There will be new content for Factions after the "main game", The Banner Saga proper, comes out. the glue that keeps the franchise going between major releases." Alex Thomas "Factions is its own thing," Thomas says, and will be, he hopes, "the glue that keeps the franchise going between major releases". Stoic didn't want to "muddy" the message any further. There will be no multiplayer in The Banner Saga single-player story games. People didn't realise there was a single-player game: they thought Factions was it - all of it.įactions will live on and will remain the only place you can play The Banner Saga against your friends and other people. The problem is, Factions messed up people's perception of what The Banner Saga is. It's not that Factions didn't do its job: more than 150,000 people played, a core following formed and the game's rigorously tested combat is better as a result. "Yeah, hmm, jury's out on whether that was a great idea," Thomas reflects. Released on Steam at the start of the year, this was, and is, a free multiplayer game (with optional costs for character variations) showcasing the game's combat, world and style - a demo of sorts. The Banner Saga: Factions is separate to that. And, I'm excited to find out, this is only the first of three planned games, each linked (like Mass Effect, coincidentally) by one giant story. There were delays and changes but what's been created is something "much bigger" than originally conceived. Today we're a month from The Banner Saga's 14th January, £18.99, release (there's an additional 20 per cent discount, plus a little gift, for pre-ordering now). I think people were captivated by Arnie Jorgensen's beautiful Viking artwork, and the promise of a storied, strategical, turn-based adventure for adults. Was it the team's BioWare past that excited people? Were people imagining a triple-A blockbuster like Mass Effect? Thomas thinks so, but I don't. It was one of three times the three men of Stoic used the on-site bar. But at the same time you're riding this high of 'how much can we raise now?!'." "And now any kind of failure is a public failure, and that's something to be concerned about. "Everything goes up when that happens," he explains - money, expectation. They were, co-founder Alex Thomas tells me, "dumbfounded". They shouldn't have been, because in 24 hours their game, The Banner Saga, had reached its goal. In one week, the amount they were going to ask for changed from $10,000 to $30,000 to $50,000 to $100,000. Friends who'd raised $5000 there egged them on, and as they were preparing their pitch, along came Tim Schafer with Double Fine Adventure and blew the vein wide open. This way, if things didn't work out, they could just about shrug it off and get a job again. Any more and they'd have to dip into their respective family's savings. They swapped the security of a corporation for a shed-of-an-office behind a bar and laid down a plan: six months, tiny budget, game. Then, two years ago, they broke away and followed a dream - an idea for a game that had been buzzing around their heads since childhood. For six years they were ants in a colony - three people amongst the hundreds building Star Wars: The Old Republic at BioWare Austin.
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