Banner Saga 3 - The End of a Saga

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Arnie Jorgensen and Zeb West from Stoic Studio discuss the ending of the Banner Saga trilogy:

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End of a Saga: What Stoic learnt from the Mass Effect finale

Studio co-founder and ex-BioWare dev Arnie Jorgensen joins producer Zeb West to discuss ending the Banner Saga trilogy

Trilogies in the games industry are often just a series of loosely connected stories rather than a single cohesive narrative, typically an excuse to go on one adventure after another until there are no adventures left and the whole thing can be rebooted.

In essence, the games industry rarely takes advantage of the trilogy format in a traditional sense: to tell one epic story.

Of course, a trilogy is nothing without a conclusion which often leads developers and publishers alike to keep pushing. Every great saga is judged ultimately by how it ends, and there's likely not a person working in the industry today who doesn't remember the carnage which ensued following the conclusion of Mass Effect 3.

With the narrative-focused Banner Saga series set to conclude next week following the launch of its third installment, indie developer Stoic is in the precarious situation of having to actually deliver a satisfying conclusion to a project six years in the making; a prospect so terrifying that most developers either stumble at the last hurdle, or keep running until there are no games left to make, and the series simply collapses under its own weight.

It's a reality which has not failed to dawn on the team, the founders of which were working at BioWare's Austin studio during the Mass Effect 3 debacle.

"Being on the inside of the studio, even though we weren't directly working on the game, we were even more cognisant of what was going on and where maybe there were some missteps, and we really took that to heart in our own game," Stoic co-founder Arnie Jorgensen tells GamesIndustry.biz.

"Here's the point: if people play our game and they say: 'Finally someone nailed it. They finished an epic and I feel like it was a satisfying ending for my playthrough. My personal playthrough'... it really feels satisfying for the player. We focused on that with the Banner Saga 3, really trying to make sure people feel that way and we hope we did it."

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