Games
We talk to Banner Saga’s creators on the final chapter in their mythological freeze-to-death-a-thon.
Like a starved caravan of trembling peasants hiking across a bleak expanse of ice, snow and murderous bandits, it's a sad fact that many, if not most crowdfunded games end up keeling over and dying. Well, it's not always sad. Everyone knows at least one Kickstarter hatchet job that was well-deserving of of an actual hatchet between the shoulder blades.
The super-successful posterchildren of crowdfunded video games are celebrated because they're rare – rarely followed, rarely funded and rarely well received. And that's what makes the Banner Saga such a wonderful oddity. While there have been bigger successes on Kickstarter since Broken Age first set the trend in 2012 ( Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity and Shadowrun, to name just a few), the Banner Saga's almost episodic format means that while inXile and Obsidian are still in the process of shoring up funds for their first sequels, Stoic – The Banner Saga's creators – are charging ahead of the pack to release the series' third and final instalment of the strategy game series.
How, you ask? Well, according to John Watson, co-owner and technical director at Stoic, making the concluding chapter of one of crowdfunding's best-loved video game series was more about tweaking the wheel, rather than reinventing it.
"Banner Saga 2 was an exercise in refinement of the first game," Watson says. "We deliberately avoided adding or changing the mechanics in a dramatic of drastic way. We wanted to keep the game, essentially, the same. One of our guiding principles is that if you wanted to play all three games in one sitting, they should feel like one whole game. They need to be coherent.
"So for the second game we deliberately avoided making any major disruptions, but we refined certain aspects based on feedback from the first game. One of the problems was the difficulty of the final battle. There was an issue with the final chapter, where there wasn't enough Renown [The Banner Saga's in-game currency] to share between your Supplies [which keep your caravaners alive and morale high] and levelling up your characters. So, some people decided that the best choice was to let everyone die, let morale drop but rank up their characters.
"Mechanically, that made a lot of sense. And while we want that to be a legitimate decision for people to make, we don't want the mechanics to force you down that path or communicate to you that that path is the correct path."
According to Watson, that's the same mentality being carried over in The Banner Saga 3 – no major retooling, just little tweaks and touches, like adding new combat mechanics and monsters for your merry band of travellers to hit them with.
For those unfamiliar with the Banner Saga, the monsters (known as The Dredge – armoured monsters created by a vengeful god to wipe out life) are only one of the challenges that the player faces as they lead their caravan across the wildlands between strongholds. As your gaggle of nomadic pilgrims expands, characters and their stories develop according to the morally grey choices that the game presents in its encounters – and the results of choosing one path over another are not always clear cut.
Failing to take the right action in a prickly situation can leave you suddenly without a cherished character, as they plunge – to take an example from the first game – over a cliff while clinging to a cart full of treasure. The Banner Saga knows that good drama requires surprise and despair, but for players coming back to the series for a third time around, how do you stop veteran players becoming wise to its crueller tricks?
"People who become familiar with anything, whether it's a game or a TV show, they build up a level of 'meta-thinking',” says Watson, of players trying to outwit the developers when they sense a crisis looming. "You start thinking, 'Well, OK, for this story maybe this character has plot immunity, because we know that he has to make it through to the end to resolve something'. Or, 'We know that the writers of the game will probably do something this way, because they did something similar in the past'. So in the case of something like Game of Thrones, you engage in lots of meta-thinking about what the show writers are planning, and that kind of meta-thinking does grow the more familiar people become with your work.
"Like, Tyrion [Lannister, from Game of Thrones] is a fan favourite," he continues. "If you kill Tyrion, you would lose a lot of your audience. So the writers themselves have to engage in this meta-thinking about killing him off – they would have to weigh that against the repercussions to the show's wellbeing. So they're in sort of a bind. They could choose to kill off Tyrion, but they would have to consider that many people would be upset and might stop watching the show. The same things apply to us. There are certainly some characters in our game that our well-loved so we have to tread lightly."
Not as slightly as some, however. One of the benefits of keeping the Stoic team so small (it started with three, and has currently grown to just six employees), is that it can control its budgets and take more risks with its characters than would make sense for a triple-A studio. Stoic may still have to be careful about bumping off certain characters for cheap shocks, but when it does decide to let you take a wrong turn, it doesn't have the worries that larger studio would have about sending voice-acting and motion-capture fees over the cliff with your unfortunate former companion.
"The idea of wasting resources is a consideration for indies as well, I think," he says. "If we invested half of our budget into a character that could go away in five minutes, that's probably something we would want to rethink. But having unexpected and unusual outcomes is something that indies can do, and I think that's a big strength.
"That's a big difference between most triple-As and indies. Everyone has to think about making a living, of course – you have to pay the bills. But with indies, there are typically fewer people on the team, and you don't need to sell as many copies. The total investment in an indie game is much lower than a triple-A game, even though some indies are becoming multimillion dollar games. So you can get away with taking some risks that you couldn't in a company that is driven by profit and publicly traded."
But why, then, when series like The Banner Saga are so well received and made on (comparatively) tight budgets, are the big publishers simply putting small teams to the side to make their own competing games that muscle in on the indie scene's niche?
Ubisoft have some track record with that idea: 2014's Child of Light released to very high praise indeed, while other indie-a-likes such as Valiant Hearts and Rayman: Origins similarly found themselves sitting high up the Metacritic rankings. And if Ubisoft can pull this off with such a degree of success, why isn't everyone with money to burn doing the same thing?
"I think it would be very hard for triple-As to control their budgets," says Watson, frankly. "We have very real budget constraints: we have a certain amount of money, we don't want investor money, and that's all we have to work with so we have to make it fit. If you're a big triple-A studio, there's going to be this temptation to say, 'Well, if we just spent another $2,000,000 then we could have better animations'. A few million at a time and you're suddenly looking at a very large-budget game and your risk is high again.
"And maybe [a Triple-A studio] could make a Banner Saga. And maybe it would be successful relative to the amount they spent. But the margin – the amount of profit it would generate – would be negligible compared to the total bottom line of the company. It might be a success, but they'll say, 'OK, we spent two million, and we made five. That was a profit, but we don't care: that’s not enough to register on our radar.' That could be part of the thinking. Like, why would Blizzard want to make something like The Banner Saga? Why would they want to make a game that makes a profit of a few million dollars?"
It's strange to think back to 2012, when it was difficult to open the front page of a gaming website without being crushed under an avalanche of op-eds about what crowdfunding meant for gaming.
Writers, communities and commenters could so often be split into two camps. Was crowdfunding a flash in the pan? Or the end of the Triple-A fatcats with their ever-ballooning budgets and games that so often felt like minor iterations on whatever happened to be popular at the time? Five years later, as Watson and the team at Stoic begin to plan how to spend the last batch of backer money for Kickstarter's first video game trilogy, he ends our interview on a conciliatory note that proved both sides of the debate overreacted.
"I think it's great," he says, of the way the ecosystem of small, medium and enormous videogames has settled into equilibrium. "The triple-A studios do what they do, and Blizzard does what it does, and those games are awesome. Those games are wonderful and it's really good that these companies exist and are making these mega-blockbusters. Everything just kind of fits together to serve different appetites and different audiences."
The Banner Saga 3's Kickstarter will end on March 8, 2017 and will initially launch on PC/OSX, (and possibly on consoles and handhelds later).
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