Back in December last year, Stoic Games technical director John Watson explained in a post on their forum that due to a limited budget and time constraints, the Vita port of The Banner Saga would be put on “the back burner”.

“I have been excited about the Vita port since day one, and I would love to see the Banner Saga running on my own Vita. The realities, however, of a very small team and a limited budget, put an immutable check on the speed of our progress. Stoic is composed of only 4 full-time internal team members, all of which are currently working 100% on Banner Saga 2.” – John Waston

Stoic handed the task of porting the PS4, Xbox One and Linux versions of the game over to another developer. These were supposed to be completed by November 2014, but as we now know, the game didn’t reach these platforms until January 2016. However, they did manage to put together a playable version on the PS4 that was shown off at Sony’s PlayStation Experience event in December 2014.

Confident with the progress that was being made, Stoic passed on the task of porting the game to the Vita and the deadline was extended to 2015 but the company once again fell behind schedule. In May 2015 the company went out of business, leaving the ports unfinished.

Once again Stoic began the search for a company to pick up the unfinished code and complete the ports. By August 2015 they’d found a new developer (Versus Evil) and things were going smoothly. But it came at a price, as the previous company had gone under, Stoic needed to pay a second company, effectively doubling their porting budget. At this point, the Vita version was lagging behind and Stoic was out of funds.

It was at this point that Stoic released the previously mentioned forum post where Watson explained: “Once we can recover the substantial costs of initial console porting, we can consider our strategy to move forward with Vita”.

This post prompted an unforeseen response from the Vita community that was noticed by Sony.

On the 23rd of December 2015,Gio Corsi, Senior Director of Third Party Production & Developer Relations at PlayStation announced via Twitter that Sony would be partnering with Versus Evil to continue work on the Vita release.

Leaping forward to September 26th, 2016, in an interview with Pocket-console, third party production lead producer John Sanders revealed that Code Mystics were now working on the Playstation Vita port of The Banner Saga and that it would be a direct port of the original game and would not feature additional content.

Unable to confirm a release date Sanders said: “Code Mystics is building up momentum, so I would expect that we’re going to be hitting the performance tuning, polish, and bug fixing phase soon. While we can’t say specifically, I would expect to get this into eager PS Vita fans hands early 2017…we shall see”.

On the topic of bringing Banner Saga 2 to Vita, Sanders said: “Doing the work on BS1 helps set the stage for more Banner Saga to follow on PS Vita from a tech point of view”.

Stoic’s John Watson went on to say “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”.