The Banner Saga is proof that fantastic art and atmospheric music do not a decent game make.

Looking back at the original Kickstarter pledge I’m not sure I particularly have the right to be disappointed in this game. Stoic hit nearly all of their design goals, for all that the Banner Saga is very, very late: the best way I can describe it is as the choose your own adventure segments of King of Dragon Pass (if you haven’t yet played this game go and get it off of GoG and thank me later) mixed with the interesting tactical battle system they trialled in their Factions multiplayer offshoot. The premise of the game is that you’re in charge of a caravan of refugees fleeing from a unstoppable destructive force encroaching on your lands from the north, and that you have to manage supplies, keep morale up, defend the caravan and make key decisions that (in theory) have far-reaching consequences. The supplies are either acquired through events or by buying them whenever you reach a settlement and morale is improved by stopping the caravan and resting; neither of these are particularly deep systems but they do lend your progress (or lack of it) an air of desperation when you run out of food with no idea when you’ll be able to get more and people start dying from starvation. The primary mechanics of the game are the multiple-choice decisions that pop up every now and again and the turn-based tactical combat, but the sad catch is that the combat doesn’t even come close to living up the promising system demonstrated in Factions.

How this happened is a little bit of a puzzler when it’s using exactly the same ruleset (see the preview linked above if you want to know the detail), but I don’t think it works anywhere near as well when applied to a single-player game with repeated battles against an AI opponent. One problem is the extremely limited number of enemy types, which can be boiled down to “big baddies”, “big baddies with shields”, “small baddies” and “archer baddies”. There’s very little progression as you eke your way through the wilderness; you fight the same enemies in the thirtieth battle as you do in the third, and by that point you’ve mastered the tactics required to beat them down a long time ago so that you’re just going through the motions. Battles become unwelcome speedbumps to your progress in the caravan and plot side of things rather than a fun challenge, to be rushed through as quickly as possible with no real thought given to tactics or abilities beyond Swarm Enemy -> Break Armor -> Cripple (second step optional).  Because of the weird initiative system that determines turn order – where each side moves a single unit at a time and turns always alternate between players, meaning that if you have two units and they have ten units you get to move each of your guys five times in the time it takes them to cycle through theirs once – it’s always far better to cripple an enemy so that they can do almost no damage instead of finishing them and taking them out of the turn order entirely. What seemed like a unique tactical quirk in multiplayer quickly becomes tedious and rote in single-player, and this is exacerbated by the half-baked War system.

Many of the fights in Banner Saga are scripted affairs involving your named heroes only, but occasionally the entire caravan is called upon to fight – this is ostensibly why it’s important to keep the “Fighters” and “Varl” segments of the caravan population high, although I never had a battle where I didn’t at least equal the enemy force in terms of numbers. Every time your caravan fights you get a multiple-choice popup where you can choose tactics, but whatever you do it always seems best to follow it up by charging in with your best and bravest to personally cleave some skulls in twain, which is done via — *sigh* — an autogenerated combat with exactly the same enemies you fought in the last ten War encounters. There’s not even any thought given to the War combats; the game just dumps you in an arena with some baddies and expects you to have fun.

As you may have gathered, I did not have fun. I had the opposite of fun, to the point where I actively tried to avoid combat if possible, but during the first three hours of the game it’s nothing but combat. Stoic have taken the staggeringly dumb decision to split their narrative into two¹, and so the first half of the Banner Saga lurches back and forth between the tales of Rook and Hakon, both of whom end up leading large groups through the frozen wastes. Rook is in charge of the aforementioned caravan of refugees, and his story is interesting and engaging. I have very few complaints about Rook’s share of the plot. Unfortunately the start of the game is weighted far more towards the exploits of Hakon, who is leading an army of varl (read “horned giant”) back to the varl capital city. Because he’s part of an army Hakon’s tale involves far, far more War combats than Rook’s, and Hakon gets almost none of the interesting survival decisions to boot.

