Eternal Arena

[Cú Cuinn]

I really like Eternal Arena, it's nice to see Stoic make good on their Kickstarter promises.

But it's a little underwhelming. Enemies are chosen form premade spawn tables, the player can’t make their own enemy spawn table. There goes my dreams of reenacting the final battle from my fanfiction where Kragsmen and Dredge create a joint alliance to take over the world, and our heroes (and secret lovers) Canary and Hakon must fight them at the steps of the white tower while succumbing to the hallucinogenic effects of the Purple Bog Mist that was created by Stonesingers using Kragsman swamp gas technology which totally is not the Darkness.

I guess that premade spawn tables aren't that bad, but why don't any of those tables include King Meinolf? Or Warped Eyeless? Or Starving Fighters?(those guys who ambushed Bolverk+Folka in BS2 and were the only time where the player fought against a landsman class.)

There were a lot of really interesting encounters and enemies in the Banner Saga that aren't represented in Eternal Arena, but should be. Stoic included a few of the bosses like Trìgecánnthàe and the three Sundr, and even the more obscure Urmas Bearlord. But not others like Meinolf, Warped Eyeless, Sefa, or Dagr. Why? I understand that Stoic is a small studio, but it can't be that much extra work to export a spawn table.

There are also some complaints that there is no way to save favorite settings on hero specs, which I agree with. As it is, half of the time spent in Eternal Arena is specing abilities and stats, which is boring and makes Eternal Arena lose its charm very quickly.

[FatalFrosty]

Most of the charm resides into making it to the leaderboards for each challenge. To me at least.

I had thought about Meinolf being a possible future dlc part, but as a playable hero, not enemy.

It would be interesting also if we could be pick heroes as enemies.

As for other characters, I want more obscure stuff. Playable Rugga, Vognir, Jorundr, and that 'youngest varl' we hear of at some point in story, can't recall his name. The Valka man which I also forget the name right now, who Eyvind and Juno face before the final battle in 2nd game, could also be interesting. Those 'sub' story 'new' characters could have newly created abilities for them and such.

A pack of the other Sundrs we hear of could be cool also of course. But it's a dream.

However, looking at the % of how many steam players actually play in Eternal Arena based on the achievements for it, none of this is likely to happen.

[FatalFrosty]

As about the spawning, I agree it definitly could use some tweaking. I actually sent some grief and suggestions about it in my feedback reports during the closed beta. Unfortunalely, there was either no time or they were deemed to be too much of a difference from the original planned designs.

Right now, the Additional Wave Enemies list is completely useless. It's always just a repetition of what can be in the first wave, and it shows up even for maps that can't have waves.

Besides, what's shown in the spawn groups is totally misleading. Sometimes more than one enemy of the different types shown will show up, sometimes some types shown won't have any enemy representing them, and what shows up in waves seems to be more or less random among what's shown. So basicly, it only just shows up a list of 'potential' enemies that can show up among each spawn group. The only advantage this serves, is that specific strategies cannot be premade... only the first time you try a challenge, since the first wave is always the same and always deploys the same.

My suggestions were that we should be able to put waves on every map (especially since there is no seemingly logical reason to not allow it) and we should be able to select how many enemies of each type available amongst the spawn group selected will show up, and be able to choose that for each wave.

The advantages from these settings would allow to create much deeper strategy oriented challenges, and be able to set them up in a more specifically strategic way based around each scoring methods.

Edit; But really, what seems like the 'easiest' thing they should do right now is to allow 2nd and 3rd wave enemies to be different spawning groups than the 1st. You could have your Kragsmen on first wave and Dredges on second wave fantasy, and we could make a battle where each wave has a Sundr, instead of having to face all 3 of them at once like right now.

Just from this little tweak, the possibilies would be glorious.

[Cú Cuinn]

Yeah, I agree.

Did you mean Kvig, the youngest varl, and Valka Dusi, that one Valka?

