KickStarter The Banner Saga

[Sensuki]

Same, lol. I just skip the dialogue and play the battles.

 

[Copper]

It is a shame.

 

[roshan]

How did you guys like the final fight? IMO the easiest battle in the game, it was really anticlimatic and my only real disappointment But those ending slides though, pretty damn awesome, made up for the lousy final battle.

 

[MicoSelva]

This game is pissing me off so much. I do not mind making bad decisions and living with the consequences, but I do hate guessing what my answers will do and then getting random consequences because the thing what happened was not what I intended at all (just like in Mass Effect - I guess that is modern Bioware pedigree).

Also, not being able to save and quit at any time is fucking unforgivable. No, game, I do not want to play through this third battle in a row right now, I am tired and want to go to sleep now, I have work in the morning. What? I will need to replay the previous two battles next time? Fuck you!

For a story-based game the story is not very interesting, dialogues are boring and characters pretty bland and one-note (not to mention unsypathetic). I am also gravely disappointed with the 'caravan management system' or rather lack thereof.

The battles themselves are ok, if a little bit too simple system-wise. I do like the music too.

Overall, I am rather disappointed with this game. It is pretty mediocre. I guess I should not have had high expectations, but of all the games I backed on KS, this one is the worst, so far.

 

[Infinitron]

It's not for everybody(tm).

 

[Ellef]

Yeah the non combat areas of the game are pretty poor. All questions have a right answer, a less right answer, and a wrong answer which you can't logically deduce, just find a guide if it bothers you. The dialogue is best ignored.

Combat is deceptively simple. Try finishing most battles on hard with 1-2 casualities max, it becomes an exercise in tactical and strategic planning then.

 

[roshan]

Oh come on you pussies. Man up. You faggots like choice in your RPGs but want to "WIN!!!" regardless of what you pick, like in most other RPGs which are basically designed to massage the egos of all sorts of pathetic people. Banner Saga is probably the first game that not only does choice but also actual consequences. You make the wrong decision, you have to live with it, plain and simple. No need to bitch and whine. In the immortal words of Dak'kon, "Endure. In enduring grow strong."

 

[MicoSelva]

No, roshan. For c&c to work in a game you need to be able to make informed (or at least partially informed) decisions, not just guess randomly which option designers marked as the right one this time. Also, the mere existence of objectively best option at every point means the c&c aspect is flawed at the very least.

 

[Copper]

Sounds like you're not approaching this from enough of a storyfag perspective. Sure, some choices get people killed, and loosing your renown investment stings - but so what? A Rank 1 can still contribute to the battle, and there's plenty of characters. I just went with what felt right, role-play wise, for the character and the situation, and had very few regrets - the deaths and fuckups were nice tragic beats, imo. I may not have min/maxed item harvesting etc., but the game generally punishes you for pushing your luck and doing stuff that, at least in retrospect, was risky. And sometimes there's just shit whatever you choose, which is refreshing to be honest.

I thought the game did have a save and quit system, but I'm possibly wrong there.

Conversations are p.banal, though.

 

[MRY]

Wow, MicoSelva is either my sockpuppet or my soulmate. That said, I think there is some truth to the point Copper is making -- even cosmetic choices are substantive if you are invested in the story because those choices are how you define the characters. The problem is that the choices often too quickly translate into game terms (which encourages the player to think along those lines) and it was hard to get invested in the characters / scenario early. (I gather that Rook's story gets more interesting.) It sounds like MicoSelva and I both quit at the same point, the three battles in a row where you couldn't quit and save. Why didn't someone flag that in testing?

 

[ghostdog]

Yeah but if things happen basically random, it may be cool (or not) but it's not real C&C, as mico said. A consequence as a gameplay mechanic needs to be a result of the player's choice and indeed something always needs to be gained for something to be lost, even if what's gained is only a storyfag decision or an impulse to be greedy, brutal, or mean. Gain and loss don't have to (and shouldn't usually) be equal, but when something eventually happens the player should be immediately aware how this was a consequence to his choice and it should make sense.

 

[Karellen]

I think I've already said much of this somewhere earlier in this thread, but at the risk of repeating myself, I had no real problem with the way choices worked in Banner Saga. This was largely because their rationale was already familiar to me from the game that largely inspired them, namely King of Dragon Pass. It's a slightly gimmicky type of C&C game in that the outcomes of choices were never clearly defined and indeed there often was a random element to what exactly would happen. That said, it all works out because a lot of good choices could be inferred by applying cultural knowledge: basically, what you were supposed to do wasn't so much to micromanage things, but rather assert leadership and principles. In individual cases, you'd win some and lose some, but by making decisions as if you were an Orlanthi chieftain, you'd end up doing OK in the long run. This is largely how it works in Banner Saga, too; the "best" choices, when applicable, can often be deduced based on the narrative, characterisation and setting.

