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KickStarter The Banner Saga

Leechmonger

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Jan 30, 2016
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In Banner Saga it's just a much more gamey incarnation of the same thing, is all.

Fallout 3 is just a much more casualized incarnation of the Fallout series, is all. True, but it's a matter of degree. At some point it becomes disagreeable.

Anyway, regarding the 'keeping enemies alive so they can be useless' thing, it's a pretty standard tactic in many games from Gold Box stuff to Baldur's Gate. If you're fighting an overwhelming enemy force made up mostly of close combatants, you'll probably be fighting them at a chokepoint, right? You can certainly just grind them down as they come, but that allows them to make attacks against your frontline... it's much better to just debuff the 2-3 enemies in melee range into uselessness and pick off everyone else with ranged abilities and AOEs without them being able to counterattack (of course you need to handle archers and mages somehow, but a narrow chokepoint combined with limited LOS can help with that). The AI is very ill-equipped to handle situations like this.

I'll go ahead and quote myself:

There's a big difference between "finishing off severely wounded enemies who don't pose much of a threat is not as valuable as damaging healthier enemies" and "finishing off severely wounded enemies is actually worse than doing nothing at all due to a quirk in the combat mechanics." The former is reasonable, the latter isn't.

Choosing healthier targets is not the same as actively avoiding wounded ones. In the former you'd still target as many enemies as you can with an AoE, wheras in the latter you'd place the AoE such that it doesn't kill wounded units.
 

v1rus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 14, 2008
Messages
2,253
Oh, the good old "WHY THE HELL WOULD SOMEONE LEAVE THE 1 HP OPPONENTS ALIVE?" discussion.

Just give it up gayiz. It makes zero freaking sense. Still, gewd game. Didn't try the second part yet. Is it on the same level as the first one?
 

rado907

Savant
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
249
Just give it up gayiz. It makes zero freaking sense. Still, gewd game. Didn't try the second part yet. Is it on the same level as the first one?
It's not worse. If you enjoyed the first one, you'll enjoy the second one, too.
 

Kayerts

Arcane
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
883
Didn't try the second part yet. Is it on the same level as the first one?

The game system wasn't originally designed for high-level progression and is starting to show strains. It's now possible for optimized builds on a few characters to break the game. You might think that e.g. Rook and Iver were overpowered in TBS1, but they are nothing compared to TBS2's Alette. (The game repeatedly tells you that the gods are dead, but if that's so, why is she in permanent god mode?)

Story-wise, the setting starts to become higher-magic, which has pros and cons but ultimately felt less interesting to me. You get scheming wizard shenanigans, but your characters start to feel sidelined from the real story, to the extent that I'm not totally sure if one of the two protagonists accomplished anything over the course of the game. Worse, there are too many plot points that hinge on wizards using powers that the player did not previously know about to solve the problem du jour. This seems much less compelling than the first game, which established a sense of stakes early on.
 
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Wow, I'm at the final battle now, and what an utterly excellent experience this has been! Had I played it earlier, it would have totally been my GOTY 2014. Fuck the Codex and it's generally bad taste, these gender challenged idiots have had their brains totally raped by playing years of shitty Obsidian, Bioware and Bethesda games.

GRAPHICS: 5/5. Every scene in the game is a thing of beauty, really loved how much effort was put into the animations (Banner Saga does "beautiful" the way Fallout did "gory", just look at Alette stringing her bow), even the caravan changes to reflect which heroes you have in your party.

CnC: 5/5. Wow, finally a game that takes the CONSEQUENCE part of CnC very seriously. What players usually mean when they say CNC is that they want to make choices, each of which will lead to a positive "consequence" for them. But this game continuously forces you to make tough decisions and will often punish you for them way down the road, this game actually benefits from the limited save system because otherwise it would be too easy to savescum through the whole thing. Excellent design.

Combat and Character System: 5/5. Riveting until the very end. Love the chessboard style deterministic combat, it actually allows you to compute stuff and plan way in advance how you will tackle a particular enemy or encounter, a perfect example of how simplistic principles can turn into complex scenarios. Also really like the character system, you can't make wrong choices because every attribute is useful, but at the same time, you really have to think carefully because you need to build the character in a way that synergizes well with the other heroes you like to use, and in a way that compliments your play style. Itemization is excellent, you can only equip one item per hero, but the items are game changing and can completely alter how you use that particular hero. AI was also very good at targeting and eliminating my weaker characters.

