KickStarter The Banner Saga

[norolim]

I'm surprised nobody praises the music. Banner Saga has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game.

I was just listening to it now!

Ha! I'm also listening to it right now. Got a full soundtrack with my copy of the game

 

[Starwars]

The soundtrack is fucking amazing. One of the best game soundtracks ever, I think it really gave extraordinary "weight" to the setting. Really fleshed it out really!

 

[Ninjerk]

Reminds me of Conan soundtrack. I remember thinking that having the soundtrack done by a real orchestra was an odd stretch goal during the KS.

 

[Sensuki]

What? That was usually a 'Would you like fries with your Colossi meal?' moment for me - they only summoned grunts, who, again, can probably be one-shotted even at late game if you've kept certain character classes alive. It's semi-free XP!

I was under the impression the summoned ones didn't give XP ?

 

[mindx2]

The soundtrack is fucking amazing. One of the best game soundtracks ever, I think it really gave extraordinary "weight" to the setting. Really fleshed it out really!

Reminds me of Conan soundtrack. I remember thinking that having the soundtrack done by a real orchestra was an odd stretch goal during the KS.

I specifically remember a lot of people were slamming them for spending any KS money on a full orchestra. Lot of at the time but I suppose they pulled it off quite well.

edit: I probably thought it would be a waste of money that could go into gameplay . However, this game really sells itself on it's atmosphere (wonderful visuals and sound) that goes a long way it making it a better "game" than it would be without those elements.

 

[Copper]

What? That was usually a 'Would you like fries with your Colossi meal?' moment for me - they only summoned grunts, who, again, can probably be one-shotted even at late game if you've kept certain character classes alive. It's semi-free XP!

I was under the impression the summoned ones didn't give XP ?

Apparently not - well, they still provided a kill, which is important in its own right for leveling characters.

 

[MRY]

So I've been playing this game a bit (since it deals with similar matter to my current project), and I just reached the tower siege part (where you find the wizard or whatever at the top of the tower). After going through three (?) battles, I quit to stop for the night, and loaded it back up, only to discover that it hadn't checkpointed me, apparently the checkpoint is after you leave the tower area entirely. My exasperation at replaying the fights has increased as my outcomes have been worse in the replaying. So, this leaves me with a few questions:

(1) I'm mixed on the game so far. Does it get sufficiently better to stick around? ironyuri said yes, so I'm inclined to, but if everyone says no, I might reconsider.

(2) If I'm finding the battle system boring but not easy, and am mainly playing to see how the game treats the subject matter, would there be any reason not to just set the difficulty to the lowest and plow through it? I'm not seeing much in the way of rewarding tactics, just a test of patience and attention mostly. (I think I'm playing on highest difficulty, but I can't remember.)

(3) At some point do you fight something other than dredge? I'm finding them kind of boring.

(4) The special abilities never seem to yield a better result than just hitting someone. Am I missing something?

 

[Sensuki]

@#2 :/ The game is very tactical man. Turn order, Movement, positioning, targeting, ability and willpower use all matter.

@#3 You fight other Varl/Humans too

@#4 They do matter. It depends on which unit you have. I find that Alette's ability is not very good, but Rook's is awesome if you position yourself correctly. The Varl whirlwind attack is useful. One of the Viking guys does this multiattack that randomly hits armor/health - using that first will deal more health damage than a normal hit when units are full health, then once their armor is gone you start regularly hitting them. There's also a taunt ability which is good, keeps guys off your squishies. The human kid has some defend ability which is good for using him as aggro/sponge while your other guys do the work. The white haired chick's trap one is also situationally useful if you use it correctly, as it can deny heavy hitters their turn - which is valuable.

I found good use out of most of the unit abilities in the game. There's only 1-2 I didn't like.

 

[InspectorRumpole]

So I've been playing this game a bit (since it deals with similar matter to my current project), and I just reached the tower siege part (where you find the wizard or whatever at the top of the tower). After going through three (?) battles, I quit to stop for the night, and loaded it back up, only to discover that it hadn't checkpointed me, apparently the checkpoint is after you leave the tower area entirely. My exasperation at replaying the fights has increased as my outcomes have been worse in the replaying. So, this leaves me with a few questions:

(1) I'm mixed on the game so far. Does it get sufficiently better to stick around? ironyuri said yes, so I'm inclined to, but if everyone says no, I might reconsider.

