The Banner Saga's story will be determined via conversation and travel decisions

Stoic Studio has updated its Kickstarter page for The Banner Saga with a lengthy entry regarding how combat, conversation and travel will tie together the branching storylines in the single-player portion.

The later two, are the focus of the update, as combat was discussed in a prior update.

The story will be driven by dialogue, which will in turn be affected by events which occur when the player exploring and travelling. It will also be impacted by decisions made, and these decisions will affect the game as whole.

"By having largely text-driven and modular gameplay, we can produce a ton of high-quality content quickly and cheaply," wrote creative director Alex Thomas. "While a standard RPG requires cinematics, voiceovers, 3d art, lighting, scripting and unique animations for each and every event, our advantage is in creating less expensive but vastly larger amounts of content.

"If you’ve ever wondered why older games like Planescape and Fallout could afford to have deep and rich stories with lots of characters and cool ideas like unique “low intelligence” dialogue while modern games somehow fail to match their predecessors, it’s because they could produce a lot of content quickly and cheaply, and leaves the details to player’s imagination. It’s a trade-off for modern cinematic presentation, but one that we think is the right decision for The Banner Saga.

"Additionally, this style of production lets us iterate the writing up until the last moment. It’s impossible to overstate how important this is... the ability to be agile and make changes to existing parts of the game based on new ideas gives you the best chance to make something exceptional."

Some decisions will even have to be made about where to travel, how to budget time and resources, each having a "huge effect" on the player's journey across the land.

Exploration mode will be entered when camping out in cities, and in some instances this can trigger an event which will cause the player to once again make decisions which will impact the story one way or another.

Decisions can also be the cause of future events in the game.

The team's goal is to release The Banner Saga sometime during mid-2013 release.