There are three common explanations for beginner’s luck. The first is how novices feel no pressure when going up against experts, but experts overthink their strategy to avoid losing to a newcomer. The second is centered around problem spaces: novices don’t know what actions are typically ineffective, so they’re open to more possibilities than the limited set internalized by a veteran. Finally, the most common of the bunch is that experts try to predict what the other player is doing, and when a novice breaks their heuristics, the game plan begins to break down. At the root of all these explanations is an asymmetry between mindsets, where the ordered thinking that comes with experience clashes against chaos, which can lead to some amazing upsets. You might expect I’m trying to explain how I got through a difficult game with no trouble, but instead, my goal is the reverse: explaining how this game used asymmetry to beat me.
So, how is luck possible when a game is a machine with set rules? Well, consider this scenario the game presents you with: a poetry competition breaks out in your little journeying caravan and you have the option to either join in with a verse of your own, just cheer from the crowd, ignore it and listen for danger, or break it up and tell everyone they should be on guard. If you’re concerned about the safety and morale of your people, the best compromise is probably ignoring it and staying vigilant. However, that’s the second worst decision you can make. The actual best possible decision is joining in with a verse of your own. Now consider a second scenario: you encounter wild fruit that no one recognizes and apparently tastes funny, but people want to collect it for the food supplies. Do you just start eating it anyway, or discourage people from doing so? If you thought it might be best to exercise caution, you’ve picked the worst option. Admittedly, not even the majority of the game’s events work with such questionable logic, but the inconsistency is high enough to disrupt informed decision making regardless. The developers were able to construct events with full knowledge of what would motivate me as a player, but the inconsistent results give me no comparable understanding of how they're thinking. It creates the sort of asymmetrical mindset that makes me feel like the game is just getting lucky shots against me, with the ordered approach failing against a chaotic system. The counterargument might be that the entire point of the game is overcoming a harsh situation, and how real-life choice and consequence is never cut-and-dry. However, I think a good response to this comes from another game about leading a wagon through the dangerous wilderness: The Oregon Trail. When reaching a river crossing, the choices would be to ford straight through, caulk the wagon, hire a ferry, or wait for conditions to change. All these options carry their own risks and tradeoffs, but as a player, I understand all of them. If I decide to go straight through and lose many of my supplies, it feels completely justified. When hiring a ferry, I fully understand that the loss of cash could impact me later. The Banner Saga succeeds in creation of a bleak tone with its chaos, but how am I supposed to feel connected to my decisions, when the decisions themselves aren’t consistently connected to certain consequences?
The combat has the same sort of asymmetrical chaos that makes it hard for me to connect. With its turn-based grid combat one might recognize from Fire Emblem, some restarts and failures are expected, but the logic behind the enemy behavior is a tactical black box. Enemies might completely ignore a powerful caster one shot from death to go target someone at full health, turning their imminent victory into a defeat. Sometimes they do the opposite, immediately focusing their fury on a single strong hero and crippling my strategy in the first few turns. Fire Emblem may seem random with its percent chances to hit, but enemies will reliably chase down the hero they would be most effective against, and that’s something I can at least plan around. Meanwhile, in The Banner Saga, sometimes it feels like I’m the AI and the game is the player. I’m making consistent decisions based on which enemy unit moves next and what they’re weak against, but the AI follows a logic known only to itself, breaking my heuristics and creating chaos. Sometimes I beat difficult fights with ease, sometimes the AI would happen upon genius tactical gambits, and another disconnect begins to form as a result. How am I supposed to feel connected to these battles, when my tactical choices don’t have consistent results?
As questions like these kept recurring to me, the best answer I could come up with was to just… let go. Let the AI occasionally get lucky upsets. Let some events play out in ways that seem illogical. I forced myself to fully embrace it as a set-character RPG, where I simply made the choices I thought the player character might make, even if they seemed wrong. The art and well-constructed drama still made that a pleasant enough way to play, but it’s disappointing how the potential for sharing the journey with the characters was lost thanks to chaotic rules and inconsistency. The question I’m left asking myself after that ruling though is whether I’ll go on to play The Banner Saga 2 and 3, since this first game isn’t a self-contained story; the plot is far from resolved and many decisions only pay off in subsequent games. If each of them were unrelated stories, I would probably skip out, but the promise of refinement and a payoff to the drama is a concept that interests me. The Banner Saga was a Kickstarter game from an entirely new studio, so I can understand some of its floundering when trying to establish something as complex as a choice-focused trilogy of RPG's. Beginners may not always be lucky, but I have some faith that their skill will shine through in the end.
