The Banner Saga - Interview @ Wired

Alex Thomas from Stoic chats with Wired in a lengthy 6-page interview about The Banner Saga. Here's Alex's reponse to a question about Choose Your Own Adventure books:

Thomas: From the start of the design we intended to make each of our three main systems (combat, travel and conversation) influence the others in exactly the way you’re talking about here. To summarize briefly; the story involves you and your people trying to escape what seems to be the literal end of the world which is sweeping slowly across the land. The travel scenes from the video are actual game-play which are akin to a cross between King of Dragon Pass and Oregon Trail. You’re not responsible just for a single character or a party, but for an entire society of people, and that opens up a lot of options people haven’t played with much in role-playing games.

As you travel events will happen — your clansmen get in disputes, supplies run low and a wide variety of other unexpected issues come up that you have to deal with. Making decisions during travel can affect the difficulty or frequency of combat, and in turn barely surviving a fight doesn’t return you to full health afterward. You know you’ll be in trouble if you get in another fight soon, but making camp to rest will chew up time. Time is a key element to the game, and events can change based on when you encounter them. Through these smaller events you’re forming the story of your caravan, and through primarily dialogue you unravel the mystery of what’s happening to the world and what you can do to change things. One of our key goals has been to let bad things happen and to allow the player to deal with mistakes and keep them. Being a smaller, indie project has given us the ability to mess with the world in a way that bigger developers may shy away from. If your home town goes up in flames, you haven’t lost the game. It just keeps going. What is important to you, as the player, should be to do the best you can for you, your friends and your people.