The Banner Saga 2 Interview

There's an article-style interview with Stoic's Arnie Jorgensen and Drew McGee over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, during which the artist and writer tackle a variety of questions about The Banner Saga 2 and its place in the planned strategy/RPG trilogy. An excerpt:

(We're going to have more win scenarios,) says Jorgensen. (We're going to have a lot more variation in combat, not just '˜kill them all'. John [Watson, the lead programmer] did a whole new toolset for the engine so we can make it more scripted, so we're going to be moving story through the combat.)

He goes on to elaborate on what McGee was saying about the tutorial/demo battle. (The whole thing feels a little more cinematic. We have destructibles now so you can put up barricades and have them broken. You can put up urns that are knocked over with coals that come out and affect the battlefield. We're doing everything we can except for we're still not doing height.

(That's something a lot of people bring up but it would break our combat balance. Everything is so finely tuned with archers and they're almost overpowered so if I game them height we're done. I might as well only roll in with archers! Some people think it would make it more fun but it would really just break the game.)

Secondary characters have had their roles altered too. (What we used to get for war, it would just say '˜Here's how many Dredge, here's how many fighters' and then you go into a fight. It didn't feel very tactical or rewarding. This time it's story based.

(You can get advisors now. In a war they might come up to you and say '˜You hold them off for a little while and I'll come in and we'll smash them from the back' or it could change the win scenario or it could say '˜Let's toss clansmen at them and run'.)