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KickStarter The Banner Saga

roshan

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It's funny how in several threads, Codex idiots keep bringing up chess as an example of how "turn based combat" should play when it suits their arguments (for example when they are arguing against randomness making combat more tactical, when chess actually has no numbers while RPG's by definition are number based games), but when RPGs actually go ahead and implement chesslike mechanics (such as always alternating turns in Banner Saga, or weapons arbitrarily limited to firing in certain directions in Odium) I don't see these chesstards around praising mechanics taken straight from their holy grail. Perhaps pissing their pants because their simulationism has been ruined.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
It's an interesting system in that it has big consequences for how battles play out and that's cool, but it also funnels you into a particular, very unintuitive, strange way of playing where you just want to leave everybody alive on as low HP as possible and then manipulate the AI into getting into each others' way. The primary reason the system isn't 'elegant' is that it greatly lengthens the tedium of late battle wrap-up, when victory is assured as long as you spend another 8 turns not killing half their units.

I'd be down for modifying how turns work - it just makes too little sense for the last surviving dude to get 6x the turns of everybody else.

They do give you some incentive to kill enemies with that horn of willpower points, though.
 
Unwanted
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All of you debating the pertinence of the combat system seems to miss the point that it's not pertinent to the current predicament.

Played through the whole game after the sale.

It's a game without failure state whatsoever. You simply can not die no matter what. There is no game over until the very end boss fight. If you lose a fight you just go on. The Caravan mechanism is a number on the top of the screen with no impact at all on anything. I camped 1 year straight on the same spot just for fun. The entire caravan and warriors were dead from starvation. Nothing happened and I could go on. The battles would scale to this by pitting me against an army of 1 opponents. No one would even mention that I slept for one whole year right next to the chasing Dredge army or that I had lost a thousand men in the process.

The Choice and Consequences are as shallow as you would expect from the developer's previous overlords. They have little impact outside of immediate dialogue, a character leaving/dying (rare), an extra fight, or that useless number on the top screen changing. I am ready to bet that destroying the bridge or not will have little impact on the next game, only one line of dialogue or two mentioning the survival of the Giants army while you're in the Human capital. Having been nice with Ludin or your behaviour in the last city might lead to different dialogues and maybe a fight in the second game as well.

That's not even speaking of the characters mechanism. Levels are capped at 5. Only one item per characters. One ability and one passive, limited amount of classes. 6 stats or something that you distribute limited points into and that you will end up almost maxing at level 5 anyway.
The fights themselves are extremely repetitive. There's basically 6 different enemy units and that's being generous, counting the armour vs strength melee.

It's a good visual novel where you interact with the characters and with a combat gimmick. Nothing else. Why it's still considered an RPG leaves me wondering.
 
Self-Ejected

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Just finished it after starting it yesterday (it's only 15 hours after all). Beat every battle on hard mode, it was a fair challenge but never very "hard" outside of some optional battles I absolutely could not beat. The fact that the hard achievements are so rare on Steam just shows that the game mostly appeals to storyfags.

Speaking of which, the graphics and the music do a great job conveying a unique atmosphere and the overall story is prefectly serviceable. However, the dialogue writing was awful, especially at the start. I understand that using ye olde speake is unpopular nowadays, but most of the characters in chapter 1 and 2 sounded like 14 year old boys during a P&P session.

Second biggest issue is the UI, which was plainly developed with touchscreens in mind. Forcing players to click on arrows to advance through one-line-at-a-time monologues is inexcusable.

Combat was really fun though, especially after all the Codex bashing had me adjust my expectations downward. The health mechanic is gamey, sure, but I found it consistently entertaining and interesting to use. Good enough for 15 hours, anyway.
I only beat the final battle by using a skill I'd never used before (the pushback one, so I could let the boss walk past the front lines). The fact that you can freely choose move order among your units felt like "useful dumbing down" to me and led to interesting considerations about what kind of character should be the first to move in a given battle (for instance, the guy whose spells kill diagonally should move first in battles where the enemies start in a diagonal pattern, etc.).