I’ll be honest, I nearly gave up on the Banner Saga after hour two, when it seemed like there’d be very few multiple choice events and that the game would just consist of combat after combat after combat. Fortunately it soon came to its senses and solely focused on Rook for the latter half of the game, at which point I started to enjoy myself far more than I had previously, but I still can’t get over the decision to start things off in such a ham-handedly awkward way. The weird thing is that Hakon’s story has almost no effect on Rook’s; some characters appear in both, but aside from some scene setting they’re almost totally independent of one another, and so apart from boring the crap out of me with War combats the only real effect this narrative split had was to prevent me from getting comfortable with one group or the other. When I finally switched back to Rook for the last time I actually had some difficulty remembering who was even in his party and how they’d gotten there, and so I think that breaking up the story like this is a hell of a self-inflicted wound. Maybe they couldn’t find a way to make the combat good in single-player, but the story split was absolutely not necessary; I would have much preferred a six hour game about Rook rather than an eight hour game about Rook and Hakon, and if that’s what I’d gotten I think I’d be a lot more positive about the Banner Saga than I currently am.

That narrative, anyway. Just how much of it is genuinely multiple-choice, and how much of it is a cleverly camouflaged railroad? Past experience has taught me that it can be very difficult to tell without playing through a game more than once. Alpha Protocol is the only one that’s really held up under prolonged scrutiny, and even though the Banner Saga’s low tech interface means that it’s somewhat easier to do branching narrative than it would be for something with full 3D art and animation I suspect it tends more towards the Mass Effect side of the spectrum; you can change how certain non-critical plot points unfold but not where they ultimately go. The choice you do get is very welcome and very good at making it feel like your decisions do matter, and I think in the end that’s what counts. By the end of the game I felt like I’d twisted things enough that it was just as much my story as it was the writers’, largely because I’d screwed up quite badly several times and everyone was dead. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that a lot of those failure points were hardcoded to happen one way or another and that I was supposed to end the game feeling that way. Is that what the game actually does? Maybe not, but the only way to be sure is to play through it a second time, and given how badly the Banner Saga starts that is the last thing that I want to be doing.

For all the bone-headed design decisions that have been made there are some compensations, however. The music isn’t tremendous since it tends towards atmospheric mood stuff rather than distinct melodies that you can follow, but I’ll never call it anything less than appropriate for what the Banner Saga is trying to do, which is portray the flight of refugees from an unstoppable force pursuing them across a frozen hinterland. That art, though. Usually I wouldn’t use a screenshot that isn’t representative of the actual in-game experience to head up a review, but for the Banner Saga I’ll make an exception because the vast majority of the art is utterly gorgeous. I’m not talking so much about the character portraits and talking heads, since while these are pretty good they also get reused a hell of a lot with palette swaps to represent different characters; however, the parts where your caravan is trekking through a stylised representation of the northern wilderness are nothing short of incredible.  The caravan animations suck, but you’re not looking at that, you’re looking at the backgrounds. You can spend a lot of time looking at the backgrounds. And when you reach a point of interest the view will zoom in to a close-up where you can ogle the scenery in fine detail.  I’d almost say the Banner Saga is worth buying for its art alone², since I can guarantee you that you will never see a properly commercial title employing 2D art assets anywhere near as well as they have been here³

That’s only almost, though. The final question, and one that I’m having some trouble coming up with an answer to, is: is the Banner Saga worth buying, period? It’s intensely frustrating at points when it didn’t have to be, and while the setting and story are great the quality of the actual writing is unexpectedly pedestrian. In so far as capturing that King of Dragon Pass feeling of not having absolute control, of only being a leader who can influence people and has to keep them happy, I’d say the Banner Saga does nail that successfully. It’s less than the sum of its parts, though: it has a good combat ruleset that it fails to take advantage of, and a compelling narrative that it’s split into two, and neither element really manages to synergise with the other at any point. I can’t help feeling that if you cut the combat and Hakon’s story from the game entirely you’d end up with a smaller game, but a much higher-quality one. As it is the Banner Saga feels tragically flawed in a way that the games it drew its inspiration from did not; there’s a lot in its that’s good, but because it couldn’t keep its focus the good elements are surrounded by a lot of useless mush. A lot of it may come down to personal taste – I know other people who are playing it and loving it, so my disappointment is by no means universal — but I can’t really recommend it unless you’re really in love with the art or happen to be in the market for an unusual story-driven RPG. Otherwise there’s enough to dislike about it that it falls squarely into “wait for sale” territory; I’m glad the Banner Saga exists but I’m not going to pretend the end result was anywhere near an ideal outcome.