(2) If I'm finding the battle system boring but not easy, and am mainly playing to see how the game treats the subject matter, would there be any reason not to just set the difficulty to the lowest and plow through it? I'm not seeing much in the way of rewarding tactics, just a test of patience and attention mostly. (I think I'm playing on highest difficulty, but I can't remember.)

(3) At some point do you fight something other than dredge? I'm finding them kind of boring.

(4) The special abilities never seem to yield a better result than just hitting someone. Am I missing something?

Based on your post i don't think you'll enjoy the rest of the game much. This isn't an rpg for everyone.

 

[Infinitron]

The special abilities are extremely situational, as opposed to being "awesome buttons" that you have almost no reason ever not to use other than running out of mana, like in so many other games. They are, in short, balanced.

It does take some thought and experience to figure out how to set up the situations that allow you to take full advantage of them.

Re: too much dredge, you'll be seeing less of them after this chapter, as you switch from leading a varl army on the warpath to leading a band of human refugees on the run.

 

[Copper]

Yeah, MRY , if you don't like the combat, soldiering on isn't something I'd recommend - watch a let's play and skip the battles. The game has a nice melancholic vibe to it that probably doesn't come across if you're watching it, but I doubt being frustrated will help either. I found it rewarding, as in, it's quite clear that bad results are your own fault for exposing the wrong person, but by the time I got to the tower on hard, I had Hakon and the super cleave guy up to 5, and they can comfortably kill/cripple 1-3 enemies a turn.

Spoiler

Anyway, you're about to switch perspectives again, and Rooks team has a lot more optional combat - I think you can bypass both big siege fights, although you'll pay in blood for it.

On specials - Ivar's ability is quite good as a mobility aid for your own troops, there's a warlord character who can swap turn order, there's the Mender, who can (positioned right) wreck both your own and the enemy's shit and (more usefully) cure armour damage. Alette's ability pretty much depends on shooting through a tank character like Egil into whoever's ganging up, but yeah, I generally had her too far back to get much out of it, and prefered to save willpower for armour breaking/massive late fight damage. The fire witch's cinders are great openers, especially agaisnt a big mob of Dredge. The prince is obviously great at taking out the slingers.

 

[Karellen]

(1) I'm mixed on the game so far. Does it get sufficiently better to stick around? ironyuri said yes, so I'm inclined to, but if everyone says no, I might reconsider.

(2) If I'm finding the battle system boring but not easy, and am mainly playing to see how the game treats the subject matter, would there be any reason not to just set the difficulty to the lowest and plow through it? I'm not seeing much in the way of rewarding tactics, just a test of patience and attention mostly. (I think I'm playing on highest difficulty, but I can't remember.)

(3) At some point do you fight something other than dredge? I'm finding them kind of boring.

(4) The special abilities never seem to yield a better result than just hitting someone. Am I missing something?

You already got pretty substantial responses, but regarding difficulty, I would say that I think Banner Saga is about as fun on Normal difficulty as it is on Hard. Difficulty by itself isn't what makes the game fun, but rather the way the system - which is exceptionally deterministic - allows you to optimise your actions. Even when the fights aren't that hard, you can still refine your tactics to win more cleanly and efficiently, which is where the game's appeal lies in my mind. That entails playing in a very deliberate and thoughtful way, though, and like Sensuki said, precisely manipulating things like turn order and initial positioning and such which even in many tactical RPGs aren't all that important. In that way, though, Banner Saga really does play more like a board game than a typical tactical RPG; the system is fairly simple, but result is that all decisions really do matter, and the fun is in calculating and reading ahead the way you do in something like Go or Chess. So if you just shift the difficulty to Easy and bruteforce through, I can't imagine the game would be much fun.

The biggest drawback of the game is that the fights get rather repetitive; there simply aren't enough different scenarios in the game. I actually quit the game for a few months after the Tower sequence too. My impression from continuing after that was that the combat does get somewhat more varied afterward, since the enemy tends to have ranged units a lot from that point on and various stronger units in general. But if the system on the whole doesn't appeal to you by now, I can't say whether it will be that much more interesting. The rest of the game revolves around Rook's caravan, though, which is much more appealing than Hakon's, both in terms of narrative and the gameplay; the travel scenes are more taxing, and in fights you're using the more fragile human characters, which I always liked more, and you fight other humans every now and then too.

The final fight of the game is pretty great, though, and that's worth holding out for too.

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah in that first second battle in the game, I love to do that until I complete it without a unit loss (on Hard). Subsequent battles are much harder (almost impossible) to do without at least one guy dropping.

Hit the hammer on the head about the deterministic -> optimization bit.

