KickStarter The Banner Saga 3

[toro]

Yeah, I liked the part where you get to play Vegeta.

And you spank Pikachu with your dick?

 

[LESS T_T]

Gamasutra Twitch interview: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...pers_discuss_making_a_proper_grand_finale.php

 

[LESS T_T]

Whatever this is:

STOIC AND HYPER RPG PARTNER UP FOR 4-PART TABLETOP ROLE PLAYING SERIES

BALTIMORE, MD – July 18th 2018 – Stoic, an independent game development company, and Versus Evil a leading independent video game publisher, today announced their partnership with HyperRPG to create a tabletop role playing series based on different races and characters from the Banner Saga universe. The weekly campaigns will be led by a human dungeon master (DM) and will amplify the already rich character and story threads that the Banner Saga video game series is famed for, complete with tough situations and choices to make.

The Banner Saga tabletop campaign will be running for 4 weeks every Tuesday from July 24-August 14th. 7pm-9:30pm PST on Twitch.tv/hyperrpg

Viewers of the show will not only delight in how this RPG plays out, but they will also be given an exclusive HyperRPG Heraldry title which they will be able to use in-game.

With the launch of third and final game in the series, Banner Saga 3 on July 26th, gamers will be able to play the complete saga from beginning to end on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch on July 26th.


Hyper RPG The Cast

The campaign will feature the cast of Andre Meadows from Black Nerd Comedy, Trisha Hershberger from Geek & Sundry, Dave "Lasercorn" Moss Host of ToasterGhost , Steve Zaragoza from The ValleyFolk, Youtuber, Shelby Grace and Adam Koebel Co-Author of the Award Winning Tabletop RPG, Dungeon World who will serve as the Dungeon Master!

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...what-stoic-learnt-from-the-mass-effect-finale

End of a Saga: What Stoic learnt from the Mass Effect finale
Studio co-founder and ex-BioWare dev Arnie Jorgensen joins producer Zeb West to discuss ending the Banner Saga trilogy

Trilogies in the games industry are often just a series of loosely connected stories rather than a single cohesive narrative, typically an excuse to go on one adventure after another until there are no adventures left and the whole thing can be rebooted.

In essence, the games industry rarely takes advantage of the trilogy format in a traditional sense: to tell one epic story.

Of course, a trilogy is nothing without a conclusion which often leads developers and publishers alike to keep pushing. Every great saga is judged ultimately by how it ends, and there's likely not a person working in the industry today who doesn't remember the carnage which ensued following the conclusion of Mass Effect 3.

With the narrative-focused Banner Saga series set to conclude next week following the launch of its third installment, indie developer Stoic is in the precarious situation of having to actually deliver a satisfying conclusion to a project six years in the making; a prospect so terrifying that most developers either stumble at the last hurdle, or keep running until there are no games left to make, and the series simply collapses under its own weight.

It's a reality which has not failed to dawn on the team, the founders of which were working at BioWare's Austin studio during the Mass Effect 3 debacle.

"Being on the inside of the studio, even though we weren't directly working on the game, we were even more cognisant of what was going on and where maybe there were some missteps, and we really took that to heart in our own game," Stoic co-founder Arnie Jorgensen tells GamesIndustry.biz.

"Here's the point: if people play our game and they say: 'Finally someone nailed it. They finished an epic and I feel like it was a satisfying ending for my playthrough. My personal playthrough'... it really feels satisfying for the player. We focused on that with the Banner Saga 3, really trying to make sure people feel that way and we hope we did it."

Although not directly hit by the explosive rage of a fandom with a victim complex, bearing witness first-hand to the fallout informed their approach to the Banner Saga and it's countless branching narratives.

"We've always known from the start of the Banner Saga 3, and even earlier, we have to stick the landing," says Jorgensen. "If we don't stick the landing, then we're going to feel like it was all for naught, so we've taken it very very seriously."

It's something the studio takes very seriously indeed and, after seven months in development, they restarted the entire game from scratch.

"We started from the end to make sure we were sticking the landing then went back and wrote it from the front to the back, knowing exactly where the story was going to end," Jorgensen continues. "So we knew where the story was gonna go, six years ago, but how you get there has changed... So on this one we took it very seriously, and we started with the endings."

The maelstrom of fan outrage which soured the conclusion of Mass Effect 3, and the studio's attempts to smooth things over with a free extended cut release, underlined not only the importance of getting it right, but where exactly it all went wrong, as Stoic producer Zeb West explains.

"I can remember early pre-production conversions where we brought that up and in thinking about it, in the ways in which BioWare ended up changing their ending, were less about radical changes to the story, and more about providing a sense of closure to an epic," he says.

