The Banner Saga Interview
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How much influence from working with Bioware on The Old Republic and each other has carried over to your new company, Stoic?
Hmm, I'm not sure if influence has been as important as experience. Our gameplay is very different from The Old Republic in both combat and exploration. Though I love the scope of what BioWare achieves with their dialogue we've taken a slightly different approach to it. I would say it's more similar to The Witcher in that our goal is to give the players choices in conversation when it's really important and when it affects the development of the story. That said, the experience we've all gained from working at BioWare is immeasurable. John, who is creating all the tech for The Banner Saga, was the lead combat programmer on SW:TOR. Arnie's experience as the lead concept artist translates perfectly into making a 2D game where his artwork becomes the actual game. My time on design and cinematics gave me a lot of experience on just how to make dialogue that branches, and once you know how it works you realize it's nowhere as easy as you'd think. In terms of successfully developing a game we absolutely owe this to all our previous development experience.
Why Vikings?
It's interesting that we've gotten this question as much as we have, it was a pretty easy decision for us. We really love the visual themes, history and mood of their culture and (pre-Skyrim) it was rare to see them in games, especially the role-playing variety. We knew we wanted a fantasy setting but desperately wanted to avoid from the very overdone (elves, dwarves and orcs) dynamic. It's also worth mentioning that one us is named (Jorgensen).
