Banner Saga Factions out of beta: now what?

Banner Saga Factions
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Multiplayer tactics battler The Banner Saga: Factions (previously covered here) has been given a soft launch; it will be available to the general public (i.e. not just Kickstarter backers) next Monday, February 25th.

In the wake of this announcement, Alex Thomas of Stoic Studio took to Kickstarter to explain the delay in getting the single player RPG aspect of The Banner Saga finished. (It was originally planned for release in November 2012.) In large part, he chalks it up to getting more money than they expected from their Kickstarter campaign:

When we set a launch date of November, we didn’t know if we’d match our funding or not. If I’m completely honest it was probably too optimistic, even if we had only gotten the minimum funding. We should have known better, and I apologize for that mistake.

Just as importantly, we made 7x the funding we expected. We made the game exponentially bigger. Imagine a tv show that gets picked up for 7 more seasons, or a book that gets made into a 7-part series or a 20-minute indie film being given the funding to turn it into a 2 hour feature film. All of these things take a long time. And hopefully, every one of these examples means a much better end result.

He also addresses various complaints about the multiplayer Factions component, including accusations that microtransactions unbalance the game. Read the full update here.

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1 Comment »

 
  • BarryB says:

    Making a single player game is vastly more simple than making a multiplayer game…

    That’s kind of scary. Because while there’s a great deal of code and issues that have to be taken into account with multiplayer, a decent singleplayer game requires far more AI, and has a host of its own issues. Presumably he wasn’t thinking about AI, but that’s what I find curious.

 

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