Do the choices you make in the game contribute to the sense of meaningful interactive moments?
Banner Saga is a turn based strategy game which also incorporates text based storytelling through frequent narrative cut scenes. The game I feel is heavily sided with storytelling through these cut scenes which sometimes allows you to choose an answer from a small selection of choices. These choices don't seem to have a major effect on the story and the game play early within the game, as I didn't make it too far through the game. The story fragments are split up through game play scenes where the player is thrown into a strategic turn based battle against the enemy. Through these battles the player has to control his men, deciding where to move the characters and whether or not to attack the armour or health as it depends on who you're using and who you're facing.
The choices you make within the battle don't seem to have any affect on the actual story within the whole game, as you could let your characters be killed but it doesn't affect the outer story at all, the character will still be alive and the story will continue. As long as you can defeat the enemies, the story will continue. In regards to the dialogue in the cut scenes, the selection of choices given to the player seem very minor at the start of the game, they don't really affect the overall story that much. Later on further into the game this might have more of an effect, but I would have to play it through multiple sessions to find out.
The choices in this game also don't have any time limit, during the battle scenes the player has as much time as they want to make a decision to progress the battle, so the choices made aren't made out of reflex they are made out of thinking and strategy. This also applies to the dialogue cut scenes, the characters will wait for probably an infinite amount of time for the player to respond to the conversation.
An excerpt from Sebastian Domsch's reading Storyplaying also explores the concept of time during game play, and is further explained in the article.
'These are the games whose concept of time is at least partially turn-based, that is, the passing of event time is restricted to the making of a turn, which does not necessarily have an equivalent passing of play time.'
Sebastian Domsch -Storyplaying
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