The biggest C&C element is probably which characters you decide to level up with your limited xp pool. You can get fucked pretty badly by focusing on characters who can die or disappear later on, but unpredictable party changes seem like a fair, logical part of the game world to me.

All in all, good game. Too linear for a second playthrough, and still a tad too long with all the pointless side scrolling traveling at the end, but certainly more fun than MMX and the second half of D:OS.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
All of you debating the pertinence of the combat system seems to miss the point that it's not pertinent to the current predicament.

It's a good visual novel where you interact with the characters and with a combat gimmick.

??? The combat is the meat of the game. It is the most pertinent thing in any discussion of it.

It's a game without failure state whatsoever. You simply can not die no matter what. There is no game over until the very end boss fight. If you lose a fight you just go on. The Caravan mechanism is a number on the top of the screen with no impact at all on anything. I camped 1 year straight on the same spot just for fun. The entire caravan and warriors were dead from starvation. Nothing happened and I could go on. The battles would scale to this by pitting me against an army of 1 opponents. No one would even mention that I slept for one whole year right next to the chasing Dredge army or that I had lost a thousand men in the process.

The Choice and Consequences are as shallow as you would expect from the developer's previous overlords. They have little impact outside of immediate dialogue, a character leaving/dying (rare), an extra fight, or that useless number on the top screen changing. I am ready to bet that destroying the bridge or not will have little impact on the next game, only one line of dialogue or two mentioning the survival of the Giants army while you're in the Human capital. Having been nice with Ludin or your behaviour in the last city might lead to different dialogues and maybe a fight in the second game as well.

Well, you ask why it's considered an RPG, yet I don't really know of many RPGs where choice and consequence is game-ending. At a high level, that stuff is always flavor. If you want a game over, just tell yourself you failed and reload a saved game? Ultimately, the game's travel overlay is just a vehicle for delivering combat scenarios. It was immediately obvious to me that stuff like supplies and the size of my army was mainly just fluff that's for the "feels". If you want a proper caravan management strategy game, look elsewhere.

That's not even speaking of the characters mechanism. Levels are capped at 5. Only one item per characters. One ability and one passive, limited amount of classes. 6 stats or something that you distribute limited points into and that you will end up almost maxing at level 5 anyway.

But it's so balanced that I don't care! :love:
 
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Unwanted
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Well, you ask why it's considered an RPG, yet I don't really know of many RPGs where choice and consequence is game-ending. At a high level, that stuff is always flavor. If you want a game over, just tell yourself you failed and reload a saved game? Ultimately, the game's travel overlay is just a vehicle for delivering combat scenarios. It was immediately obvious to me that stuff like supplies and the size of my army was mainly just fluff that's for the "feels". If you want a proper caravan management strategy game, look elsewhere.
But it's so balanced that I don't care!



- It has brought the definition of the world Linear to a whole new level. You progress by walking, automatically, on a curvy line.. Having meaningful C&C allowing you to branch out in different directions for example would have been the only way to redeem it..

- Am I getting too old? This is only one step before Hepler's skip combat button. It's all the more ironic when they are former Bioware employees.

- If this is about combat then this qualifies as an overpriced mobile game. The scope of the combat itself is very limited. There is a chess app with more encounter variation than this.

- These inconsequential shifting numbers on the top of the screen was all for the sake of immersion. Needless to say it's not very convincing.

- Neither do I, but this is too shallow to qualify as an RPG. Tacticular cancer discusses games with more RPG elements than this game.
 
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Bibbimbop

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It's funny how in several threads, Codex idiots keep bringing up chess as an example of how "turn based combat" should play when it suits their arguments (for example when they are arguing against randomness making combat more tactical, when chess actually has no numbers while RPG's by definition are number based games), but when RPGs actually go ahead and implement chesslike mechanics (such as always alternating turns in Banner Saga, or weapons arbitrarily limited to firing in certain directions in Odium) I don't see these chesstards around praising mechanics taken straight from their holy grail. Perhaps pissing their pants because their simulationism has been ruined.