"I think that is where we put some of our focus, and also just really 'hey, did you make these choices throughout the games? Well guess what, here are the consequences to those choices.'

"Not necessarily trying to steer everyone into a couple of primary branches, which I think is what kind of gives you the feeling it didn't matter, and we want to make it feel like it did matter. There are some big differences in the endings, and then there's also like a million micro-differences with who you see at the end and who's with you and who's there in those moments."

Now with over 40 characters, many of whom can die in abrupt and surprising ways, coupled with two tandem storylines and all of the perilous choices in tow, Banner Saga has become a complex spider's web of narrative possibility. It has, in fact, grown so complex over the course of three games that Stoic relies on its fan community to help keep things on track. The development team even refers to the Banner Saga Wiki which, according to Jorgensen, is "some of the tightest design doc stuff we have."

"One thing we relied on Banner Saga 2, and more so in Banner Saga 3, is we have a really great community," he adds. "And within that we have an even deeper community, people who have been with us since Banner Saga Factions [the series' proof of concept], and they help us find problems with the game and lore issues.... It's really a multi-headed approach to making sure this game is airtight as we can make it."

The dedicated community is something which has supported Stoic since day one when it raised over $700,000 on Kickstarter for the first game. It was also why studio bosses decided to Kickstart the final game after forgoing that option with the second installment.

"One of the crazy benefits of that was suddenly 20,000 people are really engaged," says West. "The community that came along with us was really valuable from that first Kickstarter. And the core of that, we had invested in a community manager after Banner Saga 2 just to really try and maintain that direct connection that we valued from Banner Saga 1.

"During the Banner Saga 2 process, the team kind of went dark just trying to deliver the game as quickly as they could, but we were missing that feedback and direct engagement from the community. So for Banner Saga 3, that was a big reason why we Kickstarted [it] to really have that community involvement throughout that process."

Banner Saga has morphed from its original scope into something far bigger than the developers ever envisaged. It was never intended as a trilogy but in order to do their original vision justice, the studio founders knew a single instalment wouldn't suffice. Stoic wants the complete trilogy to feel like a single game, and while it's not something the team regrets, it's certainly not something Jorgensen would recommend.

"I wouldn't suggest anyone really do this, and the reason is, if we're really trying to create a game that's one game, but it's over the course of six years, play styles change over the time period, the games that people are interested in change, your game style may become outdated, the look may become outdated," he says.

"So by signing yourself up to three games that are really back-to-back, single experiences is really, really risky. It worked out for us, but that would be something our studio would be really careful about in the future."

 

[ItsChon]

I'm excited for this. Going to replay the games back to back, and hopefully the third will deliver.

 

[Infinitron]

As the end of the saga draws to a close, Taylor Davis, Malukah and Peter Hollens take a fond look back at working with Austin Wintory on the official soundtracks for all three Banner Saga games.

 

[TemplarGR]

Great, another cool mobile phone game to waste some time on the toilet while taking a shit, then utterly forget it afterwards....

 

[Infinitron]

"The final hour has struck for Strand. A sea of dredge assail its gates as Eirik and Valgard rush the Governor to safety... while an even deadlier foe approaches..."

 

[Infinitron]

Reviews are out: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-26-the-banner-saga-3-review

The Banner Saga 3 review - mournful tactical excellence
Clash of clans.

Stately, vivid and tragic, this brooding epic finally reaches its climax.

While the world outside beckons with summer sunshine, I have decided to return to the cold, faraway lands of Stoic Studio's The Banner Saga instead.

Since the last part of this series, which now finds its conclusion with The Banner Saga 3, an unexplained darkness has warped everything it touches. Having accompanied many different characters in their desperate search for safety from the race known as Dredge, it now increasingly looks like nothing short of Ragnarok, the apocalypse, is at hand.

The Banner Saga has always been my go-to out of the brand of games that make certain defeat an important part of their appeal. In many of them, such as Into The Breach or Telltale's The Walking Dead, you can't avoid death, and neither should you try to. Among all the games that want me to win, to emerge victorious in some capacity or other, The Banner Saga has, from its very beginning, merely asked that I hold on, somehow.

It's writing like this that makes the game feel timely and profound.

This is exemplified in its three types of gameplay: at the end of The Banner Saga 2, the giant-like varl Iver has set out into the darkness threatening the entire world. While you control him, you're once again travelling to reach a certain destination. The urgency of your task forces you to make the decision of when to rest and when to push on.

