, indie project has given us the ability to mess with the world in a way that bigger developers may shy away from. If your home town goes up in flames, you haven’t lost the game. It just keeps going. What is important to you, as the player, should be to do the best you can for you, your friends and your people.