@turambar said:

OK, then ignore the first sentence or two I wrote. Everything else I wrote applies. If you want to min-max the game, obviously someone will path out all the best responses, but that's clearly something to do on the 2nd and 3rd playthroughs if you're hunting for achievements. You're not meant to know the outcomes of the choices your first time, because they aren't meant to be "Hey dawg, let me break down the pros and cons of these options." That's pretty clearly not what they're going for.

The game isn't asking "You're about to leave, the king is bestowing upon you a gift, do you want more money or more units?" The game is asking "Some fucked up thing is happening, role play your way out of it as you see fit, we'll see how it goes, but you're probably gonna get a raw deal no matter what".

It's not what they're going for, but its what you get when you ask a question with a "correct" answer amongst them. This isn't something that requires a deep cost benefit analysis to figure out which one gets you the most, or loses you the least. There is often one choice that gets you nothing but a beneficial result.

It's not that at all. I don't want to know the result of my actions. I don't want a pro/con list or a who dies list. I just didn't want this to be a choose your own adventure, I wanted it to be closer to Fallout. You don't know what your choice will bring, but the text gives you a hint, and your knowledge of the world and listening to people becomes the skill. These moments exist in Banner Saga, but we're talking 10%. Max. Most conversations are you trying to guess which morality the designers thought best suited the game (and thus is the optimal one), which is not my idea of roleplaying. When that's not the problem it's the opposite: the optimal choice is too easy, and so the other choices are pointless.

Look I still played through it and I'm a third through again to test the difficulty and the decision trees and frankly I'm not sure if I like it more or I like it less. Knowing the optimal route, it's hard not to take those decisions, especially if I know it keeps a powerful or cool character alive. And the more I push the system the more I realize that many decisions actually don't matter. The state of your caravan barely affects anything. Just willpower in battle, which is meaningless since it doesn't affect maximum available in a battle, but just how much you start with. So you can just rest and get it at the beginning of the round. You can literally have 0 food, clansmen and fighters, and still get through the game.

@turambar: @geraltitude: Alright, well we just fundamentally disagree, because the part where it's a choose your own adventure, and things go wrong despite your good intentions, is one of the coolest parts of the game for me. It would be less interesting if I could just deduce which outcome would give me the most benefit. The choices you're given are all meant to seem like somewhat reasonable ways to address the situation, but because it is a story written by a person, the other characters in the story react poorly to some of the choices, to create tension. The outcomes are arbitrary, and that's fine. Maybe there was some reward I didn't get because I choose a worse dialogue option. Who cares, the game isn't very hard anyways. It was more fun that I led the caravan in the way that stuck to my values, even if the game didn't reward me for it.

After about an hour, I was playing the game as a TellTale-style decision-making simulator first, and a tactics game second.

Though I agree that it's regrettable that the supplies and clansmen don't really affect anything, and even the morale at its lowest barely hampers you. Hopefully they tweak those systems a bit in Chapter 2.

I have really liked what I have played so far, however, my friend told me that one of my party members is going to be, well, the worst, and I am bummed out now

@iodine: Your friend is a dick.

@bisonhero I just got the part in question and oh god I hate everything.

So is his avatar. Coincidence?

I agree, the game totally achieved what it was going for, and it wouldn't have been nearly as successful without it. I think that ideally it'd be more of a situation where every choice results in something bad and something good and you have to come to terms with things regardless... but with so many choices, you're going to have to put up with some bad shit regardless. What bothered me was how perfectly it seemed like you had to play to get through Act III with any food left, but it looks like they patched that. My fault for playing the game so hard when it came out. So long as it's possible to do acceptably (but not very) well by organically making choices that sometimes go wrong, I think the game is doing fine.

Man the game was great until the final boss battle where the difficulty spike did not make it fun at all for me on normal. It requires 2 characters, one which I never leveled up. I ended up trying 4-5 times before just bumping the difficulty to easy - which was then way too easy of a fight.

I probably could have spent more time on it but sadly don't have the time anymore to devote to beating on boss battle.