Depending on who you've saved all the way back in the first instalment of The Banner Saga, either archer Rook or his daughter Alette has led their clan to Arberrang, the last city that still stands, only to find it besieged both from the in- and outside. In their position, you have to make certain logistic decisions, such as how to defend the city walls or allocate supplies, and mediate between fearful parties of different races to stave off certain chaos for a little while longer.

The Banner Saga has managed to make your choices up to this point matter, for the most part. If you import your save game from The Banner Saga 2, it will remember how much renown you have earned and are thus able to spend on either levelling up your characters or buying supplies, and you get to reunite with all the characters you managed to save. Depending on how you fared, your roster is now enormous. If you start afresh, The Banner Saga 3 will assume you got everyone out alive. Both cases will likely leave you with more characters than you'll know what to do with.

This time around you fight warped versions of humans and other creatures.

Narratively, having many people with you isn't a bad thing, because you'll finally be able to learn more about those you've been travelling with for a long time but never got to know. As before, brief moments of respite regularly give you the chance to talk. The Banner Saga is most enjoyable if your playthrough of the previous instalment isn't that long ago. While you can watch a summary of past events, there are a lot of small references that I appreciated more because I could still place names and faces. In terms of the tactical battles however, having this many characters leads to having a few duplicates in your roster, characters with different faces, identical abilities, and not much else.

Stoic tries to counterbalance this by giving you the option of continuing to fight several waves of foes. If you win one round, you can take a moment to exchange the fallen or severely wounded members of your fighting party and keep going to earn more rewards. If you really enjoy the battles, this is the option for you. I found it made the already frequent altercations drag on unbearably at times.

The levelling system now allows you to invest in higher likelihoods to dodge blows or do critical damage once you've maxed out all your stats. This makes The Banner Saga 3 almost too easy on occasion. Battles in the previous two games sometimes had me gnashing my teeth, this time around, I wasn't in danger of losing once. Enemies are now twisted versions of classes you already know, slightly stronger, yet easy to overcome once you know how. Once I found my favourite combination of fighters, I only changed them if the layout of the map called for it.

The Banner Saga 3 takes you to the center of the world.

With Iver's travelling band of mercenaries you'll encounter a few new enemies, most notably something that looks like a cross between Cthulhu and a tick. They even make the acquaintance of a few new characters, among them someone who plays a pivotal part at the very end of the game.

The way The Banner Saga 3 presents what's essentially a lost battle from the start is exceptional. The writing is as strong as ever, realistic enough that sometimes I just had to stop playing to open the blinds and let the sun in for a moment to escape the bleakness of it all. Much of the soundtrack by Austin Wintory ends up being even darker and less melodic than before, with sharp, dissonant wind sections punctuating the silence like sudden burst of panic.

Everything, from the way your timer is now counting down the days to the knowledge that you'll make a bad decision somewhere and it will cost you somehow helps you understand the true meaning of war - something that's easy to forget when elsewhere, you're so intent on winning it.

The Banner Saga 3 ends up uncomfortably timely, as it confronts players with the fear of the other at multiple junctions, and fits in several pertinent questions without ever saddling you with answering them definitively. In this game, I met people for whom power was more important than helping to end suffering, and I had to deal with the certainty that those I left behind would likely die, but could also turn out to be a burden if I wasn't careful.

It reminded me that squabbles for power and the fear of death are real, that all most people can do in the face of this is to take it one day at a time. That's why in many respects, the ending of The Banner Saga 3 isn't an ending at all, and I wouldn't blame anyone for being slightly dissatisfied with it.

After everything is said and done however, you have the memory of meeting new friends and fighting some stressful battles, and I guess that's really just what life is about.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/07/26/wot-i-think-the-banner-saga-3/

Wot I Think: The Banner Saga 3
I'm going to need a Saga holiday after this

After waiting two long years for the final instalment of Stoic’s fantastical strategy trilogy, The Banner Saga 3 begins in the best possible way. It picks up where the second The Banner Saga 2 left off, and one of the first things you get to do is punch your scheming arch nemesis – who probably made your last moments of that second game a right misery – square in the face.

You can punch him so hard, in fact, that you can permanently break his nose for the rest of the game. It’s an immensely satisfying moment in a series that, up until now, has been more a war of attrition and bleak perseverance than anything else. Sadly, it immediately goes back to being a bit grim again, and pretty much stays that way until the credits start rolling. Is it the ending we’ve all been waiting for? Here’s wot I think.

It’s hard to talk about The Banner Saga 3 without mentioning the other two. This is very much the climax of Stoic’s ongoing story, and playing it without any prior knowledge of the others would be a bit like starting your first Lord of the Rings marathon with Return of the King and then wondering why everyone’s so hell-bent on murdering this dusty Frodo lad.


Just look at that lovely broken nose….