Also really happy with the worldbuilding, the conceptualization of the races, the story and plot. Very very good stuff.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Well put !
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Got around to playing this and liked it overall. Beautiful art and music and seems to have actual C&C woven into the story regarding a few heroes and events. The downside to that is that they built a lot of the overall "C&C" and hero survival aside from said events based on rather meaningless "dialogue choices" which seem a bit stupid and arbitrary and it comes off as an annoyance, since 95% of times you're essentially presented with a dialogue and a choice you have to click that acts like:

"Choose A if you want a strong item, 10 morale, 20 renown, 30 supplies"
"Choose B if you want nothing to happen"
"Choose C if you want to lose 40 fighters, 5 morale and 20 supplies"

And for some of the hero-based conversations:
"Choose A if you want X to die"
"Choose B if you want nothing to happen"
"Choose C if you want X to join"

Once you've figured out that there's always an obvious "good" and "bad" choice and 97% of these dialogues have no consequences no matter what you pick (they could've essentially replaced the actual "choice" with the text of what actually happens as above, since other than that it's mostly flavor), you naturally want to start to Min/Max.

Another thing is that the difficulty curve is weird, you start off with Handholding easy-peasy shit making you think you can take your time and play however you want and at some point the game throws "WAR!" after "WAR!" at you, you gotta use every bit of Renown to level all the heroes to stand a chance and there's usually 2-3 of them walking away from battles "Injured" and in every battle you gotta try to get the cripples away from danger to prevent said, since there is no healer. Then near the end after the two caravan groups meet it gets easier again as you got multiple Lvl5’s and the Mender that can repair armor and kill shit with lightning diagonally.

Liked the combat system, having to choose for various enemies if to go for armor or strength/HP directly with consequences e.g. potentially getting the armor down but them hitting and knocking down one of your characters with full STR or starting to hit STR/HP and having to run around the battlefield with 2 characters left with low STR themselves trying to snipe the stragglers that can barely hit through the shield because their STR got so low, using low-HP enemies as shields to block the live ones from getting there (since the lower strength they have, the weaker they hit and with only 1-3STR left the chance to hit gets really low and deflects happen a lot) or starting on one part of the battlefield and mowing down everything there before the other side gets there, special abilities were helpful but not particularly OP etc.

The ending was kind of stupid with that “Desu Ex Machina” character with supa powas appearing from nowhere when seemingly all was lost and you’ve been running for months and some of the story-telling can feel a bit sluggish due to tendency for unending visual novel-like dialogues with non-moving no-voiceover sprites for exposition, but overall I still liked it due to fantastic art style, music and interesting lore (spent lots of time just reading the map and trying to figure out where everything is in relation to one another etc.) and it left me wanting to see how the story goes on and what happens next, so it managed to convince me to buy the 2nd part.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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I've got to agree with most of that.

It's one of the games at a great price in the steam black Friday sales & I thought I'd finally give it a shot.

I'd heard some moaning regarding the combat as there's no zones of control to combat, no attacks of opportunity & people just casually walk around the battlefield & after my first couple of battles I got this sinking feeling that combat was going to be an uncontrollable mess. However, it does seem to work and by the end of the game the battle system feels comfortable and manageable with barely any fights being complete cakewalks but also none desperately unfathomable.

I wasn't a fan of King of Dragon Pass at all & I was also a bit worried when the game started throwing impossible to properly answer questions at the player each with it's own unique outcome, which could be really bad or really good or whatever. Some are common-sense but most are usually just guesswork. ie: One group of assholes wants to join, do you accept? Yeah, ok, they turn out to be assholes & do you over vs later, a different group of assholes wants to join, do you accept? Yeah, ok, they then turn out to be true bros etc etc. & the game will throw dialogue choices at you every step of the way. However, I quite like it here whereas I pretty much detested it in KoDP, I guess because here it's just one part of the game rather than most of the game. Again, as the game progressed it became something one could be comfortable with.

If I was to make a nitpick it would be regarding combining XP with food supplies. It absolutely works from a balance perspective, it just doesn't really work from a gameplay perspective in that it messes with the gradual progression of characters. For example, in my game my main hero got stuck at level 3 for most of the game & only levelled up to level 5 for the final fight... when resources were no longer an issue. Similarly, levelling up itself doesn't seem to have that big of an impact, at least for a first-time run through the game where one isn't mastering each class but just experimenting with each class, trying to get kills with each class & so not sticking to a regular party much. Also, levelling up barely offers anything in the new skill department & I'm not sure a single character chose willpower at level up. & you can't really specialise in a skill that much as each skill has hard-limits per character, so no putting all your points from all level-ups into strength. It's more like minor tweaking rather than exciting levelling to which the main benefit of levelling is the final difference between level 1 & level 5 & the ability to wear better items.

