The Banner Saga - Reddit Q&A

Couchpotato

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Stoic Studio's hosted a recent Q&A on Reddit with Composer Austin Wintory.

We are working on the tactical RPG The Banner Saga which launches on the 14th. This project was a Kickstarter funded game and with your help we have it finished. We have with us today Austin Wintory, our composer, who has created another awe inspiring soundtrack.




More information.
 
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Any early impressions from Watchers yet? I believe it has been released now. I may not get to try it tonight, due to paperwork. :(
 
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Playing it now, good first impression. Looks great on my tv =)

Some subtitles during the cut scenes would be nice to have as an option, and it would be nice if I knew when the game was autosaving(no manual saves)
 
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No manual saving :-/

Anyways I am particularly interested in total playing time at this point. I get the impression this is a fairly short game. How short will determine whether I buy it now or at the next sale as some show of support (and wait for chapter 3 to play it)…
 
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Yme thanks for the input, I almost did buy it, but now... Sorry but I can't.
If they do however patch it with subs and saves, I'm in.
 
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I swear, on any new KS projects that I support in the future, if it is a single player game, I'll be verifying that it will have a normal save feature. The game deciding when it will or not save just doesn't work for me, I find it insulting to not be able to do it when I choose.

I supported this game, haven't loaded it up yet because I'm waiting on a patch or 3 first. Hopefully, since the free version has been out a while, a minimal amount of extra work will be necessary.
 
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I actually quite like autosaving. The more often, the better. Makes you consider choices more and more carefully approaching battles ;)
 
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played for an hour, pretty slow pace even outside of combat.

Subtitles are need as it's sometimes hard to understand the viking accents.

I have no idea whats going on storywise with missing some dialog due to not understanding what they were saying also it's not clear if i'm one of the vikings or just controlling them and watching the story. In chapter 2 I suddenly am controlling humans but i'm not sure why I must have missed something.

To be fair storywise I haven't read anything about it previously I bought the game solely for combat. Having said that though I can't think of another game where I didn't understand the story when playing.

As for combat unfortunately it's nothing special but I'm only an hour in and it's still showing tutorials and i just got my first ranged unit so it's very possible it gets better. Although after an hour of Blackguards combat I was hooked and replayed the released chapters 3 times.

Chapter 1 was only about 40 min so i'm not sure what that says about length.

No manual save as mentioned but when I did quit I restarted and it put me right back where I left off. Not sure if that was just luck though.

My initial impression is mixed it didn't hook me right away like Blackguards but it hasn't turn me off so much that I won't return. well see.
 
The review on gamespot says it's about 10 hours. And the developers responded to the threads asking for subtitles that there only about 5-10 minutes of spoken dialogue in the game.

Still need subtitles though, there are people out there who are deaf and suchlike. It's just a standard feature all games should have.
 
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I hope they have indeed implemented save on exit at least. That should be the bare minimum for a PC game...

10 hours? Way too short. Steam sale it is...
 
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Really does need subtitles then, imo. Last video game sounds I heard were from my son's Nintendo back in the 90's. I'd much rather have some Lacuna Coil or Pink Floyd blasting than listen to dreary drips or footfalls, lol. First thing I do is disable sound when I load up a game or install one.
 
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I'm not deaf nor hearing impaired, it's just that I don't understand every possible dialect mix and games tend to be full of such things. It's not like all voiceovers were made by crystal clear John Hurt or Claudia Black.

Because of that I always turn subs on in games.


As for saves I've said it already a few times:
- if I wanted a console game, I'd buy a console not PC
- when my PC restarts due to frequent power shortage (and UPS doesn't help every time) I want to resume from my quicksave, not to get bored replaying half an hour of a game or more
 
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All the non-cinematic stuff is subtitled so I didn't have an issue, especially since there's not a lot of it. The saving thing is going to be personal preference. I didn't have an issues following the story, the humans/varls groups are different, they just gave you control of the humans once the varl story hit a semi stopping point. I'm sure they tie together eventually.
 
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loving it so far but only played a couple of hours. Also count me as wanting subtitles, as a non English-native speaker, plus viking accent, it's tough to understand some dialogs.
Don't mind the no save feature, it's basically a 'go as you go and accept the consequences' thing. No problem with that.
 
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I can see why they might not want people saving before every fight, but it at least needs save on exit. Aside from that, it seems alright. I'm only past the second fight as a human. Think I'm still in the tutorial. I hope it get a little less linear, but there aren't any indications it will thus far.
 
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No save on exit eh?

This Just went to a 75% sale purchase for me. This practice really needs to be discouraged. I want to exit the game when I choose to and not lose progress, at the very least.

Kind of a cheap excuse that they did not include saves to make sure people don't save spam (Like, could they not practice some self restraint themselves !? but I digress) when they don't bother to implement the bare minimums…

P.S. Speaking of bare minimums; is the combat any decent at least or as basic as some implied above ?
 
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It stays linear into Ch. 4 and I'd bet through the entire game.

The save on exit doesn't seem too bad, though I know not everyone will feel the same. It seems to auto save after every battle and I think it saves after some, if not all, random events (which happen pretty often). The auto saves appear to take up multiple slots too so you can backtrack if needed.

The combat is pretty basic sadly, especially when compared to the MP version. There's not a lot of enemy types and a lot of them lack special abilities (at least into Ch. 4). The MP version is so much deeper because every unit has a special ability and multiple upgrade paths. Allows for a huge variety of viable tactics which wasn't leveraged for the campaign it seems.

Still enjoying it though.
 
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Hmm does sound like a pretty barebones little game…

Pity about the combat. I was hoping for something more involved, it just being turn based is simply not enough for me. I am lucky enough to like and appreciate a lot of different games for their respective strengths. But I really need them to be good at what they do for me to invest.

So what is this game about? CnC mostly I guess? That does interest me indeed so I think I'll invest a bit around Chapter #2's release (that is where you get the bigger sales ;) )

P.S. Funny how big complex games like the Witchers are mainly based on CnC too (CnC Atmosphere and strong writing is all there is there ;) ) but they do allow you to save and noone thinks less of them btw :)
 
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Hmm does sound like a pretty barebones little game…

I just stated playing the game and so far I'm enjoying myself. :]

The reason the game length is short is because it's only chapter one if a planned trilogy. I hope they make enough money to continue development.
 
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CnC plays a big part in this game and I think they did a good job. There were several cases where I found myself going "Please don't let this choice blowup in my face." For the most part, I've gotten by with what I wanted or something I didn't mind, though I did lose one of my level 3 Jarls for picking wrong in one case. I had plenty of spare troops, and an OP level 5 warrior, so it didn't impact combat difficulty too much but it did hit the emotional cord.

So much of the story and choices are built on apocalypse type ideas. EG: The world is going to hell, this is the situation. Which of these choices can you live with?
 
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