Yes, there’s a recap video on the main menu to remind you exactly what went down in the first two games, and even a dedicated tutorial mode if you’re completely new and/or forgotten how it all works – because let me tell you, the main game doesn’t spend any time covering the ground rules again until the properly new bits come up.

But for reasons I’ll explain in a minute, I’d argue The Banner Saga 3 is really aimed at existing Saga-ites only. The people who, like me, have already trudged back and forth across this gorgeous, decaying fantasy world, gritted their teeth through its repetitive combat, and are now waiting to see whether their maybe-good-maybe-not text adventure-style decisions will save this dying land from the encroaching darkness and world-eating serpent ripping it to pieces. I would not recommend coming to it completely fresh.


Spinegrinder is an excellent name for a bear.

Like the first two games, there are two main focus points in the final leg of this journey, and the story shifts back and forth between them. Half of your party are now encamped in the last human stronghold of Arberrang – the game’s Minas Tirith, if you will – and their job is to keep this melting pot of warring factions, desperate civilians and power-hungry dissidents from tearing each other’s throats out, making sure there’s still something left at the end of it all, if and when the darkness finally lifts and the frozen sun starts moving again.

The other half are heading north on a Sam and Frodo-style do-or-die mission to try and prevent this apocalypse once and for all. Protected from the darkness by the Valka witch Juno, this particular strand is The Banner Saga at its most familiar. Here, your band of warriors haul their tired limbs across long, winding landscapes that are somehow even more beautiful than before, despite being warped six ways to Sunday by the spreading purple gloom. It’s a real visual treat to revisit these old locations in their newly twisted state, and it makes you realise just how far you’ve come and what kind of devastation you’ve narrowly been avoiding all this time.


There are some good new faces in The Banner Saga 3 – creepy witch Alfrun with the funky face tattoo became a fast favourite.

It’s also where you do the bulk of the game’s fighting. Forget the Dredge. The new baddies of The Banner Saga 3 are the Warped, the lost souls who didn’t make it to Arberrang on your trek westwards and have become corrupted by the darkness. All right, they’re essentially just gloopier, meltier versions of all the enemies you’ve fought before, man and Dredge alike, but their newly mutated forms and special abilities do add a new wrinkle to The Banner Saga’s time-worn, tile-based strategy battles.

The basics are exactly the same as the first two games. Your strength stat still doubles up as your overall health, armour still has to be chipped away if you’re not strong enough to get past it, and willpower can still be spent activating special attacks, beefing up your regular attacks, or helping your characters traverse a few more tiles on its grid-based battle map.

Some Warped, however, can absorb strength damage if they’ve still got willpower points left to spend, and nearly all of them explode upon death, leaving willpower-sapping pools of goop in their wake. The latter becomes particularly dangerous if you end up herding a lot of them into the same cluster of tiles – while your willpower gets nuked standing on these tiles, they get a willpower bonus. These goop spots do fade over time, but these self-inflicted hazards definitely go a long way to make up for the overall lack of variety in its battle grids, which are by and large just big empty squares.


When the nastiest Warped get 18 armour, most of your 10-strength fighters just don’t stand a chance.

Eventually, though, The Banner Saga 3’s combat falls into exactly the same trap as its predecessors. As much as it feels genuinely refreshing for the first few hours, you soon realise you’re being hounded by the same half dozen or so enemy types every fight, and it all becomes a bit of a drag – particularly when, for reasons I won’t spoil during the second half of the game, time is really of the essence. XCOM, this ain’t.

It doesn’t help that most of the characters in your Sam and Frodo party are stuck with such piddly stats, making them ill-equipped to deal with a lot of enemies reliably on their own. Even if you’ve imported an old save file where they’re as buff as they can be, you’ll quickly find several characters’ stats max out well below your average Warped, which rather forces you to rely solely on your trusty giant Varl and a couple of other beefier favourites.

You can pour points earned from levelling up your characters into extra talents – such as giving them a higher chance of absorbing or even avoiding strength and armour damage, for example – but fundamentally, it still doesn’t change the fact that most of my party can still be wiped out in a single hit, particularly when the latter part of the game’s difficulty curve takes a steep climb north. This stagnates the game’s sense of variety even further, as you’re not only facing the same enemies multiple times, but you’re also using exactly the same party members to take them out. I’d much rather trade talents for higher max stats any day.


Defeat these Warped in 40 turns and you’ll have the chance to replenish your party with fresh fighters. Or just leave.