Of course, all of this didn't work quite as well in Banner Saga as it did in KoDP, because the latter had a number of systemic elements that ultimately made the choices a lot more interesting. Most importantly, in KoDP, you had the Clan Ring that would give you advice on which choices to pick; usually they'd disagree, but it served to highlight the rationale behind each choice and helped to maintain the impression that all choices were, in some sense, valid. In fact, while a lot of choices in KoDP had a clear best and worst choice, there were also many situations in which the best choice was situational and depended on the decisions made at clan creation and composition of your Ring; the effects of specific good choices were often a mix of good and bad, too. Finally, there were a lot of follow-ups and delayed consequences to decisions in KoDP, which gave it a great sense of narrative continuity, while Banner Saga did that only sporadically.

So I guess I'd say that the premise of how the narrative choices work in Banner Saga is fine - making the outcomes of choices strictly transparent so you could work out the best choice in a strictly rational manner would be pretty banal in the long run, and it wouldn't match the tone of the game. The execution is only so-so, though - it'd be good if they looked at the things that made the decisions work better in KoDP and went about implementing some of those features. That said, even as it is, I think it's OK if you think of it as a side dish for the turn-based combat.

 

[Copper]

Agree absolutely, both on the premise being good and the execution being lacking. There's a lack of competing resources to balance - hell, all they had to do was rip off the mechanics of the Battlestar boardgame. Here's an encounter, you more or less have to expend some of these resources or those, if you run out of any, game over, good luck keeping them balanced. The 'best' choice for a wounded character could be different for a hale and hearty one too. There's some of that, food vs morale/healing, food vs renown, levels vs items, but these are badly phrased, and there could have been more - those text encounters are super cheap to do, and they just cry out for tons of contextual stuff, and instead it just feels random. kinda makes you wonder what the writer was doing while the artist was producing all that art!

 

[Infinitron]

Agree absolutely, both on the premise being good and the execution being lacking. There's a lack of competing resources to balance - hell, all they had to do was rip off the mechanics of the Battlestar boardgame. Here's an encounter, you more or less have to expend some of these resources or those, if you run out of any, game over, good luck keeping them balanced. The 'best' choice for a wounded character could be different for a hale and hearty one too. There's some of that, food vs morale/healing, food vs renown, levels vs items, but these are badly phrased, and there could have been more - those text encounters are super cheap to do, and they just cry out for tons of contextual stuff, and instead it just feels random. kinda makes you wonder what the writer was doing while the artist was producing all that art!

It's not just a matter of writing but also of design, and making all those more complex travel mechanics feed into the combat and other things without imbalancing anything. With the limited budget this game had, I can see why they felt they had to be very careful to avoid going out of scope with that stuff.

 

[roshan]

No, roshan. For c&c to work in a game you need to be able to make informed (or at least partially informed) decisions, not just guess randomly which option designers marked as the right one this time. Also, the mere existence of objectively best option at every point means the c&c aspect is flawed at the very least.

Yeah but if things happen basically random, it may be cool (or not) but it's not real C&C, as mico said. A consequence as a gameplay mechanic needs to be a result of the player's choice and indeed something always needs to be gained for something to be lost, even if what's gained is only a storyfag decision or an impulse to be greedy, brutal, or mean. Gain and loss don't have to (and shouldn't usually) be equal, but when something eventually happens the player should be immediately aware how this was a consequence to his choice and it should make sense.

I don't agree at all, I mean, in real life we are rarely able to predict the results of our actions, why do we expect games to provide us with complete information regarding decisions we are making? And the game always DOES indicate when a choice involves a certain amount of risk. If you pick risky options you are most likely going to suffer, except for the rare times when it actually pays off, this is the way shit works in reality, and the way Banner Saga works as well. It's pretty sad that gamers are so acclimatized to the usual "ego massage" format for quest/game design that they can't take a bit of realism in their games. Read the typical RPG developer interview and they often reference designing quests around making players feel good, or influential, or awesome, not upsetting them, etc - which is a design philosophy that I unfortunately find both sad and sickening.

 

[Copper]

Agree absolutely, both on the premise being good and the execution being lacking. There's a lack of competing resources to balance - hell, all they had to do was rip off the mechanics of the Battlestar boardgame. Here's an encounter, you more or less have to expend some of these resources or those, if you run out of any, game over, good luck keeping them balanced. The 'best' choice for a wounded character could be different for a hale and hearty one too. There's some of that, food vs morale/healing, food vs renown, levels vs items, but these are badly phrased, and there could have been more - those text encounters are super cheap to do, and they just cry out for tons of contextual stuff, and instead it just feels random. kinda makes you wonder what the writer was doing while the artist was producing all that art!

It's not just a matter of writing but also of design, and making all those more complex travel mechanics feed into the combat and other things without imbalancing anything. With the limited budget this game had, I can see why they felt they had to be very careful to avoid going out of scope with that stuff.

True, but would it have killed them to have more than one conversation for most NPCs, for instance? Or have more/any weight to those town conversations?

