The Banner Saga Preview

The folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have put together a preview/roundtable for The Banner Saga, based on a few hours spent with the title. I don’t get the impression that either of the writers enjoyed the story too much:

Adam: You led a group of giants, a few humans and a snotty prince through confusing and dangerous battles. Sometimes they were fighting men, mostly they were fighting angry people made out of pebbles. You may have noticed that the sun had frozen in the sky? That is because of lore. The group in the East fired some arrows, became refugees and panicked quite a lot. Everyone probably died more than once. Does that sound about right?

John: Seems to. I was so confused when it switched to the weaklings in the East, with no warning, or mention of who anyone was. I really felt like I’d arrived mid-story. Was that my being stupid, or was that the game not having that info in yet?

Adam: I don’t know how intentional it is. There’s an enormous amount of history already in there the map is like a miniature Lonely Planet guide to the world but nothing is explained directly. The very first fight is against some humans in a great hall, with other people watching on in a seemingly relaxed manner. I didn’t know why my units were giants with horns, or why they were killing some of the people and not others. I didn’t know where they were going or why, but by the end of the three hours or so, things were starting to make sense.

John: Yeah, I figured they were the baddies. I was surprised when I was playing them. Am I fair in saying this is the first on-rails RPG?

Adam: I felt like I was being held at arm’s length at first, and I’m still not convinced by the sudden switch to the East, but I appreciated the slow-build by the end. Like a slightly clogged drip feed.

It feels a little like Fire Emblem. Tactical turn-based combat interspersed with journeying, conversation and levelling up. That’s the closest comparison I can think of. And with perma-death too, although not in combat. Units that fall in combat are injured for a while, with reduced stats, but during the journey itself, decisions can kill characters.

John: And entirely reshape your army. But an army you really have no consciousness of.

Adam: Yeah. During travel the composition of the group is listed at the top of the screen peasants, warriors and Varl (the giants) and during large battles or other incidents, numbers rise and fall. And there are supplies as well, to keep everyone fed and fit. But it does sometimes feel arbitrary I collected loads of supplies, never had to worry about them, and then lost most of them due to one poor decision. The supply numbers, in particular, seem more suited to a journey with more player agency. If you could choose to take long routes through barren land or fertile ground with many enemies and space for ambushes, it’d make more sense to monitor that and make decisions that felt like they had weight.

John: I felt like I had no agency at all. Which was the strangest part of this. I felt like I was being dragged from fight to fight, asked questions I didn’t understand that had an impact I wasn’t able to measure.

And that wasn’t helped by my having no idea who I was throughout. Characters appear and disappear, and the way conversations are displayed makes it furiously difficult to work out who’s saying what to whom.