Late last year, PlayStation’s Third Party Production division stepped in to make The Banner Saga on PlayStation Vita a reality, after developer Stoic suffered through a troubled porting process. In a new interview with Pocket-Console, Third Party Production Lead Producer John Sanders revealed that Code Mystics (PS Vita ports of Metal Slug 3, The Last Blade 2) is handling development of The Banner Saga on PS Vita, which will be a “direct port” and won’t include additional content.

Asked about any challenges experienced so far with development, Sanders revealed that things have been going smoothly so far from a technical standpoint:

To this point there have not been a lot of specific technical challenges related to the game scope/content itself. It’s going to be super beautiful on PS Vita! What we’ve faced is some resource challenges in switching developers to Code Mystics, digging into the codebase, and ramping resources to complete it. It’s hard to review a port in part/piecemeal, as you need to get most of the game up and running first. So it takes a lot of time, but when it clicks the whole game is pretty much there and the focus becomes performance tuning, polish, bug fixing, etc.

Sanders couldn’t commit to a firm date as Code Mystics has yet to hit the tuning/polish/bug fixing phase yet, but he currently expects The Banner Saga for PS Vita to be released in early 2017.

As for The Banner Saga 2 possibly coming to Vita, Sanders said the stage is set for it from a tech point of view, while Stoic’s John Watson added, “Yes, from a tech side, having a unified engine really helps things along. It took us 2 years to port TBS1 to PS4, but because we were able to leverage the technology, we released TBS2 on PS4 only 10 weeks after the PC launch. We hope we can get this developmental speedup on the Vita side as well.”

[Source: Pocket Console; Screenshot is from PS4]