The Banner Saga Preview and Interview
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First, a snippet form the preview:
The Banner Saga's story mode does not feature permadeath. Not as a consequence of normal, no-frills battle, anyway. But I can't think of a game I've played in recent memory where each and every choice I made felt so heavy. I went from telling tiny squads which squares to move to while fighting drunks (that was a fun tutorial) to managing a powder keg caravan of thousands. And if I didn't keep it all together? If the whole thing went sky high, if I didn't placate the spoiled human prince, if I didn't show my Varl legions that I was just as firm yet wise as their old leader, if I didn't keep our supplies topped off, if I didn't get rid of the spoiled supplies some grateful merchant accidentally gave us when we saved his life, if I didn't, if I didn't, if I didn't.
Then the ice would break. Characters I came to respect (if not necessarily befriend) would leave or die. Already tenuous Varl-human relations would be ruined. I'd have so much blood on my hands that I'd basically be drowning in the stuff. The Dredge once scattered and disorganized, now unified for some mysterious purpose, inky lips smacking hungrily for conquest would follow through with their war effort in earnest, and nobody would be even the slightest bit prepared. Everyone would be sad. No one would love me. The Dredge would hold celebrations to commemorate my cowardice, parades to spit on my banner. They'd tuck their ink blob children in at night with tales of their genocidal extermination of all magnificent viking beards how it began with mine.
It was basically ultra-high-stakes Oregon Trail. Every few overworld steps brought some new decision, event, or disaster of which battle was only one. And it wasn't even close to the worst. It was actually kind of bizarre: I liked a lot of my caravan's more visible members (many of whom I could converse with when we stopped to camp), but we got along about as well as Oregon Trail and my grades in elementary school computer class. So we'd trade verbal barbs, and oftentimes alliances, supplies, troops, and lives hung in the balance.
And it was frustrating. It was frustrating because I couldn't be everything for everybody. For every one person I pleased, I pissed off another ten. But keeping people happy and keeping them alive, as it turned out, were two very, very different things. Going off the beaten path to rescue a village from Dredge assault might have sounded like the right thing to do, but was it really? For my steadily dwindling troops? For my tired, hungry peasants? For morale? For the respect of my best fighters? Playing hero, as it turned out, was rarely practical.
Then one from the interview:
(We really haven't been supporting Factions much recently,) admitted Thomas. (If Factions really was our focus and we wanted to make that a profitable thing, there's lots of stuff on the table for us to do. But we haven't had time to do any of it because of single-player.)
(We're gonna finish chapter one of the single-player, and then we're gonna turn around and spend some time on Factions again,) Jorgensen clarified. (You can't just shoot a game out and then forget about it and not support it.)
In the short-ish term, that means new classes and characters from chapter one will migrate over to Factions as soon as they've finished their tour of duty in single-player. Both games use the same codebase, so bringing content from one into the other won't require too much time or effort on Stoic's part.
(Everything we do can go both ways. If we make new classes in chapter one, we can modify them a bit and then put them in Factions,) said Watson.
(That's what we want Factions to be,) added Jorgensen. (We make that content, then we put it in Factions in between single-player chapters.)