It also discouraged me from engaging much with The Banner Saga 3’s other new feature: wave battles. At certain points in the story, you’ll only have a limited number of turns to take out your foe before a new batch pitches up. If you succeed, you get a chance to swap out your injured for fresh blood and carry on for the chance to earn rare treasures you can equip later on, or just high-tail it out of there and carry on with the story. The only problem is that none of my reserve party were anywhere near capable of surviving a complete wave, so I often just legged it and carried on – which sometimes makes narrative sense, but mostly feels a bit contrived.

The downside is that if you fail, you’re stuck dealing with a fresh wave of Warped with whoever’s still standing, no substitutions allowed. This prompted a fair share of reloads when this happened to me (made even more infuriating by The Banner Saga’s vague and often sporadic auto-saving), as there was no way in hell I was going to defeat more than half a dozen fresh Warped with just two remaining characters on half health. Maybe I’m just not very good at keeping people alive in The Banner Saga 3, but no-win situations like this just aren’t very fun.


Don’t think I’ll be sticking around for this one…

Combat is still a bit of a dud, then, but thankfully, The Banner Saga 3 really delivers on the old text-adventure front. This has always been The Banner Saga’s greatest strength in my books, and you continue to have a tangible impact over the events of both parts of the story right up until the very end – particularly when it shifts back to your Arberrang crew.

You still do a bit of fighting in Arberrang – there continue to be hundreds of Dredge camped outside the walls, after all – but this part of the story does suffer somewhat for being confined to a single location. I got rather sick of marching my 1000+ strong caravan back and forth between the main hall and city gates time after time, and I felt Stoic could have done more with the city’s artwork to better portray its gradual descent into frenzied desperation.


It’s pretty the first time round, but on the third trek down you just wish there was some kind of fast-travel feature.

Luckily, as someone who’s strolled into town with the respect of what appears to be at least half the city’s population in tow, you get to do a lot of the decision-making on how to deal with this catastrophe, and the choices you make here result in some of the game’s biggest and most heartbreaking set pieces. They may not be as thrilling or exciting as The Banner Saga 2’s iconic floating rock bridge getaway, for instance, but the stakes have never been higher for the perilous city of Arberrang, and the last thing you want to do is mess up all the hard work you’ve put in to get to this damn city in the first place.

I won’t go into the details as they’re best left discovered for yourself, but I was surprised by just how brilliantly it incorporates all of your previous decisions from your past playthroughs. When I played The Banner Saga 2, for example, I had a really rough time. Being the nice person I am, I ended up picking up every waif and stray possible, which took a massive toll on both my food supplies and my caravan’s overall morale. When morale is low, you get penalised with fewer willpower points, making every fight that bit harder, and by the end I was just glad it was all over.


Rugga really gets his just desserts in this game.

In The Banner Saga 3, all those hours of grind and toil from the previous games were finally made to feel worthwhile – and damn it felt good. This is save-importing done right, and something I hope other studios (*cough*Telltale*cough*) learn from in the future.

Don’t fret if you didn’t end up with a 1000+ strong caravan, though – there may be an initial panic around a certain mid-game event, but Stoic’s narrative structure does everything in its power to get you through to the other side. Trust me.

Ultimately, though, whether you have a satisfying ending or not is very much down to your choices, and yours alone – which, for a game like this, couldn’t be more fitting. Yes, it runs the risk of being a massive anti-climax if you make a few duff decisions, but even that has a kind of poetic justice to it – it’s just another tragic tale to be woven into your ever-eventful banner.

Overall, I think you will have a good ending – and one worth the pain you’ve had to endure over the course of these collective 40-odd hours. And even if you don’t, at least you’ll never be faced with the question of why Frodo just didn’t use an eagle to plop the ring into Mount Doom and have done with it all.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-banner-saga-3-review/

THE BANNER SAGA 3 REVIEW

Having established a reputation for mercilessness, Stoic’s Norse RPG epic was never likely to allow its exhausted heroes some respite. If anything, The Banner Saga 3 is even more crushingly grim than the previous two episodes—though that’s only fitting, since this is, in every sense, the end of the line. As a small group ventures into the wastelands beyond Arberrang’s fragmenting walls, looking for the serpent that’s about to destroy the world, you’re not just left wondering if they’re going to make it. The more pressing question is whether, if they do succeed, there’ll be anything for them to come back to.

“Despite everything that’s going on, it’s still mankind that worries me the most,” says Rook astutely, moments before things go from bad to disastrous. Arberrang was already in a bit of a state upon the caravan’s arrival; now, with its king at death’s door and irredeemable bastard Rugga having successfully sown divisions among the populace, the city is a powder keg, waiting for the tiniest spark to make it explode. And now here come the dredge—your former enemy suddenly vulnerable and sympathetic—begging to be let in, before they can be consumed by the poisonous fog that has choked the rest of the world. It’s a deeply distressing scenario, even before Rugga starts spouting off about “the will of the people”, and making populist speeches riddled with the kind of lies that frightened citizens are only too willing to believe.

