20 Video Games That Will Make 2013 An Awesome Year For Gamers

11. The Banner Saga

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XuJe9kvTjg One of the early Kickstarter success stories, The Banner Saga is a strategy role playing game (SRPG) that is being developed by three ex-Bioware employees who left the company after The Old Republic was completed. Sporting a beautiful art style that looks like it's straight out of a Disney animated movie, The Banner Saga will feature turn-based, tactical combat across a grid plane. The game is releasing on PC, with the possibility of later ports to XBLA and PSN. Why it will be awesome: Video game projects that turn to Kickstarter for funding are usually the result of a developer, or a team of developers, wanting to create a game that is a personal passion for them. Often times, these personal passions don't resonate very well with business-minded game publishers who are thinking about profit above all else, and the ideas never come to fruition. 2012 saw the success of the first Kickstarter-funded game, the wonderful FTL: Faster Than Light, and showed that developers working together with the fans who fund them can generate great end results where everybody wins. In an era where SRPGs have become something of a niche genre, it will be interesting to see if The Banner Saga can follow in the footsteps of giants such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, and Tactics Ogre. The game looks very promising, and based on the excellent support it received from fans (it reached its development funding goal in one day, and ended up generating nearly 7 times that amount by the time the fundraising campaign ended), The Banner Saga could very well be ushering a new era of independently-developed SRPGs.