Quit whining like a little baby. You're the master of framing an issue so that you can be right, but you know the arguments were quite different where they are discussed in their proper contexts. Their proper contexts are not in this thread, however, so shut the fuck up.
 

jagged-jimmy

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Ultimately, the game's travel overlay is just a vehicle for delivering combat scenarios. It was immediately obvious to me that stuff like supplies and the size of my army was mainly just fluff that's for the "feels". If you want a proper caravan management strategy game, look elsewhere.
But you miss the point. The addition of this "caravan" mechanic reinforces the feel of a mobile game. If it's shallow, why add it? If you add it, why not make it at least slightly better / rewarding / punishing. This is a game, if you add a feature, it should affect gameplay, have consequences.

And you could say that combat is gimmickly, because they probably felt they MUST have combat. But they didn't want to invest much into it. Thus this balanced, yet simplistic design. They could've made this into point and click CYOA.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
But you miss the point. The addition of this "caravan" mechanic reinforces the feel of a mobile game. If it's shallow, why add it? If you add it, why not make it at least slightly better / rewarding / punishing. This is a game, if you add a feature, it should affect gameplay, have consequences.

And you could say that combat is gimmickly, because they probably felt they MUST have combat. But they didn't want to invest much into it. Thus this balanced, yet simplistic design. They could've made this into point and click CYOA.

Hah. I can't consider something that is so well thought out "simplistic" or low investment. The term that I would use is "subdued". :obviously:

And the caravan stuff is nice enough. A surprising amount of effort went into the game's lore and it's fun to slowly discover more about the world as you travel. Reminds me a bit of Myth mission briefings. I like how you're always dealing with the mundanities of the road.

A bit of C&C and a bit of flavor is good enough to provide context for the battles IMO (which again, I find worthwhile and not gimmicky). Could it be better and more far-ranging in its effects? Sure, but they did a very good job for their budget and development time. I can't wait to see what they do in Banner Saga 2.
 
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Copper

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There are at least two game ending scenarios, by the way - if you loose on the tower fight against the mini-boss, you get a game-over screen as well, and I'm not sure what happens if you suck and can't kill the traitors.

It's a bit tricky to argue about this - yes, nearly every fight can be lost without serious consequence, other than the fact that you'll probably keep on a losing streak, but since there's little penalty for losing, that's not such an issue. Is that really a problem?

I'd argue that this is a sensible solution to the Hepler Button. Fights happen - you can't avoid them or skip them, but it's not the end of the game if you wipe out, so 'dumb' players in it for the story can either just suicide their guys time after time, or play around with the systems and actually get a bit better, so by the end, they're capable of winning fights. Most importantly, the story keeps moving, so there's less incentive to wind back the clock and try that scripted sequence again for a better outcome. It would be like every single mission in X-COM being a win or die situation - if you're reloading a lot, then why not reload a lot more?

HAving said that, the fights could have been given a bit more consequence - I thought from their pitch that your combat team would be a mix of 'story characters' and mooks from the caravan, who suffered more permanent fates for falling in battle. Having characers threaten to (and actually) desert from your obvious incompetent miilitary leadership based on the amount of injuries taken, or having the traitor spring his ambush when you're most injured would have been interesting - I'm a big fan of combat feeding into the social. Even characters starting as the basic Factions unit types, and the type of specialist they can become reflects your story choices (Innocent vs Kill-all-men Alette, etc) could have tied the c&c, combat and personality of characters together more.

The world map in this game is insane. I think I spent more time reading all the little descriptions than actually playing the game proper. The lore is super cool and Stoic did a really good job tying in the details of the world with the narrative as you travel it.

It's a shame they didn't do more with the map though - it's there for the lore, but how many people looked at 2-3 things, got bored, and never opened it again? Even a simple black fill taking out the parts that have been invaded by the Dredge, creeping along behind you, or information changing to grim rumours about the fate of over-run settlements would have made it a lot more interesting, I think.




 

SCO

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
No, the most important uncommon design point is the way the enemy always gets half the moves regardless of how many units they have left.