And if one pressure-cooker environment wasn’t enough, the potential world-savers of the piece have been forced into the uneasiest of alliances. Trapped within a bubble of light magic are one-armed Varl giant Iver, spellweavers Eyvind and Juno, and the Ravens, episode two’s mercenaries who aren’t just minus a leader but have effectively been tricked by a mind spell into helping out. Of course, when the episode begins, they don’t know that yet. But the penny has to drop soon…

The two-pronged approach to storytelling works as well here as it has in previous entries, the plot always seeming to switch back just as you’re getting anxious to find out what’s happening to the other group. However, there’s one key point of difference that may well prove divisive. Arberrang is a sprawling place, big enough that it requires your caravan to trudge from one side to the other as you deal with the various internecine conflicts inside the walls and to help keep outside threats from breaking in. But where previous episodes had you regularly encountering new places and people, your knowledge of the world growing with every city and village you passed through, there isn’t the same sense of journey this time. Not only is half the action is contained within a single place, but the other half of the story has you exploring a world that lies in ruins.

As it turns out, you’re not the only ones out there, but you shouldn’t expect the cast to grow much beyond the small handful of newcomers introduced at the outset. And you don’t get to gawp at the pretty scenery so much as shudder at the fate of anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the darkness. The visuals are still arresting, but more abstract: at times you’ll swear the abundance of jagged edges is going to puncture your shimmering bubble, which appears ever more fragile with every step. Whichever group you’re currently following, the atmosphere is consistently, oppressively unsettling, the tension so thick you can practically taste it. That’s partly thanks to some typically masterful use of sound: Arberrang is a relentless cacophony of bassy rumbles, cracks and shouts, while echoing howls, eerie whistles and distant screeches are your soundtrack in the world outside. Around all this, Austin Wintory’s score swirls and eddies ominously, with odd atonal stabs that add a disturbing note of hysteria to an already chaotic mix.

All of which means this final episode strikes a slightly different tone to the previous two. And yet, somehow, it works. True, there’s nothing that quite matches the exhilaration of the second game’s floating rocks set piece—though a sequence where the caravan is forced to cross a lake of ice provides one of the series’ most spectacular moments to date—but the focus on character is ultimately the right decision. Stoic invests just enough in its few new faces that you’ll care about them, but this is all about ensuring a satisfying payoff for those you’ve grown attached to over the course of two or three episodes.

Not everyone gets equal time in the spotlight, but that’s inevitable with a cast of this size. Besides, this wouldn’t be The Banner Saga without a few abrupt—and sometimes shocking—farewells. You’ll face more life-and-death decisions than in both previous entries, and if some of them feel particularly cruel, it all adds to the increasing desperation. Amid such confusion and disorder, you can’t be expected to make the right decisions all the time; here, more than ever, it’s usually a choice between bad and worse. As a general rule: trust should only go so far, and though it’s tempting to do the ‘right’ thing, when the world is turning in on itself, that might not necessarily be the wisest course of action.

There’s no let-up in the game’s strategic combat either, with enemy reinforcements arriving as soon as you’ve finished a fight. The new wave-based format doesn’t apply to every encounter, but more often than not you’ll be given the choice between fleeing or battling on. Choose to continue, and you’ll be given the opportunity to reposition your current units—arrows indicate from which direction new opponents will arrive—or bring on replacements for anyone who’s taken plenty of punishment and will be thus unlikely to last another round.

With no opportunity to train units this time—given the circumstances, the option simply wouldn’t make sense—it’s often worth persevering unless your very best units are in danger. Besides, your rewards for carrying on are twofold: not only do you get a chance to give your less capable fighters some much needed battle experience, potentially earning them a promotion, but you’ll be rewarded with a useful item by defeating the boss of the final wave. You’ll collect others on the way, though, so you’re not overly punished should you choose to take the coward’s way out.

When equipped, these trinkets often give significant boosts to character talents, which is one way to lean into an individual unit’s specialities. The other is to spend renown on giving them a heroic title, though you’ll need to choose carefully, since they’re unique to that character and can’t be removed. But these can be game-changers. If you’ve got a decent ranged unit, you can dub them The Forsaken, boosting their attack power as long as they’re away from their allies. By contrast, The Hopeful is handy for support units, increasing the armour and strength stats of anyone in the squares immediately adjacent to them—though you may prefer one of the options that lowers their aggro instead. And you don’t need to think too hard to realise how to benefit from having a Death’s Messenger on your team: promote them to the highest rank and they’ll deliver five points of extra damage on consecutive attacks against the same enemy. And with items potentially pushing specific abilities beyond their natural limits, you can end up with a better-than-average chance of resisting damage, or earning a critical hit bonus.