I was also initially confused by the lack of an inventory screen, lack of character screens & lack of loot generally. I had no idea at all what to make of the UI. But, again, it all becomes comfortable as time passes.

Excellently un-put-down-able & there's a good two days of solid gaming here with a strong impulse to immediately replay it. I'd say the best thing about the game is the pacing. It constantly switches you from the different aspects of its gameplay in a very timely but also not impatient fashion, each loop feeding into the next pretty much perfectly. Plenty of stuff to keep an eye on, plenty of variety to keep the mind on & each new location is a genuine feast of exploration.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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I've played this game three times now & steam says I've been playing it for 33 hours. The first run through took 16 hours. So it's safe to say that 50% of this game is various dialogues (that you eventually need to skip through) & the time it takes to work out all its new systems. However, for quickly running through the game, eight hours is very acceptable even if a bit more button-mashey (to mash through dialogue).

Some things of interest from replays:

The game actually employs level-scaling. There's some set fights that are the same every time but there are also some level-scaled encounters. For example, while doing a run to secure the "under 120 days" objective I picked every "ignore it & move on" option & spent nothing on rations & barely ever rested (maybe 2 days worth of resting throughout) & as a result of this my party was very small & I had barely any followers; so now when I encounter a "war" screen: Instead of saying "they have 500 men & you have 550 men" it will say "they have 87 men & you have 93".

It's really frustrating that it forces you to have Allette in the final battle, even if she's not carrying the ex machina and you choose Rook instead. This really limits the enjoyment of replays as it stifles the end-destination of levelling up a wide range of combatants.

Egil is a great character & in the third run through, where the objective was to "keep Egil alive" he was even the last man standing when he struck the final blow to the Bellower, however, the game's plan to kill this dude off verges on the 'cheap tricks' level of irritation. Likewise the "keep Allette innocent" objective relies almost solely on the Onef game incident. I had to find a walkthrough to find out why Allette's objective was never triggering as in the second run I didn't use her in combat once prior to the final battle & apparently failed this objective. In most runs I suspect one would want to hire Onef due to the bonus supplies & extra battle (XP) opportunities & so Egil is just going to be wasted space for all runs, so might as well kill him off at the start.

Injuries aren't so bad, it seems on normal difficulty they are limited to a maximum of three. So your dude can go into battle triple injured & fall in combat & they'll still be only triple injured. Gameplay-wise, this is fine, awesome even. Logically, this is weird & silly.

After war battles one gets the opportunity to continue the battle a bit longer by "chasing the enemy down". Here, again, the game can verge into the 'cheap tricks' department. For example, after one initial battle I pressed "you betcha I want to continue this" as I had taken barely any damage in the first fight; to which the respawn then puts a dude right next to my archer & one-shots her on the first turn. If I'm the one chasing them down, why is it I can't reposition my troops but the AI can put theirs anywhere they like. Not a big gripe, it just feels like a cheap trick.

The amount of dialogue & unskippable cutscenes gets a bit wearing upon quick replays where one is mostly just there to enjoy combat, levelling & build varieties etc. The amount of genuine C&C isn't that varied & most of the best ones can be figured out fairly quickly so that you'll always pick the 'right' option each time with the amount of ambiguous or highly varied situations being very rare. So the game loses a lot of its lustre upon replay as you mash through dialogues & stare for what seems like eternity as your caravan slooooowly passes through each godstone etc. I also can't find a button to skip the tutorial mode at the start of the game.

The build variety is actually very enjoyable. There really is a vast amount of different builds to experiment with & levelling anyone up never feels like a waste (although I've yet to bother getting Allette beyond level 2, that's something to do in the next run I guess). While most fights involve just crunching people with normal attacks, the special moves do have lots of use, just more so with some characters than others. I'd say the most used special move-based characters would be Egil, which is why it's a double irritation that the game kills him off so determinedly, and the Mender's Restore Armour spell, the closest the game gets to an in-game healing mechanic.

I've only got a couple more objectives left to get on normal difficulty & then I'll give 'hard' mode a shot, which, again, one supposes is just going to be about the combat & probably worse morale issues, so, again, it's a shame there's a lack of 'skip' buttons throughout the experience.
 

Whisper

Arcane
Vatnik
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Feb 29, 2012
Messages
4,357
Game gives choices, but almost never explains or hints at outcomes.

Do you want to turn left or right? Turn left and your character dies? Why? Just because.
Turn right? Winner is you!
 

