The first game was done by one artist, like the whole thing, from UI to environments. It’s a natural evolution that really comes from just continuing to try hard. We’ve kept in the very angular graphical elements, but gone deeper into the texturing of the assets.
Speaking to how it’s evolved I think it’s become a bit more detailed. Though it’s done with with brass, it’s also beautiful and melancholy just like a story about vikings but displayed on a beautiful backdrop. I believe he did this to ground it and make the world feel really “solid”, strong. If you notice it’s almost all brass instruments, almost no strings. The music was designed after the art/story were pitched and Austin Wintory scored it to be a bridge between the two worlds. There’s a tension there that has really resonated with people. MMORPG: How does music and art impact the story and how has it evolved over the years?Īrnie: We picked this style, based on Eyvind Earle’s work, to be in juxtaposition with the somewhat brooding, dark story. We went out of our way to make everything work, and hopefully it does! On a personal level I really hate cop-outs in stories that give you a really interesting premise with a flat ending that has leaves it up to you to interpret like “What do YOU think happens?”. From the outset, that’s what we wanted to achieve. We put a ton of resources into making a ton of content that most players will never see unless they replay the game multiple times. In fact, one of the highest priorities was to make sure that the entire saga had a really satisfying and clear conclusion, and that all your choices really do matter all the way from things you did in in the first game.
#The banner saga endings series
MMORPG: Are there any cliffhangers in BS3 or are most of the story threads that have been woven through the series brought to a conclusion?Īlex: The Banner Saga is 100% a complete experience, there are no cliffhangers or “what if” scenarios at the end of Saga 3. But we also plan to tell some of those untold tales along the way. As promised in our Kickstarter, after launch we’ll be delivering Survival Mode for Saga 3, a back-to-back battle mode with leaderboards and new achievements (for those who love to dive deep into the turn-based strategy), and also Endless Arena a quick-play mode with sandbox-style battle options and different gameplay rules.
There’s so many unexplored areas of our worldmap and so many untold stories along the way. Zeb: We also have a lot more in mind for this world. All these things will mean that players will have to adjust their playstyle more when switching between caravans. We have added a Valka Spear to replace the war horn for the darkness caravan, and we’ve added new timed wave battles that change up the pacing of battles. We have a group of heroes in Arberrang, the last human city that hasn’t been overtaken by the darkness, and the battles there will feel more like the battles in previous games, but for the darkness we’ve introduced lots of new warped enemies that are familiar but have their own unique twists. Matt: From the feature side, moving one of the caravans into the darkness has given us a thematic excuse to really mess with some of the battle systems.
How have you kept things “fresh” for players, and at the same time familiar, from a features and storytelling perspective? MMORPG: Once BS3 launches, the story will be closed. One of those things was making sure that your choices along the way really do dramatically affect your ending, and I think we pulled it off in Saga 3. We also started production with certain goals about how we’d do things differently than our predecessors. It’s much better for it- if we had tried to compress everything that happens into a single ten-hour experience I don’t think it’d have room to breathe and really get to know the characters. Back in those days, we only imagined the game as a single product, it wasn’t until we started getting into the nuts and bolts and really expanding how much we wanted to do that the story grew until something of its current size. MMORPG: Was the Banner Saga story’s arc laid out prior to development starting on the first chapter? Meaning…did you know how it was all going to end, or was the story iterated upon over time?Īlex: Yeah, we actually started even before the Kickstarter pitch with a rough outline of everything we wanted the player to see.
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