This somewhat evens the odds against a very different kind of threat. The toxic shroud beyond Arberrang’s walls has warped every man, woman and beast, which means you’ll face standard warriors, dredge and even bears given otherworldly powers. One type of dredge can now stretch out a mass of writhing tentacles, draining the strength and willpower of a single unit to empower their own kind.

A standard axeman, meanwhile, still possesses his bloody flail attack, but now his unearthly endurance means his willpower stat will absorb the weight of strength attacks for the first couple of turns. Even before they explode, leaving behind puddles of will-sapping goop, willpower is at a premium—and only the Arberrang lot has the horn that allows you to replenish it. The others can call upon a bolt of lightning that spreads diagonally to other units, though that potentially includes your own. As such, the strategies you use for one group should differ quite significantly from the other, making for a more entertainingly varied tactical experience.

There’s a big shift in the story, too, though to reveal its exact nature feels a little too much of a spoiler. Suffice to say, for two games we’ve all grown used to the days ticking upwards, but beyond a certain point, the number becomes a countdown. Suddenly, you’re more aware of the passing of time than ever, the slow trudge of your heroes making you wish they’d get a move on, despite the many hardships they’re facing.

Though it refuses to pull its punches throughout—landing a few right at the death—this is a shorter conclusion than you might expect, lacking some of the range of its sprawling predecessor. And it’s true that there’s perhaps not quite enough visible evidence of Arberrang’s deterioration, even with the sound and music team doing their best to amplify the turmoil. But with the world falling apart, it makes perfect sense to zoom in on its people—and their wildly different responses to their extraordinary predicament make for enthralling, wrenching drama. The result is a thrilling and affecting finale that closes the book on a bleak but riveting journey in fine style. It is, in short, the ending the saga deserves.

THE VERDICT
90

THE BANNER SAGA 3 REVIEW
A daring, exciting and bleakly powerful payoff that handsomely rewards your investment in its characters.

 

[Infinitron]

More: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-banner-saga-3/critic-reviews

God is a Geek 9/10
RPG Site 9/10
PC Gamer 90/100
DualShockers 9/10
FANDOM 4.5/5
Gaming Nexus 88/100
COGconnected 88/100
IGN 8.3/10
New Game Network 83/100
App Trigger 8/10
Strategy Gamer 4/5
Wccftech 8/10
GameSpot 8/10
TheSixthAxis 8/10
Eurogamer Recommended
Rock Paper Shotgun

 

[Ivan]

 

[Infinitron]

And out:


https://af.gog.com/game/banner_saga_3?as=1649904300

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Why is there no discount on the older titles of the series, you'd think they'd have something like that on release day.

 

[Belegarsson]

Been playing it a bit, pretty much The Banner Saga: Chapter 3 so it's gonna be great for people who enjoyed the last two games. I'm personally not fond of the first game and still dislike how "automatic" stuffs work outside of combat so it remains an ordinary game to pass time while waiting for Pathfinder for me.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/banner-saga-3/posts/2247349

Banner Saga 3 has LAUNCHED!
Posted by Zeb L. West


Greetings to our beloved Backers and Bannerfolk,

We did it. Together with you - the fans and supporters - we made Banner Saga a complete and epic trilogy. It took so much help and support to get to this day, and we want to give you our sincerest thanks for your faith in us!

Banner Saga 3 launches today!
You will find your game keys (if you haven't already) on PledgeManager, on the checkout page when you click "Claim My Codes". If you have issues, questions or concerns please send us an email to help-pm@stoicstudio.com.


The trilogy is now complete!
Now what are you waiting for?! Go play the game! And tell us what you think - we put our whole hearts into the story, the battles, the art, the music - and our best hope is that you feel like this is final chapter delivers the ending to your saga.

HyperRPG livestream of tabletop RPG!
Our friends at HyperRPG are putting on an amazing four-week tabletop session live-streamed for your role-playing pleasure! We'll be giving away copies of the games in the chat, along with an exclusive HyperRPG Heraldry to raise proudly at your in-game camp site!


Hardcore Banner Saga Tabletop RPG!
Trailer Contest Winner
Congratulations to the winners of our fan-made-trailer contest! Please check out the winning videos as we got some incredibly impressive entries. Thanks to everyone who submitted your trailers - it was great to see such a huge outpouring of submissions!

