You’ll frequently be asked to make tough decisions as you travel, like whether to add refugees to your party (knowing they’ll mean more mouths to feed), or whether to steal livestock from a farm. Every stop you make to rest, recover, and raise your party’s spirits is a day’s worth of food you don’t have to feed the hungry families that follow you. Days have lost all meaning, save that they measure roughly how far you’ve gone and how much you have left. Throughout your adventure, you’ll find yourself leading huge caravans on massive treks with very limited supplies. Here the game begins to resemble The Oregon Trail.
In most games, these apply only in terms of dialogue choices, but in The Banner Saga choice permeates all aspects of play. There are a lot of “verbs” at play in the design of this game, but at its heart are choice and consequence. Additionally, every place in the world has its own name and bit of backstory, which you can read by selecting it on the world map.
Though the gods are mostly based on Kickstarter backers, they’re integrated into the story well enough that you can’t tell which. Men and Varl have a long and complicated history of wars and alliances, as well as many little details that define their races. Stoic have written up a staggering quantity of lore to bring the game world to life. Likewise, the world that surrounds them is breathtaking, styled after the backgrounds of Sleeping Beauty, and divided into myriad parallax layers that give a sense of depth. Animation elsewhere is fairly sparse – most cutscenes just involve characters standing around talking as the wind occasionally rustles their clothing – but the character portraits are so detailed that it hardly matters.
As a result, despite all the effort made to avoid fantasy clichés, I find myself heavily reminded of the animated Lord of the Rings Films. The game makes heavy use of rotoscoping, especially for its battle animations. It also allows the story to flow more smoothly, instead of contriving reasons for a single person to be present at every world-shaping event in history.Īll of it is presented beautifully, with a sweeping orchestral score composed by Austin Wintory (the genius behind Journey’s soundtrack, which should tell you everything you need to know), and an art style reminiscent of the golden age of animation. Similar to Game of Thrones or Fire Emblem, this approach gives you a broader perspective on the conflict and the politics surrounding it, as well as a greater sense of the characters involved. You’re still confronted with ethical conundrums, but instead of making decisions for a single, player-created character, your perspective is constantly shifting between heroes. It’s interesting to see the Bioware formula applied to this brand of epic, world-spanning fantasy. His only aim is to help his clan survive, but his decisions could very well shape the fate of their world, even as it ends around them. With their chieftain dead and their prospects looking grimmer by the minute, Rook, the town huntsman, leads his clan west and away from the encroaching horde. This includes the small village of Skogr, which finds itself besieged by an army of evil colossi decked in black armor. The heir to the Varl throne is killed in the opening skirmish, leaving an uncertain army under the command of Hakon, his right-hand man.Īcross the continent, a mass of Dredge sweeps southward, destroying everything in its wake. It’s hoped that he will help to shore up the fragile alliance between the races, but only days into their journey they find themselves beset by the Dredge – an ancient and powerful enemy long thought extinct. A caravan of Varl – giant men with horns sprouting from their skulls – sets out for their homeland of Grofheim with Ludin, the Prince of Men, in tow. More pertinent is the fact that the sun has inexplicably stopped, trapping the land in a cold, endless twilight. The Viking-inspired world of The Banner Saga is in something of a bad way.
0 kommentar(er)
