Banner Saga 2 - Interview @ PixelDynamo

Pixel Dynmao have interviewed Technical Director John Watson about The Banner Saga 2.

The Banner Saga 2, like its predecessor, gives equal weight to both narrative and gameplay – and indeed tries hard to make the division between the two nonexistent. “You’re kind of trying to please multiple audiences,” acknowledges Watson, but “in The Banner Saga they’re really kind of merged together, you can’t have one without the other.” In many other SRPGs, some encounters aren’t important in the overarching story; in The Banner Saga series there isn’t any such thing as a random encounter; every fight is significant because it’s a part of the struggle of the characters’ daily lives.

The commitment to merging narrative and gameplay goes even further. There are no randomly-generated characters amongst your fighters; everybody has a name, a history, and particular way of fighting. Thus, character classes are more rigid in The Banner Saga than in some of its more freeform peers. In the first game, a character named Ivar loses an arm, and this loss shapes the way he fights; he’s never going to pick up a bow, for instance. This deliberate rigidity is one of the major ways in which The Banner Saga series differs from its SRPG peers. Whereas in something like Disgaea, players could have a character be a mage and then a fighter and then a thief, no matter how disparate these classes are, Stoic’s game shows a commitment to the predilections of its characters.

Thanks Eye.