I didn't recognize it at the time, but they fucking stole this from gungnir (a PSP console game). Also a Unusual Experience You Might Enjoy.
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I didn't recognize it at the time, but they fucking stole this from gungnir (a PSP console game). Also a Unusual Experience You Might Enjoy.
Gungnir was fun until the last few missions that I cheesed my way through with ranged units.
 

Karellen

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Wow, no wonder Blaine doesn't like it. This game's combat and character systems are a masterwork of gamist/Sawyerist design.

While Banner Saga is totally gamist, I don't know if I would call it particularly Sawyerist. If anything, Banner Saga is way more gamist than anything Sawyer has put out, since Banner Saga really is designed like a board game. What really sets it apart is that battle mechanics and character building in Banner Saga are highly discrete, whereas Sawyer, even in his PnP RPG designs, seems to favour fine-grained derived statistics with very moderate impact on character power. This is something that I have an issue with as far as Sawyer goes - it's as if his design approach were to make statistics fairly complex, yet "balance" them to prevent players from making bad parties, since that "isn't fun". There is something futile about this, though, because really, what's the point of having an elaborate system if it doesn't matter what choices you make in it? That's not gamist at all. In Banner Saga you can build a bad team, but it's not a problem because the system is immediately legible - the difference between 1 Armor Break and 3 Armor Break is enormous and it's clear what the impact on the battlefield will be, so people will naturally start to make informed decisions.

Sawyer's fundamental problem, as far as I can tell, is that he thinks that people generally play games badly. It's a very pessimistic line of thought that I think also strikes many people as conceited. My observation from playing board games, though, is that people are natural strategic thinkers, so long as they're given enough information to act strategically. That is precisely what Banner Saga does - it's a game with simplistic, deterministic (yet precisely calibrated) rules that harshly punish mistakes, which incentivises players to regularly read half-a-dozen moves ahead. This is what makes the game fun and engrossing even when it's not particularly difficult. On the other hand, take something like Neverwinter Nights 2 - I remember playing Mask of the Betrayer and how a few hours in I realised that I had no idea what was even going on during the battles and, more to the point, didn't really even care enough to figure out.

'Course, there are also drawbacks to how abstract and simplified Banner Saga is. For instance, the game lacks varied mission objectives, maps and combat scenarios, and the reason for that is that the mechanics as they are can't really accomodate them. When it slightly tries - for instance, by changing unit placements - it doesn't really work, because there's no advantage for the enemy in, say, having the player's party surrounded; in fact, this situation is strictly advantageous for the player since it means that you can just wipe out one half of the map while the enemy is busy moving useless units on the other side. This is probably the biggest problem Banner Saga has compared to crunchier games which can handle different scenarios with more ease. One thing I hope the future games will do is introduce some special rules and victory conditions for different battle situations like sieges, raids and so on - the Bellower battle was a lot of fun specifically because the fight broke a lot of the implicit rules of the game, which made things a lot more dramatic than they otherwise would've been.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Karellen Banner Saga strongly limits your ability to make a bad team by placing fairly low maximum cap values on stats that a particular character type isn't "supposed" to be good at.

You can still do stupid stuff like invest all of your stat points in Willpower without having the Exertion to actually use it, but even that shouldn't be too crippling - because even a Level 1 character with no stat improvements at all is robust enough to contribute to a battle. (Isn't that "moderate impact on character power" as well? It's a game where levelling up itself isn't strictly necesssary!)
 

Copper

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It was interesting watching my totally non-hardcore wife play it and complain that the game didn't penalize messing up battles enough - without the 'get good to progress' barrier, she felt very little incentive to make tactical decisions, and only hit her stride with the tactical stuff in the late game.
 

Karellen

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Karellen Banner Saga strongly limits your ability to make a bad team by placing fairly low maximum cap values on stats that a particular character type isn't "supposed" to be good at.

You can still do stupid stuff like invest all of your stat points in Willpower without having the Exertion to actually use it, but even that shouldn't be too crippling - because even a Level 1 character with no stat improvements at all is robust enough to contribute to a battle. (Isn't that "moderate impact on character power" as well? It's a game where levelling up itself isn't strictly necesssary!)

