The Banner Saga by Stoic

The Banner Saga

A mature, story-driven, turn-based strategy game steeped in viking culture, by three game industry veterans.

Created by

Stoic

20,042 backers pledged $723,886 to help bring this project to life.

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The Banner Saga

by Stoic

Update #44

Nov 8, 2013

The Banner Saga launch date and trailer

38 Comments

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Greetings, backers!

It has been a long time coming, but all for a good reason. Today we've finished putting together an announcement trailer for The Banner Saga. What are we announcing? A release date!

Watch below:

I'd love to give you an update on everything going on at this point. We finally feel comfortable with giving a release date for one very big reason: we are essentially content complete. This means the game is playable from front to back, the combats are in place, the characters are all hooked up and every conversation throughout the game is ready to go. In essence: we're almost done with the game. This is a huge milestone because we've been working nearly every waking hour since Factions released to get to this point.

We've partnered with a new marketing and distribution team called Versus Evil who have taken a lot of work off our plate and help us put together new promotions so that we didn't take away from production time. They've done an amazing job on the new website (http://stoicstudio.com/) and will be helping to make sure we get seen by as many people as possible at launch.

What's left to do? We'll be spending an appropriate amount of time on playtesting, polish and balance. We've been getting help from a QA house to help us find and write bugs because the game has become both long and complex at this point. What we originally envisioned as a 6 hour game is probably closer to 15+ hours on the first playthrough, and all the branching variables and additional systems are time-consuming to test. We'll also be playing through the game a lot to get combat balance in as good a state as we can. Lastly, you may have heard this before, but polish is the difference between a good game and a great game in our minds. Personal touches, transitions and making sure that everything is finely polished is really important to us. For example, we've added procedural snow, random events in travel, items in combat, an interactive world map, every godstone in the game and tons of new characters and classes.

This week we also had Austin Wintory in the office to walk through the game and hook up each piece of music for the game. He's gone back to his studio with a list of things he wants to add, and we've got an insanely high-quality, huge score now in place for this game. He's been swamped lately with this work but is still raring to go on a music update for you coming up.

We also want to quickly mention guild crests here. We'll be having another update in the immediate future, because we've done what we think is the right thing and made sure that guild crests as closely matched the original intent as possible. We had gotten feedback on many different ways people wanted guild crests inserted in the game and got a little sidetracked by this, but have returned to the original idea: you upload them to us and we'll make them all available to anyone who plays the game, so everyone will see your contribution. We will need guild crest donators to upload their designs and we'll have an update about how very, very soon.

Thanks again for all your support... we are very nearly there and it's because of each of you.

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The Banner Saga

The Banner Saga launch date and trailer

Comments

Christopher Superbacker on November 9, 2013

twincast~Eternally Tormented WoOS-o-DOoD Superbacker on November 8, 2013

Stephen "Stoibs" D Superbacker on November 8, 2013

Stoic Creator on November 8, 2013

kamalloy Superbacker on November 8, 2013

Christopher
Superbacker
on November 9, 2013

twincast~Eternally Tormented WoOS-o-DOoD
Superbacker
on November 8, 2013

Stephen "Stoibs" D
Superbacker
on November 8, 2013

kamalloy
Superbacker
on November 8, 2013