I find that it has a huge effect on the rhythm of gameplay and just makes it feel really distinctive. Yet, you have to be much more careful with regulating your Willpower and keeping an eye on how you’re using it because you don’t just have it whenever you want it based on killing enemies. And instead, you have pocket Arc Lightning whenever you want it, which ends up making a huge difference because you can plink at enemies if they are in the right position and you can get these great chains. So what we’ve actually done is we’ve replaced the Warhorn - that’s been kind of a staple of battles in the previous two games - in The Darkness with the Valka Spear, which has a huge effect on battles because you can no longer just sort of have “pocket Willpower” whenever you want it. And if you remember at the end of The Banner Saga 2, they got the Spear of the Valka from the Tower that’s one of the things that they were doing at the very end of the game when Iver has to fight Bolverk. The caravan that is moving through The Darkness has Iver in it, it has Juno, and it has Eyvind.

It’s just really cool to see that sort of level of communication that we thrive off of, that we feel like “Wow, this is hitting an audience and they value it.” That’s the main thing that brought us back to Kickstarter for the third game and really just wanting to create that structure. We really kind of picked up and brokered that community into a cool group of people that love to do fan art, they love to do fan fiction and videos involving our characters, weird pictures of our Vikings playing basketball against the Dredge, and stuff like that. But, in the same way our indie studio has grown and changed, so has Kickstarter as a platform it’s become much more of a mechanism to find your “hardcore fans” and to find new fans that can look at your previous project and be like “Wow, okay – they delivered on that and they sort of brought everybody along with them as a community.” I mean, we thought like everyone else did that Kickstarter is a mechanism for kickstarting a business, and it did do that for this business, for sure. ZW: We really missed using Kickstarter for the second game.

Over that time, it’s taken us shorter and shorter amounts of time to release these games on all platforms, so one thing that we’re really excited about that just sort of demonstrates the “growing up” of our small indie studio is being able to release in like 10 languages on all platforms, basically at the same time. Zeb West (Producer, Stoic Studio): From the producer standpoint, Stoic has kind of grown from being a three-person indie studio to being a 14-person studio that has two locations in Seattle and Austin. So those were my two goals, and I think we delivered on them. And for the third one, I don’t want to suggest that we’ve completely overhauled everything, but I feel like there is a lot more variety to the battles and different things going on in the battles that will help make it feel a little fresher relative to the other two games. The Banner Saga 2 polished the battle system a lot, it introduced some new things, but it felt very much like a continuation of the first one.

The banner saga story