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The post Thoughts: The Banner Saga. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Banner Saga: Factions had a soft release to Kickstarter backers on Monday. For those who don’t know, Factions is the free-to-play multiplayer component to the Banner Saga that Stoic developed first to make sure their combat system for single-player Banner Saga worked properly. The release of Chapter One of Banner Saga proper has been set (rather optimistically, in my opinion) for this summer, so it’s not going to be arriving for quite some time. While I’m waiting for it, though, I figured I’d dip my toe into Factions now that it’s out of beta to see if this much-vaunted tactical combat is all it’s cracked up to be.

When you first load it up Factions shows you a gorgeous animated intro (more on this later), rushes you through a tutorial teaching the fundamental concepts of the game, and then dumps you into the menu masquerading as a city screen with a low level squad of six fighters. There are two of the horned giant-types — a Shield-Banger and a Warrior — two Archers, one Raider, and another Raider who has been upgraded into one of Factions’ prestige classes, the Thrasher. You take this squad and you enter the matchmaking system, which will automatically find an opponent for you to slug it out with over a small battlefield composed of square tiles. First person to kill all of the enemy fighters wins. Sounds simple enough.

Except it isn’t simple. Not in the slightest. Factions pleases me immensely by taking a leaf out of Darklands’ book and adopting a combat system where health and attack power have been combined into a single Strength stat. When one of your fighters gets hit for five damage, they also lose five attack power and are that much weaker in subsequent combat. The only thing preventing Strength loss is the Armour stat, which functions as a buffer to soak up Strength damage. If a character with eleven Strength attempts to make a Strength attack on a character with nine Armour, the armour value is subtracted from the attack value and the attack will only end up doing two points of damage. All characters – even Archers – start out with reasonably high Armour scores, so before you can do serious damage to somebody’s Strength stat you have to wear down their Armour first by attacking it directly.

It’s this Armour/Strength dichotomy which is the beating heart of Factions’ tactical combat. Games start with each side carefully jockeying for position, attempting to focus fire somebody’s armour down whilst trying to avoid the same being done to them. It takes two or three attacks to reduce armour to the point where serious Strength damage will start to bleed through to the character it is protecting, but if this happens you have a serious problem because it can only take one attack focused fully on Strength to render somebody more-or-less useless for the rest of the battle. A character with one Strength is basically a dead man walking; they might be able to use Willpower – a limited bonus stat used to boost movement range and power up attacks –  to help out by whittling down armour (attacks on armour always hit), but they’ll have such a massive penalty to their ability to target strength it’s probably best to hope your opponent takes pity on you and puts them out of their misery.

I like this combat system. It’s somewhat flawed when implemented as part of a free-to-play multiplayer game (again, more on this later) with a human being controlling each side of the battle, but the basic concept is easy to understand while having a lot of tactical possibility. Armour is a temporary barrier that will go down eventually, but it will protect your troops during the first few turns of combat and moves things away from a situation where the person who strikes the first blow wins because the other guy can’t hit back any more. It also provokes some painful decisions: do you hit their Strength now and reduce their subsequent attack ability by a little, or do you further ruin their armour so that another character can possibly one-shot them down to almost nothing later on? Both choices have their advantages (and disadvantages), and precisely which one you choose will be determined by the specific situation on the battlefield at the time, which is always a good sign of tactical depth.

Said tactical depth is improved further by the way the various classes attack and buff/debuff those Armour and Strength stats. Raiders, Archers, Shield-Bangers and Warriors are the four base classes of Factions, with the prestige classes offering variations on a theme with extra abilities and higher stats. Warriors are the heavy hitters, able to demolish an opponent in one blow if their armour has been reduced sufficiently, and they also do additional damage to anyone caught nearby. Shield-Bangers are the tanks, with high Armour and Strength values and the ability to riposte and deal a point of armour damage in response to any melee attack made on them. Because they’re giants Warriors and Shield Bangers take up four squares instead of one which can make them very awkward to move around; if you want to slip somebody through a gap quickly you’re going to have to call upon the services of a Raider, who are basic human fighter-types who give temporary armour bonuses to characters standing next to them. Finally – and most interestingly of all – Archers get a Puncture ability which gives their ranged attack a bonus of two Strength per point of Armour their target has lost, which makes them excellent for following up attacks and killing battered targets.