I'm not really talking about more complex mechanics per say, but more interesting choices and situational locks for content that depend on you having a certain level of morale or a certain number of fighters/clansmen/etc when you hit that part of the road. Let's say you have two extremes - Paragon Rook, who has a massive caravan of happy clansmen, and Renegade Rook, who turns away all strangers and travels as light as possible. When they roll into a town, they could get different flavour text, and a different reaction - Paragon Rook is snowballing, gaining more and more people all the time, putting immense pressure on their food supply, making heroic choices harder and harder. Renegade Rook finds it harder to get people to trust him outside of military matters, etc.

EDIT: I'm talking about having the game say 'You crossed the wastes with no casualties? Here's an effect.'

 

[roshan]

Goddamn this game has an incredible soundtrack.

 

[Inquisition]

Yep, soundtrack and art design are top notch. They really nailed it.

 

[Ivan]

barely literate indeed

 

[hemtae]

Steam just downloaded a 1.2 GB patch for this. On the steam discussion, the devs had this to say:

Not chapter 2 - official announcemnt coming in the AM.

Short of it = Updating Windows Version (bug fixes) as well as adding a few other features. Your save games *should* not be affected. We had to get the update on Steam today in order for something to happen tomorrow morning in conjunction with Valve.

Howdy Folks!

We're aware of the issues with Linux and SteamOS and we're working with Valve to get that sorted!

Apologies folks - we'll get this corrected instead of waiting until the AM to post info. Expect the full notes + updates + special stuff coming soon.

If I had to guess, its steam workshop integration.

EDIT: Its just the Linux/SteamOS version

 

[Infinitron]

Version 2.16.41 now Avaiilable!

We're happy to announce that we're updating to Version 2.16.41!

Major Changes

• Fixed Linux graphical issues related to Intel / Nouveau video drivers

• Videos do not play and a purple screen appears
• Fonts in the game not rendering properly
• Tutorial popup window backgrounds not appearing
• Text disappears when hovering cursor over saved games in Load Games menu
• Game stops responding on loading screen when using nouveau driver

• Fix issue with Hakon's being at rank 6 for some players, causing errors in the Heroes GUI
• Fix issue where the battle horn was unusable for some save older save games
• Add commandline option textscale=2 to increase text size globally

Bugfixes and Improvements

• Fixed gamepad icons not being positioned properly on Help Overlay messages
• Make damage indicator numbers vanish as soon as an affected unit dies
• Fix Puncture bonus not being reflected in damage indicators
• Dredge Fire Slinger no longer causes ability confirmation GUI to appear on its target tiles
• Improve mouse hitbox sensitivity around the enemy damage popup
• Fix missing text for Alette's Heroes description after she puts her hood up
• Fix Alette's stats being reset after donning her hood
• Fixed issue where player is unable to confirm a selection on the Heraldry menu when using a gamepad
• Added gamepad configuration for type of Xbox360 wired controller on Mac OSX
• Hovering cursor over units now display stat banners like it used to
• Fix issue with stat info banners piling up at origin of battle board on the beginning of second wave of war
• Fixed issue where player may open action menu without a pending move order being canceled
• Reduce a performance hitch when the battle resolution banner appears (victory/defeat)
• Preload match resolution texture and optimize some iso rendering hitches

Some additional notes:

- Able to dismiss the auto-detected Gamepad Configuration menu now to return to mouse/keyboard controls



Details about the Linux rendering fixes:

There was an incompatibility between the free Intel / Nouveau video drivers and the version of Mesa that The Banner Saga was using for OpenGL. The previous workaround, involving the export of the MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE environment variable, is no longer necessary and should be disabled if you were previously using it.

Grimdark hooded Alette confirmed as important plot point in Banner Saga 2.

 

[Severian Silk]

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.

Damn it! You just ruined the game for me. I wish I hadn't opened this thread.

Alette is pretty sexy, though.

 

[Infinitron]

Codex review by Bubbles: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-codex-review-the-banner-saga.99922/

 

[Starwars]

I'm replaying this at the moment. I really like this game.
So many faults, C&C is a bit lacking at times (and kinda dumb also in a few places), the combat gets samey, the writing is sorta...weird (the world is wonderful though) but it's one of those games that manages to feel special and unique and I love it for that.

I normally dislike non-interactivity but in this I find myself immensely enjoying that fucking caravan just moving forward with the awesome music in the background.

And yes, the soundtrack is one of the best gaming soundtracks ever if you ask me. Absolutely essential to the game.

Really looking forward to part 2, especially if they can improve upon some of the less good things in the first.

 

[Higher Game]

This game is a work of art, but it's more of a painful RPG than Lisa. The ridiculous random deaths and party switching make its short length much more tolerable; There is no way such a system would hold up over a 40 hour epic. However so brief, it feels epic anyway somehow. The writing is damned good for being able to make you care about as much as possible for characters with such short lifespans. I knew better than to try hard mode on the first try for this, but it was still appropriately tricky at enough times to be satisfying.

The most true role playing you'll do is trying to keep the damned caravan as healthy as possible, even if it doesn't mean anything except honor/score.