Darth Canoli

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Perched on a tree
Game gives choices, but almost never explains or hints at outcomes.

Do you want to turn left or right? Turn left and your character dies? Why? Just because.
Turn right? Winner is you!

That's a more than valid point, i enjoyed the first Banner Saga (even the second one, somewhat) but it's mostly because of the settings and the story-telling it's an interactive story.

C&C are dumb as fuck, mostly, as explained above.

Combat is alright, bad but alright and i surprisingly enjoyed it at first but it started to bore me through the second episode and i couldn't play the third for more than an hour.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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So I've now played the game five times for a total of 53 hours of gaming, lol, you'd still be halfway through a regular cRPG by this point, though I can't say I mind, I've really enjoyed each run & by trying to use different approaches each time it feels like I've just played the game once still, if you exclude all the mashing through dialogues aspect of course.

And I've got to say, I really like the combat in this game, really really like it. I kind of wish there was an unlimited combat mode as the only thing not making me play it again is just all the mashing through needless plot/story for the same results/rewards. The great thing is, the game does have an infinite combat mode in the training tents & one could simply save the game at a camp & boot it up whenever one gets an itch for some Banner Saga combat, which I might well do. However, this would doom you to always playing the combat with the same dudes against the same level-scaled opponents unless you put together a bunch of saves from throughout the game. So... such a shame the game doesn't seem to have a save button & only allows you five save files, all of mine being at the end of the game, obviously.

Some interesting things to note from my hard difficulty run:

One of the objectives is to complete the game on hard without losing a single battle. I completed this objective even though I had to reload the first Rook fight in the house, as I only had Rook and Ivar as I was aiming for a keep Egil run as key to my plan to get this objective. I kinda forgot what I had to do with this fight & remembered after the first few strikes & reloaded. So you don't need to start again if this happens to you. Also, in the final fight with the Bellower, in the first battle with him, where you need to shoot him with the arrow, I mistakenly moved my arrow holder too early & he got killed, which brought up the reload screen as another member of the team cannot pick up the arrow. This also luckily didn't affect the objective, I guess because the fight wasn't lost, it was just defaulted. A technicality.

Another useful point regarding the latter case there, it seems the arrow comes with aggro attached, but you aren't allowed to know how much. The Dredge who went out of his way to smash the arrow wielder had previously been attacking someone wearing a +1 aggro item, but immediately abandoned this pursuit as soon as the arrow wielder came in range. It's difficult to know for sure what the algorithms are for aggro generally, as character weakness also plays a strong part, so maybe my arrow wielder was just the weakest target and it had nothing to do with the arrow itself. I definitely got the feeling that the arrow had aggro attached though as I had plenty of weaker characters on the board.

It would be interesting to know the exact workings of aggro generally which would be another great advantage of save games & infinite combat scenarios, to allow the player to actually figure out the permutations of these things if the game itself doesn't want to be open about it.

Anyway, I got part 2 in the sales as that's at a great price too, so that's something to look forward to next time I get the itch. In the mean time, time for a break from the cold wastes, these black Friday sales have left me awash with new things to play.
 

Ninjerk

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Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
So I've now played the game five times for a total of 53 hours of gaming, lol, you'd still be halfway through a regular cRPG by this point, though I can't say I mind, I've really enjoyed each run & by trying to use different approaches each time it feels like I've just played the game once still, if you exclude all the mashing through dialogues aspect of course.

And I've got to say, I really like the combat in this game, really really like it. I kind of wish there was an unlimited combat mode as the only thing not making me play it again is just all the mashing through needless plot/story for the same results/rewards. The great thing is, the game does have an infinite combat mode in the training tents & one could simply save the game at a camp & boot it up whenever one gets an itch for some Banner Saga combat, which I might well do. However, this would doom you to always playing the combat with the same dudes against the same level-scaled opponents unless you put together a bunch of saves from throughout the game. So... such a shame the game doesn't seem to have a save button & only allows you five save files, all of mine being at the end of the game, obviously.

Some interesting things to note from my hard difficulty run:

One of the objectives is to complete the game on hard without losing a single battle. I completed this objective even though I had to reload the first Rook fight in the house, as I only had Rook and Ivar as I was aiming for a keep Egil run as key to my plan to get this objective. I kinda forgot what I had to do with this fight & remembered after the first few strikes & reloaded. So you don't need to start again if this happens to you. Also, in the final fight with the Bellower, in the first battle with him, where you need to shoot him with the arrow, I mistakenly moved my arrow holder too early & he got killed, which brought up the reload screen as another member of the team cannot pick up the arrow. This also luckily didn't affect the objective, I guess because the fight wasn't lost, it was just defaulted. A technicality.