Less excellent is the initiative system, where each player takes it in turns to move a single character in a set sequence¹ rather than moving all their characters at once. This is completely necessary to prevent one side having one or two fighters alpha-striked off the map with nothing they can do in response, and also adds the additional tactical complication of targeting a character who has just moved (and thus won’t be doing anything for a while) versus targeting someone whose move is just coming up. However, if one side loses a few characters and (for example) the match goes to six versus three, the game will ploddingly continue to alternate between players as if each side still had a full roster. This means that the side with three fighters left will get to move each of those fighters twice in the time it takes for the side with six fighters to move each of them once, and in a scenario where a nearly-dead fighter is practically useless it makes more sense to keep them alive on one point of Strength so that they can take up a slot in your opponent’s turn order instead of killing them off. It’s a really bizarre, gamey phenomenon that arises purely as a result of the game rules, much like playing games of keep-away in Blood Bowl where you’d run the ball up and down the touchline and not score until the turn the half ended. I didn’t like it then, either; Factions incentivises being a dick by drawing things out for your opponent and making them waste their time instead of going in for the kill, and I can’t really call this anything other than a failure of the game’s design.

(In fairness I don’t really know what they can do to fix it that wouldn’t dramatically unbalance things somewhere else. Also, when you get an enemy team down to the last fighter the battle enters “Pillage mode” and you get to move all of your fighters at once, greatly speeding up the end of the game.)

Still, if you can overlook this slight oily sheen of artificiality that takes over towards the end of the game Factions is an enthralling tactical experience. I don’t like keeping wounded enemies alive but it’s hardly a game-ruining feature. No, if there’s a game-ruining feature in Factions it is (sigh) the inevitable microtransactions that come with every Free-to-Play game. Every game of Factions that you play will gain you Renown, which are the game’s experience points. You get one Renown for every enemy character you kill, plus a bonus for winning, plus other sundry bonuses, but in practice you’re going to be getting somewhere between four and ten Renown per game. While you’re gathering this XP your characters are accruing kills on the battlefield, and once they’ve hit five kills they can level up to one of three prestige classes via the Proving Ground. That is, if you have enough Renown.

You will hit the level one kill boundary for every single one of your starting characters by your fourth or fifth game. In this same time you will have gathered – along with the starting Renown the game gives you – about sixty Renown. It costs fifty Renown to level up one character to the first level of the prestige classes; god alone knows what subsequent levels cost. Once you’ve done that you’re looking at ten-ish games of Factions before you can level up another one, and when they take around half an hour each this is not an insignificant time investment. If you want to buy more characters to change your lineup that’ll cost more Renown. If you want more slots to store characters that’ll cost more Renown. And clicking on the Renown total at the top of screen will take you to the ever-present microtransaction store, where you can part with your hard-earned cash for precisely that. I wouldn’t exactly call it grasping, as such, since it never pressures you to spend your money, but it is certainly very grindy. It’ll be a long time before you can level your squad up from the base classes and branch out in the tactical options available to you, and this would be completely unnecessary if it weren’t for the game’s Free-to-Play funding model.

Fortunately I do think Factions has the depth to stand up to that kind of repeated play. I’ve only played seven games so far, but even with the basic characters available to me I’ve made plays – and had plays made against me – that were breathtakingly subtle in how they used movement, positioning and attacks to take out targets an opponent thought was safe. As I said at the start, I wasn’t that interested in Factions as an ongoing concern and was merely having a look to see what the combat system would be like for the full game, but now I think I might stick around and play for a while longer to see where Factions goes. It’s very fun, and – for now, at least – the playerbase is unfailingly polite², so it’s never unpleasant to drop in for a game or two.

Based on the evidence provided by Factions the Banner Saga proper looks like it’s shaping up extremely well. My major problems with it are the microtransactions and the issues inherent in playing for advantage against another human being, and neither of those will be present in Chapter One when it eventually staggers towards its Steam release. The rotoscoped animation is incredible; perhaps it’s because the last game I played that used rotoscoping was the original Prince of Persia³ that it seems so fresh and vibrant, but it’s also combined with some stunning background art done in a different style which nevertheless meshes with the rotoscoped characters very well indeed. The combat works. The art and animation works. The voice acting is… kind of ropey, if I’m being completely honest, but I’m hoping that’s just the case for Factions. All they need to get right now is the scripting of the campaign itself, and based on Stoic’s recent namedropping of King of Dragon Pass in a Kickstarter update it seems like they’re heading in the right direction with that as well. All in all, I’m very excited for the RPG part of the Banner Saga now. There are very few upcoming games I can say that about.

Banner Saga: Factions will be available to everyone next Monday via Steam plus a few other places.

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The post Impressions: Banner Saga Factions. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.