The main elements of gameplay in The Banner Saga will center around travel, events, conversation and combat.
Travel
As the player progresses through the narrative, he or she will have to take into consideration the logistics of leading a caravan along a route through a landscape peppered with both hostile and friendly factions, all of whom also interact with each other.
The travel across the land will happen in two ways: shifting between a world map and side-scrolling travel with an emphasis on the caravan. All the while, the game will instill the sense of urgency and hardship that would naturally come with leading a caravan of thousands of people on a march across a huge landscape. Time will also play an integral factor, meaning that traveling will seriously impact player decisions.
The primary route to be taken by the caravan will be planned on the world map. Both the course toward the goal and high-level decisions will be made there. This will include deciding which towns and territories to pass though and how direct or circuitous that route will be. A balance between the shorter, but potentially dangerous routes and the safer, more roundabout options will have to be struck. These choices will also directly affect the events that occur along the way. The player's caravan will be carrying news that others along the route have not heard, and what the player does with that information will impact the story. In addition, the world is not an unoccupied land mass peppered with friendly villages. There are contested territories and different factions who have different opinions of each other. Negotiating these problems will be an integral part of travel and the narrative that unfolds.
At key points along the path events will occur that are out of your control and have world-wide effects. How you react to them, and the path you forge in response, are part of your story.
When major events happen, or you’ve taken an action like setting up camp or entering a town or city, the world map transition into the side-scrolling mode shown in the trailer, called exploration. This is a big part of gameplay! Here you can see the size and mood of your caravan, how many people are traveling with you, and get a better view of the world around you. Exploration will introduce you to the stark beauty of the world around you, and better immerse you in the environment.
In exploration, you’ll be able to interact directly with your camp or a city to talk with characters in your caravan, enter buildings if you’re in a city, rest for specific amounts of time and adjust how you’re traveling. The city in Factions is a working example of how exploration will work.
The decisions you make along the way have an effect on how you are traveling. Your speed is a combination of factors, and you’ll need to manage the caravan’s endurance, morale, size and supplies to stay out of trouble.
Endurance inevitably decreases as you travel. The only way to restore it is to rest, but that costs time. Morale comes and goes based on your actions, how successful you are in combat, and how much the caravan agrees with your actions. Mobility is dictated entirely by the size of your caravan - the fewer people are traveling with you, the faster you can go. Of course, this also means the fewer people that may survive. Lastly, supplies amplify all of these other factors. Go too long without finding food or medicine and everything else will deteriorate quickly.
Events
This brings us to events. If you’ve ever played King of Dragon Pass, you’ll be familiar with this sort of system. As you travel, the game notices how you are doing in each of your travel stats. If you’re within a certain threshold, you may trigger an event.
Usually, events arise without warning, and are related to what is happening around you. You’ll have to react to them in the way you think best for everyone. If you’re low on supplies your caravan may try to revolt. If you’re high on morale, you may end up with a camp full of rowdy drunken revelers. However, don’t fear when an event pops up, they’re just as often positive experiences as they are negative, and may be crucial in keeping your caravan healthy and happy.
Even more importantly, don’t think that events are one-time deals. The decision you make this time may cause a new event to arise later. Just because you’ve resolved a problem for now doesn’t mean it won’t come back to haunt you further down the road. Events can be related to the area you’re traveling in, the decisions you’ve made in the past, the state of your caravan or pre-determined events along the way, and can affect everything from your caravan’s stats to which characters in your party live or die.
Events, however, are just the tip of the backdrop to a broader story.
Conversation
Conversation The main focus of the game has always been a deep and personal story. The things that are happening in the world may be out of your control, but you always have a choice in how you react to them, and the main way you do this is through dialogue.
Traveling and events feed back into conversation. At key events and in camp, you’ll talk to characters in a more personal point of view. Instead of describing what has happened in narration like an event, conversations become closer and more personal. The Banner Saga is primarily a dialogue-driven story.
Coming from a history with BioWare, we’ve familiar with how to create branching story. Where we differ is in the idea that every line needs to be something that the player has chosen. Instead, we provide a choice of what to say when there is an important decision to make, instead of filling dialogue with false choices that loop back to the same place and have no bearing on the conversation.
So, through conversation you’ll make key decisions that have wide-reaching implications throughout every other part of the game. You’ll decide how to handle the most important situations that arise, make decisions that may affects the caravan’s morale, size and supplies, and form a personal connection to the characters traveling in your party.
Combat
The horn was a major feature we had wanted to implement early on and works beautifully with the current system. Currently, each kill you make adds a star to the horn. These stars can be spent to blow the horn, creating the effect of restoring willpower to your characters during combat. In the single player game different main characters carry different horns, and their effects will be unique to them and compliment their personalities. In this way each character not only has their own stories and motivations, but changes the overall feeling of fighting with their team. We hope to roll this eventually into Factions, as well.
Just as with every other system in the game, your actions in combat will have a broader reach than just the immediate result. Characters in battle do not heal immediately after combat, instead needing time to recover during travel. Characters who are seriously wounded won’t be able to jump right back into combat, instead relying on other fighters on your team who may not be as experienced. Choices you make in conversation and travel can affect how difficult combat is, and your performance in combat can, in turn, influence the caravan’s morale and endurance.
Combat can also be as prominent as you’d like, depending on how you play the game. During combat, the caravan will continue to move. While destroying your enemies ensures victory, you can choose to hold them off long enough for the caravan to escape and you’ll be able to retreat, giving you the choice to play aggressively, defensively or cautiously to minimize the damage you take and your ability to fight another day.