This is all no easy feat, and is specifically enabled by the writing’s tightly woven relationship to a variety of interconnected gameplay features, such as chess-like hero battles currencies like ‘Renown’, supplies, and your caravan’s supply of people and more abstract systems like time limits and your party’s level of morale. There’s almost no randomness here, but the writers don’t shy away from unexpected consequences.
There’s always a myriad of competing potential good and bad outcomes to consider to a given course of action, and you never know how it’ll play out. Send your hero solo, and he may succeed, but it also leaves him vulnerable at the cliff’s base and there are giant bears in the area, so you could lose him permanently. The winch will probably cost time and resources, and you may get attacked while building it, but it seems a safer way to retrieve things. Do you move on? Do you order a group of warriors to start constructing a winch to retrieve the supplies and bodies? Or do you send a hero down there to haul it all back up? Moving on may lower morale and sacrifice the supplies, but could save time. A few drunk men and a wagon of supplies tumble off a cliff. The reason The Banner Saga’s choice-points are so constantly engaging is because almost every one of them has some sort of implied stakes. Then, at the end of all three instalments, if the sum of your decisions is found wanting, you’ll fail to stop the world ending. But this time you play as each of the lead characters, making decisions which will change the course of that journey permanently, determining who lives, who dies, and what they experience in-between. Much like The Lord of the Rings, The Banner Saga trilogy charts a species-diverse group’s splintered journey across a detailed fantasy world, as the forces of world-ending evil close in.
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