Note: This was another game taken from my recommendations list, from user Ninjabunny. I’m sorry that this review came out sounding so negative! I hope there’s consolation in the fact that I enjoyed it enough to mentally commit to the sequel, and that I already owned the game anyway, but had never gotten around to it. Like you mentioned in the recommendation, the aesthetic was incredible, and I loved a couple characters like Oddleif and Iver. Maybe now that I have my bearings, the sequels will be much more pleasant.
So, how is luck possible when a game is a machine with set rules? Well, consider this scenario the game presents you with: a poetry competition breaks out in your little journeying caravan and you have the option to either join in with a verse of your own, just cheer from the crowd, ignore it and listen for danger, or break it up and tell everyone they should be on guard. If you’re concerned about the safety and morale of your people, the best compromise is probably ignoring it and staying vigilant. However, that’s the second worst decision you can make. The actual best possible decision is joining in with a verse of your own. Now consider a second scenario: you encounter wild fruit that no one recognizes and apparently tastes funny, but people want to collect it for the food supplies. Do you just start eating it anyway, or discourage people from doing so? If you thought it might be best to exercise caution, you’ve picked the worst option. Admittedly, not even the majority of the game’s events work with such questionable logic, but the inconsistency is high enough to disrupt informed decision making regardless. The developers were able to construct events with full knowledge of what would motivate me as a player, but the inconsistent results give me no comparable understanding of how they're thinking. It creates the sort of asymmetrical mindset that makes me feel like the game is just getting lucky shots against me, with the ordered approach failing against a chaotic system. The counterargument might be that the entire point of the game is overcoming a harsh situation, and how real-life choice and consequence is never cut-and-dry. However, I think a good response to this comes from another game about leading a wagon through the dangerous wilderness: The Oregon Trail. When reaching a river crossing, the choices would be to ford straight through, caulk the wagon, hire a ferry, or wait for conditions to change. All these options carry their own risks and tradeoffs, but as a player, I understand all of them. If I decide to go straight through and lose many of my supplies, it feels completely justified. When hiring a ferry, I fully understand that the loss of cash could impact me later. The Banner Saga succeeds in creation of a bleak tone with its chaos, but how am I supposed to feel connected to my decisions, when the decisions themselves aren’t consistently connected to certain consequences?
The combat has the same sort of asymmetrical chaos that makes it hard for me to connect. With its turn-based grid combat one might recognize from Fire Emblem, some restarts and failures are expected, but the logic behind the enemy behavior is a tactical black box. Enemies might completely ignore a powerful caster one shot from death to go target someone at full health, turning their imminent victory into a defeat. Sometimes they do the opposite, immediately focusing their fury on a single strong hero and crippling my strategy in the first few turns. Fire Emblem may seem random with its percent chances to hit, but enemies will reliably chase down the hero they would be most effective against, and that’s something I can at least plan around. Meanwhile, in The Banner Saga, sometimes it feels like I’m the AI and the game is the player. I’m making consistent decisions based on which enemy unit moves next and what they’re weak against, but the AI follows a logic known only to itself, breaking my heuristics and creating chaos. Sometimes I beat difficult fights with ease, sometimes the AI would happen upon genius tactical gambits, and another disconnect begins to form as a result. How am I supposed to feel connected to these battles, when my tactical choices don’t have consistent results?
As questions like these kept recurring to me, the best answer I could come up with was to just… let go. Let the AI occasionally get lucky upsets. Let some events play out in ways that seem illogical. I forced myself to fully embrace it as a set-character RPG, where I simply made the choices I thought the player character might make, even if they seemed wrong. The art and well-constructed drama still made that a pleasant enough way to play, but it’s disappointing how the potential for sharing the journey with the characters was lost thanks to chaotic rules and inconsistency. The question I’m left asking myself after that ruling though is whether I’ll go on to play The Banner Saga 2 and 3, since this first game isn’t a self-contained story; the plot is far from resolved and many decisions only pay off in subsequent games. If each of them were unrelated stories, I would probably skip out, but the promise of refinement and a payoff to the drama is a concept that interests me. The Banner Saga was a Kickstarter game from an entirely new studio, so I can understand some of its floundering when trying to establish something as complex as a choice-focused trilogy of RPG's. Beginners may not always be lucky, but I have some faith that their skill will shine through in the end.
Note: This was another game taken from my recommendations list, from user Ninjabunny. I’m sorry that this review came out sounding so negative! I hope there’s consolation in the fact that I enjoyed it enough to mentally commit to the sequel, and that I already owned the game anyway, but had never gotten around to it. Like you mentioned in the recommendation, the aesthetic was incredible, and I loved a couple characters like Oddleif and Iver. Maybe now that I have my bearings, the sequels will be much more pleasant.