Winners:

• First place – David https://vimeo.com/280864313
• Second place – William M https://vimeo.com/281026401

Third place winners:

• Dylan https://youtu.be/9RAuj49QmRE
• Marcos https://vimeo.com/280709204
• William E https://vimeo.com/281002168

Thanks to all who took part!


Watch now!
Happy Launch and another huge heartfelt thanks from the whole team!

-Arnie, John and the Stoic Team

 

[Dodo1610]

Finished it yesterday, Banner Saga 3 was definitely the best of the series. The encounters are better designed and are more fun this time but the narrative is still the main attraction. The art is as beautiful as ever and the soundtrack is better then before. So i would recommend it and the series as a whole if you enjoy great Visual Novels because that's what these games really are.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[vonAchdorf]

Did it sell better than 2?

 

[fantadomat]

Did it sell better than 2?

I doubt it,the game shouldn't have been episodical. I have it on the PC and don't even feel like installing it maybe in a month time if there is nothing to play.

 

[Harry Easter]

Finished it yesterday, Banner Saga 3 was definitely the best of the series. The encounters are better designed and are more fun this time but the narrative is still the main attraction. The art is as beautiful as ever and the soundtrack is better then before. So i would recommend it and the series as a whole if you enjoy great Visual Novels because that's what these games really are.

Reads good. I think, I should finally do my replay of 1 and start 2.

 

[Starwars]

I just finished the third episode after replaying the other two as well.

It's a really cool ending chapter in terms of the setting and where the story goes I think. The atmosphere is spot on and it definitely feels dramatic enough. In that regard I like it a lot.

3 took me a shorter time to finish than the other two though, which feels a bit weird given that it's more expensive. Also, I though the actual ending sucked quite a bit. Given the span of the game, the characters, the choices you make etc, it really called for some sort of prologue or something I think. But it ends very abruptly. Probably the biggest disappointment I have, it feels like the journey deserved something more satisfying at the very end.
Music and art are absolutely top notch.

I'm not a superfan of the combat system, though I don't hate it other. It can be pretty fun, though I think there are some fights through the episodes which are really badly designed.

But yeah, it's a pretty cool and unique campaign all together. Not sure if I'd consider it worth the money for all 3 episodes at the moment but if there is a nice sale I'd definitely recommend picking them all up.

 

[LESS T_T]

Survival Mode DLC is out now:





GOG: https://af.gog.com/game/banner_saga_3_survival_mode?as=1649904300

Run from the Darkness, keep your party ahead of the onslaught. Survival Mode tests your tactical mettle in a series of escalating battles. Choose and promote your party members carefully as combat deaths are permanent. Can you keep your heroes alive, win all battles, and survive?

Features:

• Choose from 43 of your favorite Banner Saga characters!
  
  
  
  
  
• Collect 30 different Battle Items to help endure each challenge.
  
• Wave Battle - Insane difficulty battle through multiple waves! Reinforce mid-battle with heroes from your roster!
  
  
  
  
  
• Collect 12 new achievements as you demonstrate your tactical prowess.
  
• Play in Easy, Normal, or Hard difficulty modes and see how you rank in 7 different leaderboards against both global players and your friends.

Relevant KS update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/banner-saga-3/posts/2297866

 

[LESS T_T]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/press...AGA_3_ETERNAL_ARENA_GAME_MODE_ENTERS_BETA.php

BANNER SAGA 3 ETERNAL ARENA GAME MODE ENTERS BETA

BALTIMORE, MD – December 4th, 2018 – Take up your axe and enter the Eternal Arena to quick-play new, unique challenges! Customize your own maps, rules and enemies to create unique tests of skill. Become the stuff of legends by conquering the weekly tournament and competing against the world for the highest score!

Stoic, an independent game development company, and Versus Evil, one of the leading independent video game publishers, today announced that the new game mode for Banner Saga 3, Eternal Arena is currently in beta ahead of its December 12th launch. The soon to be introduced game mode was a $400K Stretch Goal as part of Banner Saga 3’s original funding drive, which it comfortably smashed through in less than a week.

“The Banner Saga 3 Kickstarter allowed Stoic to increase the scope, fidelity and production values of Banner Saga 3, and the Eternal Arena represents the final Stretch Goal promise with a mode that will allow its fans and backers to fully explore their tactical whims”, said Steve Escalante, Versus Evil General Manager.

Features:

• Weekly Challenge: A weekly tournament with a global leaderboard.*
• Arena Mode: Design your own battles, pick the enemies, and change the rules in this spellbinding sandbox mode.
• Play with all the characters, enemies, and battleboards from the entire Banner Saga Trilogy and refine your party tactics.

*Online Internet connection required to participate in recurring leaderboard challenges.