I would like to see some more obscure characters brought into Eternal arena too, and maybe Survival as well, like Sefa, Onef, and Vognir. It wouldn't be that hard as they are already fully animated and have pop up thumbnails. Sure, they only have the animations for one ability, but so does Nikels. Though, the game uses Vognir and Onef's models as common enemy types in many levels, so it may be confusing.

I like the idea of a playable Meinolf, but playing on both sides of the fight with him, I realize that his abilities are very Elite guard-oriented, so he wouldn't be very useful even with Petrus and his summonable guard. And without a guard Meinolf is useless. But it would be cool to have Meinolf, Ludin, and Petrus all fighting together, showing off Arberrang's colors. But having his as an enemy would be much better, his is one of the most unique boss battles in the saga, not quite as good as Sundr, but certainly better than Bolverk. In my opinion. Especially if Ludin and Yrsa fight alongside him. Meinolf just has such a unique character model and animation, its a shame that he only showed up once in the campaign battles and never again.

I think that creating entirely new characters, with their own animations and abilities, would be time-consuming and costly. Though I'd love to see it happen. Remember that Stoic is a pretty small studio, just three guys from Texas. Most of the animation work is done by a third party studio, which makes it more expensive, especially sense Banner Saga's art style uses traditional animation instead of digital. Stoic couldn't really be expecting much of a payout from adding these characters.

I agree with the whole spawning thing. It can't be that hard to change the type of different waves, or increase the number of waves. I would really like to be able to control the number of waves, as the fights end too soon in my opinion.

I also noticed problems with enemy spawning, like the ones you said. Also, I notice that when fighting some of the 'Boss' spawn tables like Kragsmen Hard and Horsborn hard, which have Urmas Bearlord and Trìgecánnthàe, they treat them as normal enemy types. So you might be fighting three or more Urmas Bearlords, or even worse, half a dozen Trìgecánnthàes. Which is weird. This doesn't happen with other boss spawn tables, like Bolverk or any of the Sundr.

[FatalFrosty]

Yes, Kvig and Dusi are who I meant. Sefa has a cool face and sprite colors, but she was still just an archer. It's true however that her battle was the only time we could fight a landsman class, which I'm glad I'm not the only one who had noticed. It should thus show up in the fighters group spawn of the arena indeed.

I'm not sure why Onef isn't in the Arena. He was a sub character, but still like a regular one for a little while, even if it was relatively short. You could use him in battles and upgrade him, he was a caravan member, which is what differentiate him from Meinolf, and makes him more like Dagr and Nickel, who are in the Arena. It almost seems like he was just forgotten.

I agree it's weird about the multiple Urmas and Triges, but I kind of like that it can happen. After all they're just like beefed up versions of other enemies, while Bolverk and the Sundrs are unique characters.

[Cú Cuinn]

I remember Sefa having much higher stats than other archers, In one of my playthroughs she actually managed to kill a few of my heros on her own and nearly won that fight, even after her other goons died.

[FatalFrosty]

That's true, and I'm now wondering if she had some of the archers' abilities as well. It's been a while. But I agree, she should be part of some spawn groups, but if she has her own, it definitly needs a lil more variety than her battle had.

[Cú Cuinn]

I think that Sefa had only Rain of Arrows. Most of the variety and difficulty came from the snow blindness debuff applied to everyone and the fact that you cant choose your party, its always Bolverk, Folka, Bak and some unnamed Ravens.

To be honest, I'm not sure if enemies with more than one ability makes them that much harder to fight. Dagr and Urmas aren't that harder to kill than regular enemies. I think its just the high stats of minibosses and the fact that they are unique that makes them stand out. So Sefa having only Rain of Arrows doesnt make her worse than these other minibosses.

[FatalFrosty]

Nah it doesn't make her worse than these bosses, but if she gets a spawn group it should contain more enemy types than she had, and she should have more than 1 ability to compense the fact that her stats ain't that much higher than other ability wearing type archers. If not, she'd just be a normal archer with 1 ability, and be weaker than normal kragsmen archers.