 

[MRY]

Sounds like I should at least try sticking it out a bit.

My problem with combat is that aside from the big dredge, nothing is remotely a threat, and two of my guys (Hakon and the other big hitter) can one-shot anything other than a big guy. Conversely, the big dredge can one-shot most of my non-varl guys, and can knock my varls down dramatically. Since there are so few ranged attackers, and not at lot of great ways to knock armor down quickly, combat winds up being pretty cheesy: I try to have tons of 1 HP trash mobs standing, then work to position myself so that my heavy hitters get to hit their heavy hitters first, which is outcome determinative.

It's not that it's un-tactical: the outcome of the battle turns almost entirely on how much effort I put into counting tiles and making sure no one gets within the heavy hitter's range. It's just that the tactics are pretty simple but require a lot of patience, which doesn't sit well with me. I don't feel like I'm making hard choices so much as making easy choices that require me first to double check an accounts book.

 

[Copper]

Not to be a smart ass, but why aren't you hitting the high strength Collossi with Hakon straight out the gate? He can reliably drop their damage down to tolerable with one hit if you pump Willpower, since their armour isn't great. Of course, you need to be able to isolate them and you don't get much out of his special, but eh. I found the AI is quite good about targetting armour/strength based on its own strength - a standard grunt may not be much of a threat, but a few 1 Str stragglers bashing armour for 2-3 points can put most characters into the danger zone quickly.

 

[Wulfstand]

Weren't the game's sales high enough to pump up the 2nd (and 3rd?) installments? I haven't heard anything about this since its release, and I remember it being a very enjoyable experience, mainly due to its artstyle and music.

 

[MRY]

The battles are typically set up so that Hakon cannot reach the Colossi initially. And in my experience, even with high willpower and max strength, I can maybe take off a third of their life, tops. At that point they would get a counterattack on Hakon that would cripple him. (At least, that's my experience.) My usual tactic is to try to have three guys hit them in a round, two to chisel off four or five armor points, then Hakon to hit hard.

It's entirely possible I'm just not that good at the game, though. I've never been much of a turn-based star, given my lack of patience.

 

[GloomFrost]

Weren't the game's sales high enough to pump up the 2nd (and 3rd?) installments? I haven't heard anything about this since its release, and I remember it being a very enjoyable experience, mainly due to its artstyle and music.

Developers said ages ago that it is going to be a trilogy. And the second part had been in development for a long time.

 

[Copper]

It's possible I'm just talking out my ass here - in some ways, Hakon's story is easy mode. Grunts are certainly a threat to Rook + co, one breaking through is bad news for any archers, for instance, and heavy hitters will mince Ivar if he's carrying the front.

Ultimately I liked the system, but wanted more diversity in scenarios than 'kill everyone on this perfect plane'. The biggest letdown was the lack of impact to dialog - you rarely miss out on much if someone dies, for instance.

 

[Ellef]

Just picked this up, driving myself mad aiming for zero casualties in every combat on hard (anyone here done that, or an exercise in futility?), that early combat with the super armoured guy was fun for that. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, but shieldwall is crazy good early on, because enemies don't switch targets when you activate it. The archers seems underpowered early on, with oddleif and alette having pretty average abilites and low strength.

 

[Sensuki]

I've been able to do the first few battles, and a few others without anyone dropping, after that usually I lose one or two. Usually just reload on Pyrrhic victories

 

[roshan]

The battles are typically set up so that Hakon cannot reach the Colossi initially. And in my experience, even with high willpower and max strength, I can maybe take off a third of their life, tops. At that point they would get a counterattack on Hakon that would cripple him. (At least, that's my experience.) My usual tactic is to try to have three guys hit them in a round, two to chisel off four or five armor points, then Hakon to hit hard.

It's entirely possible I'm just not that good at the game, though. I've never been much of a turn-based star, given my lack of patience.

I usually check the large dredge with someone who has high damage but medium armor. Forget about the armor and attack health first, using as much willpower as you can to pump damage. By reducing their health, you also reduce their ability to damage your health, which gives them no choice but to attack your armor instead.

 

[Sensuki]

 

[SCO]

Just picked this up, driving myself mad aiming for zero casualties in every combat on hard.

IIRC i did, except the end

 

[Ellef]

What strikes me as I play more is how almost all abilities have an interesting use and aren't mindlessly spammable attacks. The only one I haven't found a use for is that starter archers line attack. The dialogue is 100% amateur hour, though. I just hold down enter now and skip it all, which is basically unheard of for me.