You make a fair point there, you really can't make a useless character in Banner Saga, which is actually fine in my book. That said, I should retort a bit - what you do in Banner Saga isn't about building individual characters but putting together a decent team, in which case it's basically about what you do with Renown. That's the neat thing about making everything run with the same resource - the decisions you make are generally commensurate, so you're specifically positioned to choose not just which stats to build, but more to the point, which characters to level up at this specific juncture, whether it's worth it to spend a bunch of Renown on a nice item (and many of them are really nice), or whether you want to spend it on food to keep your people alive (which is admittedly mostly a vanity thing, but it works well enough if you consider it a victory condition to not be a gigantic bastard).

I guess it's a small distinction, but somehow it strikes me as a crucial point when it comes to design philosophy: Sawyer's idea of "balance" comes across to me as saying, "chill, it's not that big of a deal what you pick, just go with whatever you think is cool, we've got your back", whereas Banner Saga's design mostly says, "you have these limited resources, now do your best with them". One of these tickles the part of my brain that deals in strategic decision-making, while the other does not. That's why I don't mind at all that in Banner Saga you're mostly making choices ranging from OK to Good to Very Good (or, as is often the case in scripted scenes, from OK to Bad to Extremely Fucking Bad) - the basis of those choices is (often) informed and goal-oriented, and it's what keeps the game together.
 

roshan

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I just started this game, love the art and the world map. At a camp screen now and will have to explore this a bit. The first couple of training battles I played seemed quite interesting. Why has Codex consensus on this game been so poor? Not many people voted it as game of the year in Crispy's poll (7%), only 17% are looking forward to the sequel, and it only averaged 3.2 in the RPGOTY poll.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I guess it's a small distinction, but somehow it strikes me as a crucial point when it comes to design philosophy: Sawyer's idea of "balance" comes across to me as saying, "chill, it's not that big of a deal what you pick, just go with whatever you think is cool, we've got your back", whereas Banner Saga's design mostly says, "you have these limited resources, now do your best with them". One of these tickles the part of my brain that deals in strategic decision-making, while the other does not. That's why I don't mind at all that in Banner Saga you're mostly making choices ranging from OK to Good to Very Good (or, as is often the case in scripted scenes, from OK to Bad to Extremely Fucking Bad) - the basis of those choices is (often) informed and goal-oriented, and it's what keeps the game together.

I guess I see what you mean, but this seems like a matter of the game's basic genre and how it frames itself. A semi-aimless high fantasy romp in an ostensibly open world* vs a tightly-controlled journey with a beginning and an end.

Anyway, I see enough of a resemblance to Sawyer stuff to call it that. *shrug*

(*Not actually "open" in the Bethesda sense, but "open" in the sense that the player character has a large enough amount of leeway to do stuff that the gameplay can't really be funneled down into "goal-oriented choices".)
 

Grunker

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Why has Codex consensus on this game been so poor?

It's not, really. The majority vote seems to be "p. cool", it's just that few have played it, and a handful played it and really didn't like it.

Overall though, most people seem to think it's good. I for one am looking forward to the sequal with great anticipation.
 

toro

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I just started this game, love the art and the world map. At a camp screen now and will have to explore this a bit. The first couple of training battles I played seemed quite interesting. Why has Codex consensus on this game been so poor? Not many people voted it as game of the year in Crispy's poll (7%), only 17% are looking forward to the sequel, and it only averaged 3.2 in the RPGOTY poll.

Because sometimes Codex cannot into good games. Finished the game twice and looking forward to the sequel.
 
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agris

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I just started this game, love the art and the world map. At a camp screen now and will have to explore this a bit. The first couple of training battles I played seemed quite interesting. Why has Codex consensus on this game been so poor? Not many people voted it as game of the year in Crispy's poll (7%), only 17% are looking forward to the sequel, and it only averaged 3.2 in the RPGOTY poll.
I don't understand the lack of players either, I thought it was excellent for what it was (i.e. made on a shoestring budget). I'm really looking forward to the second, my biggest hope is that improve the combat maps and make them more varied and dynamic ala Blackguards 1.
 

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