The Banner Saga 2 is less than a week old, but that hasn't stopped fans from asking about what's next. During a panel at PAX East 2016, the team behind the epic fantasy adventure (and one of our favorite games this year) already began talking about plans for The Banner Saga 3 . After the event, Stoic’s Arnie Jorgensen and John Watson spoke with iDigitalTimes about what’s next for the franchise.
“We had the whole story and we broke it into three arcs, and you’ll see the second arc is going to be ramping up. It’s going to get a lot more tense, it’s going to get a lot weirder,” said Jorgensen.
The Banner Saga 2 leaves off on an incredible cliffhanger, so the thought of an even crazier story in The Banner Saga 3 is incredibly exciting. Even the in-game map itself seems so, so big it’s hard not to want to go adventuring in it. This is a rich, multilayered world that is rife for narrative exploration and Stoic didn’t hold back when creating it.
“Arnie created the map and just went crazy,” said Watson.
The challenge for Stoic right now is to make sure that a thriving community springs up around The Banner Saga 2 and that the demand (i.e. sales) is there to sustain the ambitions for the incredibly talented team behind the game. It’s a small studio, and there is a lot left unexplored in The Banner Saga 2 simply because there just wasn’t enough manpower to get to it.
“We have this world to play with, but we can only have so much. And if we can continue in The Banner Saga , if ‘Saga 3’ is successful, then we can flesh it out with other games and different systems,” Jorgensen said.
But if you look around PAX east 2016 there are a lot of cosplayers bringing the characters from The Banner Saga into the real world. The passion is there, and Jorgensen thinks the interest will grow over time. Right now it's a little behind its predecessor in sales, but Watson thinks the go-to fanbase for The Banner Saga 2 may just be a bit distracted.
“When we released the last one we didn’t come out the same time as Dark Souls 3 ,” he said.
He also hopes that fans can start to figure out how to makes mods for the game. Watson released all the content creation tools when the first game released, but he admits that they weren’t especially user friendly. He hopes to rectify that in the future.
“It’s one of my dreams that, by the time we finish The Banner Saga 3 , the tools are mature enough to make it easier to share with people. But I love the idea of modding,” he said. “Modding adds a lot of longevity and helps create a community.”
It’s going to take a community to support the ambitions the world of The Banner Saga is capable of sustaining. It could be positively massive, and Jorgensen believes that there is room for much more than just one more game.
“If the fanbase is there after we finish The Banner Saga 3 then we’ll continue to flesh out the world,” he said.
