@ Chris Wellons:

Wow, good job on Northbound. Although the first thing I did was to go into the “corruption” area and was disappointed it did not kill me. Other than that, well done. :)

And yeah, I really wish they had a regular turn sequence. I feel like most of the character abilities would simply synergize better with an X-COM like turn sequence…

Then again I’ve been reading a lot about this particular argument lately, with respect of tabletop games and there are a lot of people who strongly advocate alternating sequences like this. The idea is that they minimize the amount of time any given player has to spend sitting and waiting for enemy movements. Not only that, but many games with distinct movement phases do have action-reaction elements, like for example Overwatch in X-COM or Warhammer 40k.

I still prefer the traditional turn sequence though.

@ Karthik:

Yeah, I noticed that too. I was obsessing about not losing people from my caravan up until I realized it actually meant nothing. There wasn’t any game-effect of having your numbers dwindle, and no one ever mentioned it during the narrative bits. So it was just a number going up and down with really no weight attached to it, which was kinda unfortunate. It seems that only reason you might want to use Renown to buy food is to get the “Quartermaster” Steam achievement. But that’s just meta-gaming and not a tangible in-game reason to do anything.

I totally get what they were going for with the “shit is random, because life is also random” sudden character death events. I can appreciate that from an artistic point, but most of the time it just annoyed me. Whenever I got blind-sided with an unforeseen shitty event, I would typically just re-load and pick a different dialog/choice branch.

I don’t know – I feel like this sort of thing is stripping agency from the player. I’m not opposed to game throwing you curve-balls, but I feel that it works best if it also gives you a chance to struggle and persevere and come out victorious in the end. Or at the very least to fail spectacularly on your own terms.

I think that at the end it all boils down to the implicit contract between the player and the developer which implies that in every situation there exist optimal win states. It is one thing when a game abolishes this expectation. Many roguelikes do this: for example you might find an unidentified magic potion and the easiest way to check what it is is to drink it, at which point it may turn out it actually was the The Greater Potion of Instant Death Because Fuck You. And that’s fine. I’m ok with that kind of randomness because:

a) There is usually some way to mitigate the risks, and when you die it is usually because you were impatient or because you were not paying attention. Even though the punishment is usually dealt out via a random number generator, it is ultimately your fault.
b) You go in knowing everything will be terrible forever, and the fun is in seeing how spectacularly can you fail this time

Banner saga has win states though. For each of the conversations there is usually at least one optimal option that results in no losses, no character deaths and sometimes even a favorable boost of some sort, and one terrible option that kills bunch of named characters. But there is no way for you to evaluate or mitigate the risk in any meaningful way. You are basically just playing the Monty Hall game, but if you pick the door with the goat, you actually have to take the goat home and it poops all over your furniture.

I feel that Mass Effec kinda handled this sort of thing better during the suicide mission where you could either pick “the right person for the job” or face the possibility they could die forever. At least there it felt like you were making and informed informed choice rather picking random door, hoping it is not a goat.

But yeah, I get what you’re saying.

Hey Luke,

I share your enthusiasm for the lore and setting of Banner Saga. I’ve not seen or read anything like it before. Plus, the art and haunting music came together to impose this air of crushing despair on your journey in the game, and it kept me glued to my chair until I’d finished it… twice.

But I played the game in Feb, or whenever it was released, as I was a Kickstarter backer. Since then I’ve had a while to think about The Banner Saga, and I came to the conclusion that its systems don’t mesh well together. The only major criticisms I read about were the combat and the random outcomes of your choices, but I think there are some deeper, systemic problems.

For example, the same resource is used to buy supplies and upgrade your fighters. This tradeoff is contrived and ‘gamey’ the way XCOM’s decisions are, but that’s okay. The first time I played it I spent it mostly (not entirely) on food, which meant I lost more battles, gained less renown, and the final fight was pretty much impossible. It was a downward spiral.

The second time I upgraded my fighters, and had a caravan strength of zero during the final march to the coast–and this did nothing. A thinning of your numbers does not affect anything–not the narrative, not the random events, not the combat scenarios. Some of these events should be impossible with zero people in your caravan but they happen anyway. And no named NPC ever died of hunger (or even mentioned the dwindling supplies), so it does not even affect you on an emotional level. Your caravan strength is just a number on the screen that does nothing.

The game also does this annoying Bioware thing of segregating the combat bits from the marching and other narrative bits. This is my chief problem with Bioware games, and it was disheartening to see it here. At one point the chieftain’s wife was run through with a knife in a dialog ‘cutscene’, but she was available for combat a minute later. (I’ve also had the reverse happen.)

And while I liked the conflation of hit points and strength, I never could wrap my head around the alternating turn order even when the parties are completely mismatched in number.

> “What is worse, there is usually no way of telling which options are dangerous, or what their effects might be.”

I actually loved that the dialog based calamities were not foreseeable or explicit trade-offs. Maybe it’s a philosophical thing; life is pretty random and capricious, especially in times of change or disaster. This is what calamities are like. Heck, I also liked that I lost so many combat encounters and the game just continued, leaving you to lick your wounds.

I can see why someone looking to ‘game’ the game (as opposed to roleplay) might be annoyed by this. This actually takes me back to the discussion we had about Dishonored on your blog. Many people were furious that it gave you all these toys but ‘punished’ you for using them. I had some qualms about the way the chaos meter worked, but I liked it in principle. To play Dishonored purely as a power fantasy and simultaneously expect to be rewarded for psychopathy struck me as being petulant and a little arrogant.

Anyway, for a $10 pledge on Kickstarter, The Banner Saga left me very pleased and wanting more. If they can intertwine their systems to be less disjoint and expand on the lore, I think the next installment will be great stuff.

Your review almost exactly covers my feelings about the game. The atmosphere of the game and the world it creates is fascinating and was easily my favorite part of it all. In fact, my 7DRL entry, Northbound (video, about), was loosely inspired by The Banner Saga.

Other than this, though, I thought the game was too punishing. Games can be challenging, but just punishing the player for no reason doesn’t accomplish this in a fun way. Like you said, there’s no rational correlation between your choices and the consequences. Thematically it makes sense — hopelessness and inability to meaningfully affect your situation — but it makes for bad gameplay. Civ5 had an early game design mistake like this: they wanted AI diplomacy to be mysterious, hiding the AI’s logic from the player. Instead of being rich and interesting, it resulted in the AI’s behavior being indistinguishable from die rolls, only frustrating players. They eventually backed out of that game mechanic because it didn’t work.

The turn-taking combat mechanic was a major flaw, IMO. It means as you kill enemies, they speed up because each of their units gets turns faster than your units. Under some circumstances, having more units can be a liability, because the extra units are consuming turns that are better spent by stronger units. This also plays into your described strategy of keeping the enemies alive: weak enemies not only clog up the map, they slow down the strong enemies by wasting turns.

Still, like you, I’m excited to see more of this fantasy universe.