Another useful point regarding the latter case there, it seems the arrow comes with aggro attached, but you aren't allowed to know how much. The Dredge who went out of his way to smash the arrow wielder had previously been attacking someone wearing a +1 aggro item, but immediately abandoned this pursuit as soon as the arrow wielder came in range. It's difficult to know for sure what the algorithms are for aggro generally, as character weakness also plays a strong part, so maybe my arrow wielder was just the weakest target and it had nothing to do with the arrow itself. I definitely got the feeling that the arrow had aggro attached though as I had plenty of weaker characters on the board.

It would be interesting to know the exact workings of aggro generally which would be another great advantage of save games & infinite combat scenarios, to allow the player to actually figure out the permutations of these things if the game itself doesn't want to be open about it.

Anyway, I got part 2 in the sales as that's at a great price too, so that's something to look forward to next time I get the itch. In the mean time, time for a break from the cold wastes, these black Friday sales have left me awash with new things to play.
You might try to load up the multiplayer version they released (for free) before the first game came out and see if anyone is still playing.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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You might try to load up the multiplayer version they released (for free) before the first game came out and see if anyone is still playing.

but wait... if you play against other humans then the whole aggro system is null and void. Pointless. And yet the aggro system is a fairly crucial aspect of gameplay on hard difficulty. At least that was my experience. While I'm sure it's possible to have combat with other humans using this system, the system won't be the one that makes the combat great IMO. & it definitely wouldn't help investigate the aspects of combat that involve aggro, which was a lot of my post there.
 

Ninjerk

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Messages
14,323
You might try to load up the multiplayer version they released (for free) before the first game came out and see if anyone is still playing.

but wait... if you play against other humans then the whole aggro system is null and void. Pointless. And yet the aggro system is a fairly crucial aspect of gameplay on hard difficulty. At least that was my experience. While I'm sure it's possible to have combat with other humans using this system, the system won't be the one that makes the combat great IMO. & it definitely wouldn't help investigate the aspects of combat that involve aggro, which was a lot of my post there.
Au contraire, the system makes PvP matches quite excellent if you're a fan of chesslike games. Most of the griping around the combat system of BS was about the "maiming" meta and how counterintuitive it felt--if one can overcome this initial resistance (as I suspect you have) it really opens up a fantastic and unique gameplay experience (maybe Blood Bowl comes close? I have it but have not played it). I never got as deep into the singleplayer experience as you have, so aggro never really grabbed my attention. The first half of your post was general enough for me to think that perhaps you might enjoy aspects of Banner Saga that I don't feel have gotten their due amongst the denizens of the Codex, but if aggro specifically informs the entire post I concede that the multiplayer experience may not appeal to you.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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Oh yes indeed, the combat even without the aggro is enjoyable, & I can see how human vs human battles could be great, just saying how there's two different approaches that way & that human vs human wouldn't solve greater aggro learning.
 

v1rus

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Messages
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Gonna play this. I beat the first one 4 years ago (cant remebmer shit tho), and loved it. Planning a full playthrough rn.

Which diffculty should i pick, normal or hard? Id like a challenge, but nothing insane or masochistic.
 
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I've had this sitting in my library for 7 years and finally got around to playing it. Other than it being very obviously a mobile game (interface is very basic), it looks exceedingly good and sounds really great, too. On a 4k display, you have to right click the game's executable and tell Windows to let it decide its scaling behaviour, otherwise it will default to a much lower resolution and look like shit. You should also add textscale=2 to the launch options so you can have readable text. There's unfortunately no scaling for the cursor, which is tiny.

Anyway, although the tactical layer seems pretty simplistic, it hasn't bothered me so far. Will keep playing. One of the best early Kickstarters for sure.
 
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v1rus

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Jul 14, 2008
Messages
2,253
I've had this sitting in my library for 7 years and finally got around to playing it. Other than it being very obviously a mobile game (interface is very basic), it looks exceedingly good and sounds really great, too. On a 4k display, you have to right click the game's executable and tell Windows to let it decide its scaling behaviour, otherwise it will default to a much lower resolution and look like shit. You should also add textscale=2 to the launch options so you can have readable text. There's unfortunately no scaling for the cursor, which is tiny.

Anyway, although the tactical layer seems pretty simplistic, it hasn't bothered me so far. Will keep playing for sure. One of the best early Kickstarters for sure.

Its faulty, but still quite good imho. Playing on the hardest difficulty is a must.
 

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