Banner Saga 2 - Interview @RPS

“One of the things we’ve seen a lot in comments is some of the combat felt a little slow, or not diverse enough so that was the number one thing we tackled,” says McGee. “No-one seems to have a problem with the type of heroes you can play as, it’s the type of enemies you’re fighting so we went through and thought where can we spend our budget to diversify that enemy base – give them new abilities, buffs… My whole thing was to give them a culture and really extrapolate on that to bring the Dredge to life.”

The team has also dedicated a lot of time to watching Let’s Plays of the first game, picking out where players hesitate or pause. “You see where they lose interest – you can hear it in their voice and see it in their mouse clicks,” says McGee.

“Now the combat boards are all going to be hand touched. They’re going to be scripted to really follow the narrative so it’s never going to be this situation where I’m just on a blank board with random spawners. The first battle you fight there, the tutorial, is you come upon this village that’s about to be sacked so the whole battleboard emulates that. There’s destructible barricades. That wasn’t in the first but it really provides a new layer to the strategy.”

The differences between the first and second game sound like they’re not disruptive but just apply improvements and learnings so I ask whether the team has plans for the whole trilogy to be playable from beginning to end as a single entity with no breaks. “We want it to be that seamless feel so we’d love to have some boxset collector’s edition that looks like Tolkien’s masterpieces so you should be able to load it and play first to third,” says McGee. On that front he notes that it would be “lovely” if they could work out a way to apply these tweaks and improvements retroactively. (That’s not a declaration of intent, by the way. Just a ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’).

They’re also having some discussions about eventually making the game fully voiced. That’s not an idea that appeals personally as I like the space reading gives for you to add your own ideas to characters. I think I’d be really thrown off if Alette didn’t sound like *my* Alette. “To a degree it’s grass is greener on the other side,” says McGee. “There’s something about reading it and putting your own voices to the characters.”

Originally Posted by Edgy
Gonna play the waitng game then.